On Artificial Wisdom: For U of T's Cognitive Séance 45

It’s rather unfortunate that I couldn’t be there for the Mind Matters conference, and that I’m missing this wonderfully-themed Cognitive Séance as well. Even so, I’ll contribute by adding a few thoughts. I started typing this stuff out as a wall post, but my words have once again outgrown their container, so I’ve moved them to my blog. Well, here’s what I have:

A couple of useful approximations of wisdom that I’ve found useful are “problem solving ability in the absence of expertise”, and “meta-expertise”. Neither is perfect, but both are instructive. The first can be understood as being “execution-level”, while the second is “development-level”. The performance-competence distinction comes to mind.

Goals and problems are relevant to discussions of wisdom. Problem detection and goal selection are flip-sides of the same coin. The first indicates an external disruption of homeostasis, while the second suggests an internal redefinition of the same. The agitation or dissonance that this state of affairs produces is what moves the agent to act.

Action can be external or internal. External action, as Searle might say, attempts to fit the world to the agent’s preferences, while internal action attempts to fit the agent’s preferences to the world. So long as the world-mind difference is reduced sufficiently, the “problem” will have been solved satisfactorily.

To witness wisdom in action typically requires an unfamiliar state of affairs. One kind of foolishness is to mistake the unfamiliar-yet-irrelevant as a problem. If the unfamiliar scenario is genuinely unacceptable, though, a wiser agent (understood in some manner that is independent of this problem) will be more likely to find a solution than a less wise agent (assuming that neither have domain expertise).

Since expertise is out of the picture, wise agents appear to rely on heuristics. If two agents have identical repertoires of heuristics, the one that selects a subset for use in a more context-sensitive fashion is more likely to reach a solution. Having a larger repertoire of heuristics, I would imagine, might initially provide an advantage, but would eventually lead to inefficient heuristic selection.

These execution-level thoughts about wisdom apply “at runtime”, so to speak. On the other hand, wisdom also involves development-level components. To continue the analogy, they are “compile-time” factors. This is where “wisdom as meta-expertise” enters the discussion. For example, the heuristics an agent learns over time affects how well it can solve an unfamiliar problem. This means that some deviation from homeostasis encouraged the agent to revise its repertoire of heuristics. It (partially) solved its “sub-optimal heuristics” problem, and if it practises this skill enough, it might gain expertise in heuristics optimization. Similarly, acquiring expertise various specific domains might lead to “expertise” in expertise acquisition. The reason I’ve used scare-quotes is that “domain-general expertise” is an oxymoron, though I’m not sure whether “expert generalizer” is.

Now I’ll turn to Artificial Wisdom (AW). Some artificial expert systems that exist today have been spoon-fed their abilities, while others have become experts through practise. It’s this second type of artificial systems that are more likely to act as the forerunners to AW. One important tool that helps humans acquire expertise is generalizing across different instances of the same kind of problem. “The star-shaped peg fits in the star-shaped hole” and other blindly-discovered solutions to similar problems can lead an intelligent agent to heuristics like “look for a hole that’s the same shape as this peg”.

Notice how I’ve performed a bit of recursion above. Generalizing across instances of the “acquire expertise” problem, I’ve picked out the “generalize over problem instances” heuristic. Continuing this recursive trend might prove fruitful to AW research.

Wise agents probably excel in identifying accidental successes and developing them into reliable algorithms and heuristics, kind of how Jeff Hawkins describes the neuroscience of rehearsal in On Intelligence. Other essential mechanisms for developing AW include ways to evaluate similarity and relevance.

I hope all of you have a great Séance!

xkcd on the Extended Mind

On August 3, I was flipping through kxcd’s nerdiddlyumtious comic archive, and decided to share this one on my facebook wall. By the time I checked my account the next day, my wonderful CogSci friend from university and bona fide IT maven, Vladislav Sekulic, had responded with these praiseworthy posts:

Vladislav Sekulic So true! Brings up interesting issues. Compare Mike1979 chatting with his Wikipedia/Google-savvy friend to an actual car mechanic/expert. Suppose he gets the same advice and answers. Does his internet savvy friend know as much as the mechanic about car repair? 

To narrow down the situation here a bit. Let's say his friend could always have the internet handy and could find any declarative piece of information that is relevant regarding car repairs. Or if we're talking about the medical domain, suppose additionally that the person one way or another has free online access to any scientific journal they could care to search, and can obtain/borrow any textbook that is typically assigned to novices in the domain of interest. Assume the person has a modicum of scientific ability and critical thinking, can write well, etc.

Would this person be able to answer any question or present a good argument for a given position regarding these domains? I.e., aside from declarative knowledge, is there a component to expertise in a domain that is a superset and cannot be acquired except through actual practice of the domain? 

