I asked ChatGPT to devise a dialogue between a person in favor of gender transitioning and a person opposed to the process. AI gave me a polite conversation peppered with numerous “I get what you mean” and “I understand what you’re saying.” All very polite and civilized.
Polite AI, Impolite Humans
And that’s where AI fails. Where? It failed to imitate a real conversation between two dissenting humans in our contentious times. It kept emotions in check because it has no inner brain desperately holding onto its identity and belief. The AI dialogue was polite, ideal. It was a model of rational, congenial discussion. It was even compassionate. The politeness, the frontal-cortex driven conversation drove its makeup. But most humans are just not that detached from their emotions, emotions that surface on touchy subjects like gender, gun control, abortion, and war. In all likelihood, a conversation between people on opposite sides of a controversial issue would more likely be peppered with “That’s crazy,” You’re crazy,” “Your mother was a Commie,” or other such statements. Rationality? Calmness? On point comments? Maybe at no time and no place have controversial topics engendered purely reasonable discussions. Certainly, in our own era, online comment sections are full of vitriol, and TV opinion shows…Hey, are you talking over me right now?
The Last Refuge of Cool Rationality Isn’t a Refuge at All
What about science? Surely, dialogue in science is rational and devoid of feeling. Ah! Think again, Grasshopper. Deep-seated emotions run in every inner brain, and they are always looking for a way out or a way to break through the outer brain like bats exiting a cave. Anyway, buckle up, cowboy, there’s much to be said here.
Take scientific controversy in any field. The opponents on issues are just as emotional as anyone else as Hal Hellman reveals in his 1998 book on the subject. Like everyday arguers, scientists make slanderous comments and write libelous passages for public view. In 1800, for example, Edward Drinker Cope of the University of Pennsylvania accused Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale University of incompetence, plagiarism, and destruction of samples in his effort to dominate the paleontological community. Each wanted to be known as the fossil expert par excellence, leader of the pack, so to speak. Marsh countered with his own accusations, saying that Cope had stolen some of his fossils and was mentally unbalanced. (121 ff.)*
Who cares? Of all the topics that humans keep in mind, paleontology has to be nearly, if not exactly, last on the list. I’m going out on the proverbial limb here, but among the one to two thousand daily visitors to this website nary a one of them, including you, probably awoke this morning in a dither about fossils. But the Cope-Marsh battle made the front page of New York’s Herald, a major newspaper in1880. As Hellman writes, “The Herald sold lots of newspapers; subsequent issues over the next two weeks continued to carry charges and countercharges.”
I have to tell you that I was affected by the irrationality of Cope-Marsh disputes though both died long before my time (Cope in 1897 and Marsh in 1899). Here’s my story; then I’ll get back to the handling of controversial topics, the inner and outer brain, and slander, libel, and lies.
When I was eight years old, I asked my dad to take me to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, a story I’ve told before but find germane enough to repeat here (Forgive the old professor; he means well). We took the sark green 1949 Ford and spent a few hours wandering around the museum. In the Hall of Dinosaurs, one of the world’s premier collections, we saw the Brontosaurus. Diplodocus, and other dinosaurs. As I looked at the Brontosaurus, I commented to my dad that the head didn’t seem right. Oh! Had I only published!
Because Marsh was obsessed with beating Cope and being first, he had placed a carnivore head— that of Camarasaurus—on his headless Brontosaurus skeleton, setting the stage for all museums to copy. In fact, Marsh had not found a new species for his incorrect head, rather he was looking at the headless skeleton of an Apatosaurus. Carnegie Museum followed Marsh’s mistake by placing a Camarasaurus head on its own “Brontosaurus” in 1932, and kept it mounted there until 1979, when it relabeled the skeleton Apatosaurus and gave it the appropriate herbivore head. As I said, I should have published in 1951, but eight-year-olds have short attention spans and limited experience, so the world had to wait for professional paleontologists to discover what I instinctively knew as a kid.
The point is that emotions, like Marsh’s desire to be known as the best and to degrade the reputation of his opponent, are the drivers of most arguments and many mistakes. Rational questioning is questionable in most controversies. Slow methodical discussion isn’t the conversational mode in modern times. That’s what we saw during the COVID pandemic, for example.
