The Components of Sapience Explained

George Mobus

Background

In the introduction to this series I described, in brief, the four major components, or functions, of sapience as I have been able to decipher from various literature sources (see also my May 20, 2008 blog, "What kind of tacit knowledge produces wisdom?"). Most of my early thinking about wisdom and sapience derived from the wisdom research literature in psychology, particularly the work presented in Sternberg, 1990. But several lines of neuroscience, regarding the architecture of the brain, in particular the prefrontal cortex, and its evolution have also contributed to some of these ideas (Barrs & Gage, 2007; Calvin, 1996; Calvin & Ojemann, 1994; Damasio, 1994; Gardner, 1999; Gazzaniga, 2005; Goldberg, 2001). In this installment I want to provide more detailed descriptions of the four functions and how I think they interact with one another. The view presented here should not be taken as a neurological one. Even if it turns out that the prefrontal areas I think are most implicated in the central function of sapience, these four sub-functions should be understood as descriptions of functions only and not brain modules. My plan is to provide some intriguing evidence from neuroscience in a follow-on installment. The fifth installment will provide some evolutionary background on sapience — how it may have been selected for, when and how it developed, and how it might have developed to provide better guidance to cleverness.

Recall that the components, as I understand them thus far, are judgment, moral sentiment, systems perspective, and strategic perspective. I will take these in order. And just as I segregated functions of the mind (affect, intelligence, creativity, and sapience) in the prior installment, I will attempt to circumscribe the functions of sapience in order to clarify the role of each separately. Then I will attempt to knit them together to provide a more holistic view of sapience.

As I tried to show in the last installment, the key to understanding the role of sapience is how judgment interacts with cleverness to guide decision processing. This is how sapience affects behavior. Here I will try to show how the other three components of sapience work together to create the framework of judgment.

Figure 1. Sapience can be viewed as four main, interacting functions; judgment, strategic perspective, systems perspective, and moral sentiment. All of these are supported by the storehouse of tacit knowledge generated by judgment-guided learning (cleverness).

In the figure above we can visualize a rough map of how these components interact. Not shown are communications arrows between strategic perspective (SP), moral sentiment (MS), and systems perspective (SYP) that may exist, at least for tighter integration. In this diagram I assume that the main interactions between these three components is through what is learned and stored as tacit knowledge. These three, in turn, provide input to judgment that guides both what is to be learned (by the cleverness components of the mind) and how what is known should be used to make decisions. Also not shown is any connection between affect and moral sentiment which was noted in the prior installment.

The idea here is that there is a long time scale loop whereby tacit knowledge is learned and thus affects perspectives and moral attitudes. These, in turn, provide judgment with current systems and strategic situational views along with current understanding of the moral implications. Judgment draws on tacit knowledge (long term store and model of the world/self) to combine all sources of information in order to guide cleverness in making decisions and that includes decisions about what features of the world should be attended to in order to learn appropriate new knowledge.

It might be a good idea to pause at this point and distinguish between two types of memories that are sometimes confused, namely between declarative memory and what I have been calling tacit memory (also known as implicit memory). The former involves memories of actual events, places, faces, etc. The latter is the background knowledge of concepts, categories, and models. Specific memories of places, things, etc., may be the foreground of consiousness while meaning and context, unbidden to ordinary consciousness, is the background. The two memory types are not disconnected, though they are undoubtedly coded differently in the brain and occupy different locations in the cortices. One form of declarative memory called episodic memory is what most people think about as being 'memories'. For example, they might think that our heads are full of strings of episodes, like frames in a movie film, that somehow all connect, and that is all there is to memory. But memory doesn't work this way. What seems to make episodes encode in memory is a strong relationship to the background meaning, specifically, affective tagging or somatic marking. Briefly, our brains do have an ability to encode sequences of a sort (after all that is what motor programs are). So a specific episode may be encoded given sufficient motivation to do so. But the pieces that make up the salient parts of an episode are probably not in discrete packages. Rather an episode is reconstructed from pieces of both episodic and tacit memories that are recalled in a specific sequence.