For control, let's further assume that procedural knowledge is not relevant, i.e., the person does not actually have to be able to repair an engine or perform a heart transplant, they just need to be able to give step-by-step instructions on how to do the same, or give advice about it, or argue why a certain procedure is not optimal in some way, etc.

One reason I've wondered about these issues relates to self-proclaimed "experts" who blog or otherwise put information online about an opinion they have on a subject, whether politics, climate change, health, or otherwise. They may present a cogent argument, and give good evidence, even going so far as to quote papers from reputable scientific journals. Nevertheless, they do not have formal training in that field. 

Some people who would read their opinion would not care about that, and only be impressed with the actual arguments -- though, to be fair, in many of these cases I'm sure there is some implicit confirmation bias that the person held before even reading the piece. But others would disregard the argument out of hand simply because they do not have the relevant credentials, regardless of the substance of their reasoning. Who would be right?

Sometimes such a self-proclaimed expert will be able to (seemingly) successfully spar with an actual expert in the field. This is perhaps most readily apparent on climate change denier blogs. To a lay person or amateur, it may seem that the blogger and the scientist are on equal footing. But perhaps this would not be the case with a third-party observer that is also an expert, say an actual climate scientist (I can't think of a real example, this is just hypothetical and may not actually happen, which is telling in itself). They may find it "obvious" that the blogger is way out of league. For example, they would never actually endorse their post to be published in an actual scientific journal -- *aside* from any considerations regarding the person's credentials, i.e., rejection on the basis of the writing alone. 

Again, our climate change denier blogger has all of the abilities I've attributed to them above (full online/journal/textbook access). And I know, I've switched from car repair to climate change, but they both relate to expertise and I hope can be addressed in the same way (or not?).

So, what is the difference between the lay person who sees the online climate change dispute as legitimate, and the expert who sees the climate change denier blogger as being "obviously wrong"? 

Is there something really silly about the situation as I've presented it?

Am I totally procrastinating right now??

August 4 at 8:34pm

Vladislav Sekulic I see it as a bit of an "information age" version of a Chinese Room, but am ultimately most interested in the nature of expertise and, importantly, credibility, which has obvious social implications.

August 4 at 8:37pm

Vladislav Sekulic To be fair, I should give a stab at this first. Prima facie, I would say that one difference is that although the super-blogger and expert can have access to the same factual information, the latter has had time to integrate this information in such a way that they can find connections that are not readily apparent, and can see the "big picture" that lets them reason in a way that is more veridical. Although, to be sure, even (and especially) amongst experts, there can be deep disagreements about the "big picture", so perhaps this consideration is not a good one.

August 4 at 8:46pm

Given the time and thought that Vlad had already invested in this conversation, I decided against standard facebook protocol (which typically involves a crass one-liner by way of reply) and bagan typing out a more suitable response. Before I knew it, my reply had swelled far beyond sensible facebook post length, even by our own outrageously verbose standards. With my own post nowhere near complete, Vlad and I were joined by the brilliant Tristan Nixon:

Tristan Nixon I think your last comment is the most telling. A person who searches online for a practical piece of advice, and then parrots the answer to a friend does not really "know" the answer to the query - they are simply acting as a proxy for the internet's "knowledge". A mechanic (one hopes), not only knows a lot of practical advice about cars, but also has a sophisticated and detailed mental model which unites and organizes that knowledge. They aren't just parroting facts from a big database in their heads, they can use the model to generate an indefinitely large set of different suggestions, advice, predictions, diagnoses, etc. about cars. Its a competence vs. performance distinction. A lay person may have a sufficient model of a car to be able to digest and understand a certain piece of information about spark plugs, but their ability use their limited model to adapt to novel and unforeseen issues is going to be much less.

August 5 at 6:51pm

Tristan Nixon As for climate change denier bloggers, I think there's a small handful of amateurs who actually have a fairly decent understanding of the science, and make a few good critical arguments. There's also a whole lot who know very little and who make overly simplified arguments that appeal to a lay audience precisely because they give the illusion that these issues are simpler and more straight forward than they really are.

August 5 at 7:12pm

After nearly a fortnight’s worth of typing, procrastination, thought, and delays, I finally posted my response as a facebook note.

Needless to say, I have yet to receive a response. :-)

Instead of having you click through to the old note, I’m copying the whole thing below. While facebook’s intellectual property issues provide enough justification for this redundancy, the main reason that I’m putting this up here is that I had accidentally switched “Mike1979” and “Me” in my note. This glaring error is corrected in the version below.