COVID
With no evidence that six-foot separations and one-way aisles in grocery stores and the wearing of masks had staved off a single infection and in spite of the demonstrable immunity of most children, governors—mostly Democratic—shut down small businesses and schools and mandated draconian rules for social interactions, including putting little kids in masks. And no one on the Left seemed to tolerate any questioning, any skepticism. People called other people “murderers” for going out in public and for not being vaccinated; people wore masks outside while walking alone, even outside cities, in the woods, for example. Rationality? It’s not easy to come by in any controversial issue. And, yes, I understand that placing the wrong head on a fossil does not rise to the level of responses to a pandemic. Nevertheless, there are parallels. As history shows, ensuing generations don’t learn the lessons of their predecessors. So, next pandemic, next set of angry people arguing for and against mandates, not discussing mind you, but shouting, condemning, belittling, defaming, slandering. No AI calm and polite discussions, no rationally driven observations that the vaccinated head of NIH got COVID as did numerous vaccinated political figures dictating an economic shutdown that laid off millions of workers. Ridicule of those who had questions and vitriol spread faster than the virus.
Poor Alfred, All He Wanted Was to Share His Evidence
Or take the case of Alfred Wegener, a climatologist who suggested with evidence that the current continents were once part of a supercontinent he called Pangaea. When he attended a conference in the United States, he was harangued by geologists who attacked him personally because 1) he contradicted their prevailing view on how mountains form and 2) he was a climatologist and not a geologist—damn his evidence however reasonable. Now, to be fair to his opponents, Alfred did not know the mechanism of continental drift, which is seafloor spreading, and that gap in knowledge created doubt.
Yes, I also have an anecdote that ties me to that controversy. I remember asking my dad in the kitchen what we lived on. He said “Earth” (I was maybe five). I said, “What does it look like?” He lifted an apple from a bowl on the table—he ate an apple every evening till he died at age 97— and pointed to a position analogous to 40 degrees north latitude, and said, “We live about here.” Because it was rounded, I asked why we didn’t fall off. He said, ”Gravity holds us on.” And he went on to say that there were people living near the bottom of the apple. And they, too, don’t fall off. Sometime later (I have no idea exactly when) he showed me a world map. Having a mother who worked puzzles on a card table during winter nights in those days before television, I said almost immediately that the continents looked like pieces of a puzzle if they were pushed across the intervening Atlantic. Again, I should have published. If I as a child could suspect a link between continent shapes, one might think that Wegener’s educated opponents might have suspected he was onto something worth scientific examination. His Pangaea showed the match of puzzle pieces. They just needed to use their outer brains to recognize that coastlines not only on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but also across other bodies of water, did indeed show a fit that was suspiciously coincidental.
But the men at the conference didn’t just present counter arguments. They were unkind to the mild-mannered Wegener whose continental drift hypothesis became accepted sea-floor spreading theory a quarter century after he died. Why the vitriol? People would rather adhere to their past beliefs than challenge them even in the face of evidence like Wegener’s fossil and rock connections.
Marsh and Cope, Wegener and American geologists: In his Great Feuds in Science, Hal Hellman recounts ten similar controversies, beginning with Galileo’s defense of Copernicus’ geocentric Solar System, a defense that got him put in virtual house arrest for ten years. Other issues have also led to contentious dialogues and socially harmful repercussions: Newton vs. Leibniz, Voltaire vs. Needham, and Darwin vs. Soapy Sam (Bishop Wilberforce). I’ll make a small wager that you were somehow involved in contentiousness over the COVID pronouncements, especially over restrictions imposed on the general public but not self-imposed by the political leaders, and over contradictory medical advice (Fauci: No need to mask; wear a mask; wear two masks).
In his epilogue, Hellman writes, “Resolution of such issues is particularly important, for without it, society is hard put to make reasonable and widely acceptable decisions concerning what, if anything, to do about the problems inherent in such controversies”(194). Yep. Try having a discussion with someone across the political divide concerning how to spend tax revenue, how to approach the issues of abortion, immigration, school choice, public education, inner city gang violence, homelessness, the Middle East, climate and energy, the “deep state,” fake news, MAGA, bail-free releases, no punishment for stealing under $1,000 from a retailer, riots on and takeovers of college campuses and city neighborhoods by anarchists, or any other issue of the day. You will be lucky to have a polite conversation, one emanating from the frontal cortex. Like Mr. Hyde, the vitriol will emerge from the inner brain. Just watch opponents on pundit shows to see the talk-overs and shouting.
All because we are, as Dr. Christian Conte points out in YouTube videos and in his Walking through Anger, attached to our ideas as a toddler is attached to toys. Experiments with pre-toddlers and toddlers have shown that they become upset if you take a toy they have been holding because they don’t distinguish between themselves and the object (like a ball). Recently, I observed my great granddaughter at age 18 months say “mine” and gesture with her hand to her chest when anyone took something she perceived to be the object of her attention. Sharing is something adults teach to kids. Sharing ideas is something many adults never learn.
