1.

That our mental models of the world are in some way incomplete or deficient isn’t — I don’t think — an especially surprising or controversial idea to most people.[1] This is usually expressed in a few ways, but my sense is that the most popular are: (a) that we have biases or blindnesses to certain phenomena or experiences, and (b) that there is a lack of an absolute frame of reference.

These ideas are memes, in the high-brow sense,[2] and they should feel familiar enough to anyone that engages even passively with popular discourse. These memes are applied to moral judgments and truth claims equally. Confirmation bias, race- or sex-based prejudice, and arguments about cultural appropriation versus appreciation fall into the first, while identification of different cultures’ done things (‘how can we comment on how these people choose to live?’), and arguments about the interpretation of statistics — or about the statistics themselves — fall into the second meme.

I don’t really care about whether it is good or not to have these memes be a strong force in the popular discourse, but what I do want to do with them is highlight that our culture styles itself as one that accepts relativity — and even fluidity — in how it approaches reality.

One of the most commonplace expressions of this is the appeal to lived experience-as-expertise. That the experience of an individual constitutes a view that can be considered level with an expert’s view is a feature of public discourse on most topics.[3] Granting lived experience this central importance to the working-through of issues that are considered important in the discourse is an acknowledgement that one’s mental model is deficient. To put this another, perhaps more interesting, way: there are certain things that are inaccessible to each of us, based on our respective mental models. Listening to and respecting lived experience is a means of overcoming this basic tenant, and is a reason we are enjoined to do so; or to, more generally, speak with those that are not ‘in our bubbles’. In effect, we are asked to supplement our mental models by observing — to the degree it is possible to do so — the mental models of others.

2.

How our current model of the solar system — that planets, their moons, and other detritus orbit the sun and not the earth — is a story of how difficult mental models are to dislodge once they ossify into dogma.

The version of the story I know — I assume I’m missing some vital elements[4] — is that a model of the firmament-as-dome was considered normal until certain observations made it impossible to preserve that model’s primacy. But it is important to observe that the firmament-as-dome made sense until there was enough of a body of evidence to overturn this. That is, most observations that could be got before Copernicus’s — and, really, Galileo’s — time were evidence for the dome theory.

In my mental model’s version of the story, the movement of some planets was nonsensical — the retrograde movement of some planets causes problems if you assume that they’re charting a straight course across a curved, but flat, plain — and repeated, futile attempts were made to account for this using the dominant theoretical model of the day. Finally, a model that reframed the problem was proposed, and, since all observations could be explained by this model, it was slowly, and with great resistance, accepted.

But it was actually far more revolutionary than this story suggests. The problem itself wasn’t reframed, but instead the reliability of our observations was hurled into doubt.

The topic of the 3 June, 2021 episode of In Our Time was Kant’s Copernican Revolution. One idea that stood out to me was articulated by Anil Gomes:[5]

Pre-Copernican astronomy assumed that you were fixed, and that when you looked up in the sky and you saw the planets moving; what you saw was the real movement of the planets. And then Copernicus comes along and says, “now, what you’re seeing are not the real movements of planets, but just the apparent movement of the planets.” And you have to explain the apparent movement by you doing something — you’re actually moving as well.

And, in a way, Kant thinks that pre-Kantian metaphysics is like that: everyone thinks that you’re fixed, and that the objects you see are the real objects, and you’re not contributing to them. And he wants to take this Copernican move and say, “actually, what you see is partly dependent on you.” So the Copernican revolution is a way of recognising that we’re imposing something on the world, and that explains how we can know about it a priori.[6]

That the observations of the planets themselves are not objectively true, but are in a sense only determined relative to the position and movement of the observer, is in spirit utterly opposed to the idea of a fixed, orderly, clockwork firmament.

3.

That our perspective is so relative is obvious to us now, and any serious attempt at measurement or observation must take into account the measure’s level of precision, or its expected error. Science as method attempts to remove as much of the error that our paralax introduces as it can. It is, effectively, a method of Monte Carlo sampling[7] in which small experiments are run to look at highly specific phenomena, and these observations aggregate up into a more complete picture of the underlying but inaccessible probability distribution of reality. The validity of a scientific study can ride solely on the extent to which it removes the human element.