Mind over Meter

Singularly rustling

Peerless paradox

Cursed well's divination

Moored hyperbolous

Send me higher fluidly

Synchronominous

Bicamerally dualist

God in us we trust

A GTD implementation in OneNote

While I'm working on my next post, I thought I'd pass on this template that I made. It's a Microsoft OneNote notebook with section groups and sections set up as an implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done method of personal information management.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ynpy7jsk934dsn3

The Specificity Hierarchy of Wisdom's Research Barriers

Writing about different research topics can be challenging for different reasons. Some of these reasons are shared by all research topics, simply by virtue of being research topics. Just like all other types of problems that people solve every day, academic research is constrained by space and time, laws and morals, and similar common restrictions. While I can’t think of any at the moment, there are also sure to be problem solving constraints that apply to all academic research, and yet to no other problem. For now, however, let’s call any factors that impede all academic research global research barriers.

On the other hand, some of the barriers faced by individuals and teams of researchers are shared by various subsets of all researchers in academia. There could be many ways to group researchers and their research difficulties together. For example, Warren Thorngate has discussed different ways of grouping research and research strategies, using the spatial metaphors or length, breadth, and depth. I suppose that people that make decisions that affect a university’s coffers might categorize research programs by how much they cost, or by some measure or other of their success. However, the types of difficulties that this post is about are ones that arise from characteristics of thesubject matter that they pertain to, as opposed to some other difference between difficulties faced by various research topics that arise from factors other than their subject matter.

Some research barriers affect more topics than others do. In other words, those barriers have a greater scope of impact. Given a very specific research topic, narrow enough, say, to be the subject of a short publication, then relationships of scope between it, other topics similar to it, and the barriers that they face can be represented by a simple diagram.

The central region of Fig. 1 represents the publication’s narrow research topic. Let’s call this Topic X. The ring around it represents its research barriers, specifically those that it does not share in common with similar topics. Let’s call this Barrier Set A. Beyond this ring lie other research topics. These topics are not hindered by Barrier Set A, i.e. those barriers that impede progress research on Topic X to progress. However, they are still subject to some other obstacles, some of which they share with Topic X. The second-innermost ring, Barrier Set B., represents those barriers (and only those barriers). The outermost ring represents those factors that impede research in all academic disciplines. This outermost ring therefore stands for a limit case for research barriers that we’ve already identified and named global research barriers. So to keep things consistent, let’s call the ring’s referent the Global Barrier Set.

Collectively, these rings and the area between them represent a Research Barrier Specificity Hierarchy, or RuBbiSH. Note, however, that a specificity hierarchy as I’ve outlined above can only be created for a particular topic. To speak of such a hierarchy, represented by concentric rings and regions, only makes sense if there is a central topic to provide context. The RuBbiSH that this post is about is that of wisdom research. I would like to go over a few important barriers in this hierarchy, starting from the most general and broadly applicable to the most specific.

The most general set of research barriers form the Global Research Barrier Group, or GaRBaGe. This is not static, but changes as the face of academic research progresses. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, we’ve defined the GaRBaGe in a way that includes as its members all constraints that academic research shares with other problem solving activities. That means that general temporal constraints (deadlines, number of working hours available, etc.), and limits on cognitive and attentional resources, for example, are included in the GaRBaGe.

On the other hand, some of the obstacles faced by wisdom research do not belong to the GaRBaGe, and instead are narrower in scope. Even so, other topics might still share some of these research barriers. Chandler provides a specific example.

Attempting to study wisdom, suggests Chandler, has a ‘post-apocalyptic’ flavour to it. What he means by this is that our understanding of the mental realm is not the same as it once was. While our scientific data on phenomena in the brain have become more refined, some other aspects of the study of mind have become more fragmented. In the case of the study of wisdom, researchers might at times find themselves feeling like archaeologists and historians, piecing together texts and practices from the past. When most of your resource materials are ‘from’ the past, interpretation could become as important as observation.

This barrier is one of the most general that applies to wisdom research, and I’d like to call it the barrier of Discontinuity. Large gaps between periods of research on a topic make older texts more difficult to interpret. Historical shifts in language and context alone can make an already challenging manuscript appear completely intractable, should intervening dialects and contexts become inaccessible. Texts that discuss wisdom are from times and places different enough from the twenty-first century, global, capitalist socio-economy that I see outside my window that their meaning often and unsurprisingly slips from my grasp. While much of the advice of ancient sages is timelessly excellent, some of it was appropriate for their own milieu, but doesn’t transfer well to ours. Also, even the apparently eternal and ever-applicable advice of ancient texts (which are probably more similar to what we mean by wisdom than context-specific advice anyway) might be presented and explained using examples that are wholly unfamiliar to an intelligent, well-informed person of today. An example might be advice on business ethics from the past that illustrates its point by using some curiosity of slave trade as an example. This is just one way that Discontinuity hampers research.

