Stop Pretending You Know Shit
Identification and Integration: A Critical Distinction For Approaching Intersubjective Sensemaking
This will be a piece about how we come to believe in stuff, and what our relationships with the stuff we believe in could/should/might be like. The ideas presented are not the newest or the most revolutionary, but they are important. It is my belief that collectively, we have a vast well of untapped potential that could be accessed if only we weren’t so attached to the idea that we as individuals “know” things. Though this may seem like an obvious lesson, and one that we might have learned a couple thousand years ago, we seem to still be struggling to digest it. Often the wisest course of action is to acknowledge the limits of what we know, and be honest about what we don’t. Sometimes, we actually seem to be getting worse at this, and it is a necessary and achievable goal to make some consistent marginal movement in a better direction, if we just think about it a bit and take on even a small amount of responsibility. This won’t be some unrealistic call for the emergence of the ubermensch, or a rallying cry for an instantaneous leap in class consciousness, or anything like that. It may appear as though humanity is in need of several miracles, but even if that is the case, I don’t think one is coming. Essentially, I believe that we need to stop waiting for some moment of perfect kairos to catalyse meaningful improvement in the world, and just accept that what we can do is at least try to stop running into the same brick wall over and over again.
The discussion of bias that follows is a simplification. I want the reading of this article to be relatively painless, and so I’ve limited myself to speaking mostly about confirmation bias. A more nuanced way to do this would be to explain many different biases and heuristics and the relationships between them. If the idea of such a discussion interests you, I recommend that you look up the work of Daniel Schmactenberger and John Vervaeke.
After a brief discussion of confirmation bias we’ll get into how we can become identified with ideas, ideologies, religions and all sorts of other memeplexes. I then want to examine the difference between identifying with an idea (or a complex of ideas) and having integrated it. My overarching assertion is that all too often we mistake our identification with an idea for an integration of it, and proceed to go around making truth claims and moral and/or intellectual value judgements, exerting a sense of superiority characterised by an adolescent overconfidence of knowing the answer. As uncomfortable as it may be to do so, we would do well to see this mindset for what it is: nothing but an extremely frustrating hindrance upon our ability to learn.
Knowing is the enemy of learning. Certainty is the enemy of curiosity. You cannot claim to have integrated that which you only love or hate. These will be the main takeaways, and I will work to make them viable propositions. Let’s press on.
(Rather than flit between terms for specific complexes of ideas, I will continue to use the somewhat inelegant but appropriately neutral and general term “memeplex”. A meme is an idea, a memeplex is a complex of ideas which are somehow structurally and functionally linked together). (If the term needs more explanation, click here.)
Confirmation Bias — Can’t Make Sense With it, Can’t Sensemake Without It.
Confirmation bias is the mechanism which makes us attracted to information that provides reinforcement for our existing perspectives, whilst we ignore that which challenges or critiques them. It exists for a reason. Like all cognitive biases, it is an essential part of our cognitive machinery; an adaptive strategy that helps us to reduce the complexity of the world into a manageably coherent experience. In order to not be overwhelmed by the endless richness and detail of the world, we need shortcuts, heuristics that are buried so deep in our cognition that they are able to function without our knowing or willing it explicitly. These shortcuts help us to filter out irrelevant information, and one of the ways in which they do that is by altering the salience of objects and ideas in the world around us, such that we find information which endorses our existing memeplexes more salient than we do any information that contradicts them. This particular phenomenon is what I’m referring to when I use the term confirmation bias.
Obviously enough though, it is ever the case that that which has been adaptive for us in the past can outlive its usefulness, and even that which is still an absolutely necessary part of our functioning can end up trapping us within feedback loops which quickly become dysfunctional. This is especially true in this world of all-consuming-digital-online-everything that we inhabit. All the major online platforms (which exert considerable influence over the character of life) now employ artificial intelligences, the workings of which no human can really claim to understand. These intelligences are designed to maximise time spent by users on site, and it is not surprising that this has given rise not to a paradise of free sharing of information and cross pollination of ideas, but to billions of bespoke reality tunnels, the construction of whose ever narrowing walls is made possible, in no small part, by confirmation bias.
Given that we cannot do away with confirmation bias altogether, we are then forced to ask a different question about it. Here we have options, and could ask a number of different questions, but I will pursue brevity, and suggest just one. It is this:
What does a healthy relationship with one’s own confirmation bias look like?
