Chapter 7 - Emergence and Science

Chapter 7 - Emergence and Science

Like a rat in a maze

the path before me lies.
And the pattern never alters
until the rat dies.

Patterns, Simon and Garfunkle

Seventh grade science grabbed me and and I was sucked in by Ms. Helen Kicklighter.  (She said we could remember her name as follows – “Don’t kick so hard, kick lighter.”)  I didn’t notice it at the time, but she was truly a nerd.  She had taught my two older brothers and seemed pretty old when I was in seventh grade.  She had been in a car accident years before I was in her class and could not turn her head.  That made for some amusing times when we’d try to get her to quickly look our way.  Rather than turning her head, she had to move her entire body, shuffling her feet as she did.  It seemed funny for a bunch of 12 year olds.  Ms. Kicklighter got me to put together an exhibit for the Dade County Science Fair.  She suggested I do something about the effect of smoking on grades.  It was a pretty daunting research project for a 7^th grader but she was there to make sure it got done.  It was a very scientific project – I put together a questionnaire that I gave to all 7^th and 8^th graders.  Somehow, I was able to get the names of people who indicated they smoked and Ms. Kicklighter was able to get copies of the smoker’s grades.  (I’m pretty sure this was a violation of someone’s civil rights, but things were simpler in the 1970s.)  I put together bar charts using plastic tape on poster board instead of PowerPoint, which was still many years from its invention.  My final results showed that people who said they smokers got lower grades, on average, than people who did not smoke.  I have no idea if the results were statistically valid as I didn’t know about things like sampling error.  I had a conclusion section that postulated why people who smoked might have lower grades but the reality is I had no idea.  People who smoked in 7^th and 8^th grade tended to be rebellious and rebels didn’t do things like homework or studying for tests.  I had found a correlation and we’d like correlations to lead to a cause and effect explanation.  With a cause and effect, we can then determine a pattern and once we have a pattern we can predict the future. 

A Short History of Science

Science grew into the large enterprise we see today because of one simple fact – it does a better job of predicting the future than any other human invention.  People talk about how they get into science to deepen their understanding of a particular subject (Just like people say they get into politics to better the world.)  You don’t get too far in the scientific world if you don’t find patterns.  Without patterns, the world is a scary and unknowable place.  If there were no patterns you’d never go outside because you’d never know what would happen.  Fortunately, the universe is built on a combination that allows for patterns and chaos, which breaks the pattern.  At its heart, science is a methodology for looking at observational results, finding a pattern and using the pattern to predict the future.  We saw in the earlier chapters that most interactions lead to patterns and those patterns allow the universe to have a stable base from which to evolve. 

There are a lot of patterns in the world early on we noticed the pattern of daylight/night time and the seasons.  It took a while for nerds to evolve, taking delight in observing the patterns more closely and starting to see things that others did not.  The closest planets – Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – were discovered early on and a model of the solar system, with the earth at the center, evolved from there.  Calendars were created as a byproduct of the seasonal patterns.  Sundials were early devices that took advantage of daily patterns.  The relationship between science and religion is documented well in other places so we’ll leave that part of the discussion aside.  It took a while, but eventually science became a separate field of study.  Galileo was not the first scientist but he is credited with promoting the cause more than any one before him.  Early scientists used observations to look for patterns.  Galileo performed experiments (like dropping balls of different weight to see if the fell the same or different speeds) and looked for patterns in the observations.  Once a pattern is observed, a prediction can be made and more experiments can be performed to test the accuracy of the prediction.  One of Galileo’s first experiments was with pendulums.  He noticed and then measured how long it took a pendulum to swing back and forth.  We performed experiments and determined that the length of time it took for a pendulum to complete one cycle (the period of the pendulum) was related only to the length of the pendulum.  He put together a mathematical formula based on some experimental evidence and then used the formula to predict the results of new experiments.  His predictions were spot on and today his discoveries are taught to all new physics students.  Mathematical formulas were a new way of expressing patterns and were a great advance from physical models, like the initial models of the solar system.  Modeling is the way science advances, so the introduction of a new way of modeling allowed science to advance even more quickly.  Let’s look more closely at modeling.

