Hamlet – MarkCleaveland.org

The Qualia of Grief

Emotions, like any category of perception, are not unitary things. Let’s hold up grief. We use the word “grief” to describe a state that has a range of causes and functions. Discombobulated tears might accompany the death of a loved one, or appear for a parent during a child’s wedding. They might occur when one is alone, or they might occur only when surrounded by others. And a psychologist would use these differences to suss out the causes and functions of grief. Is it a behavior that strengthens social relationships? Does it prune painful memories via an associative process? Is it a by-product of a homeostatic process? Does it follow a regular time course. Does it follow culturally bound display rules?

This is the science of grief where there is no single “grief” in the same way that vision does not exist to perceive a single object. There are depths, shapes and colors — all actively working away within the nest of vision. So it is with emotions. They are collectives, not singular things, to which the buzzing of science (itself a collective) applies iteself, bending the universe towards a place of prediction and control. The logical. The rational. The process-oriented.

But is that all there is? Does that miss anything of value?

There is a reason why the logical, rational, and process-oriented approach of science feels so alien in relation to our emotions. To feel is to live, after all. “Are you a robot or a human being?” Emotions are just processes. Emotions are just functional states. True. …And? Isn’t there more to be said? Are they not also something felt? Don’t they possess a qualia? They are how we know we breathe, these feelings. They are how we know we are awake, are headed towards purpose. So, what would death be, but an absenting of all feeling?

Again, let’s hold up grief, because if anything stands in opposition to the void, it is grief — that assertion of the unique living moment, or friend, or future, or loved one, or self, in the face of loss. It is the bulwark against the contaminating encroachment of dissipation and mere time. There is a reason why it shares so many qualities with disgust, another emotion centered on the purging of poisons. Grief purges, but within a different digestive realm, the realm of the historically accumulated, subjective self, the subjective identity layered as an associative thicket.

With that in mind, I’m going to take a slightly different approach with this post. To try and consider grief on its own terms. Not pinned down in a scrapbook. Not to make a point, or rather yes, to make a point, but in the same way that the emotions that reside within us make their points: indirectly, lyrically, and laid out like the tesserae of a mosaic. It is ironic that I am going to use words to do this, because the language of emotions is not that of words. There is a reason why emotions and music reside conceptually together rather than emotions and language. But we use the tools we have.

***

So, what does grief tell us — that feeling of convulsions and dry heaves when the world sleeps, and a voice (your voice) blurts out, “No! No, no, no, no, no, …” It is as if identity itself were a corporal force intent on the impossible — an expulsion of absence. The self again and again convulsed and emptied. Emptied yet again. Gasps and then being crumpled into a respite, only to be convulsed and drawn fetally to the floor once more. It is a feeling more complete than any after-party black out. Except here it isn’t a stomach’s attempt to empty out poison, but the body coming to the rescue of mind — it’s the body’s hand reaching into the mind’s darkness to pull out that which is missing. Grabbing and clenching it scrapes away for a thing that can’t be found, shuddering as the breaches appear again, and again.

When I was younger I thought that there was only one way to turn grief into meaning — that grief had but one act. The solution was to cordon it off from language and lock it down. To express trauma was to belittle it. To express grief would be to dissect “it” (that necessary “it”) from the body, and wound’t this just compound loss with but another loss? Unspoken, at the very least, the necessary presence could remain, in the same way that the ink of an etching carries in it the impression of the now-absent wood. It is the room left unchanged when the children go off to college. It is Iago at the end of Othello declaring that from this point forward he will say nothing. A defiant flag planted as an ode to darkness — that shadowed landscape in which motivations and their contingent wreckage have no comprehension or sense within the breath of living. The burned images left behind after the bombs took away the living. There is that. At least there is that. A preserved totem pointing to an empty chair. To speak would be to share, and to share would be to re-experience loss by handing it over to others who can only nod, and mm-hmm, and then eerily go about their own busy lives. As eerily as robots. Here, at least, kept within the shadows they remain, ever pointing to that which was lost.

Within that refusal there is a type of purity, or a solitary imprint of purity crystalized against the tides of convenience. That is is the purpose of each convulsion. The loss will stay within, and to carry those remains, space must be made. All must be jettisoned, hollowed, and extracted. To do otherwise is to lose even more, and to lose is to no longer be. Holding on to the emptied space within is existential. As the mind laments, the body comes to the fore.