Is Entropy the Cause? Rationality Is Humpty Dumpty
Being rational requires effort, balance. We're all perched precipitously on a wall high above treacherous rocks.
Is it because we live with entropy? Order is under constant attack in the universe. In fact, as the physicists tell us, the Cosmos is on a path to disorder. Societies long in the making can disintegrate in a flash. It’s only the constant attention to rational order supported by the constant repression of inner urges that keeps a society together and functioning for the greater good. But as we know, individuals act on individual perspectives and desires and only consciously determine to act cooperatively. Sharing points of view isn’t easy as all the controversies among supposedly learned intellectuals have revealed.
The Toddler Remains
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget wrote about “object permanence.” In his studies of babies and toddlers, he found that babies live in “the now.” Objects in infants’ proximity or in their grasp exist. Removed or hidden objects don’t. This is a matter of distinguishing between mine and other, as I see it. It is also, if I can make a controversial leap, the essence of holding onto ideas, which are surely analogous to objects in the brain’s inner selfish center of self-preservation and identity. You take something from my idea, you mistreat it, and you affect me personally. Take a toy from a baby or young toddler, and the toddler cries or gets frustrated or angry. Take something from my adult world, and I respond similarly. The attachment to toy isn’t, in my mind, much different from attachment to idea (or reputation).
And so, to go back to the beginning of this little musing, I’ll conclude that polite conversations on controversial topics aren’t as easy as Artificial Intelligence might suggest. Maybe the reason for the difference lies in the embodiment of our minds. We have physical brains in a physical body that developed in a physical world. We have a history of personal identity development that includes a selfish period, or self-centered period. We have a personal tie to objects that at the onset were not “permanent” but that became permanent. And we seem to have transferred that physical permanence to an understanding of idea permanence. “MIne,” my little great granddaughter proclaimed as someone picked up one of her toys. “Mine" Cope, Marsh, Voltaire, Needham, Darwin, and Soapy Sam the Bishop proclaimed.
And what about you? In any discussion about a controversial issue, do you say “Mine”?
*Hellman, Hal. 1998. Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever. John Wiley & Sons.
Polite AI, Impolite Humans
And that’s where AI fails. Where? It failed to imitate a real conversation between two dissenting humans in our contentious times. It kept emotions in check because it has no inner brain desperately holding onto its identity and belief. The AI dialogue was polite, ideal. It was a model of rational, congenial discussion. It was even compassionate. The politeness, the frontal-cortex driven conversation drove its makeup. But most humans are just not that detached from their emotions, emotions that surface on touchy subjects like gender, gun control, abortion, and war. In all likelihood, a conversation between people on opposite sides of a controversial issue would more likely be peppered with “That’s crazy,” You’re crazy,” “Your mother was a Commie,” or other such statements. Rationality? Calmness? On point comments? Maybe at no time and no place have controversial topics engendered purely reasonable discussions. Certainly, in our own era, online comment sections are full of vitriol, and TV opinion shows…Hey, are you talking over me right now?
The Last Refuge of Cool Rationality Isn’t a Refuge at All
What about science? Surely, dialogue in science is rational and devoid of feeling. Ah! Think again, Grasshopper. Deep-seated emotions run in every inner brain, and they are always looking for a way out or a way to break through the outer brain like bats exiting a cave. Anyway, buckle up, cowboy, there’s much to be said here.
Take scientific controversy in any field. The opponents on issues are just as emotional as anyone else as Hal Hellman reveals in his 1998 book on the subject. Like everyday arguers, scientists make slanderous comments and write libelous passages for public view. In 1800, for example, Edward Drinker Cope of the University of Pennsylvania accused Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale University of incompetence, plagiarism, and destruction of samples in his effort to dominate the paleontological community. Each wanted to be known as the fossil expert par excellence, leader of the pack, so to speak. Marsh countered with his own accusations, saying that Cope had stolen some of his fossils and was mentally unbalanced. (121 ff.)*
Who cares? Of all the topics that humans keep in mind, paleontology has to be nearly, if not exactly, last on the list. I’m going out on the proverbial limb here, but among the one to two thousand daily visitors to this website nary a one of them, including you, probably awoke this morning in a dither about fossils. But the Cope-Marsh battle made the front page of New York’s Herald, a major newspaper in1880. As Hellman writes, “The Herald sold lots of newspapers; subsequent issues over the next two weeks continued to carry charges and countercharges.”