Another constraint that applies to wisdom research is the barrier of Immateriality. This is an obstacle that it holds in common with all other mental phenomena, as well as with some other fields of study outside of the arts and sciences of mind. Mathematics, many topics in philosophy, and many disciplines in the arts and humanities deal especially with intangibles. Symbolic Logic might be a paradigm example, but Information Studies, some sub-disciplines of Linguistics, and even Economics often face the barrier of Immateriality.

Immateriality makes it more difficult for observers to come to a consensus about the ‘object’ of attention, precisely because what is being paid attention might not be an object at all. John Locke famously noted the difference between publicly accessible, measurable features of the world, such as mass, length, or shape, and other features that seem to reside in the observer as much as they were located in the world, such as colour, scent, or sound. This difference between what Locke called primary and secondary qualities is one example of a specific aspect of Immateriality (i.e. subjectivity) that can trouble researchers. If there is nothing of your subject matter that can be directly measured, sensed, or observed, then coming to agreement regarding its nature is often a tricky business.

Another issue related to Immateriality is that science is only supposed to operate in the material realm. However, on the other hand, Cognitive Science and its many cognate disciplines aspire to generating naturalistic theories and explanations of mental phenomena. This usually involves taking out an “intellectual loan”, to use a phrase from Dennett, and hoping that the shorthand of immaterial terms that we use to describe mental entities and phenomena will eventually cash out in purely physical terms.

For some, this means that while mental stuff is real, it’s actually all physical stuff. For others, Such as Churchland and Churchland, it means that there is no such thing as mental stuff, and we’re simply too naïve to comprehend this. The hope there is that some day, our knowledge of the mind will have advanced enough to reveal that all lower-level mental phenomena are equivalent to specific physical correlates, and presumably that it will be possible for people to make sense of this bridge between the material and the immaterial.

However, as many people have pointed out, the truth of the mind-matter interface might be incomprehensibly counter-intuitive, perhaps similar to the way that large patches of quantum theory famously are. Is the interface between mind and matter itself material or immaterial?

The last and narrowest research barrier that I’d like to discuss is the barrier of Normativity. Not all non-physical research topics require a normative component to their explanation. Here’s one way to understand this: The three contrasting classes of theories that might relate to a research topic are descriptive, normative, and prescriptive theories. Descriptive theories (or just as well, the descriptive component of a theory) provide support to an explanation of the research topic by recording observations and inferences about the subject matter. This component of a theory is most often a necessity, rather than an optional feature.

On the other hand, only some research topics also include a normative component to their explanations. In contrast to a descriptive theory’s observations of its subject matter’s current or past states of affairs, a normative theory involves claims of evaluation, appraisal, and judgement of these states of affairs. In other words, while descriptive theories target the topic’s ‘reality’, normative theories involve the topic’s ideals. While some research topics disallow or simply do not call for any normative remarks, others might involve many evaluative or similarly qualitative arguments, and some might even fail to appear complete without making normative claims. Ethics and Law are clear examples of a discipline that requires mention of normative phenomena. However, Biology and Medicine are also normative disciplines, since their ideas of development and decline, evolution and ‘devolution’, health and illness, are normative notions.

Normativity is a narrower, stricter constraint on wisdom research than Immateriality. First, the barrier of Normativity certainly appears to apply to wisdom research, since it pertains to human excellence and living a good life. As soon as better and worse enter the conversation, normativity applies. Second, Normativity appears to be a more specific research barrier than Immateriality, since not all psychological phenomena are required to have a normative valence. For example, most people would agree that a person ought not to be held morally accountable for his or her brain’s memory capacity. In this sense, memory does not appear to be a normative research topic.

In another sense, however, it is possible to produce a normative standard of physical memory function, with which an individual’s ability to remember could be compared to the rest of the population. While this type of research undoubtedly deals with evaluative notions, and quite possibly the idea of ideal human memory, no moral blame or responsibility is being discussed. While I’m not sure whether there are names for these two kinds of normative distinctions that an argument or theory could make, the distinction seems to be an important one.

Moral relativism and lack of consensus in normative judgement make normative topics especially tricky. Coming up with some way of explaining the normative phenomenon in question usually requires some normative standard against which it could be measured. Without some acceptable level of consensus about such normative standards, some fields of study become much murkier.