“Breathe taking.” We use the phrase to describe an encounter with that which defies language — those bones thrown out as augury when the stars and darkness impose their weight. Maybe it is the way her form once weighted itself next to you. Maybe it was the bump of shoulders on a walk in the woods. Maybe it was the furniture to be assembled and placed within the living room of a future. Maybe it was a voice — that voice — her voice — doing a silly sing-song over the telephone. “Breath taking.”

Maybe this why you gasp and shudder. A body plunging into the dark water where all else is silenced in the long sub-surface swim. The body holds its breath in the only pontomine of living that remains. At least it is something. Words? They are not breath taking. The are breath giving. A camera set back in motion. The house sold to a new family. The furniture replaced. Bulldozers brought in to build a subdivision where the orchard once spread. The large trucks arriving to cart off the detritus to time’s indiscriminate heap.

Words? They are slippery, changeable things. Breath held? This is grief’s first act. Give me silence of such weight that the record skips and the earth ceases its turning. Time grinds to a halt to a point where loss can have no meaning. The images remain. The voices remain. They will remain.

***

When I was in my 20’s the book The English Patient made an impression on me. The title character was burnt beyond recognition – his only identity held within the echoes of Herodotus’ Histories. Its pages interleaved by his own clipped and glued additions and added observations. In the book, his is the negated vortex — an intensity existing solely within its essential absence.

Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. But… our room never appears in the detailed reports which chartered every knoll and every incident of history. (p. 145)

The English Patient is a “breath taking” book. That is its gravitational center – the collapsed weight of a grief so total that nothing now remains but the husk of this patient now restricted and compartmentalized to a hospital bed while the battle lines of WW 2 pass forward and into the distance. Detritus, that is the English Patient. A book centered on the unpacking of a loss — which is grief — but it is also a book of the singular individual still there, alive in a hospital bed — a tangle of words that leave behind the dewed webs of morning and no spider found. Because grief is not for the generic, but the particular. And how can we account for the particular but through words?

You used to be like those artists who painted only at night, a single light on in their street. Like the worm-pickers with their old coffee cans strapped to their ankles and the helmet of light shooting down into the grass (English Patient, p. 55).

Yes, it is a dilemma. There is indeed a noble purity in grief’s first act. There is a beautiful rebellion. A refusal to give in to the “decay” and the loss of the valued particular — that single entity made possible by her, by him, by this. There is a courageous refusal in grief to bend to the universe’s authority by letting go of the now-gone. Grief is Hamlet’s declaration that he will hold on to that which is more than, purer than, and more essential than the “windy suspiration of forced breath.”

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly. these indeed seem. …But I have that which passes show. (Act 1, Scene 2)

To hold on to that purity, Hamlet will famously refuse to act. And that is the endpoint of grief’s first act.

***

Here is “Hamlet” contacting the real estate agent weeks after being told that the woman he had built his life around needed another man. She wants Hamlet, she tells him, but needs to do this for herself. So, why then is he visiting the real estate agent? What delusion is he holding on to?

Here is “Hamlet” making a picnic – crackers, cheeses, frois gras, and cold drinks to take on a hike that is the agreed upon first-time-in-a-month. They have been practicing distance and limiting calls — being friends. So why the picnic? Because the next day is the Qixi Festival. He won’t say that he knows, and in their chatting… their perfectly friendly chatting, it is never mentioned, neither by him, nor by her. He doesn’t want to ask if she knows. He doesn’t want to hear that she might not.

Here is “Hamlet” purchasing two tickets to see a show in a month. He is alone at home now, and she lets him know that she is seeing another. She tells him that she’s sorry. Again, and again she uses that word. And he does hear it, and he does understand. She means what she says. There is no malice. But it is a form of grief that makes him buy those two tickets — the phantom limb still felt when the eyes alight on absence. Except, how can it still be grief when grief was once his act of defiance — the dark grip tightened against dissolution?

Now it begins to sink in to poor “Hamlet” that his acts of defiance are less an assertion, and more a dissipation. The held-on-absence now eating at the holder. A Polaroid slowly bleaching itself back into a void. His acts have now become an emptying of self, not a protection of the other’s purity.

“Wasn’t grief’s gold,” he asks no one, “to hold on defiantly to the unique against contingency’s encroachment? Wasn’t it that heroic insistence that denoted me truly?”

Yes.

A simple whisper now, grief.

Yes.