I have to tell you that I was affected by the irrationality of Cope-Marsh disputes though both died long before my time (Cope in 1897 and Marsh in 1899). Here’s my story; then I’ll get back to the handling of controversial topics, the inner and outer brain, and slander, libel, and lies.
When I was eight years old, I asked my dad to take me to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, a story I’ve told before but find germane enough to repeat here (Forgive the old professor; he means well). We took the sark green 1949 Ford and spent a few hours wandering around the museum. In the Hall of Dinosaurs, one of the world’s premier collections, we saw the Brontosaurus. Diplodocus, and other dinosaurs. As I looked at the Brontosaurus, I commented to my dad that the head didn’t seem right. Oh! Had I only published!
Because Marsh was obsessed with beating Cope and being first, he had placed a carnivore head— that of Camarasaurus—on his headless Brontosaurus skeleton, setting the stage for all museums to copy. In fact, Marsh had not found a new species for his incorrect head, rather he was looking at the headless skeleton of an Apatosaurus. Carnegie Museum followed Marsh’s mistake by placing a Camarasaurus head on its own “Brontosaurus” in 1932, and kept it mounted there until 1979, when it relabeled the skeleton Apatosaurus and gave it the appropriate herbivore head. As I said, I should have published in 1951, but eight-year-olds have short attention spans and limited experience, so the world had to wait for professional paleontologists to discover what I instinctively knew as a kid.
The point is that emotions, like Marsh’s desire to be known as the best and to degrade the reputation of his opponent, are the drivers of most arguments and many mistakes. Rational questioning is questionable in most controversies. Slow methodical discussion isn’t the conversational mode in modern times. That’s what we saw during the COVID pandemic, for example.
COVID
With no evidence that six-foot separations and one-way aisles in grocery stores and the wearing of masks had staved off a single infection and in spite of the demonstrable immunity of most children, governors—mostly Democratic—shut down small businesses and schools and mandated draconian rules for social interactions, including putting little kids in masks. And no one on the Left seemed to tolerate any questioning, any skepticism. People called other people “murderers” for going out in public and for not being vaccinated; people wore masks outside while walking alone, even outside cities, in the woods, for example. Rationality? It’s not easy to come by in any controversial issue. And, yes, I understand that placing the wrong head on a fossil does not rise to the level of responses to a pandemic. Nevertheless, there are parallels. As history shows, ensuing generations don’t learn the lessons of their predecessors. So, next pandemic, next set of angry people arguing for and against mandates, not discussing mind you, but shouting, condemning, belittling, defaming, slandering. No AI calm and polite discussions, no rationally driven observations that the vaccinated head of NIH got COVID as did numerous vaccinated political figures dictating an economic shutdown that laid off millions of workers. Ridicule of those who had questions and vitriol spread faster than the virus.
Poor Alfred, All He Wanted Was to Share His Evidence
Or take the case of Alfred Wegener, a climatologist who suggested with evidence that the current continents were once part of a supercontinent he called Pangaea. When he attended a conference in the United States, he was harangued by geologists who attacked him personally because 1) he contradicted their prevailing view on how mountains form and 2) he was a climatologist and not a geologist—damn his evidence however reasonable. Now, to be fair to his opponents, Alfred did not know the mechanism of continental drift, which is seafloor spreading, and that gap in knowledge created doubt.
Yes, I also have an anecdote that ties me to that controversy. I remember asking my dad in the kitchen what we lived on. He said “Earth” (I was maybe five). I said, “What does it look like?” He lifted an apple from a bowl on the table—he ate an apple every evening till he died at age 97— and pointed to a position analogous to 40 degrees north latitude, and said, “We live about here.” Because it was rounded, I asked why we didn’t fall off. He said, ”Gravity holds us on.” And he went on to say that there were people living near the bottom of the apple. And they, too, don’t fall off. Sometime later (I have no idea exactly when) he showed me a world map. Having a mother who worked puzzles on a card table during winter nights in those days before television, I said almost immediately that the continents looked like pieces of a puzzle if they were pushed across the intervening Atlantic. Again, I should have published. If I as a child could suspect a link between continent shapes, one might think that Wegener’s educated opponents might have suspected he was onto something worth scientific examination. His Pangaea showed the match of puzzle pieces. They just needed to use their outer brains to recognize that coastlines not only on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but also across other bodies of water, did indeed show a fit that was suspiciously coincidental.