In conclusion, I’d like to mention some challenges that I’ve faced in my own research that probably wouldn’t have arisen had I been studying the Wason Selection Task instead of wisdom. I don’t know how strongly others in my field would empathize with me regarding these difficulties, but I’d be curious to find out. Since these barriers pertain only to wisdom (or perhaps a few other topics most similar to and intermingled with wisdom), they might be thought to reside at the very centre of the diagram of wisdom’s RuBbiSH. While I haven’t been able to come up with generally-applicable, catchy names for these barriers like Discontinuity, Immateriality, and Normativity, I might be able to provide a rough sketch of the often subtle difficulties unique to wisdom research, as I have experienced them, and which have severely delayed this blog’s development.

Ah, yes: development. Development is actually a key concept while studying wisdom. More specifically, wisdom is intimately tied to personal development, i.e. growth, maturation, and transcendental qualitative shifts in a person’s thought, action, and character. For this reason, a researcher dedicated to wisdom can become primed to spot events and phenomena in his or her environment (and especially in people in the environment) that are germane to people’s development. Since the person whose development is most accessible to the researcher is typically his or her own, perhaps others have noticed an increase in self-scrutiny similar to what I have felt since immersing myself in this project years ago.

While increased self-scrutiny is not strictly a barrier to research per se, it produces disruptions in life and thought more generally. Just as describing what one is doing while performing an action usually yields worse results than silently devoting all of one’s attention to the task (i.e. concurrent verbalization negatively impacts performance), being an agent in the world and simultaneously observing oneself being an agent in the world is extremely challenging. The attentional and cognitive overhead is probably considerable. It wouldn’t be so troublesome were it not so automatic for me. When important, life-impacting situations arise for me, it isn’t unusual for me to anxiously struggle to maintain focus on deciding and acting, as I become increasingly absorbed in deciphering the more general, theoretical reasons behind my ability or inability to decide and act well. By becoming captivated by the unfolding and development of one’s own character, one runs the risk of shaping one’s life into something paradoxically autoanthropological. Every time I look in the mirror, I violate the Prime Directive, and it makes me wonder whether Heisenberg had similar flights of fancy while staring at the chin he shaved. Every self-observation shapes a person’s life, and these unavoidable adjustments to one’s character seem to accrue rather quickly when the self-observer is involved in wisdom research.

Another issue that I’ve faced that remind me of the weirdness between observer and observed is about wisdom researchers’ own normative standards. While studying a set of normative standards, how the brain maintains and modifies them, how they are propagated through culture, and so on, these standards are unavoidably compared to the researcher’s own. The reason why I say that this is unavoidable is because while the researcher might refrain from concluding that his or her own normative standards are better or worse than those under investigation, it is probably impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to even make sense of other normative standards without making use of one’s own. We ‘see through’ our norms as much as we see through our eyes, so a hypothetical, non-normative wisdom researcher would be roughly analogous to a blind ophthalmologist.

The problem here isn’t that the researcher’s own normative standards influence his or her understanding of the normative standards under scrutiny. While this is certainly an issue, it is one that applies to a broader set of topics than just wisdom, and is instead part of the barrier of Normativity. What I am trying to point out is that sometimes the researcher is persuaded to change his or her normative standards, largely from being exposed to so many other expressions of normativity. The reason why this is problematic is that the researcher’s normative yardstick begins to resemble Neurath’s ship, undergoing continual renewal. Furthermore, since this metamorphosing set of norms acts as the researcher’s metaphorical ‘lens’ of observation, the impression that filters through these norms and is cast upon the researcher’s thought also changes in normative ‘shape’ or ‘colour’.

This concludes my first actual post on Cortical Wisdom. It’s helped me point out different types of research issues before I actually attempt to address them in depth. While there are many potential topics to choose from for next time, I’ll probably wind up talking about rationality or expertise. Please leave feedback, since it would be great to find out how comprehensible and interesting this is to others, and would certainly spur some motivation, too.

Learning, Un-Learning, and Wisdom

  Since I started learning about wisdom, there have been more than a few occasions where a friend, relative, acquaintance, or random person at a party has asked me what wisdom is. As you might imagine, this concept isn't something that's easy to relate to others quickly.

  Usually, any approximate, ten-words-or-less definition of wisdom causes the listener to take what I've just told them about wisdom, and unwittingly begin to fill in all of the missing details from their own experience. If someone has heard of I.Q. and little else, chances are that he or she will colour their understanding of wisdom in light of that psychometric measure. If someone has a particular religious or philosophical leaning that they abide by, or happens to admire a particular historical figure, their version of wisdom will gravitate towards that particular pre-established ideal, just so that they don't have to rewrite their normative standards of living because of something they were told at a party.