But that was only the beginning, dear Hamlet.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile
and in this harsh world draw thy
breath in pain to tell my story. (Act 5, Scene 2)

Here we see “breath taking” giving way to “breath giving.” The importation from grief (Hamlet) to speak. The graved object granted a new living. Awkwardly at first. Breath held for so long must begin with gasps — the faces of the audience perplexed. But the attempt must be made or else that which has been lost, will only sink with the swimmer.

Read him slowly dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did… Think about tithe speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old paragraph its is otherwise (English Patient, p 94).

Yes.

In the suspirations of weeping one will find grief’s second act. The curtain slowly rising to reveal the actor returning to account. A calling of the nightingale against the eternal slumber.

***

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time from outside the window, far below the cricket players set up their pitch. And the commuter train rattled out its clockwork. She was this. To him she was this; as well as birds in the wood and water that spilled over moss-covered rocks next to a hiked path. She was the dusk view from the fire tower and the scramble back to a car as darkness settled. She was breath taking and breath giving. Words. And words, and words, and words passed back and forth between them, sitting on the carpeted floor with a spread of dishes, and faces inches away, and in the passenger seat of a road trip, and disembodied while carried over the Pacific ocean, bouncing between satellites.

Once a blizzard thickened over the highway, and they slowly retreated their increasingly helpless car to a small parking lot. And there they sat. A thickening of specked white on the windshield and windows. The flashing light of bulldozers clearing the lots of the nearby stores. Until they decided to risk it, together, white knuckled and attuned to every slip, every utterance, every turn and dip. From her phone she declared, “We just need to make it another mile, and then it should clear.” And later, hours later, while walking the bricks of a city street, they would feel connected and impressed by what they had come through together.

So it was. It was always a hunt with these two. Returning to a neighborhood to look for the black cat with white paint it its fur. Entering a phone booth in search of the secret entrance of a speakeasy. Once the correct number was dialed, a back door opened to reveal bookcases stacked high up to a ceiling, cushioned chairs, and candles. And there were ciphers and scavenger hunts that began with Tarot cards and ended with a gifted pair of socks hidden in a lab’s operant chamber. And maybe that, indeed, is a story worth telling. A ridiculous, wonderful story.

For, once upon a time…

It was her birthday, and they traveled into the nearby city. She wore a new dress that sparkled and he wore a tie. And through a window, the stacked lights of the buildings stood like trees. And later in the nighttime they hurried across the city to catch the last train, running through throngs in the station, holding hands and laughing. And when the train’s doors closed, and seated, they weighted against one another as the compartment rocked and clacked the two of them, and, the other tired revelers, who when the station arrived, dispersed themselves breathless and breath-filled into a summer evening.

Emotions as Possession

Emotions are a form of perception. They are sensations that provide information about the external world, and as perception they are also beliefs about the external world – albeit beliefs that I have been terming “visceral.” So, let’s keep trying to get a handle on how visceral percepts are different from those connected with sight, smell, etc. In this post I’m going to highlight what is known as the assignment of credit problem.

This is a photo of me and my daughters back in 2000 on a trip to Italy. Some of us are travel tired. Some of us are smiling for the camera. And some of us are asking “wuzzat!”

When my daughters were little, around 2-3 years old, I used to carry them on my shoulders while walking down the sidewalk. With their head perched just next to mine, they would often point out at something and say, “Wuzzat?” “A trash can.” “Wuzzat?” “A porch.” “Wuzzat?” “A doggie.” “Wuzzat?” “Ummmm…” What is the word for the structure that supports a swing at the playground?

I bring this story up, because we usually think that our thoughts and behavior are a direct response to the world. We see a red wheelbarrow, we point at it, we name it, we approach it, and lift its handles. We hear a sound to our left, and we turn our eyes to see the friend that has just called out to us. We smell fresh bread, and walking into the kitchen, find a loaf just out of the oven. In other words, our perceptions allow us to build maps of reality…maps that we trust as somewhat true. Yes, artists and philosophers have famously pointed out that these maps are not equivalent to reality — that they merely represent reality. Pointing at the wheelbarrow, whether by word, image or gesture, is not the same as the wheelbarrow, itself. Nonetheless, these mappings contain a high degree of confidence. The image of a pipe is not the pipe, but it is contains a high degree of “pipe”-ness.

