Is a Worldview Just a Weapon?

The mind is like an interface, a set of maps, or a snail shell

I recall a philosophy conference I attended as a graduate student, in which one of the speakers gave what I considered an appalling talk. I thought of her at the time as a hipster postmodern feminist, and instead of presenting an argument on some straightforward philosophical topic, such as the nature of knowledge, whether God exists, or the difference between science and pseudoscience, her entire talk was personal.

What I mean is that the article she read to the audience was all about her personal background, and how different listeners would interpret her differently depending on their backgrounds. She seemed to relish the chance to relate embarrassing personal details about herself and her sexuality, to attempt to shame the listeners and to call attention to their possible biases. In short, she was assuming there’s no such thing as objectivity, so there’s no point in arguing for anything since no one can handle an argument with any neutrality.

At the time her talk disgusted me. I regarded it as self-indulgent and childish. In the analytic philosophy tradition that formed the foundation of my philosophical thinking, there’s a big difference between logical argumentation and the ad hominem fallacy. Disposing of an argument by attacking the person presenting it is illogical because an argument can stand on independent, epistemological merits.

That philosophical tradition elaborates on the upshot of modern science, which is that objectivity seems not just possible but profoundly useful. Scientists set aside their gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, and social status and speak relatively universal languages such as mathematics and they perform experiments that let the facts speak for themselves.

Critical thinking can do the same, as a cheaper, homegrown method, as it were, for getting outside ourselves and determining the reality of some situation. Instead of working in a laboratory, we can just think logically in our daily life, and philosophy is supposed to be a systematic treatment of such arguments pertaining to the most general, basic questions we can ask.

Yet it turns out that the postmodern relativists have a point.

Setting aside philosophical jargon, we can think of a practical dichotomy between two kinds of beliefs, those to which we’re indifferent and those about which we care a lot. How should we make sense of thoughts, arguments, explanations, models, and worldviews with that dichotomy in mind? Indeed, what is a mind and how does it relate to these various mental states?

The mental interface

Here’s how I think the mind appears to us in the twenty-first century, given our scientific knowledge: the mind is an interface between our body and its environment. Somehow, the brain generates this interface and presents it like a HUD, a Heads-Up Display, as in the kind a military helicopter pilot might see on her helmet screen.

So, there’s the terrain which the pilot can see with her naked eyes through the helicopter window, and then there’s the information the helicopter’s computer displays on a screen that acts as an overlay. That is, the HUD stands between the pilot’s eyes and the window, reporting, for instance, that a mountain in the distance is 2.2 km away, or that a target is approaching, as indicated by the red dot the computer lays over the enemy base which the pilot is supposed to bomb.

We’re more familiar with this kind of interface from computer games. For instance, a game might inform the player she has only two lives left or that the coins on the screen are worth a certain number of points if her character can grab them. If you’re playing a role-playing game, you can search your inventory and the game’s interface will tell you all about the magic swords and other treasures you’ve collected.

Again, there’s the game’s simulated domain itself, the environment the player and the avatar — Sonic the Hedgehog, for instance, or Geralt of Rivia from “The Witcher” — are supposed to be seeing, and then there’s the game’s interface, the special information reserved for the player.

We can think of our unaided sense organs as like the pilot’s eyes looking out the helicopter window, or like Sonic racing through the simulated jungle. Our mind enters the picture often, however, hardly ever letting our senses receive unprocessed information. Thus, the mind superimposes an interface between our perceptions and the environment itself, telling us how we should think and feel about what we’re sensing.

For example, we can pull up our conceptual maps, known as “concepts.” If we’re looking at a dog, our concept of dogs might flash through our mind so that we act intelligently in that situation. Maps, too, differ from the mapped terrain in that a map simplifies for the sake of being useful. A map is an affordance, meaning it’s a tool that acts as an interface or intermediary. A map of a city will ignore many details and might highlight others. Or the map might be specialized, as in a subway map or a map of the best restaurants in town.