  This makes quite a lot of sense, from the perspective of Cognitive Science. What most people don't realize is that, very literally, our experienced life is composed of much more than the information that our senses send to our brain. When I look out of my window and see the tree across the street from me, I do what most people do, and take it for granted that I'm looking at a tree. However, there's far more to this interaction. I don't actually see a tree at all. The individual photoreceptors in my retina receive photons, and these get transduced and interpreted by my brain as a series of colours in a particular sequence (oculomotor coordination and foveation make this story a lot more complicated, though), and based on my past experience, I interpret the input stream as a tree. If I were a botanist or gardener, however, I would probably identify it as a birch or fern, or whatever the case is (clearly, I'm neither a botanist nor a gardener...).

  Similarly, if I hear a sequence of utterances from my neighbour's mouth, I might be able to parse that sequence into sentences, if it's English, or some other language I understand, or I might just hear a bunch of sounds, if we're talking about one of my neighbours that has a particularly thick accent, or if they aren't speaking English at all.

  The point I'm trying to make here is that whether it be the comprehension of something very low-level, like the object that I call 'the tree across the street', or something more complex, like 'an English sentence with a Jamaican accent', or something even higher-level, like 'what you just told me about what wisdom is', one's past experiences are the driving force behind one's ability to interpret new information. This interpretation is done so seamlessly by our brains, that with enough training, it becomes nearly impossible to see or hear or sense things in any other way. I can't hear someone speaking in English or Urdu and fail to comprehend what they're saying. I can't fall back into a state where it's all just a series of interesting patterns of sounds, and no more. Similarly, any person that has trained themselves to understand certain kinds of ideas in a particular fashion will find it rather difficult to assume the perspective of others, should they have a sufficiently different take on those ideas.

  I don't remember how gradually my attitudes to people's resonses changed, but instead of becoming rather upset that others would take what I told them about wisdom and concoct something that suited their own world-view, I now react to others' comments rather differently. I empathize with them, knowing how deeply uprooted one feels without a solid fundamental framing of the world around them. While it's true that everyone is continually making tiny changes to their understanding of the way the world works, and are, as a result, experiencing fairly mild discomfort at worst,  the more deeply-seated the replaced set of beliefs or valuations in one's world-view, the stronger and further-reaching the shock-waves of dissonance that person will experience.

  To use a rather pop-culture example, if you were shown persuasive and compelling evidence that suggested that you really were hooked up to something like The Matrix, and that all of your past and present experiences were little more than an elaborately crafted hallucination, chances are that your current cognitive framework would not be able to reorganize itself in a way that allowed you to maintian your personal identity, and still accept the new information that you had just received. Some people might simply deny the evidence provided, no matter how compelling, as a kind of 'safety mechanism', shielding them from the mental trauma that dissonance causes. Others would go through a rather literal melt-down, and given sufficient and appropriate supports, would have the chance to rebuild a working model of their universe and themselves, in ways that allow them to live in a present that can be reconciled with their past.

  The reason why the melt-down is a literal one is that when a mind is sufficiently bent by the data it receives, the brain has to rewire itself, too. Sadly, however, the biological foundation for a person's cognition is not nearly as malleable or adaptable as the cognition itself. For this reason, people that suffer sufficient mental trauma, often involving experiences that surprise them because they appeared to be impossible events, might not always be able to recover. If a person's brain has grown in a particular fashion, its neurons being woven together by the threads of its sense organs, massively incongruous input can unravel much of its mental tapestry. In the absence of an acceptable pattern to feed them, both the mind and the brain can remain in tatters.

  Although learning about wisdom can be personally challenging and mentally taxing, I'm very thankful that it isn't outright traumatic. Nevertheless, it requires not just learning, but also a considerable amount of un-learning. Letting go of old ideas, habits, and thinking styles are required, if one wishes to achieve the gift of wisdom. Despite being aware of the fact that knowing about wisdom alone does not guarantee its achievement, I can say with certitude that I have had to undergo a fair bit of difficult un-learning myself. In the process, I have gained a new sense of reverence for the sages of old, since not only did they undergo a much more profound deconstruction of their own psyches, but they also performed the Herculean feat of mental self-reconstruction.

  As I'll undoubtedly get to in a later post, part of what my colleagues and I hope to accomplish through our research is the foundation of a regimen of self-deconstruction and self-reconstruction of thoughts and actions that allows negative, self-destructive aspects of one's own mind and life to be detected more easily, and either eliminated or brought into check. It would also allow people to identify the thought processes that allow for their minds and lives to flourish, and discover new ways to allow these positive aspects of mind to be recombined, to interact, and to support each other. With such guidelines for self-training in hand, perhaps people that are willing to make an effort to improve themselves will be able to do so more safely and comfortably, and maybe more people will feel more open to making the effort, too.