Confirmation bias can serve us. The way that it makes things appear hyper salient to us, can act as the catalyst of an uncritical and unquestioning fascination in us. It can begin to stir up this whirlwind of curiosity that energises us to keep learning, to keep following whichever particular thread we are following, to click on the links for further reading, to watch the next lecture in the series, to listen to the next episode of the podcast, to stay up late researching. This is one part of how we discover a passion, a vocation, a calling. Let us not do away with this! We couldn’t, even if we tried. Instead let us cultivate the presence of mind so that, even as we are feeding the flames of our passionate curiosity, we are able to remember not to stand too close to the fire. Let us remember that the thread we are following might be leading us down a rabbit hole.
Left to its own devices, confirmation bias can create a relationship to a memeplex which actually feeds off our agency and can come to possess us, as can be observed in the dogmatic evangelism of conspiracy theory enthusiasts and many religious fundamentalists. But as long as it is functioning as part of a dynamic complex that contributes to a disposition of curiosity, it has the potential to act as a kind of interest-booster. We do need unconscious ways to alter the salience of memeplexes so that some things stand out and we can further orient ourselves in the direction of what is relevant to our aims, and confirmation bias is an indispensable part of this machinery.
Identification / The Emperor’s New Pants
Here is where I need to begin to sketch out a key distinction, between identification and integration. These are two ways of describing our relationship to any given memeplex.
When we encounter a meme or memeplex, one of the first things that happens is that we unconsciously engage the machinery of confirmation bias (as well as many other processes) in order to determine whether or not we are interested in it. If we aren’t, we might take a minute to observe it with self assured scorn, or more likely, we just flat out ignore it, and move on. But if we are, then we become absorbed and fascinated by it in the manner described above. If this condition lasts long enough and is intense enough, my suggestion is that we then become identified with it, which is to say that we outwardly align ourselves with it; to borrow a Jungian term, it becomes part of our persona. We wear this mask, sometimes very publicly, and sometimes only within the safety of certain circles. But in either case, identification with a memeplex comes along with outer signalling. We demonstrate to other relevant parties that we know about it, by acting and speaking in a way which is implicitly informed by it, or by explicitly advocating for it; extolling its virtues and advantages to those whom we believe will be receptive.
We probably all (or at least the more extraverted among us) have had the experience of discovering some writer, speaker, or some particular memeplex, and avidly consuming large quantities of the related output in a short space of time, getting caught up in the ideas, trying them on for size and wearing them around for a while, excitedly sharing our new memes, signalling our newfound intelligence, and possibly enjoying the feeling. It’s understandable that we might think that this is what integration feels like. But this isn’t integration, any more than you’ve integrated the pants you are wearing right now, at least, not according to the distinction I’m attempting to lay out here.
The Delusion Of “Knowing Your Enemy”
Let me be very clear about what I am saying: You cannot claim to have integrated a memeplex if all you have done is become aligned or identified with it as a result of being a passenger on the rollercoaster of confirmation bias. You especially cannot claim to have integrated that which you have never engaged with at all. This phenomenon is actually more common than one might assume. Ask yourself this question:
Of the memeplexes I disagree with, how many of them do I understand at least as well as the average person who supports those memeplexes?
For a very large number of people, I think the answer is probably zero. For example, think of a person you know who opposes Marxism and/or Critical Theory. How much Marx, Engels, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, or Weber (etc) have they read? For a large proportion, it’s none. It’s fucking none. Few and far between are the people who are willing to put the time into a task like this. Within academia, this might be less rare, but this fact does not seem to be adequate to ameliorate the regressive tendencies which still appear to dominate conversation. And it’s not just anti-Marxists who do this, it’s everybody. What passes for “discourse” online is most often fairly described as people with low resolution understandings of their own position, projecting their even shittier understanding of the opposite position onto whoever they are “debating” with. Even those who talk often about good faith and “steelmanning” more often than not are just people who are far enough down their own reality tunnel that they themselves believe in the integrity of their own strawmen. It goes without saying that it’s overwhelmingly likely that their “opponent” is acting out a very similar process. If we also factor in the ways in which the platforms themselves actually reward bad faith and provocations of outrage and pettiness, we start to build up a picture of what we’re up against.
