I want to launch this blog out into the blogosphere. I had hoped to have it in the form I wanted by last September, and then by November, and now by this March. But I keep imagining how you will experience it the first time you discover it. I keep modifying my plan, with the intention of making your experience positive.
Our human brains possess a unique and beloved talent of imagining future events and planning our actions in order to reach our desired futures. A person begins using this capacity, located primarily in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, at a very early age and exploits it throughout her/his lifetime. We feel a pleasant rush of dopamine each time one of our plans succeeds, each time a plan leads to a desired future. So this talent becomes a beloved part of our personal identities; and we easily claim it as part of our shared human nature.
As a result, we are always looking for causes of the events and of the situations we find ourselves in. If I knew what caused the car to stall, I could get it fixed so it doesn’t happen again. If I knew what caused me to wake up happy this morning, I might be able to reproduce it tomorrow. If I knew what caused you to read this far, I could better plan my next post.
Some events have causes which we can easily and correctly determine and then do something about. And when we do, our propensity to determine causes is reinforced.
But some events are, for all intents and purposes, random. And many have causes which are so obscure or so complex that correctly determining them would be impractical. Sometimes we will even accept the first cause that comes to our minds instead of doing the work required to find the actual cause. In all these cases our desire to find a cause can lead our thinking astray.
As we look for a cause, we regularly look for an agent whose purpose or intention has caused the event. Often the agent we assign to a purpose or intent is human. But it need not be; we readily assign intention to non-human agents, even inanimate or hypothetical ones. Religious people often use “God” as the default agent when others can’t be easily imagined.
Even if we should correctly assign a cause, our thinking can also go astray when we look for an intention and agent behind the cause. There are causes without purposes or intentions or agents. And even when there are intentions and agents these may be too complex or too obscure for us to know. In this case as well, we may accept the intention or agent that is easiest to imagine.
One aid in thinking more clearly is accepting events and situations as given until we can accurately define their causes, and to accept the causes as given until we can accurately define their purposes and intentions and agents. As we generally acknowledge the wisdom of “Innocent until proven guilty,” we ought also to acknowledge the wisdom of “Given until proven intended.” Here’s a silly joke which is an example of assuming purpose instead of focusing on the given: “I ate a box of thin mints and didn’t get thinner. Guess they didn’t work.” (See other examples in “The Original Error”)
Most of us are painfully aware of the mess we can get ourselves into when we impugn the intentions of others. Following the maxim, “Given until proven intended,” can help avoid such problems even as it clarifies our thinking.