Why I study wisdom

  I've got my first comment... exciting! Thanks, Azim. I was vacillating between replying as a comment and creating a new post for a few minutes, but my reply seems to have become long enough to necessitate the latter.

  The question posed was about my reasons for picking wisdom as my area of expertise. Since wisdom is a rather long-term phenomenon, I'll have to provide a rather long-winded explanation, too. :-)

  I've always seemed to be interested in cognition in one form or another. From the type of science fiction stories and movies I've liked as a child, to my early interest in computation and artificial cognition, it seems like my childhood experiences and interests had been preparing me for CogSci.

  This, of course, was a complete surprise to me. In fact, I didn't know that there even was a program at university called Cognitive Science. Instead, I tried to pursue a degree in other fields that, despite having strong theoretical overlaps, are quite different, methodologically. After flailing around rather uselessly as a Computer Science undergrad, and then as a Philosophy student, I took a couple of years off from university, to step back and clear my head. I was competent enough to do well in whatever courses interested me, but it seemed to me that I simply wasn't interested in very much at all.

  After becoming thoroughly disenchanted with working in a boring office for two years, I took stock of the courses that I had taken in university, and what I thought of them. Dr. Vervaeke's Introduction to Cognitive Science jumped out as the one course in my entire undergraduate career to have left a strong impact on my thoughts and actions as a person, despite having taken it as an elective, purely on a whim. It seemed like I was on to something.

  Then, I did something I hadn't done even while taking the course; I read the textbook cover-to-cover. What had once seemed like tedious details that were needed to pass a course became fascinating ideas that could be assimilated and recombined to fantastic effect. I began buying books on the mind and brain, on consciousness and A.I., and devouring them in rapid succession. Within weeks, I had re-enrolled in the Cognitive Science program at the University of Toronto.

  Now comes the question of what made me take up wisdom instead of some other interest within CogSci, since there are surely other fascinating topics of study that have better-established research programs, many times more experts in the field, and all of the advantages that come along with that. Why wisdom? I guess there are two answers that I could give, which provide responses to the hypothetical and categorical aspects of why I'm doing what I'm doing.

  After returning to university, I took Thinking and Reasoning, a psychology course on problem solving and decision-making, with Dr. Vervaeke. I did well in it and enjoyed myself immensely. It whet my appetite for learning more about how people make decisions, how they reason, and what factors lead to successfully achieving solutions to problems. It really helped me build invaluable research skills, too, since Dr. V. taught it in a way that emphasized the difference between answering three questions:

How do humans solve problems? (Descriptive)

How ought humans solve problems? (Normative)

How could humans solve problems the way they ought to? (Prescriptive)

  I remember spending days on end, scribbling ideas down, and obsessing over theoretical mistakes that seasoned researchers had made in understanding phenomena like insight. It was so much fun that I took Dr. V.'s next course, Higher Cognitive Processes, right after.

  Going into the course, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew it was tied closely to Thinking and Reasoning, and that it dealt with phenomena that were hierarchically superordinate to problem solving. Those two facts, I felt, were reason enough for me to take the course. :-) The course was about rationality, thinking styles, and the coordination of distinct types and modes of thought. All of these ideas were presented in ways that were mutually reinforcing, and that provided a way of understanding not only how their respective phenomena behaved on their own, but how they interacted. All of these higher cognitive processes were explained in connection to wisdom.

  Once again, I found myself happily mired in vast swamps of tricky problems, and after weeks of neurotic note-taking, spent about 7 hours straight, typing up my final essay, which took the components of cognition that facilitate wisdom, as presented by Dr. Vervaeke, and presented their functional and taxonomic connections in innovative ways, building on concepts from the previous course on lower-level problem solving. Dr. V. liked my final essay so much that he asked me if I'd like to write a paper on wisdom with him. I was totally blown away... to be second author on his paper, which has been over a decade in the making, was a dream come true. I immediately agreed, and have been working on the project with him ever since.

  That was the first answer to the question... one that gives a contingent, historical narrative of what led me to wisdom research. There is another way of answering, though. Telling you about what quirks of chance graced me with the opportunity to work on this project don't really tell you about my own perspectives or motives viz. the study of wisdom, about why I like learning about wisdom, or what I hope to accomplish. Well, that's precisely why I need to give you a second response.

  I seem to like asking 'why' more than asking 'how'. Instead of wondering how someone could perform better at a particular task, I usually wonder whether that task has to be done at all, and what that person hopes to accomplish upon its completion. I'm continually thinking about people's motives for performing, rather than their ability to perform. Part of the reason behind this is that I've encountered many instances of people performing excellently on tasks that they never had to do in the first place. Running really fast in the wrong direction won't help you reach your destination, as so many ancient proverbs mention.