Unfortunately, the scope of this problem is not limited to low level comment threads. We can take as an example the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. Peterson, the world’s loudest critic of Marxism, turned up to debate the world’s foremost living Marxist philosopher, having only read the Communist Manifesto. Regardless of how you feel about Peterson, this is an embarrassing state of affairs. If you don’t get why I’m saying this, then you do not understand Marxism, Neo-Marxism, or Critical Theory in enough depth to construct an argument to counter this point. I know that sounds extremely dismissive. This is not a piece about Marxism so I’m not going to waste loads of time justifying this point, it’s just an example. But Marxism is a 150+ year old discipline composed of hundreds if not thousands of different perspectives. Marx himself wrote over twenty books containing hundreds of thought experiments and theories. Marxist and Neo-Marxists have deep critiques of Marx and of each other. A reductive approach is doomed to result in a total missing of the point. A categorical rejection of all things Marxist is actually bordering on the impossible, such is the scope of its influence on the world we live in, and the cultures that have conditioned us.
But let’s turn this around. Think of somebody you know who opposes Jordan Peterson. Peterson has literally hundreds of hours of Psychology lectures from his courses at Harvard and Toronto University available freely on youtube. Of all Peterson’s most vocal critics, how many have actually watched enough of his content to really be able to claim a nuanced understanding of what he is all about? Some actually take pride in the fact that they haven’t watched a single one, label him a simpleton, and laugh it off. A great many people exist who have not read past the (admittedly crass) title of his self help book “12 Rules For Life”, but who nonetheless confidently refer to him as a “pseudo-intellectual” and a “snake oil salesman” without even knowing that he’s held professorships at Toronto University and Harvard. This degree of intellectual laziness should be humiliating to us all, because we all are, or at least have been, complicit in it.
It’s OK. It’s not surprising. As we know, we need bias and heuristics, even confirmation bias. It takes a lot of time and energy to study and become familiar with any given subject in detail. Learning requires that we are motivated. We need something to light a fire under us. Finding a feedback loop of self reinforcing bias affords us the energy that powers our growth and development as people. We should enjoy the feeling of the pendulum swinging in one direction, but pendulums are supposed to swing back. Confirmation bias is unidirectional, it doesn’t know how to turn around. We need to recognise the difference between this feeling and curiosity, which is omnidirectional, and does not pick sides.
To be absolutely clear, I am not, in this piece, intending to advocate for Peterson or Žižek, nor for anything either of them are commonly associated with. I am not attempting to persuade you that either one of them is “correct”. In fairness, there are people out there who have done the work to be able to justifiably criticise Marxism, Peterson, and any other subject one cares to mention. What I am hoping and calling for is more of them.
I’m trying to draw attention to ways in which our attempts to communicate with each other break down, and notice the character of those failures. When I say that we should feel embarrassed or humiliated, I’m not calling for us to be ashamed and make apologies. Nor is this a call for a radical levelling up of our cognitive capacity that turns us all into geniuses,or some unprecedented widespread spiritual awakening that drastically expands our capacity for compassion or empathy. This is actually a modest proposal:
Just learn about the ideas that you disagree with, or assume the appropriately humble stance towards them if you haven’t.
Knowing is the enemy of learning, no matter what you know. Certainty is the enemy of curiosity, no matter how it is derived. If one wants to criticise a particular memeplex, one must be able to understand said memeplex from within the context of its own genealogy, to question its truth claims in terms of its own epistemic foundations, rather than remaining ensconced firmly within one’s own epistemic reality tunnel. This is especially true if one claims to be interested in learning, if one claims to be curious, if one claims to want to participate in some genuine kind of dialogical or dialectical process or some other kind of intersubjective sensemaking.
I’m also not just advocating for better “debate”. Debate is performative rivalry. It does have its place, and I’m sure improving it is possible and would be helpful. But I personally am sick of it, and I’m arguing for a kind of discourse where “defending” or “attacking” one position or another is avoided in favour of openness and genuine curiosity. There is always something in the space between two minds which neither alone can perceive. It always seems to me, a great loss, when that space is instead filled with predictable, polarising conflict.
Circumventing Our Defence Mechanisms / Converting Communication to Communion
If every participant arrives at a conversation believing themselves to be in possession of certain knowledge, then it is only a matter of time before the conversation becomes a futile battleground. Memeplexes (that we have become identified with, partly through unconscious bias) function as masks, placeholders for our larger personality, and momentarily possess us. The memeplexes lock horns, and the conversation takes the turn into rivalry and rhetoric, with all the fallacious potholes and stumbling blocks that that road accommodates. A prerequisite for being able to play non-rivalrous language games is sovereignty, which is impossible so long as we are identified with a memeplex. Let me unpack that.