This painting by Henri Magritte is justifiably famous as it succinctly makes the point that representations are not the things, themselves. The painting of the pipe contains features of a pipe — color, shadings, etc. — but it is not an actual pipe. Similarly, the percept that our mind registers is also not an actual pipe. It is a belief in pipes — that they exist, have been experienced, have certain qualities, etc. A very simple observation, but one that bears “keeping in mind.” Now, imagine applying the same logic to our emotions. To what do they point?
“Le Trahison des Images – Rene Magritte” bydailymatador is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Emotions, though, don’t quite work this way.

Imagine hearing a sound to your left, someone calling your name. “Mark!” You turn your head to the left, but don’t see anyone. The room is empty. You hear your name called again, though. “Mark!” So, you get up and go over to the nearby table. Is there a speaker here? No. “Mark!” You look under the table; you look up into the lampshade; you tap the side of your head a few times; you press your ear up against a wall. …Nothing. “Mark!”

This is closer to how our feelings call out to us, and it is an important difference between “normal perception” – vision, hearing, smell, etc. — and the perceptions that we term “feelings” – hunger, pain, happiness, fear, disgust, and so on. Namely, if you see a red wheelbarrow among the chickens, you can walk over to it and touch it, measure it, draw it. The red object that you see comes from and is caused by the reality of the wheelbarrow. What though of the feelings that you register? What are their origins? Why are they happening? Do they belong to me?

Bethel, Ohio 3000 years ago? Actually, it is Agamemnon and Achilles riled up and ready to come to blows. Agamemnon will claim that his actions were not his, but rather the result of spiritual possession, i.e., inconvenient emotions. This image is a mosaic uncovered in Pompei and is in the public domain. Original mosaic housed at the Naples Museum.

There is in fact a long history of denying that feelings belong to the individual. Here is a famous passage from Homer’s Iliad that captures this externalizing of emotions. Agamemnon, the main chieftain of the Greek forces, in a fit of jealousy has taken for himself a war prize (i.e., the woman, Briseis) that “rightfully belongs” to Achilles. In response Achilles has taken his warriors and refused to participate on the battlefield. In this passage, Agamemnon and Achilles are reconciled, with Agamemnon blaming his actions on emotions planted in him by Zeus, Erinys and Ate.

Full often have the Achaeans spoken unto me this word, and were ever fain to chide me; howbeit it is not I that am at fault, but Zeus and Fate and Erinys, that walketh in darkness, seeing that in the midst of the place of gathering they cast upon my soul fierce blindness on that day, when of mine own arrogance I took from Achilles his prize. [90] But what could I do? It is God that bringeth all things to their issue. Eldest daughter of Zeus is Ate that blindeth all—a power fraught with bane; delicate are her feet, for it is not upon the ground that she fareth, but she walketh over the heads of men, bringing men to harm, and this one or that she ensnareth.

The Iliad, Samuel Butler Translation at Tufts Perseus

In other words, Agamemnon is suggesting that the conflicted state that caused his actions — the pride he felt in himself, and the jealousy he felt toward Achilles –originated from the gods. The emotional turbulence is not owned by him; it does not represent him; but rather was imposed on him by outside forces.

This is actually a pretty common attitude. Here is another passage taken from a work some 1,700 years later. Hamlet (Act V, Scene ii). In the passage, Hamlet is preparing to duel with Laertes, the son of a man that Hamlet has earlier mistakenly murdered in a fit of paranoid, antic rage. Prior to the duel, Hamlet publicly asks Laertes for forgiveness. However, he does so by essentially pleading insanity.

And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.

Hamlet from the Complete Works of Shakespeare housed at MIT

Hamlet’s understanding of his own emotions is essentially no different from Agamemnon’s. It’s the “I don’t know what came over me,” or the “it wasn’t me, it was the alcohol speaking.” It’s what will lead philosophers to place feelings and emotions outside of reason. Animals might possess emotions, but we humans are capable of reasoning…except when those pesky animalistic emotions get in the way.

Feelings, though, are simply another type of perception. We don’t say that vision or taste is somehow animalisitic. We simply accept that vision and taste are processes that help us construct and relate to the external world. Feelings are no different.

Except they are.