  This interest in motives is strongly related to wisdom, since wisdom has to do living well, and deciding what that means -- for a particular individual, in a particular context. Not being aware of the reasons for pursuing a goal precludes the possibility of determining whether achieving the goal has a positive or negative impact on the actor's life.

  Another reason for choosing wisdom has been a strong distaste for an attitude that some people hold towards evaluating others. In most parts of the world, especially those parts that have been more heavily influenced by Western culture, one's monetary net worth (or the material goods one possesses) has typically been the greatest factor for determining that person's worth as a person. This isn't meant to deny that some poor people haven't been held in high regard... that is certainly true. However, for the most part, if someone wishes to garner the respect of his or her peers, it seems that accumulating goods and currency is the way to go. And while having money can, to some degree, indicate that a particular person ought to be held in high esteem, there are many, many examples of the most despicable people accruing obscene amounts of wealth, usually making many other people's lives miserable along the way.

  Another issue that I have with this money-equals-worth attitude seems to stem from the fact that money is easy to measure, and other forms of personal worth are not, and this makes it much easier to compare people using money, rather than by some other standard. If, for example, we had a reliable way to quantify and measure people's honesty (so that we could say things like, 'Bob is 1.2 times as honest as Harry', or something like this), or humility, or reliability, then our evaluation of others would depend significantly less on how much money they make, or what they own. Now imagine being able to measure a person's propensity to do good, and act excellently. Wouldn't that be a boon to society? Although I'm not even sure that such objective measures of wisdom will ever be possible, or whether having such measures could potentially have some negative ethical impact, for that matter, I think that knowing more about wisdom will probably improve the accuracy of people's evaluations of others.

  It would be extremely useful to have some magical formula that allowed a person to determine, for any given context, which of several live options would be the best to pursue. While there are good reasons to believe that such a univerally-applicable formula is impossible, it is certainly true that at the level of a single problem in a single context, people do come up with solutions on a regular basis. Psychologists that specialize in studying problem solving (and similar fields such as behavioral economics and decision theory) have been trying to come up with an account of how people accomplish this, with some measure of success. However, the situation becomes rather intractable when taken up one level... how do we solve the problem of figuring out which problems are worth solving? In other words, when someone, your boss at work, let's say, gives you a problem, a solution can usually be found rather locally, using the resources at your disposal. However, if you're your own boss, or when you're dealing with problems in your life as a whole instead of a neatly sectioned-off task, not only would you have to solve individual problems, but you'd also have to find and formulate them, and then determine whether they are even worth solving at all. It's much easier to study how people solve a particular problem than how they choose which problems need to be solved. Now, when this scenario is stretched out over a person's entire lifespan, so that the 'problem space' becomes identical to his or her entire life, then the problem that the person faces is the problem of how to act wisely. Since I'd like to live a good life myself, I feel that studying wisdom will be a worthwhile endeavour to invest my efforts in.

  Some of the problems in Artificial Intelligence have to do with making a robot or other artificial agent behave autonomously. A.I. researchers hope to produce machines that have more than the capacity to solve problems that simply require the machine to take easily identifiable types of data, slot them into predetermined process threads, and churn out a response and super-human speeds. We already have computing machines like this in abundance, and while they are unbelievably useful, from the point-of-view of autonomy, most computer software and hardware amount to little more than glorified calculators. By contributing to wisdom research, I hope to help us figure out how humans are able to come up with solutions in completely novel problems, where no 'cookie-cutter' answer remembered from the past or looked up in a book would work.

  As things stand, there are massive lacunae in current research on wisdom. These gaps in people's conceptual schemes, concerning what counts as wisdom and what doesn't, I can't help but find really, really annoying. There is a lot of equivocation going on about what people mean when they use the words 'wise', 'wisdom', and 'wisely', and as a result, a lot of researchers seem to wind up talking at cross-purposes. Getting rid of these annoyances has been a strong motivating force for me.

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our world seems to be in urgent need of wisdom. Not only is wisdom a commodity in short supply, but it's also a commodity that few people recognize, that even fewer can appraise, and that even fewer still can generate. As Harvard psychologist Robert Sternberg says, while IQ-measurable intelligence seems to continue to climb upwards worldwide, people continue to do the stupidest things imaginable, and on an ever-grander scale. Without being coupled to the guiding force of wisdom, high intelligence and nonexistent or malformed normative standards can produce individuals or entire societies of people that are highly capable of behaving foolishly, or even of being every efficiently evil. 

  That's a world that I can't condone. And that's why I study wisdom.