Collective Conscious

By Jose Saramago:

The moral con­science that so many thought­less peo­ple have offended against and many more have rejected, is some­thing that exists and always has existed, it was not an inven­tion of the philoso­phers of the Qua­ter­nary, when the soul was lit­tle more than a mud­dled propo­si­tion. With the pass­ing of time, as well as the social evo­lu­tion and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our con­science in the color of blood and the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mir­ror that turned inwards, with the result that they often show with­out reserve what we are ver­bally tying to deny.

This com­men­tary caught my eye as a per­fect illus­tra­tion of an idea that I’ve been pon­der­ing since I attended a talk by Dan Ariely on human irra­tional­ity and one by Paul Zak on human trust. Zak claims a genetic basis for ‘moral sen­ti­ments’; his research has demon­strated that the pres­ence of a par­tic­u­lar hor­mone causes humans to engage in more trust­ing behav­ior. Ariely has stud­ied the var­i­ous con­di­tions under which humans lie, cheat, and steal, when they think they can get away with it, and what changes their behav­ior even when the real con­se­quences remain unchanged. We have an enor­mous set of func­tions that are out­side our con­scious con­trol; some make impor­tant strate­gic deci­sions for us, some com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion that we wish to hide.

We are not by any stretch per­fectly ratio­nal; but I argue that we have an emer­gent col­lec­tive ratio­nal­ity. So many of our chal­lenges require us to be vul­ner­a­ble to the whims of oth­ers; they require us to trust each other above and beyond what strate­gic assess­ment would per­mit. So our indi­vid­ual irra­tional­i­ties are designed to enable col­lec­tive ratio­nal­ity. In this pas­sage, our eyes auto­mat­i­cally com­mu­ni­cate our inten­tions. A ratio­nal agent might like to lie before com­mit­ting a crime; but one who is forced to wear his inten­tion on his face is pre­sum­ably much less likely to even con­tem­plate theft, as he knows the look of lar­ceny will be plainly visible.

Our coop­er­a­tive biol­ogy needs to be com­ple­mented by a coop­er­a­tive econ­omy. A pure free mar­ket sys­tem would pre­vent max­i­mum pros­per­ity for the same rea­son a purely ratio­nal phys­i­ol­ogy would. Socially-​​motivated reg­u­la­tory mech­a­nisms can and should make our world greater the same way socially-​​motivated bio­log­i­cal restric­tions do.