More importantly, there may be a deeper relationship between episodic and tacit memory in that temporarily stored episodes (from the day's activities) in working memory may get analyzed for semantic content which is transferred to tacit memory. At least some researchers suspect this is what is going on in REM sleep. Episodes having unique relevance might be transferred to longer term episodic encoding during non-REM sleep periods. Much research is needed to say much more about the way memories get formed. But the ways in which memory types are used has been revealed sufficiently to make note of these differences. Henceforth I will mostly be concerned with tacit knowledge (note also that tacit knowledge also involves procedural knowledge, as in how to perform some complex tasks without conscious attention or intervention, like riding a bike.)

Consciousness and the Mind Architecture

Though I would love to explore this avenue more fully, I must treat it as a mere detour to provide a little more context. The field of scientific consciousness studies has been making considerable progress in the last decade. Once something no respectable psychologist would touch (only respectable philosophers*), the explanation of consciousness is starting to take shape. Neuroscience has had a lot to do with this. It is now possible to identify areas of the brain that are actively participating in conscious awareness by subjects in fMRI and other imaging studies. But for now the relevance is incidental to the main topic of sapience. The two concepts do go hand-in-hand, but, believe it or not, there is much more about sapience that I think needs to be grasped before consciousness (especially the big evolutionary question: what is it for?) can be better elucidated.

Figure 2, below, shows a rough map of the mind in a slightly different way. Here the triangle (or pyramid) shows roughly the amount of neural machinery that is given to various functions. I've also identified the hierarchical control model represented by brains/minds. The diagram shows relative proportions of brain activity that is either available to conscious awareness (or semi-conscious as in aware of a mood or feeling without being able to say precisely why it is being experienced) compared to subconscious processing.

Figure 2. A rough overview of mind/brain functions that shows relative proportions of what is available to conscious awareness in the awake state.

Sapience is shown at the top as a relatively small part of what the brain is doing. But all activities of the brain do, indeed, eventually feed into this seemingly smaller activity. The flow arrow from the central region, labeled 'models of self & world', show that tacit knowledge about self and the world, which includes current states of both (short arrow pointing straight up in the middle), is available to the conscious/sapient mind which then uses this knowledge to perform executive functions, i.e. to guide intelligence and creativity in decision making.

Most of our routine decisions do not require any awareness, nor strategic control (see my blog, "How does Hierarchical Control Systems Theory help us?" for a basic description of hierarchical control theory), and so are generated directly by the coordination level. You know the experience of driving a car. You hardly think about controlling it and only need to be keenly engaged (conscious) when a surprising event occurs. Indeed, most of our daily activities do not need supervision by conscious/sapient awareness. Most can be handled nicely by lower level intelligence(s).

When we are conscious we (our brains) are either involved in intentional thinking, attending to novelty or semantic salience in the environment, or are simply aware of spontaneous thoughts (as in day dreaming). The latter is arguable as far as consciousness is concerned, but most of us, when we snap out of a day dream, have a memory of what we were thinking. These conscious moments play an important role in sapience in that they trigger the judgment process. The latter activates lower level (subconscious) processes that are responsible for 'running' the models and engaging the tacit concepts. Judgments come forth, generally without conscious awareness as we experience their effects on our decisions and behaviors. Now consciousness has access to those effects and this awareness helps encode them into working memory and short-term memory for later integration.

Thus, sapience and consciousness are interrelated as operations at the highest level of the hierarchical control architecture of the mind. This, I think, is at least part of the explanation of what is unique about human beings as animals. Our minds have evolved this sapience/consciousness apparatus to achieve strategic control not only for a single individual, but for a social body as well. In a sense this mechanism implements a kind of distributed strategic control function among members of a tribe/family.

Judgment

The use of tacit knowledge and judgment in guiding current decisions is one of the characteristics of mammalian and avian life forms. What mostly differentiates creatures in the phylogenetic tree is the scope, degree of salience, and time scale over which tacit knowledge spans. For example a duckbill platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus, order Monotremata) is an example of an early mammal whose environment is relatively simple and whose modus operandi is fairly straightforward, even if a bit bizarre. It's brain, specifically its cerebral cortex (forebrain), is scarcely more than a shallow covering of the mid-brain (limbic brain centers). This cortex is presumed to code memories for specific places, mate, pups, good hunting places, etc. whatever is important in the life of a platypus. The frontal part of the cortex organizes attention and decisions and the rest of the cortex processes sensory data (much from the sensitive bill) and formulates learned motor responses. Judgment most likely amounts to not more than moment by moment frames for guiding real-time activities.

