The View From Within - A Deep Dive Into Perspectives

[DocWatts]

Howdy! I thought I might share an excerpt from a long-form essay I wrote, which is a deep dive into the epistemology of perspectives.

The main idea that this piece explores is that we don’t just 'have' perspectives - we inhabit them. Meaning that we don't leave our viewpoints behind as we inspect their construction. Rather than chasing an impossible 'view from nowhere' or bowing out of the truth-game altogether, what I propose is embracing this 'view from within' - and learning to navigate it skillfully.

Full article can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/the-view-from-within
 

A ‘View from Nowhere’ promises an impossible escape hatch from our messy, partial perspectives. Here’s a better alternative.

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The Waters We Swim In

Like that old parable about the fish that’s oblivious to water, we too are immersed within a sea of influences that we rarely notice or examine. We like to think that our viewpoints are our own, yet they’re shaped by currents flowing through us from countless unseen sources. As social beings, our immersion within these shared currents of meaning isn’t optional - it’s a central component of having a viewpoint at all. Yet not all of these inherited patterns are benign. Some can become maladaptive when our circumstances change, while others are deliberately engineered to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. We can’t opt out, and we can’t fully step away - which makes dissecting this all-encompassing presence a real bitch.

Precisely because we don’t leave these currents behind while we’re coming to grips with how it directs our gaze, any such analysis will inevitably contain some degree of circularity. Given this predicament, we may find ourselves drawn to an impossible ‘view from nowhere’ which promises to liberate us from our messy, partial perspectives. Or else we may bow out of the truth game altogether, leaving us ill-prepared for when the world forces us to pick a lane. Neither approach works - so let’s find one that does.

When we abandon the fantasy of escape and the luxury of disengagement, we can pivot instead to an acceptance of our ‘view from within’ - and learn to navigate it skillfully. That means being able to discern between viewpoints that are aligned with our values, those we’ve slid into out of manipulation and bias, and those that are intrinsic to human cognition.

The million dollar question, then, is how to develop this discernment, when we can step back from what we’re trying to assess, but not step outside of it entirely? What we’re left with is a gordian knot, where our tools for assessing perspectives are themselves a product of those very perspectives. This predicament becomes even more challenging when we remember that we don’t inhabit these landscapes alone - we’re a product of the systems we participate in, even as we help shape them. And our current landscape is rife with systems that are precision engineered to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. And with AI entering the mix, this epistemic and emotional minefield is about to get a hell of a lot worse. Faced with the prospect of being swept beneath an exhausting tide of complexity, our frantic desperation for a life raft of easy-answers is perfectly understandable. If only the world itself was so accommodating.

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You Are Not An Island

The hard truth: if you were hoping for an escape hatch from the nebulosity of daily life, think again. Becoming skilled navigators on the sea of perspectives begins with attentive absorption within the mundane. No shortcuts here - more purposeful engagement with these landscapes of meaning is hashed out over kitchen tables and workplaces and school boards.

The takeaway of this reality-check? You are not an island - your viewpoints don’t emerge from some pristine inner-sanctum, but from the messy give-and-take of our shared, everyday world. Our vehicle for exercising agency within these negotiated realities is through culture. Culture is our shared system of collective meaning-making, which we inhabit and shape together. It’s our signature evolutionary specialization, as instinctive to humans as hive-building is to bees. And like a hive, cultures too are living systems - maintained by individuals, who are shaped by those very cultures in turn. For the influence flows both ways.

This recursive relationship between individuals and collectives reveals something crucial about perspectives. We don’t construct our viewpoints from scratch - we inherit cultural templates and adapt or invert them to fit our circumstances. To that end, our attitudes and beliefs are always situated against a horizon of significance - a tacit framework of assumptions about what matters - which we negotiate with our culture. Our intuitive sense that someone’s political beliefs are more significant than their preferred pizza toppings is an example. Most of this horizon comes to us ready-made - we don’t normally begin our mornings by drawing up an inventory of what’s important and what’s trivial. For the most part, these prioritizations come effortlessly - only jumping to the fore when our world is seriously disrupted. Most of us only catch glimpses of this horizon when we experience an unexpected loss or setback that shatters our sense of who we are.

But here’s the rub: the effortless nature of this cultural osmosis is a double edged sword - we can’t scrutinize every assumption we absorb, but only fanatics and fools doubt nothing. ‘Question everything’ may sound profound in theory, but it would be utterly paralyzing in practice. Instead, it pays to be strategic about what we’re questioning.

