The Model for the Enlightened Cognition of Compassion

The Preface

Essays written on morality would have to be some of the most boring texts ever written. Every so often some twit out there in the world writing for a published magazine – or even an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed blog post such as this – gets up on their moral high horse and preaches to the masses about How The World Should Be More Moral.

It’s enough to make a thinking man sick.

However, it’s a sad necessity that this is a topic in need of our attention – especially now. There’s a profound battle going on in the ideological landscape of the world between rationality and superstition. One of the most tiresome and recurring arguments in favor of the belief in the supernatural is that we frail mortals can only be moral through the grace of a supernatural entity, the existence of which is otherwise unconfirmable.

This argument is patent nonsense, and yet it comes up time and time again.

The alarming thing – the really alarming thing – is that when this point comes up in public debate it isn’t denounced and crushed for the nonsense it is. This is my critical analysis of Dawkins, Hitchens and Denett. Don’t get me wrong; I have great respect and affection for all three individuals as speakers and writers on the subjects of atheism and religion. However, in regards to this point all three of them have handled the moral argument for the supernatural by deflecting it. They’ve failed to tackle it head on and crush it as they should do. I’m disappointed in them.

Disappointed because, very simply put, there is a very simple, robust framework for morality under the secular framework. For this article, I’d like to call it The Model for The Enlightened Cognition of Compassion. I like titles.

I’m going to build this thing from the ground up – we’ll start from the foundation principles, introduce a cognitive model that emerges from these principles, and then explore how this model can provide a naturalistic explanation for the phenomenon of human compassion. I’ll wind it up with some options for scientific enquiry that could potentially falsify or validate this model.

Note that last sentence, creationists: This model is scientifically interesting in so much as it is falisifiable. Find out what the word means and why it’s important. Then remember it.

The Principles

We’re going to kick this off with a glance at the natural selection theory of observed evolution. I’m not going to bother trying to justify evolution’s validity – that’s getting a bit tiresome, and has been done by individuals of far greater skill and clarity than myself.

But lets have a look at evolution; more precisely, let’s examine the evolution of cognition.

It’s pretty easy to see why cognition would increase a species’ fitness for natural selection. The evolutionary purpose of cognition is to compute what the organism should do next based on the input it receives through the sensory organs.

The next thing is to have a look at what cognition actually does. Cognition allows an organisim to construct an abstract model of its environment, and it allows for this model to be constantly updated based on a ceaseless stream of sensory input.

That’s the first principle; that we have a naturalistic explanation for the origin, function and behavior of cognition.

The second principle is so basic that it needs no justification; that we nave a naturalistic explanation for the origin, function and behavior of self interest.

That’s it.

The Model

Everything we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, think and feel exists in the ongoing narrative of our cognitive model of the world around us. We can receive some input and interpret it as a physical entity with almost breathtaking ease; you’re doing it right now every time you read one of these words.

Our cognitive narratives include myriad entities as representations of all shapes and forms. I’ll leave the examination of all these cognitive objects to a full treatise on formal metaphysics, because for the moment I want to focus on just one species of these entities. Egos.

We have a very strong sense of ourselves. There’s at least two levels of this – a deeply intuitive, animalistic, biological sense, and then a highly cognitive sense of our personalities, opinions and preferences.

It’s the second sense of the word ego that I’d like to explore. This personal self is essentially the protagonist in our cognitive narrative about the world. There is a very tight link between our bodies and this mental protagonist, to the point where we often treat them as being indistinguishable. Indeed, for most purposes they are indistinguishable, and so they should be. It is the entire point for our cognitive sense of self to represent our biological forms. This is a good thing, because without it we couldn’t function socially. We evolved this ability even as we evolved the need for complex social interaction.

The reason we need such a character in our cognitive model is so that we can have some means of predicting how the other people in our world will react to us. We can tell ourselves little stories in our heads, with their own cast of characters representing the people around us. We can try out different scenarios, and work out what chain of actions will work out in our favor.