Models are a simplified representation of the real world.  For example, early models of the solar system had the Earth at the center (because everything fell towards Earth, it must be at the center) and the Sun, Moon, planets and stars orbiting the Earth attached to crystalline spheres.  They were spheres because that was the perfect shape and it was a pretty close approximation to the real orbits.  The spheres were crystalline so that the heavenly bodies didn’t fall into the Earth and you could see through the different levels.  For many years this model served us humans well.  There were some tweaks to be made to explain some anomalies in orbits of the planets but all-in-all things worked for hundreds of years.  Ultimately, new and more rigorous observations lead to our current solar system model with the Sun at the center.  It is more accurate than the spherical model and over time has supplanted it.  Now a day, we can’t imagine thinking the Earth is at the center of the universe but when you stop and think about it, it seems to make sense. 

How do these models come about?  Scientists create them and the process they follow is amazingly simple (of course, we’ve learned that simple interactions can lead to complex behavior so don’t assume science is simple).  They look at observations or make observation by conducting experiments and look for patterns.  The scientific method evolved in such a way that scientists create a Null Hypothesis to predict what they think might happen and then conduct experiments to test the accuracy of the Null Hypothesis’ predictions.  Accurate predictions elevate a hypothesis to the lofty state of theory.  Those that are tested and found to predict a wide class of behavior are promoted to Theories.  “Capital T” Theories are few and far between but the Theory of Gravity and the Theory of Relativity are two examples.  As with any human endeavor, the easy problems were solved first.  In the early days of science, it was a hobby for many people and a number of famous scientists were part timers.  For the record, Albert Einstein was a patent clerk when he did some of his seminal work.  Over time, the work got more specialized and people started pursuing science as a career.  Teaching science and research became a way to make a living.  Of course, when a large number of people are part of a profession, you can expect politics to follow.  Before going into that, I’d like to talk a little more about science and the nature of truth.

Science and Truth

George Box was a statistician who made the famous statement, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”  One of the first things a scientist will do is make assumptions that simplify the thing they are studying.  Edward Lorene wanted to study the weather but it was too complicated so he developed an experiment using a hot plate sitting underneath a spinning Bundt pan.  The hot plate was like the sun shining on the equator and the spinning Bundt pan was a 2 dimensional representation of the rotating Earth.  Simplifying a system allows you to see patterns that may be hidden in the larger system.  That simplification comes at a price.  You give up accuracy in order to gain predictability.  These days, the methodology for making observations can be so convoluted that even these observations, the facts of science, can be in dispute.  I’ve read too many science discussions expounding the truth as defined by science and I want to correct that notion.  There is no truth in science!  By its very nature of modeling, it gets things wrong.  We should not confuse usefulness with truth.  Usefulness is pragmatic, it is good enough.  In a confusing and chaotic world, we need to find a way to find our way forward; to get up every day and live in an unknowable world.  We accomplish that by simplifying the world around us.  Scientific studies show we process very little of the input that enter our senses.  We throw away information at an amazing rate because we can only process a limited amount of it.  So even we humans have to be aware of the limitations of our senses in understanding the world around us.  We build models all of the time to help us navigate through our lives and we know we make assumptions that simplify the number of things we need to think about.  For example, marriage is a human invention that allows two people to pledge they will be faithful to one another.  (Among other things.)  Trusting your spouse and having a marriage vow allows you to assume they will not cheat on you.  You can go through your day not worrying if they are cheating on you and focus your attention on other things.  All models are wrong and sometimes the assumptions you made (your spouse is faithful because they said they would be) turn out to be wrong.  We then have to revise our assumptions, change our model and figure out how that affects the relationship to our spouse.  We’ll talk more about this in the chapter on good and evil.

As science has moved into more complicated venues, like psychology and medicine, we see even more clearly how limited the scientific approach becomes.  My 7^th grade science fair project on smoking and grades did not show any causation, only a correlation. (I forgot to mention I got an honorable mention and a $25 savings bond from the South Florida Lung Association – my first indication that science could make you money.)  This is a much weaker statement and isn’t really a prediction.  I couldn’t say that if a student started smoking, their grades would go down.  (That would be a prediction.)  All I could say was that students who admitted they smoked got lower grades than students that didn’t say they smoked. I found a correlation, which is like a pattern, but not as good at predicting the future.  That doesn’t prevent people from acting on these correlations, since in a highly complex world, it seems to be the best we can do. Let’s explore how correlations came about and how they work.