In mammals and birds living more complex life styles the neocortex is much expanded and thickened owing to the vastly greater amount of knowledge these animals need to learn in order to succeed. Most of the knowledge has to be learned (vs. genetically endowed like affect) because the complex environments are also subject to non-stationarity, meaning that individuals need to be able to adapt behavior over their entire lives.

Expanded Dimensions of Interaction

In the bigger, more advanced brains, judgment becomes more important in its role of guiding decisions. Decisions themselves have become much more complex along several dimensions (Horgarth, 1980). First consider the role of time. While the duckbill might only be concerned about what is happening in real-time, more advanced mammals have to make judgments that may have an impact on their lives, days, perhaps weeks from the moment. Humans make judgments that can affect them their whole lives, and the lives of their offspring well past their own deaths.

Another dimension is physical space. Human judgments can extend to the whole world today. Indeed, by making the decision to visit the planets we may make judgments affecting the solar system. When modern humans evolved they were already capable of migrating without a specific destination in mind. They spread from Africa rapidly. But even with this ability, their capacity for building a model of much more than a few hundred kilometers radius around an individual was probably limited. The more area a tribe occupied as effective territory (the known world to any one tribe) the more other tribes and physical conditions they encountered and would have to have models for.

As personal worlds expand the number of distinct objects of all kinds will increase, as will the potential for interactions between these objects. The raw complexity of a larger world probably increases, at least as the square of the radius out from an individual's location.

Stationarity is a fourth dimension. The longer in time, the larger in space, the more complex an individual's world, the more likely that unpredictable changes are going to happen. Murphy's Law comes into effect. No matter how large one's world might seem there is always a larger, more complex world surrounding it and interacting with it. And those interactions can lead to a cascade of changes in the individual's world. Think of the example of the invasion of a foriegn species into an ecosystem. Change and difference is inevitable in the world if your world is complex. Species that have existed for so long, like the platypus, have survived in a relatively buffered world or a world where the kinds of changes that did occur had no direct impact on their fitness.

The situation for humans is seemingly at the extremes of time, space, complexity, and non-stationarity. We are omnivores, meaning that changes in species of plants and animals will cause changes in behavior as we attempt to adapt to the new varieties. Our memories, particularly our tacit memory system, must have a huge capacity in order to deal with all relevant knowledge needed to operate successfully in this expanded world. Moreover, it must be capable of constant and life-long learning as the accumulation of experiences act to refine concepts and their interconnections, or even revise older concepts as new evidence is encountered. As we now understand from the research, this latter is very hard for most people to do.

Once certain beliefs are encoded, especially in adults, it is extremely hard for most people to accommodate countervailing evidence and change their minds (c.f. Gardner, 2004, for insights into what it takes to change opinions and beliefs). The more affective attachment to beliefs there is, such as religious doctrines and stories or nationalistic sentiments, the more difficult it is to question them and revise our thinking. This is an aspect of common sapience that keeps humans from attaining wisdom that is effective. Indeed, there is a kind of pseudo-wisdom prevalent in humans who cling to old beliefs and use their tenants to guide decisions. This level of sapience was actually fine for primitive humans living in small bands and roaming over small territories. The wisdom of the elders was based on accumulated traditions (experiences) plus imagined explanatory beliefs. As long as the environment remained reasonably stable, these beliefs could serve a purpose in stabilizing the social framework of the tribe. But it is when the scope of the situation expands along the above dimensions that things go awry. Ancient belief-based wisdom starts to fail and decisions do not produce best outcomes.