Imagine that when my daughters pointed out at the world and exclaimed, “Wuzzat,” imagine if I, their father, could not directly see what they were pointing at. “Wuzzat?” …pain? …hunger? …sadness? I don’t have direct access to their perception, so in this situation, I would have to ask for more information and make an educated guess. Is it coming from your belly? Your foot? Does this help? Does that? In other words, feelings, i.e., visceral perception, are different from other types of perception in that they harder to localize within a Euclidean, causal space. A ball leaves a bat and flies through the air in a particular trajectory. We see this trajectory; we hear the connection of the bat with the ball; we sense the tactile impact of the ball hitting a glove. And yet, just describing this trajectory took years of effort by physicists. But what is the trajectory of an emotion? That sadness or happiness or anxiety or anger? What are it’s contours? In what space does it reside? What is really causing it and what forces bend its coursings?

Ceci n’est pas une emotion. I say that jokingly…sort of. The point is that the representation of interoceptive perceptions is not at all straight forward. Spoken language, after all, involves exteroceptive cues. Written language exteroceptive cues. What is the appropriate language for translating emotions? Photo is of a sculpture, “Composite Wing” by Jon Shearin, which is part of the Art on Main Exhibit in Chattanooga, TN

In psychology, this ambiguity of cause is sometimes referred to as the “assignment of credit” problem. The assignment of credit problem is a mapping problem. At any given moment perception offers up a cacophony of inputs. Depending on a task, our psychological filters remove dampen and discard certain inputs, magnify others, behaviors occur, and the world changes. The assignment of credit problem has to do with the psyche’s task of determining need, determining cause, and determining a path that satisfies need. What exactly caused the world to change? What inputs were relevant? What is the shape of the closet in which you are placing the hangers of your belief?

There are many classic experiments in psychology that get at the assignment of credit problem. Importantly, though, and relevant to understanding the landscape of visceral perception, psyches rarely simply guess. Rather, animals come into the world with particular biases. [1] Rats shocked after drinking flavored water while lights are flickering, will “assume” that the flickering lights are the cause of their pain. But rats made nauseous after drinking flavored-tasting water while lights are flickering will “assume” that the taste is the cause of their distress. (Garcia & Koelling, 1966. See this article for a description and some general applications.). [2] Male college students asked to complete a survey by a young woman on a high footbridge are much more likely to call that woman later, than if she approached them on a low footbridge. The most accepted explanation is that on the high bridge, the young men “assume” that their anxious arousal is caused by the woman, rather than by the bridge height. (Dutton & Aron, 1974. The phenomenon is often termed “misattribution of arousal,” and is the reasoning behind the folklore notion of taking a date to a scary movie or to an amusement park as a means of getting them to “like you.”

For the purposes of this blog post, though, let’s just appreciate how much guessing our psyches engage in. Or if not guessing, then biased cartography. For the rat, either or both light and taste could be the cause of their discomfort. But the “space” in which this visceral perception exists causes nausea to be ascribed to taste and shocks to be ascribed to visual cues. There was no choice on the part of the rat. No reasoning. A visceral perception appeared from nowhere and the psyche attributed it to a particular antecedent. Spiritual possession, then, or natural selection? And of course, in both cases the rat is wrong. The nausea is not related to taste, and the pain is not related to flickering lights. These connections are an illusion created by the experimenter. Nonetheless, the feelings are undoubtedly real for our poor rat and exist to inform the animal of characteristics of the environment and actions that impact these characteristics.

By the way, this notion of biased cartography is captured in psychology by notion of a “rule of thumb” or psychological “heuristic”. For example, items that we can more readily remember are felt to be more probable. This is termed the “availability heuristic” and influences the judgement that getting on an airplane is riskier than getting in a car. First of all, we get in cars much more often than we get on airplanes, and second, we are more likely to have read about airline accidents than car accidents. Therefore, the “availability” of a memory of an accident is higher when getting on a plane than when getting in a car. Or as another example, losses elicit more arousal (i.e., “feeling”) than equivalent gains, which leads us to avoid losses and demand more for items in our possession than what we paid for them ourselves. I might feel that pen is worth $1.00 when you have it, but feel like I should receive $1.50 when it’s mine. This is known as the endowment effect.

The endowment effect, the availability heuristic, and other seemingly structural mental short-cuts all relate to the assignment of credit problem. Our visceral perceptions are something like phantoms in a house of mirrors, apparently free-floating and existing only to confuse the clarity of “true,” “rational” perception. And yet there is a form to the space in which they reside. A structured supply chain built up by natural selection in the same way that vision has been built up by natural selection. That emotional vigilance you feel? Well, it might be love or it might be fear. As with vision, natural selection and your individual experience will step in to help you make the bet.