But the men at the conference didn’t just present counter arguments. They were unkind to the mild-mannered Wegener whose continental drift hypothesis became accepted sea-floor spreading theory a quarter century after he died. Why the vitriol? People would rather adhere to their past beliefs than challenge them even in the face of evidence like Wegener’s fossil and rock connections.
Marsh and Cope, Wegener and American geologists: In his Great Feuds in Science, Hal Hellman recounts ten similar controversies, beginning with Galileo’s defense of Copernicus’ geocentric Solar System, a defense that got him put in virtual house arrest for ten years. Other issues have also led to contentious dialogues and socially harmful repercussions: Newton vs. Leibniz, Voltaire vs. Needham, and Darwin vs. Soapy Sam (Bishop Wilberforce). I’ll make a small wager that you were somehow involved in contentiousness over the COVID pronouncements, especially over restrictions imposed on the general public but not self-imposed by the political leaders, and over contradictory medical advice (Fauci: No need to mask; wear a mask; wear two masks).
In his epilogue, Hellman writes, “Resolution of such issues is particularly important, for without it, society is hard put to make reasonable and widely acceptable decisions concerning what, if anything, to do about the problems inherent in such controversies”(194). Yep. Try having a discussion with someone across the political divide concerning how to spend tax revenue, how to approach the issues of abortion, immigration, school choice, public education, inner city gang violence, homelessness, the Middle East, climate and energy, the “deep state,” fake news, MAGA, bail-free releases, no punishment for stealing under $1,000 from a retailer, riots on and takeovers of college campuses and city neighborhoods by anarchists, or any other issue of the day. You will be lucky to have a polite conversation, one emanating from the frontal cortex. Like Mr. Hyde, the vitriol will emerge from the inner brain. Just watch opponents on pundit shows to see the talk-overs and shouting.
All because we are, as Dr. Christian Conte points out in YouTube videos and in his Walking through Anger, attached to our ideas as a toddler is attached to toys. Experiments with pre-toddlers and toddlers have shown that they become upset if you take a toy they have been holding because they don’t distinguish between themselves and the object (like a ball). Recently, I observed my great granddaughter at age 18 months say “mine” and gesture with her hand to her chest when anyone took something she perceived to be the object of her attention. Sharing is something adults teach to kids. Sharing ideas is something many adults never learn.
Is Entropy the Cause? Rationality Is Humpty Dumpty
Being rational requires effort, balance. We're all perched precipitously on a wall high above treacherous rocks.
Is it because we live with entropy? Order is under constant attack in the universe. In fact, as the physicists tell us, the Cosmos is on a path to disorder. Societies long in the making can disintegrate in a flash. It’s only the constant attention to rational order supported by the constant repression of inner urges that keeps a society together and functioning for the greater good. But as we know, individuals act on individual perspectives and desires and only consciously determine to act cooperatively. Sharing points of view isn’t easy as all the controversies among supposedly learned intellectuals have revealed.
The Toddler Remains
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget wrote about “object permanence.” In his studies of babies and toddlers, he found that babies live in “the now.” Objects in infants’ proximity or in their grasp exist. Removed or hidden objects don’t. This is a matter of distinguishing between mine and other, as I see it. It is also, if I can make a controversial leap, the essence of holding onto ideas, which are surely analogous to objects in the brain’s inner selfish center of self-preservation and identity. You take something from my idea, you mistreat it, and you affect me personally. Take a toy from a baby or young toddler, and the toddler cries or gets frustrated or angry. Take something from my adult world, and I respond similarly. The attachment to toy isn’t, in my mind, much different from attachment to idea (or reputation).
And so, to go back to the beginning of this little musing, I’ll conclude that polite conversations on controversial topics aren’t as easy as Artificial Intelligence might suggest. Maybe the reason for the difference lies in the embodiment of our minds. We have physical brains in a physical body that developed in a physical world. We have a history of personal identity development that includes a selfish period, or self-centered period. We have a personal tie to objects that at the onset were not “permanent” but that became permanent. And we seem to have transferred that physical permanence to an understanding of idea permanence. “MIne,” my little great granddaughter proclaimed as someone picked up one of her toys. “Mine" Cope, Marsh, Voltaire, Needham, Darwin, and Soapy Sam the Bishop proclaimed.
And what about you? In any discussion about a controversial issue, do you say “Mine”?
*Hellman, Hal. 1998. Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever. John Wiley & Sons.
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