Likewise, the ordinary concept of dogs is a stereotype, a human way of thinking of dogs as pets (or as wild animals in need of taming). There are specialists with more exhaustive conceptual maps of dogs, such as biologists or veterinarians. And of course, dogs have their doggish mental maps of each other which likely differ greatly from how we think of them. Doggish maps are also limited, compared to some human ones, in that dogs have no scientific knowledge and don’t accumulate information in cultures that span generations.

A human mind is like a library of maps or like a computer’s Windows operating system. We have all kinds of background information we can draw on to help us navigate the world. We have not just a handful of items in our mental inventory, but thousands of conceptual maps in our memory, and we name them in our languages to have handy access to them.

Worldviews and mental homes

Let’s return, then, to that dichotomy between thoughts we don’t care much about, and thoughts that are precious to us.

The mental maps to which we’re relatively indifferent would include our empirical models which help us make sense of certain patterns. For example, how do you fix a broken television? You might think you have some idea of how to fix it, and you might even try to fix it yourself. Yet if you’re not an expert on that technology, you’d be willing to inform yourself or to change your mind about televisions work, to learn new information by googling the problem. You’d start off with a vague idea of a procedure to try out, such as turning the device off and on. But you’re not emotionally committed to that guess. You don’t care whether you’re right or wrong about how televisions work. No one knows everything, and some topics are bound to interest us more than others.

Suppose, though, you work in tech support. In that case, your knowledge of televisions matters to you because your livelihood depends on it. If your concept of televisions is like a map with big blind spots, reporting only “Here be dragons” instead of simplifying the device’s workings in an efficient, useful way, you’d be embarrassed and highly motivated to undergo further training.

What happens, then, when we care about certain beliefs even more than the repairperson might care about his or her knowledge of TVs. After all, it’s only a job, and this technician could apply for another one if it turned out he or she lacks the aptitude for it. What about the beliefs that are of ultimate importance to us, such as our religious convictions, political ideology, personal philosophy, the traditions that establish our tribal or ethnic identity, or the memories that define our relationship to our family or our sense of ourselves? We might call the set of these beliefs our “worldview.”

And here we can switch analogies. Instead of a HUD, think of a snail shell. Snails are born with their shells, and the two grow up together. The shell hardens over time, providing the snail protection. Moreover, snails can’t survive for long outside their shell. Unlike hermit crabs, which have evolved to occupy discarded mollusk shells and to swap them after they’ve outgrown them, snails are physiologically attached to their shells.

A worldview is an interface, then, to which we’ve grown attached. Typically, we develop this worldview from a young age, and we grow up with it, exploring, defending, and hardening it throughout our life. Our worldview is our mental home, like a snail shell.

However, because the human HUD is also rather like a Swiss Army Knife, we’re equipped with an imagination, which enables us to leave that home territory and to explore foreign homes, as in alternative worldviews. By imagining or empathizing with other perspectives, we can act like hermit crabs, trying on other maps to see if they fit, even as we’re attached to the one with which we’re most comfortable.

The mind as a mixed bag of tricks

With these metaphors in mind, we can return to that debate between postmodern relativists and realists, between those who think arguments are just power games, and those who think objectivity is possible and important.

Where’s the objectivity in having the mental equivalent of a HUD or a snail shell? Does a HUD speak for itself, or does it depend on the user’s interests? A child couldn’t make heads or tails of the information displayed on a helicopter’s computer screen, and a dog couldn’t fit inside a snail shell. So why assume that our thoughts are really about the external world at all? Maybe that’s just how we must think to be empowered by our mental interface.

To use their shells properly, snails must sometimes hide inside them to escape danger or dry areas, and they exit them partially to find food and mates. But snail shells have no semantic content; they’re not about anything else or intended to stand in mentally for things in the snail’s environment. At least on the surface, that’s not the case with our mental interface: the mind is a collection of maps which are supposed to stand in for the terrain to help us navigate it. That’s how it feels to be a mind.