Correlations and Causation

Almost every day, a new study is published that discusses a correlation between foods eaten and rates of certain cancers.   How did we get to this?  Remember in Chapter 5 when I wrote about the study on extra-marital affairs? – “Forget the statistics, I want names and addresses?”  The simplest explanation for how we got here is evolution – specifically, scientific evolution.  (Remember, we need to qualify the word evolution.)  As science evolved as a way to find patterns, it started with the easy problems.  Galileo found the pattern of pendulums using string, weights and his pulse.  The next hundred plus years were dominated mostly by amateurs, with professionals sprinkled in here and there.  Scientists went after problems that were interesting to them or interesting to their bosses and since the tools they had to work with were primitive, they were limited to simple problems.  Scientific evolution took over as people tried different approaches to solving more complicated problems and in the 1800s, Ludwig Boltzmann made a creative leap in solving problems involving large numbers of molecules and atoms.  He realized you could treat them like identical billiard balls and use statistics to combine their individual motion into group motion.  The results were nothing short of amazing.  A box 1 foot on a side has an insanely large number of molecules in it, too many to track individually.  (Remember Avogadro’s number – 6.022 x 10²³?  That is a 6 with 23 zeroes after it and is pretty close to how molecules are in the box.)  The nature of the evolutionary process is to take an emergent property and spread it throughout the environment.  In this case, the emergent property was statistical analysis and scientific evolution took it to other fields of science where it was tried out.  Nuclear physics was able to use it with great effect, since elementary particles are indistinguishable.  As a methodology for dealing with large numbers of things, it worked well and at some point in the 21^st century, it was applied to biological and biochemical problems.  Why?  Mostly because the problems were so complex that no other way to approach a solution was available and a partial solution seemed better than no solution at all.  Looking for a pattern with a large number of human actors is basically a crap shoot.  While as far as we know all elementary particles, atoms and molecules are identical, we know that isn’t true of animals and humans.  The assumption that the actors are identical is violated so any conclusions derived from these assumptions will be less valid.  All models are wrong and if your basic assumption is wrong, you’re bound to be limited in how useful the results will be.  Medical studies are trying to move into a world where they consider the individual differences; DNA testing and genetic sequencing are the first steps.  We’ll need another emergent property (an A-ha! moment) to take us to the next level of pattern recognition in human biology.  Psychology is even further away and there’s more than one reason they call economics the dismal science. 

Now there are some places where the assumption that humans are all alike is more valid – like in the e-commerce field – and we see those models are more useful.  It is especially important that you understand the assumptions that are made at the beginning of any scientific modeling exercise.  Sometimes, the assumptions are so off-base that they have more in common with make-believe than science.  As long as there is emergence, there will be places where the old models fail – like in the economic models of the 2000s.  The effect of emergence is so large, why isn’t there more science published on emergence?  Where’s the science of emergence?

How do forces emerge?

Just to be clear.  No one has any good ideas how new forces emerge.  The history of science has been based on the assumption that all forces can be derived from the three quantum forces and gravity.  I’d like to talk about some of the conditions needed for a force to emerge and some details of how a new force might emerge.  Chaotic behavior is needed for a property to emerge.  Nothing will ever emerge from the classical world and their attractors.  A necessary condition for emergence is strange attractors.  But chaotic behavior isn’t enough.  There needs to be a high level of interaction in order under some constraints to obtain emergence.  In fact, I’ve come to look at emergence as developing from chaotic behavior under constraint.  Think of an explosion as an uncontrolled event where the energy literally blows things apart.  Emergence has the level of intensity of an explosion, but instead of flying apart, it is focused inwardly and there is a transition to a new level of interaction.  For example, a nuclear explosion uses the power of the strong nuclear force to generate a lot of energy that spreads out quickly.  The sun uses the same strong nuclear force but, under the constraint of gravity, gradually produces energy that is released much, much more slowly.  This controlled energy produces new, heavier elements from the basic building blocks of electrons, protons and neutrons.  These elements are then spread out throughout the galaxy when the sun finally explodes, only to be brought together by gravity into planets where they can be used to create ever more complex properties – like life.

One physical characteristic that seems to be related to emergence is phase transitions.  We all know that water comes in three phases – vapor, liquid and solid (ice).  Scientists have spent a lot of time studying the process where water vapor liquefies and water freezes.  It is a most complicated scenario and one that even today is not fully understood.  (So it isn’t farfetched to think that since we don’t understand phase transitions that we don’t understand emergence.)  The transition from solid to liquid has some of the properties of emergence, in that liquid water has different ways to interact than ice, but there is more to emergence. 