If we are in this state of identification with, then we are only holding onto (or being held onto by) an understanding of one pole of a dichotomy. We arrive at a conversation like somebody walking around with a rope, just haplessly looking around for somebody to play tug of war with. What would be better, would be to have a two-sided understanding, an internal tug of war, in which different memes and memeplexes interrogate one another. If we can manage to initiate and maintain a lively, good faith, internal dialog, then at least while we are experiencing that, we will begin to develop a felt sense of what are the cognitive requirements, for us to be able to take part in non-rivalrous interpersonal dynamics. After all, internal dialogs tend not to unspool into ad-hominem attacks and sarcasm in quite the same way. By internalising dialectic, we are forced to begin to learn how to converse in good faith.
If we can hold opposites (or what feel like opposites) in tension internally, then instead of going about in the world being possessed by one polarity and unconsciously seeking the opposite externally, (like a magnet, being drawn towards other, oppositely charged magnets) we can approach integration, or a least, what feels like integration.
This is where we have to be careful about what that word means. Integration should not be thought about as an intellectual achievement, or a measure of whether or not one “has” a memeplex “in their head”. Integration is better thought of as a type of relationship one can have to a memeplex, and its existence is most often indicated by a felt sense. The rest of the piece will explore what that means.
Holding Tension, A Process Theory of Integration
Integration might be thought of as a measure of an internal state. This is not some grand narrative about how, if we just keep taking opposed poles and smooshing them together, we’ll eventually bring about some ultimate state of truth or being. There is a very straightforward reason for this: It’s impossible. We can’t claim to have integrated things in their wholeness, especially that which we’ve never deeply studied, but also even that which we have. Our understanding is always partial, our fields of study are always evolving, our minds do not hold memeplexes frozen in stasis; everything is constantly shifting, updating, overlapping, interpenetrating, adapting, evolving. (This issue was also spoken about in my last post.)
So, again, let me emphasise that when I talk about integration, what I am referring to is a particular relationship to a memeplex that we can have, provided we have cultivated enough different angles from which to view it. And I’m not talking about token gestures like Peterson reading the Communist Manifesto, or one of Peterson’s critics having watched him interviewed for six minutes on Channel 4 News. If we desire not to be possessed by the memeplexes that inhabit us, then not only do we have to become familiar with the opposed argument, but we actually have to make its propositions viable to ourselves, and even this is only the beginning of what I’m calling integration. It’s not just about having some detached abstract understanding of the opposed, it’s about being able to feel it, to participate in it, to know what it is to step into the stream of thoughts and ideas which make it convincing. We need to reach the point where the counter-arguments to our starting positions are so appealing to us, that we are actually in danger of succumbing to the pull of cognitive biases in favour of them.
This is the tension that I’m talking about when I talk about holding the tension of opposites. Storm clouds and batteries hold tension, and in doing so, have the capacity for great and small releases of power and energy. Sails on sailing boats hold tension, and it is only when the sail is tensed that the boat can move. Imagine our internal game of tug of war, where our various biases are lined up on opposing teams, more or less equally matched on both sides of any given memeplex. See, it’s not about “balance”. It’s not about being the architect of some perfect and complete structure of memes, and achieving some state of beautiful harmony whereby everything can finally come to rest. I’m not qualified to make this statement with any kind of authority, but as far as I can tell, I don’t think the mind or the world (or the relationship between them) will actually ever actually permit that to be the case. The world moves. The mind moves. The relationship between the two changes constantly. The universe is a dynamically complexified and complexifying system. Cognitive bias and heuristics are the coping strategies by which we navigate this dynamic complexity. We have to recognise that bias pulls us inexorably in one direction, and the task of becoming sovereign will involve retraining bias so that it pulls us in both directions simultaneously. We need to attach an outboard motor to the sailboat, so that, when necessary, we can go against the prevailing winds.