But could that feeling be based on an illusion? All maps are simplifications, which makes them fictions, strictly speaking. Maps are tools we use that are like notes for a story we might tell. Suppose you have a map of New York City that displays the roads and some key buildings. What impoverished story could you tell about the city, based just on that slender map, putting together highlighted information in some dramatic, propositional form?

And would that map or the narrative bear some magical semantic relationship with the city itself? Or would those items be more like by-products of the city, tools we develop to come to grips with such a complex environment?

What we know is that to use these tools properly, to be a human mind, we must think in semantic terms. We must assume our concepts are about the things they classify and model. So, whereas snails are fused to their shells by special muscles, the glue that binds us to our worldview or to our customized home interface might be not just the underlying neural connections, but this know-how, this presumption that thoughts work as interfaces only when we treat them as models or maps that have contents, that are directed meaningfully towards some referent.

We can add that we’re bonded more strongly to some maps than to others, in which case the glue might be some existential dread of living apart from that map, or what some religious people call “faith.”

The reason this is relevant is that the postmodern relativist says, in effect, that we’re like snails that can’t escape their shells. Moreover, the “shells” are just extensions of us; there’s no independent analysis of how they represent their contents since shells aren’t about anything. Shells are just tools that empower the snail, and the social constructionist says our thoughts are just parts of our worldview that makes up our personality and our social role, which empower our body.

As we can see, though, it’s not so simple. For one thing, as I said, we can imagine alternative worldviews, so we needn’t be blinded by partisanship: we can try on foreign mental homes and even learn from them, modifying our native maps. Moreover, the way to use a map is to treat it as if it had meaning, just as the way to use a screwdriver is to twist it in conjunction with a screw in a hole. Tools have their optimal uses, so even if the mind were an interface that amounts to a repository of useful maps, and even if we were especially attached to certain maps, using them properly would amount to diagnosing their strengths and weaknesses, as maps.

That’s what explanations and arguments might be for. Just as technicians can inspect the helicopter computer or update the software, improving an outdated HUD, we can think of even our most treasured beliefs in objective terms. That is, we can model ourselves as persons with certain worldviews that might have some strengths and weaknesses. We can imagine how we seem to others, or how future people, super-intelligent alien races, or “God” might think of us. We can adopt meta-maps, and even meta-meta maps, thanks to that Swiss Army eclecticism that our cerebral cortex provides.

Thus, we can treat our beliefs as maps that are better in some ways and worse in others. Our concepts might emphasize something too strongly or have too great a blind spot in certain contexts, given our purposes. We can treat our beliefs as having some epistemic standing, as being reasonable or rather irrational and therefore unreliable. We can ask whether our maps’ information is relevant or obsolete, or whether it’s realistic or pure fantasy. Is the map intended to help us navigate the world or is it just a distraction, a lie that leads us around the primrose path like a pirate’s fake map of buried treasure?

Postmodern cynicism as a hint of late-modern enlightenment

If we return, then, to that postmodern feminist, we can see that there’s something off-putting about pretending, to such an extent, that arguments are impossible or futile. By talking in pure autobiography and ad hominem remarks, she meant to be revealing some inner truth, as though she and her listeners were slugs rather than snails with shells. That kind of relativism is an oversimplification. More precisely, it’s a flawed ideology, a misleading map that pretends there are no maps.

Still, the postmodernist has a point. Maps aren’t entirely what we think of them when we’re using them “properly,” and they differ from how we evolved to think of them or from how we’re often taught to use them. We can indeed imagine what the universe at large thinks of our maps, as it were, in which case such mental tools seem feeble and absurd.

Or we can ask, with Buddhists, whether there’s anyone at home in our shell. If the mind is an interface or an avatar, like in a computer game, who’s the player? Is it the Earth or subatomic reality that uses us, manipulating us as puppets, and are we therefore being played in treating our maps with intellectual rigour?

Postmodern cynicism seems, then, like a late-modern hint of secular enlightenment, like the kind of mystical apprehension that goes back at least to the Axial Age, with which we don’t just use our mental tools but see through them with a stultifying epiphany.