We really should discuss entropy at this point, because it is related to emergence.

Entropy is a measure of organization.  Larger values of entropy mean a system is more random (less organized).  So your car is a highly organized piece of equipment.  Someone had to put a lot of energy to build your car.  A car will not organize itself out the parts all by itself.  But it is how you apply the energy that makes a car “emerge” out of the individual parts.  If you just took an explosive, put it into the pile of parts and lit the fuse you would certainly put energy into the system, but you would blow it apart.  That same energy, applied in a directed way, can create an automobile.  The car has less entropy than the parts that went into it. 

Left to its own devices, your car’s entropy increases and the level of organization decreases.  Eventually, you are left with a rusted pile of junk where the car used to be. Things fall apart unless you do something (which requires energy) to maintain and organize them.    Even worse, the universe is put together in such a way that entropy always increases.  The only way you can decrease entropy is to increase it somewhere else.  We see that on Earth.  The Sun is increasing its entropy by burning as a “controlled” nuclear reactor.  The heat from this reaction warms the Earth and allowed life to emerge (decreasing entropy).  Our gain is the Sun’s loss and it is always the case, there are winners (entropy decreases) and losers (entropy increases).  In fact, if you hearken back to our discussion in Chapter 1 on hierarchy you’ll notice that as the level or organization increases in the universe, the total amount of organized material decreases.  There are more quantum particles than solid matter.  There is more inert matter than living matter.  There is more un-intelligent life on the Earth than intelligent life.  As you organize things more and more, you must leave behind more and more un-organized detritus to balance out the scale.  So there is a limit to how organized physical systems can become and I suspect we’ve reached that level on Earth. The emergent process appears to have reached a physical limit in the origin of human intelligence.  It isn’t because the physical part of the planet earth has stopped the emergent process, but the emergence of intelligence endowed us with the ability to create things with ideas much more quickly and free us from slowness of physical emergence. 

In addition to physical entropy, entropy can also correspond to information.  Once intelligent creatures created the concept of information, we were freed from physical constraints.  While there is only so much physical mass in the universe, information has no limits to the things that can emerge.  Information and it associated properties of language (spoken and written) free us from physical limitations.  Information still follows the U-ROC, things change by interacting.  Information is just something that forms that basis of interaction between intelligent objects.  Technology allows us to increase the speed of information interaction (we can talk on phones where the information travels at the speed of light rather than the speed of sound) and the range of interaction (we can talk to anyone in the world now and are not limited to just talking to people near us).  It is worth noting that while technology can increase the speed and range of information interactions, it has no effect on the quality of the interaction.  I think this is a basic limitation of technology.  Technology can improve productivity but it does not necessarily improve the quality of life.  Remember when people said we’d eventually have a 20 hour work week because technological advances would make us more productive and we’d have more leisure time?  That didn’t happen because in a capitalistic society, you need to maximize profits so the increased productivity allowed us to produce more in the 40 hour work week, not work 20 hours.  Economic evolution trumps technological evolution sp the work week remains at 40 hours, we just get more done.  It is effects like this that make us question the definition of progress.

Good and Evil - Addendum - Heaven and Hell

Chapter 6A – Heaven and Hell

I meant to address the notion of heaven and hell in Chapter 6 but published before I remembered. I just finished a Wired article in the February Issue – You Can’t Beat the Devil – discussing how hell is always better portrayed in movies and books than heaven. The author, Chris Suellentrop, brings up Dante’s Inferno as a classic example. I couldn’t agree more. Historically hell seems more interesting than heaven. With the discussion of good and evil in Chapter 6, we saw that evil evolves from interactions based on lies (either partial or full). I claimed that if everyone told the full truth all of the time, there would be no evil. Now a world with no evil should be heaven, right? Given that description, we see that heaven is nothing close to the worlds portrayed in books and movies. In a world without evil, we’d still play football and get injured. We’d still be able to swear and drink; we’d be happy and we’d be sad. None of our daily lives would be changed by the lack of evil, except we’d be able to trust everyone all of the time. We’d not need to spend any energy sorting through people’s words to see if there is some nuance, or fear that we’d be taken in by a Ponzi pyramid scheme. We’d still have murder, and people would still get mad.