The next part of this task of integration is to recognise that the apparent duality of most arguments is, in itself, a heuristic, a simplification, and often little more than an illusion. The different aspects of memeplexes often seem to be well described as dichotomies or pairs of opposites, but it is almost never so simple. To return to the metaphor of the tug of war, imagine that we could attach ropes to any given memeplex on all sides, and train different aspects of our cognitive machinery to pull us in all directions at once. The tension in a spider’s web allows movement at any point in the web to reverberate and be felt by the spider, at any other point, because it has this tension. To borrow another Jungian term (which he in turn borrowed from Alchemy), we might think of this as the natural outcome of circumambulation — that is — moving around a thing slowly, carefully observing it from as many angles as we can, accepting that one side may show us something different from the other, and not demanding that our experience be reconciled into one complete, unified whole.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not making an argument for neutrality. I’m not suggesting that we all become political centrists, or that we all withdraw from all conflict and commune only with those who have joined us on the middle path. But we might recognise that rivalry in communication of ideas is often rivalry between ideas. Warfare between narratives that we carry, rather than the glorious expression of human will in quest of “Truth” that it can so often masquerade as. Lively debate is fine, but the quality and utility of it is delimited by the complexity and nuance of the memeplexes involved and our grasp of them.
One final clarification. I am not suggesting that “integration” is itself a binary phenomenon. It’s not the case that we’ve either integrated something or not. I am proposing that there is a continuum of integration, a process that we can participate in, and that as we go through this process, we inevitably become less identified with our beliefs, less ruled by them. If we can move both sides of the dialectic into our inner world, we can reasonably hope to become capable of participating in higher order dialectical processes in the outer world.
Everyone might not yet have noticed, but every single existential threat faced by global civilisation is a call to this kind of adventure. We simply cannot even comprehend the complexity of the problems we face with single minds, working in specialised isolation. Collective action is very much a necessity, and a significant improvement of existing methods of thinking and working together must be part of what we leave behind for subsequent generations.
Trust, Faith and Other Good Reasons to Do This Work
I want to close by speaking a bit more personally for a minute, and hopefully explain why it is I’m comfortable to make this argument. Attempting the kind of approach that I’ve outlined above is an ongoing process for me, but the extent to which I’ve managed it so far has had some tangible effects which I am profoundly grateful for. My ability to be present and curious in conversations with people who might have previously challenged my ability to be calm and reasonable has greatly improved. An outcome of this which I didn’t really see coming has been that people trust me more. It seems as though people can sense genuine good faith on an instinctual level, and when they do, they open up in ways that can be extremely surprising and often very moving. I am so glad of the way my interpersonal relationships have been afforded new depths by this process.
I want to talk a lot more about good faith in another piece, but for now I will just point out that it’s not something that is purely determined by disposition. Our capacity for good faith is something that must be worked on with as much rigor and dedication as we can manage. It’s not just about “being present”, or “embodied”. It’s about who you are when you are present, and what ideas you are carrying around in your embodied mind, and what your relationship to them is. It is hard work, but the rewards can be extraordinary.
Remaining sovereign, calm and in control of our own memeplexes during challenging interpersonal situations is largely about being able to suspend judgement. Judgement is the enemy of perception. A wonderful thing about learning to suspend judgement over others though, is that as we cultivate that capacity, it is inevitably focused also inwards, onto ourselves. This can come as a blessed relief, and I highly recommend it.
Learning to do the kind of integration that I’ve laid out here is, in a profound sense, a labour of love, but as I said in the introduction, you cannot claim to have integrated only that which you love or hate. Here’s what I mean by that. It doesn’t matter if you have a P.H.D. in psychology or philosophy, or if you’ve spent ten years studying Spiral Dynamics, or if you’ve read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations every day since you were 15. These are all great things to do! But if you want to bring real sovereign presence to a conversation with somebody who hates your perspective, you are going to have to know not only why somebody might feel that way, but also how to feel that way about it for yourself. Empathy is about feeling, not thinking. We need to remember that for most people, the feeling comes first, and the thinking second. So often we use thinking as a way to project uncomfortable emotion into abstract space and escape from having to feel it. So it is no small thing that I am suggesting. Genuine empathy requires real vulnerability, and I’m not talking about the performative, carefully curated and controlled kind.
To sum up: Be honest with yourself and others about how much you know. Recognise the partiality of your understanding. Accept the challenge of genuinely understanding the position of the other. Move towards integration, even though it means moving away from the positions your ego takes up. All through this process, try not to run from feeling. Knowing is the enemy of learning. Certainty is the enemy of curiosity. You cannot claim to have integrated that which you only love or hate. Connect the circuit. Empower your own sovereignty. Feel deeply. Do the work. It is worth it.
Thank you for reading.