This is a loaded dice from Medieval London. The image shows the six sides. Good luck getting a 1, 2 or 3! Our visceral perceptions exist in a similar, biased landscape. Best guesses being assembled that map “need” to cause to action.
“File:A late Medieval to Post Medieval bone cuboid false dice dating 15th-16th century. (FindID 872260).jpg” by The Portable Antiquities Scheme, Stuart Wyatt, 2017-10-30 14:26:13 is licensed underCC BY 2.0

It’s a bit ironic

It’s a bit ironic that walking along the sidewalks this morning, I looked up to see a sign advertising the Chattanooga Design Studio. A wide crosswalk. A few homeless. Young couples Sunday sleepy, and then I was walking through the old Read House building where a Gospel Breakfast was taking place. Design. Beliefs. The Bible Belt. That’s as good a place to start this post as any, and what’s a belt for but to hold up a pair of trousers? And what are a pair of trousers but beliefs with which we clothe portions of our being?

First though, a mea culpa. I didn’t *plan* on blog posts that would end up going on and on about design, history, contingencies, or words-as-objects, and yet here I am. There’s another bit of irony for us, though. Planning…or lack thereof, and design. Sometimes the plan only emerges from the doing, and so there is hope that some sense will emerge – sense or hot mess.

“Pollock”by Piutus is licensed under CC BY 2.0

So, in my last post I suggested that our psyche is a designed thing. Indirectly, to be sure, but the idea is in there. The logic goes like this: all objects have a history, history is the accumulated processes that led to the object existing – some might go so far as to add “…and provided its purpose,” but let’s not go there just yet. Words are objects as much as can openers or bible belts – objects shaped by the happenstance of their histories. The same, though goes for our psyche. It’s an object, too. One that we happen to inhabit, and one that sticks to the skin like a wet shirt on some days, but nonetheless, an object. And if we want to talk about the history of a psyche, well, what we are talking about is the science of psychology.

Psychology is a science. I think anyone reading this knows that, but I’d like to take a moment to make sure that we all know what a science is, exactly, because to put it bluntly, science is a process for designing beliefs. A cabinet maker designs and crafts cabinets. A tailor designs and creates clothing. Scientists design and create beliefs. Particular sort of beliefs, to be sure, but beliefs, nonetheless, that emerge from the contingencies of their craft.

Now, science isn’t the only process for designing beliefs. There are lots of others. Let me give you an example.

Gone Phishin’

About three months ago I was targeted by a phishing exploit. I received an email that seemed to be from my Department Chair, and the whole thing went like this:

“Hi. Sorry. I’m in a meeting. Could you do me a favor?” “Sure. I’m not available until 10:00, but can help out then.” “I’ll still be in the meeting.” “No problem. How can I help?”

At this point I received a message asking if I could go get a gift card for $500, write down its code, and email it back. To my credit, when I read the ask for a gift card, I became suspicious. However, NOT to my credit, this suspicion didn’t immediately kick in. It took a moment to wade through a variety of other beliefs. There was the irritation about the presumption of being asked to do such a strange favor (“The favor is for me to get a gift card?!”) There was the self-criticism for having agreed to do the “favor” in the first place (“How could you be such a sap?”). At the same time there was a bit of ego patting related to being “the person” that my chair was turning to for a favor. Yeah, I wanted to believe that I was the type of person that others could count on.

All of those thoughts and emotions were triggered and played themselves out over 10s of seconds, and only then, did another belief begin to arise. “Wait. Am I being played?” This belief then led me to check the real email address of the sender. My mail client only showed a name as the originating email. But my chair’s name had been spoofed, so that hers was the name displayed on the “From” line of the email. Digging out the actual email address, though, provided the evidence I needed to realize that the emails were coming from a stranger. Who exactly I was communicating with, I have no idea. Only that they were trying to take advantage of the way that I construct my beliefs about the world, and that for a moment, it had worked. I had been led to believe that I was communicating with a particular person.

Sadly, these experiences with scammers are becoming more and more frequent. Buttons pushed. Psychological dials turned. And out pops a belief.

Here’s another one, which isn’t all that different from the frequent phone calls some of us get from the “IRS” telling us that we have urgent back payments to make.

Your in trouble, but we can get you out of it. Just provide your password, and everything will be a-ok!!