Now you could say that I’ve redefined heaven and you are correct. I think the onus on others to tell me why a world without evil is not heaven. The heaven conjured up in movies and books are not just a world without evil. It is devoid of the very thing that allows the world to exist – hope. They claim heaven is a place where everything is perfect which, by definition, means nothing changes. I understand that people grow tired of the constant “rat race” that is the evolutionary process that is part and parcel of the universe. By its very design, the universe devises new, emergent properties and then evolution take over and spreads the new property throughout the environment. That is the only way things work in our universe so what people are calling heaven is not a world without evil, it is a completely different place that has very little in common with our current world. Just as the opposite of hate is not love (it is indifference); the opposite of hell is not heaven. Heaven is a make believe place that could never exist in our universe.

We all grow tired of having to expend energy to keep ourselves evolving. Every now and then we need to take a break and gather together all of the changes we’ve experienced into a new, stable base. Every one of us has a different tolerance for that stable base (remember the drop and pool model) but all of us are programmed to eventually move to a new set of challenges and face a new “drop” of evolution.

Perhaps the biggest harm religions have done is persuade us that the drop and pool of the universe – rapid change followed by consolidation – is not natural and a prolonged period of consolidation is a desirable place to be. It isn’t – it is the very definition of death. As long as you interact with others (and yourself) you will change and you cannot change that and remain alive. Not interacting is just another definition of death.

So I’m not surprised that the portrayal of heaven is so boring and un-natural. It is a make believe place that cannot exist in the universe and one it we would not be at peace, we’d be dead.

Good and Evil

Chapter 6 – Good and Evil

You ask me if I love you
And I choke on my reply
I'd rather hurt you honestly
Than mislead you with a lie
And who am I to judge you
On what you say or do?
I'm only just beginning to see the real you

Sometimes When We Touch, Dan Hill

My buddy Gene, remember him from the 1^st Chapter, and I have known each other since 2^nd grade. He moved to Hialeah to live with his aunt and two sisters in a two bedroom duplex. Gene’s aunt kept a tight reign over him, Gene was not allowed to have anyone over to the house when she wasn’t there. Gene also couldn’t go over to anyone’s house after school, condemning him to an afternoon of boredom. I couldn’t let that happen so I made it point to go over to Gene’s house pretty much every day after school. We made up a number of games to play, most of which were related to baseball. We played baseball in his backyard with a plastic lemon and a stick for a bat. The lawn chair was set up behind home plate to act as the umpire and anything hit over the roof was a home run. One day, I was looking in Gene’s refrigerator/freezer when I saw a button that read “defrost.” Curiosity got the better of me and I pressed it to see what it did. It clicked down and as mightily as I tried, I couldn’t get the button to pop back out. I heard Gene coming into the kitchen so I closed the door and said nothing; hoping against hope that nothing would happen. Gene’s aunt came home about 5:30 and went to the fridge to get her after work beer and saw an enormous puddle of water. She yelled for Gene and asked what had happened. Poor Gene had absolutely no idea what had gone on but when his aunt told him he pushed the defrost button, he said he must have pressed it by accident. He was punished, mildly as I remember, and the next day he asked me what I was thinking. I said I wasn’t thinking at all and in spite of the deception, we’ve remained friends for over 40 years. I’ve apologized to him a number of times about the incident and have never put him in that sort of position ever again.

We all fail to tell the truth and we all sometimes say things that we know are not 100% factual. This is the genesis of our discussion of good and evil. If everyone told the truth all of the time, there could be no evil. There would be a lot of hurt feelings, but no evil. Rest assured, the universe can cope with lying and, in some ways, good and evil are basic parts of the universe. No need for a Garden of Eden to bring evil into the world; we humans are pretty good at doing that without any outside help. Let’s get into it a bit.

Origin of Evil - Awareness

First off, realize that humans are incredibly complex creations and are the product of amazing emergence. We haven’t spoken a great deal about awareness, how we perceive the world around us, and the topic is too great to cover in detail now. Suffice it to say that the way we perceive our world is built up from the interactions we have with the physical world as reported to us through our senses. We take the various inputs and build our view of the world. Perception is reality - the interactions between us and the outside world, coupled with our own internal interactions form our world view. The reason it is hard to pin down awareness is the same reason scientist can’t agree on a definition of life. It are the interactions that form the emergent property we call awareness. We can look into the brain as long as we want and we’ll never find the one place where awareness takes place. This dispersed awareness allows us to function in a degraded fashion if part of our brain no longer works, or some of our senses fail. We still have awareness, it is just not the same awareness we’d have if all of our senses worked. Since science has not embraced the notion of emergence, we’re currently stuck in a reductionist mode of research. This will pass.