And yet, identity is not spoken about in these terms. Identity — by which I mean the presentation and representation of the Self to onesself and others — is fluid, yes, and it is acknowledged in the culture that identity can shift radically and sometimes rapidly, depending on the circumstances of the individual’s life. Identity can be context-specific or it can be eternal; it can be known or discovered.

But I have rarely heard an acknowledgement that an investigation to ‘know thyself’, one is in the position of the astronomer in the aftermath of Copernicus. Not only is identity difficult to observe, the observations we can make are utterly unreliable, and what we are seeing is the action of the identity relative to itself.

Let me put this more concretely. The motiviations that lead to us adopting particular identities are, for the most part, completely mysterious to us. Staking one’s identity on one’s job, or the music one likes, or whatever, will always beg a question: why are you in that job? Why that music? And why do you think that sufficient to stake your identity on it? I suspect that you would find yourself in a chain of questions that leads to the ultimate answer: ‘just because.’ Certainly, identities may be constructed consciously and with a great degree of effort. But this once again leads us to a path of questioning that begins with ‘why that identity?’ and ends again with the plaintive ‘just because.’

There is no sensible answer we can give to these questions, for the answer is mysterious even to us. We haven’t developed a technique for removing our paralax errors. And the picture is more complicated with something like identity even than it is with celestial motion, because the stakes are so much higher: every individual has an identity that they consider to be True, and claiming that someone’s identity is not True is extremely threatening to them. Yet, they themselves can only glimpse their identity indirectly, through its effects.

And so, it seems to me, it’s one attitude for the mental models — ‘How stupid the Church was for not updating its cosmography based on new evidence! Checkmate, freaks!’ — but another entirely for identity, which is now sacred.

4.

In the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, the Buddha claims that there is no self; or, at least, this is the normal paraphrase. His monks gathered around, he points to the parts of someone’s self that might be considered Self. He indicates his body, and says that, if this were the Self, we ought to be able to change it. So his body is not the self. He does likewise with feelings, with perceptions, with fantasies, and eventually with consciousness itself. If there is a Self, he concludes, where is it?

Thanissaro Bhikku translates the final passages so:

"… Every form is to be seen with right discernment as it has come to be: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’

“Any feeling whatsoever.…

“Any perception whatsoever.…

“Any fabrications whatsoever.…

“Any consciousness whatsoever that is past, future, or present; internal or external; blatant or subtle; common or sublime; far or near: Every consciousness is to be seen with right discernment as it has come to be: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’

“Seeing thus, the instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with form, disenchanted with feeling, disenchanted with perception, disenchanted with fabrications, disenchanted with consciousness. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is released. With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’”

  1. In this post, I refer to ‘our’ culture, or ‘the’ culture. What I mean is: an Anglophone culture, made up of the important and powerful voices of the media in Anglophone countries (most saliently, Australia and the US). When I refer to the ‘discourse’, I mean discussions that occur between these important and powerful voices. The topics of these discussions, and the postures adopted by these people, inevitably find their way into everyday conversations between people who are not important nor powerful. ↩︎

  2. Says Wikipedia: a meme is an “idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.” ↩︎

  3. Again, I don’t care about questions of whether this is a good or healthy or — to be very provocative — right feature for a culture to possess. It is just a feature that our culture has. ↩︎

  4. But once more, I don’t care. ↩︎

  5. I have to note that Anil Gomes was also excellent on the Iris Murdoch episode of the same podcast (21 October, 2021). ↩︎

  6. A priori is philosopher-speak for knowledge that precedes experience. At the beginning of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses a good example of someone knowing that, if they dig beneath their house, it is likely to undermine the foundations and cause a collapse — even if they’ve never caused a house to collapse in this way. ↩︎

  7. Monte Carlo sampling is a technique of simulating a phenomenon to guess the underlying probability distribution of that phenomenon. Want to know which score is most common if rolling two six-sided dice? You can learn the probability distribution by modelling some large number of these rolls. ↩︎