Now of course, as long as we aren’t the one who fell for the scam, it can be tempting to mock those that did. “OMG, how could someone fall for that!? What idiots!!” For that matter, let’s throw in the belief that a race of reptiles is secretly running the world, that the Denver airport is the nexus of a New World Order, or that Jimi Hendrix made a pact with the devil that allowed him to play the guitar in the way that he did. [Head palm] How can anyone be so stupid?

It reminds me of one of the great smack downs in literature, a fantastic scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet tears into the puffed up, suck-ups Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak? ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

“Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Take that scam artists, fake news, conspiracy peddlers, propagandists, and politicians. You won’t fool us.

And yet…

… we all do have beliefs, and our beliefs do come from somewhere. Most of us would claim that our beliefs, unlike so many others, are grounded in evidence. Except that what qualifies as evidence never gets much examining and our belief about ourselves being guided by evidence also doesn’t get much questioning. Hamlet believes that he cannot be played upon like a pipe, and yet there are many instances in which he is played. He believes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely playing at being his friends. He believes that his Uncle murdered his father, he believes that others have tried to play upon his love for Ophelia in order to pump him for information, and he believes that Ophelia allowed herself to be so used. In other words, Hamlet swims in currents of beliefs that have been triggered by processes of some sort while mocking the processes that would have him embrace particular beliefs. In another part of the play he spits out, “Seems madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems,” as if to say, “everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, but not mine. Mine are capital-T true.”

Imagine that each lit node is a belief that is currently “turned on” by the circumstances of experience

If we take a moment, it is relatively easy to become aware of at least some of the processes that design our beliefs. In other words, to become aware of the manner in which all of us are “played like a pipe.” The preacher stands before the congregation and states that god is love and we accept this statement because the preacher is an authority figure. He stands alone before a group, with the other group members apparently attentive. He often is positioned above everyone else and wears robes that indicate a particular status and area of expertise. He is a particular age, has a particular color of skin, way of arranging his hair, and uses terms and phrases that make sense because they are said with inflections that we hear as conviction or urgency. Most of us, if we take a moment to reflect on our own thinking, would recognize that all of these “triggers” construct a potential belief that “here is a person that I can trust and whose own beliefs I will use to guide my own.”

This says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the beliefs, by the way. That’s not something I care to get into. The important point for right now is to simply recognize that beliefs don’t just spontaneously occur. They are built from particular processes that act on all of us. It is these processes that scam artists conduct like an orchestra. It is these processes that build up, brick-by-brick, the conspiracy theories that haunt the internet. But really, these histories of belief are ubiquitous. They lead the child to blame themself for their parent’s divorce. They haunt the teen who looks in the mirror with self-disgust. They spur the athlete to run just one more lap. The bonds of trust and friendship that make our day-to-day living more meaningful and the superiority complex of the psychopath – all are the clothing of belief.

I’ll get back to the particular sorts of beliefs that science constructs, but I think maybe I’ll sit with beliefs just a bit longer. For example, it is a common misconception that beliefs are “stated things” – a sort of creed or set of values to which we pledge allegiance. For a psychologist, that statement is true: creeds and values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are explicitly stated things. In the same way that a dinner jacket is only one category of clothing, creeds and values are only one category of belief. There are many other types that emerge from the factories of our psyche’s design. Perhaps we keep them hidden, and speak them only to ourselves, but perhaps not, because we don’t have the words to speak them. Yes, some beliefs reside within the realm of words. Others might more accurately be said to lie within the body: emotional beliefs, reflexive beliefs. We also have what we might as well term perceptual beliefs: beliefs that give us, for example, the meaning in a visual scene. And finally, when beliefs are combined with judgments of value, then we have moral beliefs that guide us to approach, avoid, defend and eliminate – sometimes others, but yes, sometimes ourselves.

“Kayaker at Great Falls, VA”by pthread1981 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
(Cropped)

So sure, all of us are being played, day in and day out. We have all, at least on occasion been led to believe whatever it is that we believe. We’d like to think that we’re the one doing the designing, but at best we participating in design processes that shape our psychology. Even if you are convinced that you base your living on evidence, think of all the “evidence” you never have the opportunity to experience. The saying, “He was born on third base, and believes he hit a triple” emerges, after all, from a narrow read of the evidence – the narrow slice that a single consciousness inhabits — and the goal is to become aware of history, explicitly choose from the objects it offers, and consciously project the meaning that they offer into the future. That’s the goal.