The complexity of our brain and the resulting awareness means we can interact with ourselves. We no longer need external stimuli to generate thoughts and ideas. We generate them ourselves. This self-interaction is a big part of what makes up our self-image and will plays a part in the discussion of good and evil. The awareness evolutionary process, under the influence of human awareness – remember you need to qualify the term evolution to describe which selection criteria is involved, leads to a wide range of self-images from people who are outgoing to inward turning folks. For now, let’s focus on the majority of folks who are relatively well adjusted and are not self delusional. They process the data sent to them by their senses in what we would term a “normal” fashion. There are those who are delusional and seem to have problems integrating sensory data into a reality that matches the external world. That’s a topic for a later discussion as I want to focus on how good and evil come into being in the absence of any “abnormal” situations.

A lot of words have been written on whether or not people have free will. In our discussions, we’re touched on the emergence of human awareness and intelligence. Again, in the world of emergence, hard definitions seem to elude our grasp and we find it easy to find examples that defy explanation. Given the uncertainty, I’ll assume that most people exhibit what we call free will. The exact nature of free will can be maddeningly difficult to pin down because it isn’t a thing, but a set of interactions. The various parts of our brain interact and assemble our view of the world. Since there isn’t a single place where reality exists in our brain, there is no place where we find free will. Go along with me for now as it seems like a lot of people exhibit free will. Self interaction is a valid an interaction as any other interaction and is part of the reason evil evolves. Let’s start at the beginning.

Evil Evolves

I claim that children are born without the knowledge of good and evil. After all we’ve talked about emergence and how simple interactions can lead to complicated behavior; it should come as no surprise that I believe evil evolves. It is difficult to define what you mean by evil. Again, this should come as no surprise since we’ve seen that scientists cannot define life or species. Emergent properties and the associated evolution seem to be defined by our inability to figure them out completely. We certainly know that some things are definitely living and some things are not but there are grey areas that defy definition. The same thing happens with good and evil. I’ll avoid a definition of good and evil as I don’t think that is necessary in this discussion.

As children we observe and interpret our observations. It seems reasonable to associate these observations with facts about our surroundings. We build up a fact database and as we interact with our world we very quickly find out about consistency in the physical world. Gravity is one of the first physical things we find out about and we fight it from the beginning. As we interact with others, our physical body and our own thoughts we are shaped as a person. At some point in our development, we realize that there are things that are not facts. Make believe is a very big part of our coming of age. Once we have an understanding of facts and make believe, we are in a position to learn about lies. A lie is where part of the interaction is intentionally not entirely factual. That means there are two parts to a lie, in my definition. There not only needs to be some part of the facts left out or the entire interaction is make believe but there needs to be an intentional piece to it. That’s why I needed to talk about free will and awareness before venturing into good and evil. If no one ever lied, there would be no evil in the world. There might be a lot of other things – like hurt feelings and broken hearts – but there would be no evil. (Again, we’re not talking about the self delusional folks – that is a separate discussion.)

Back to our young child, growing up and realizing there are facts and make believe. We find out pretty quickly that people who tell us facts can be trusted. Most of us quickly develop trust in our parents and we find stability in the trust. We need stability in order to grow and people who develop in this atmosphere are what we term well adjusted. At some point in our lives all of us came across a situation where we did something that was “wrong” in our parent’s terms and we were punished. We didn’t like the punishment and at some point in the future we might try to make something up to avoid the punishment. Our initial attempts (based on some of the things my children tried) are pretty lame and our parents see through them. At some point, we find out how to make up something that is close enough to the facts that they are accepted. We have learned that we may be able to avoid punishment by making something up – or leaving something out. It should be pointed out that most people tell the truth most of the time. If everyone lied all of the time, the world would be so chaotic that nothing could happen and we’d dissolve into anarchy and death. Nature learned early on (even before there were humans) that working together, it can accomplish things that cannot be accomplished alone. Cooperation is necessary for survival and cooperation requires trust and trust is based on the facts.

