Philosophical Angst Is Culture Skepticism

In her new book, my podcast co-host Agnes Callard does a great job of expressing classic philosophical angst. People often feel unmoored upon considering many “great questions”, especially: “Why am I doing any of this?” People typically assume they have adequate answers to the big questions of what they want and what is good. However, after a bit of quality questioning, they typically find that they can’t put good answers into words, and what words they try seem to be incoherent and also in great conflict with their actions. Resulting in angst.

This experience often motivates a simple argument for doing a lot more thinking on this topic. It seems hard to imagine that we are consistently choosing the right actions if our conscious thoughts are the main driver of our actions, and if those are in great conflict with each other and with those actions. The larger a deviation we estimate between our actual and right actions, the more value there should be in consciously figuring out right actions, so that we can consciously choose them instead.

If this deviation is at all comparable in magnitude to our verbal confusion, and if we can at all make progress on this problem via effort, then we are putting criminally low effort into this project of figuring out what is right. Callard calls on us to right this wrong, by inquiring a lot more into questions like “why am I doing any of this”.

Our standard story of cultural evolution says that we humans inherit our habits of doing and talking from a combination of our DNA and culture. Our DNA gave us many inclinations, including a culture habit of copying the behaviors of high status associates. Including habits of both doing and saying. Philosophical angst is in essence inviting people to doubt this heritage, by wonder how much they can actually trust their DNA and culture to tell them what to do. And also inviting them to hope that explicit discussion can make progress on figuring out right actions.

The typical confusion of our words is the primary evidence offered to doubt our DNA and culture sources. However, an evolutionary analysis of this situation may suggest a different view.

DNA evolution has long selected animals for adaptive behavior. Recently, for humans, cultural selection has been added to that process. And once culture created language, we’ve also been selecting talking habits, as well as doing habits. Through talking we coordinate our behaviors, show off to one another, and enforce norms.

Often we talk about what we do. And we’ve had several conflicting selection pressures on our talk habits. One of those pressures is indeed for consistency between different things we say, and between what we say and do. Rivals often make us look bad by pointing out our inconsistencies. But we also often face many other pressures, often quite strong, to say things that others want to hear, or that are taken to indicate good things about us personally. And these other pressures often push to say conflicting things in related contexts, and to endorse with words actions that we do not take.

This is the well known social desirability bias that is the basis for my colleague Bryan Caplan’s upcoming book. And my co author Kevin Simler and I say a lot more about many ways we misrepresent our motives in our words, and why, in our book The Elephant in the Brain.

If the main reason for our confused words, and deviations between words and acts, is the many strong conflicting selection pressures to say things that are inconsistent with each other and with our actions, then that calls into question the value of doing explicit analysis to find what is right. The key question is the degree to which our confusion is selected for being adaptive. Some possibilities

1. Our current confusion level is still the most adaptive level. So if you want to be adaptive, stay the course, and tolerate your confusion. But if you personally know that you prefer much less confusion, and are willing to pay adaption costs, then you can work to find a more coherent set of words closer to your actions, by moving all of your words and actions. You’ll still need priorities by which you decide which words and actions you are willing to move how much.

2. Current adaptive levels of confusion are much lower than they once were, as it is now easier to notice and point out inconsistencies. And maybe explicit conscious values are easier to adapt to changing circumstances. Thus we can become more adaptive by getting less confused. Here we can gain together by coordinating to find more coherent stances. Here you could use adaptive value as the priority when choosing different possible ways to be less confused.

3. We can coordinate to lower the adaptive value of confusion, via a new cultural fashion of celebrating coherence and looking down on confusion. Once this change has been accomplished, possibility 2 applies.

4. Our whole cultural evolution process is broken, so culture is drifting into dysfunction. We must either fix this process, or replace it with a new process for choosing and changing our key norms and values. Explicit analysis to consciously choose coherent norms and values might be part of such a replacement process.