Doug’s Dilemma

For example, a friend of mine – we’ll call him Doug, since I don’t have any friends named Doug – has recently started seeing a very wonderful and adorable young woman who we’ll name Sara for much the same reason. Doug wants his relationship with Sarah to be a strong one. Doug, being the overachieving prick that he is, is also about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in law and finance.

Doug considers his goal – he wants to have a strong and loving relationship with Sara. Inviting Sara to his graduation ceremony will demonstrate to her his commitment to this goal, and by involving her in one of the defining moments of his life he will significantly strengthen his relationship with her.

However, Doug also knows that Sara is extremely uncomfortable spending time with his parents. Sara may not want to come to the ceremony. If he just forces her into it, she might get resentful. Not so good for his relationship with her after all.

So Doug will have to be very careful when he asks Sara to come to his graduation not to make her feel like she’s obliged to go. On the other hand, if he phrases his request too mildly she might think he actually doesn’t want her to go – which would also harm his relationship with her.

So what does Doug do? He uses his cognitive models of Sara and himself to act out, in his head, all the different ways in which the conversation between Sara and himself might go. He practices mentally exactly how the phrasing of his request should go, and tries to work out all the ways Sara could possibly interpret and respond to it, and then tries to work out all the ways he might respond in turn. Finally, through deductive reasoning, he works out a method of making his request that will most likely result in his relationship with Sara being strengthened and reduce the risk of his relationship being harmed through unintentionally causing Sara’s resentment.

If he then enacts this conversation in reality, he may or may not be successful – his understanding of how Sara will react to him is neccesarily imperfect. It should also be added that, by neccesity, Doug’s understanding of how he himself will act is also imperfect. This mental gymnastics only needs to be better at maximizing the chances for success and minimizing the chances of risk than nothing at all in order to be a validly evolved biological system for setting and working towards complex goals.

So this is not just a rather trivial example of the delicate gender politics in budding relationships, but also a very good example of why the ability to have such a cognitive understanding of social situations is so important from the perspective of evolutionary fitness; it increases our chances of getting laid.

The Compassion

Still nothing too contentious so far. So where does the compassion come in?

I earlier stated that there was an evolutionary principle at work for justifying self interest. I think it’s plain to see that evolution can explain why all people everywhere can be expected to want happiness and to want the absence of suffering.

Here I’d like to quickly point out that I’m using the word ‘happiness’ as something distinct from the word ‘pleasure’ and that similarly my use of ’suffering’ is distinct from ‘pain’. It’s possible to be in pain and be happy, just as it is possible to be experiencing something pleasurable and still be miserable.

Nonetheless, this is simple enough to explain via evolutionary selection. There is a need for happiness to operate at the level of our cognitive narrative, much as there is a need for misery at this level. These provide the heuristic by which we can play out our goals, and also leads to a lot of human confusion about what actually makes us happy – we set our goals by what we think will lead to happiness, but often we will turn out to be mistaken.

So it seems simple that the mechanics of happiness and suffering – however they work – should be very closely attached to our cognitive models of ourselves. When considering goals we can think ‘How would this make me feel? Would it make me happy?’ and likewise we can think such things about the narrative characters we invent to represent the other people in our lives.

This can lead to compassion through a very simple cognitive mutation. Instead of the mechanics of happiness and suffering being attached to our personal protagonist, they can spontaneously become connected to the other egos in our cognitive model. In other words, we can easily respond to the perceived happiness and suffering of the people around us as if it was our own by exchanging our emotional attachments from the self to the other.

This would be a very useful mutation in our cognition from the point of evolution for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it would help to enable a framework for stable social groups to function. Secondly it could become a runaway development as a means of sexual selection along similar lines to peacock feathers – that a sexual partner that is capable of compassion would be a more desirable mate than one that is not. Thus enter the evolutionary basis for romantic, sexual love as built on mutual affection, empathy and compassion.