Of course, since most people tell the truth most of the time we make it possible for someone who is good at make believe to gain a competitive advantage. Let me state that greed and fear are the root of all evil. I haven’t thought about it exhaustively, but every lie that has been told by me or to me was either to avoid punishment (fear) or get something that wasn’t deserved (greed). So the biblical quote,”Love of money is the root of all evil” is partially right. Greed and fear is the root of all evil. Let’s go back to our blossoming child.

Their notion of good and evil is inherently tied up in how they learn from their experimenting with facts and make believe. As with any evolutionary process, there are a wide range of differences but most people end up telling few lies. There are very few people that lie all of the time, they are eventually shunned and without trust they become isolated (or imprisoned). It is the path from mostly telling the truth the lying I’d like to explore. In the late 1960’s Carol King wrote a song entitled, “Tapestry” where she used a tapestry as an analogy of the interactions in her life. I like this imagery in dealing with good and evil so I’d like to incorporate it into our discussion. If we look at our interactions as trailing a thread behind them, then it isn’t too hard to see that our interactions do indeed build of a sort of tapestry. However, we only have a thread in our interactions if they are based on facts. Lies lead to interactions without thread. There is nothing behind the interaction so it leaves a “hole” in the tapestry.

We all lie and leave holes in our tapestry. Most of the holes start out small – like a little white lie to keep from hurting someone’s feelings. Most of the holes stay small and they don’t affect the overall strength of the tapestry; they are easy to cover up and do0n’t spread. Our world evolves away from the hole and it is lost in the fabric of the cosmos with no one the wiser. Some holes become strange attractors and they don’t get left behind.

An Example

Let’s say I had made plans to go to the movies this coming Friday with my girlfriend Anne. On Tuesday, I got to talking to Marie, who was very pretty and someone I had wanted to date, and she said she’d really like to go out with me - what was I doing on Friday? Making a split second decision, I said I’d love to go out with her on Friday. So far, I’ve not gotten myself into too much trouble, but I need to figure out how to be in two places at the same time. Friday afternoon I make the decision to call Anne and tell her I’m really sick and we can’t go out. She said she hoped I felt better and we’d see each other over the weekend, when I felt better. I pick up Marie and we go to the local movie house and as I’m standing in line to buy the tickets, Anne and her girl friend show up. The hole in the tapestry Anne and I had put together blew up and the tapestry was rent asunder. I could have tried to patch up the hole and tried to gain Anne’s trust but she wasn’t ready for that and we never dated again. (Dating Marie didn’t last very long either.)

Evil doesn’t scale

That was a very simplistic example of a hole but it doesn’t take much to see that some of us make holes that become strange attractors. Ponzi pyramid schemes are a great example of a hole that becomes a strange attractor. While some Ponzi schemes start out crooked, most of them start out as well intentioned interactions based on facts. If I am investment councilor, I need money to invest. I promise I’ll make a good return on your investment. If the investment returns I promised don’t come to pass I am faced with a choice. Tell the truth and take the chance that you’ll pull your money from me or find someone new to invest their money with me, take their money and pay you the promised return. Once you make the decision to take the money from a new investor and give it to an older investor, you’ve created a strange attractor and guarantee the hole will grow. As the hole grows in size, you need to expend more and more energy to find new investors to give you enough money to pay all of the original investors. At some point, there is not enough money in the world to cover your payments and the hole is discovered and your tapestry turns into shreds.

In the same way, evil evolves out of lies that are covered up. Small lies (the white ones) usually don’t grow in size. There are ones that grow (and we don’t always know which ones will grow and which ones will not) and the fear (or greed) surrounding them make the perpetrators do things we call evil. As bigger the hole, the more energy you need to put into repairing the hole. All of your might is focused on stitching around the hole and keeping it together. Since there is a finite amount of energy in the world, the hole will eventually rend the tapestry. Evil is not scalable, since it is built on lies (omissions) which leave holes in the tapestry of your life.

