PREFACE –
WHAT DOES THIS BOOK DO?
Can a simple idea explain something of enormous complexity?
This book started with the simple idea that humans perform tactical deception with their emotional behaviour and this confuses how they understand their emotions. Then I realised that misunderstood emotions cause us to perform self-destructive actions. Gradually, the ripples of this realisation spread out to explain the most complex problem that mankind has ever encountered: understanding ourselves. Figuring out how planets orbit or trees grow is a cinch in comparison. Before I knew it, the whole thing grew into a giant multi-disciplinary argument, and I realised that if we assume that a human is a robustly logical computational device, we can account for everything it does. Demonstrating this became my obsession, like trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle. So, this book sets out to explain all the absurdities of human nature by logic.
The argument is rendered tricky by some of the ludicrous explanations of apparently random human actions that have been floating around for the past three millennia. Just as we put the concept of the soul in the trash, I have to cope with cabbies telling me about their subconscious, so I guess it will take another couple of centuries to undo that damage. It will take even longer to stop Supreme Court Judges talking about free will.
Before you start reading, it would be beneficial to give you some idea of the structure of this book, because it isn’t possible to state the argument in a linear fashion. I’ve delved into evolutionary theory, mathematics, philosophy and history, and I can promise that you will lose the plot before realising that an apparent detour was indeed necessary. The argument is anchored around a sequence of thought experiments that explore, firstly, the relationship between emotional behaviour and our concepts of emotion; and secondly, how distorted concepts of emotion cause us to derive a self-destructive action. An actual emotion (as distinct from our idea of it) has its origin in evolution by natural selection, and the point of it is to drive a survival-enhancing action; so disrupting the emotion causes it to drive actions that are not survival-enhancing, and hence (ultimately) self-destructive. The thought experiments are logical in structure, but in an odd way – they lead us to think using distorted concepts, so they explore the rational consequences of misconceptions.
You should assume that I am armed only with logic. Logic dominates because science can neither distinguish real behaviour from pretend behaviour nor determine what happens to a human when self-referencing leads to a circular causality. Beyond logic, the rest of this book is stolen knowledge. Apologies to all historians and evolutionary theorists for being a shameless purloiner of their stuff! However, knowledge is increasingly vested in experts who are becoming more and more specialised, and occasionally we need to take a diagonal slice across multiple fields to find new connections. The goal in doing this is to create a new synthesis of how everything fits together. The result here, I hope, is a radical new conception of human nature that is internally consistent and compliant with current science: everything in the human sciences reduces to logic and evolutionary theory.