The Enlightenment

The interesting bit about this model is that we can work it out, and we can work out that compassion is, by and large, a good thing. It makes the world a better place for us to live in.

So the final piece to the puzzle is the best part – that our cognitive model can turn upon itself, and we can train ourselves to become more compassionate because we logically see the benefits of doing so. We can grow to become more compassionate through effort and will alone by stealing the meditative techniques developed and refined by Buddhist and other traditions for this very purpose. We can learn to willingly disassociate the attachment of our drive for happiness and suffering from our narrative protagonists and instead associate them with the other narrative egos in our cognitive understanding of our surroundings.

Indeed, we can even learn to attach our drives for happiness and suffering to inanimate objects in the world around us. You can show compassion for a car by maintaining it. You can show compassion by your bed by scrupulously making it every morning. You can show compassion for the natural world around you by trying not to pollute it as much as you can possibly manage.

So there you go. A perfectly valid account for both how morality works and how it can be improved that is completely without reference to the supernatural.

The Falsifiability

In 1971 a study named “Newborn’s Response to the Cry of Another Infant” was performed by a man named Marvin L. Simner.

(Holy crap! Someone in a blog post actually referenced a valid scientific article upon which to base his argument! Hold on to your hats, folks – we’re getting into the twilight zone now!)

I can’t manage to find a full study of Simner’s investigation online, but I can give you an overview. Simner conducted one of the first controlled experiments with neonatal infants to test for behavioral responses to peer-generated social signals. In other words, he was testing babies to see what made them cry.

The test was extensive and complex and a bit too much to be restating in its entirety here. In summary, Simner would test the babies in his experiment against one of the followings sound files:

1. Silence
2. White noise of the same volume and pitch as a baby’s cry
3. A computer generated baby’s cry
4. A recording of that baby’s own, personal cry
5. A recording of a cry of an older infant

He recorded a bunch of different things, but the important bit was that he recorded whether or not the baby being tested cried in response to the sound file played. We’ll call this the child’s empathic response. Simner found that the babies would cry in response to items 4 and 5 more than they would for items 2 and 3 in a way that was statistically significant. He also found that there wasn’t a statistically significant difference between the babies’ responses to 4 and 5 – there was no distinction between their own cry and the cry of another.

This data can of course be interpreted in many ways, and it would fall to an expert in child psychology to give a fuller picture of all the implications of Simner’s study.

With that disclaimer in mind, here’s how this study would fit into the cognitive model I’ve described in this essay. It would seem that the babies in Simner’s study were demonstrating firstly that they had the means by which to recognise suffering, and secondly that they made no distinction between a recognition of their own suffering and the recognition of the suffering of another.

This hypothesis is both testable and falsifiable. There is a wealth of psychological information available regarding the early stages of a child’s cognitive development. Under this model, it would seem that Simner’s neonatal infants did not yet have a narrative protagonist with which they could attach their sense of suffering, so they responded to anything they could recognise as suffering.

But if you consider Piaget’s four stages it would seem that a child doesn’t acquire a sense of self until they reach the preoperational stage at about two years old.

So here’s the falsifiable bit. Test developing children for an empathic response as they grow up. This model suggests that in the preoperational stage the infant will develop the capacity for a narrative protagonist, and that at this time the trigger for happiness and suffering will attach itself to the mental protagonist. This model predicts that there will be an inverse relationship between the empathic response and how attached to the narrative protagonist the the child becomes. The expected data would be a steady decrease in the empathic response rate over time, dipping to a low point around the preoperational stage only to climb back up a few notches at the concrete operational stage (this is where the child demonstrates the ability to think from someone else’s point of view). The data after this point would probably become strongly biased by how well the child’s environment nurtures compassion over selfishness.

If the pattern of empathic response could be statistically shown to deviate significantly from this prediction, it would successfully falsify this cognitive model, requiring it to be discarded or significantly revised.

All in all, it’s a pretty neat model for the secular basis of compassion and morality. Wouldn’t you agree?