Lies that start with good intentions can stay bounded and not grow so the “evil” is small and can be ignored. It is the lies that keep growing that need to be covered up; that’s the big problem. Most evil starts with good intentions and it is the intentions that differentiate between types of evil. Evil is an evolutionary process; can we call it moral evolution? You start out with a white lie with every intention to not hurt someone’s feelings. If that lie never gets passed on through interactions (remember that if there are no further interactions around the lie it will not grow) and the lie stays small. However, if that lie gets passed on (through interactions) it might get passed on to someone who knows it is a lie and they may come back to you and ask why you are perpetrating a lie. Now you have reached a crossroads. You can fess up and say you lied, explain why you lied and the lie goes away. You may need to go back to the person you originally lied to in order to completely heal the hole; thereby breaking the lying feedback loop. If you decide that there’s too much invested in the perpetrating the lie (fear or greed is driving you) you need to come up with a new lie to cover up the original lie. You have now officially started down the moral evolutionary process with a negative (because it is based on fear or greed) feedback loop. I claim that your intentions have now changed and you are no longer lying to keep from hurting someone else’s feelings but are now lying to cover yourself. Once you have made that change of intentions, you are on the proverbial “slippery slope” that leads to an unpredictable place.

What are the outcomes? They are as many outcomes to this as there to any evolutionary process - unlimited.

Some people catch themselves early in the feedback loop, swallow their pride and make an attempt to uncover the lies. These people practice “godly” sorrow for they came to the conclusion on their own that they needed to correct the lie.

There are some who can stop the trip down the slippery slope by containing it. If only a few people are involved, you can probably put together a set of lies that will “fill the hole with spackle” that may be ugly, but it works. These folks feel no sorrow and the positive reinforcement that they can cover up a lie gives them the confidence to do it again.

At some point, lies spin out of control and start requiring an enormous amount of energy and time to keep the hole covered. Bernie Madoff was able to swindle thousands of people out of millions of dollars for many, many years. The amount of time and energy he spent covering things up was incredible but you know what? Eventually he got caught and they will always get caught. At some point, the amount of energy needed to cover the hole will exceed the total amount of energy in the universe and things will come crashing down. I’d like to explore two things about these types of people.

1. In order to pull off a really big lie and perpetrate serious evil requires accomplices and dupes. Accomplices are paid to come along for the ride and are part of the evil. Dupes are people who are told a lie but are lead to believe it to be a fact. A lot of early investors of Bernie Madoff got the promised returns on their investments and they thought Bernie was being factual. They told their friends – officially becoming Madoff dupes. In college, I read the book, “They Thought They Were Free” about the German people during the 1930s and 40s. in order to foist he incredible evil that grew out of the Nazi movement, the party needed a lot of accomplices and a lot of dupes. Why? You typically have to pay accomplices more than dupes because accomplices know you are lying and could turn on you.

2. People who are caught generally show “earthly” sorrow. They are sorry they got caught. Some time people change their ways – Michael Vick has told us he is no longer interested in dog fighting and appears genially ready to make amends. The problem with earthly sorrow is that you are never sure when the person is really sorry and when they just got caught.

Summary

Evil is an evolutionary process that grows from lies. Sometimes, a lie starts out evil in that the person originates the lie out of fear or greed. Those lies are generated by internal interactions – someone hurt your feelings and you want to get back at them. Even if they started out with the best intentions, fear or greed will turn their good intentions into some self-serving beast and the evil begins to grow. How do you stop evil? The good news is that because of the scalability issues, evil will always be found out and good eventually triumphs. By good, I mean factual interactions with people; they are truthful. The only reason evil can survive in the world is because most people are truthful and that makes them trustworthy. A perfect human would be someone who never intentionally lied. They could not do evil. They could hurt people’s feelings, get angry and yell but they would not be evil. It is pretty clear that no one living on the earth is perfect. We all learn at an early age that we can lie and it almost incumbent upon us to experiment with lying to see what it does. Psychology has a long way to go to figure out what some humans to find lying abhorrent and find ways to avoid it most of the time and some have little or no problem lying whenever it suits the situation.

In the meantime, rest assured that evil has its day but good will triumph in the long run. You need to be on guard that you do not become an evil dupe. While perpetuating an evil innocently absolves you of some guilt, being in the critical path of evil (when it is eventually found out) still hurts a great deal. There are few evil people, but when you find them – avoid them like the plague. Interacting with them is the best way to become a dupe or accomplice. If you think being a dupe hurts, being an accomplice hurts even more as you are as guilty as the principles but you more than likely didn’t get as much benefit from the lies. One lie doesn’t make you an evil person. Realizing when you made a lie into an evolutionary, negative feedback loop and correcting it without outside prompting will allow you to regain trust much more quickly than hiding it.