Which begs the obvious question: scrutinize what exactly? Since our concern is on how to exercise agency within constraints, that means zeroing in on how this autonomy gets undermined in the first place. Doing so will help us tease out where we have avenues for genuine choice. As we’ll see, some of these limitations on our autonomy are benign, while others are designed to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. But what makes us so susceptible to these problematic influences in the first place? To see how this works, it helps to understand the psychological machinery these systems are built to exploit.

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Our Cognition Is Built For Survival, Not Truth

Human cognition is wired to prioritize threats over opportunities, which is highly sensible from an evolutionary standpoint. Miss an opportunity and you might go hungry. Miss a threat and you might be dead. While today’s societies are considerably safer than the ancestral environments where this cognitive architecture evolved, evolution doesn’t care if this legacy software is a bad fit for our current circumstances. Natural selection doesn’t optimize - it satisfices, cobbling together solutions that are ‘good enough’ for survival and reproduction. As a result, outdated wiring doesn’t just get switched off - it gets repurposed.

Practically speaking, this ancestral firmware shows up in the form of cognitive biases. Two major culprits stand out for our purposes. There’s a negativity bias - where negative events are more emotionally engaging than positive ones. And there’s a recency bias - where we prioritize what’s fresh in memory.

The upshot of these inherited vulnerabilities? When our priorities aren’t our own, this can leave us hypervigilant to the wrong kinds of threats, while overlooking ones that actually matter. Our anxieties, then, provide important clues as to our psychological blind spots - areas where our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. And when these hijacked responses get scaled up across entire populations, it metastasizes in culture.

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The Authoritarian’s Bargain

So what do our cultural artifacts reveal about our current moment? Judging from our social media feeds, we’re awash in a sea of hostility, superficiality, and despair. Yet we also inhabit a world full of wonder, creativity, and joy. And here’s the real kicker - both of these realities are simultaneously true. So what’s going on here? You can touch grass, experience genuine beauty and connection - and you damn well should! But that doesn’t make the grind of day-to-day life against systems that are increasingly stacked against you any less real when you return.

The jarring gap between these two realities isn’t just disorienting - it creates a breeding ground for bad actors to take advantage of us. Our lingering sense that a better world is possible can become the hook for an ugly form of grievance politics, where demagogues offer up a set of reliable scapegoats for why the good life was stolen from us. A fairy-tale for adults that promises to return us to a mythologized past - if only we surrender our agency to a charismatic strongman, and trust in his plan to make us ‘great again’.

The allure of the authoritarian’s bargain lies in how it contains a kernel of truth - one that’s rooted in legitimate fears and frustrations. Anxiety over one’s social status is a reliable culprit here. Social status isn’t just some theoretical construct - threaten it, and people respond in dangerously predictable ways. For those feeling the gnaw of victimization and decline, it’s an attractive bargain. Sacrificing one’s intellectual sovereignty and moral agency becomes an acceptable trade off for the intoxicating illusion of empowerment it provides.

Put simply, this exhausting disconnect between our expectations and our lived reality didn’t emerge from nowhere. To make sense of this split, it will be helpful to highlight why this particular moment is unusual - and the forces brought us here. The hyper-polarized world we’ve become habituated to didn’t occur by happenstance - it has specific causes that can be traced and understood. So what happens when a disruptive technology collides with a social fabric that’s been hollowed out by decades of quiet erosion? It turns cracks into chasms.

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The Attention Economy

The digital revolution that we’ve come to take for-granted was no mere technological shift. It was also an accelerant for an erosion of communal life that was already well underway as this disruptive technology was entering the mainstream. Evidence of this atomization could be seen in declining participation in shared associations that knit individuals into a community - from bowling leagues to union halls to neighborhood associations. These stable anchors of collective meaning-making became collateral damage of changes in how we live and how we work. Suburban isolation, mounting economic inequality, and overscheduled lives gradually hollowed out the civic associations from which our shared social reality is woven.

The evolution of today’s digital platforms was a process in learning how to monetize the human needs that were being unmet in the wake of this fragmentation. And while there’s been no shortage of bad actors along the way, this commodification didn’t require an evil mastermind. Just the banal mechanics of market incentives, combined with new means for exploiting old vulnerabilities in the human psyche. The cumulative effect of this algorithmic optimization was the gradual creation of an attention economy - one where our psychological vulnerabilities are systematically exploited.

Edited yesterday at 04:38 AM by DocWatts