One of the difficulties of complex, non-stationary environments is that causal relations are sometimes very confusing. Numerous causes can lead to the same effect. Causal chains can become causal webs. A single causal event can, due to non-linear, chaotic interactions, lead to multiple (stochastic) effects. As a result the veracity of our models of the world, as well as of ourselves, can become degraded too easily. We make poor observations of reality and any errors get encoded into our tacit storehouse. Then owing to the inherent biases of judgment (Marcus, 2008, gives a delightful and sometimes dismaying treatment of built-in biases in ordinary human judgment) our judgments are further distorted from reality.

In short, our minds and our average level of sapience as a species is failing to handle the world of complexity and non-stationarity that we have helped to create. We've made wonderful discoveries in science and engineering thanks to our superior cleverness. But we have generally failed to make wise decisions regarding their exploitation in inventions and their uses. My singular paradigmatic example: nuclear weapons. Indeed the very need for weapons at all points to the massive failures of sapience at the scales beyond the tribal. Of course human evolution included the xenophobic tendencies — the Us vs. Them affective influence (Berreby, 2005) — that give rise to feelings of hostility toward others, especially if competition for resources is prevalent. But again, a higher level of sapience means having the ability to override the limbic impulses long enough to think things through.

Reflective Judgment — Meta-knowledge

Potter (1971) defined wisdom as "...knowledge of how to use knowledge." In other words, wisdom, as he saw it was a kind of meta-knowledge that transcended mere ordinary facts and episodes. He argued that tacit knowledge included an embedded moral aspect (see below) but also involved an ability to reflect on one's own knowledge, what one knew, what one suspected one didn't know, and what one should know to be considered knowledgeable. His emphasis was on explicit self reflection, which must certainly be considered part of wisdom. But as I have argued, deep wisdom also involves non-conscious abilities to judge what tacit knowledge should be learned and attend to experiences that will further that mandate.

This view of meta-knowledge, whether tacit or explicit, helps to differentiate ordinary intelligence from sapience. One might be tempted to call sapience meta-intelligence, or meta-cleverness to include the role of creativity. I prefer sapience because there are aspects of the latter that do not behave as just meta-decision making. But I will return to this subject when I cover the evolution of sapience and the brain structures involved.

The term 'reflective judgment' can be broadly interpreted as the mind (either conscious or not) reflecting on its own judgments and making judgments about those judgments! Some call this 'second-order judgment'. That is, the sapient mind examines the results of judgments made, large or small, and presumably guides learning to modify or refine the tacit knowledge that gave rise to the original judgment. Judgments must be judged.

Somewhat more narrowly reflective judgment entails epistemic cognition or thinking about knowledge (Kitchener & Brenner, 1990). Wisdom is often described as including an ability to make complex decisions in the face of uncertainty. Uncertainty is inherent in incomplete knowledge so a wise person understands that the risks associated with any complex, especially socially pertinent, decisions is due to an incompleteness in their own knowledge. How gracefully the person deals with such uncertainty, that they continue to apply their best judgment without claiming that it is based on absolute truth, for example, is a property of sapience. The sapient brain knows when it is dealing with incomplete or even inconsistent models of the world and adjusts its judgments accordingly.

This too is a guide to what needs yet to be learned. Uncertainty might be reduced in future such situations by learning more knowledge about the characteristics of the current situation. Models can be improved so that better decisions are made in the future. Or, and this is the harder problem, if outcomes from judgments do not meet expectations, then models may need to be altered. This requires determining the failure and taking steps to correct the model for future use. Many ordinary people find this very difficult or never really realize that it is essential in order to become wiser.

So sapient judgment involves a self-monitoring and meta-judgment capacity that is essentially automatic and should generally result in improving tacit knowledge over time and multiple experiences. People who never reflect on their own progress toward wisdom (or evaluate the efficacy of their judgments) and never seek improvement are doomed to foolishness. An old (I think Chinese) paradox says that if you think you are wise, then you are not, but if you seek wisdom, then you are!

Moral Sentiment and Guidance to Reasoning

There has been a tremendous spurt of research into the basis of moral and ethical behavior in the last several decades. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and anthropologists have begun to unravel the neural substrates and universal behaviors associated with moral sentiments. And the study of the evolution of moral behavior has demonstrated that the human capacity for moral reasoning is innate and has developed extraordinarily in the genus Homo.

The literature on the subject is extensive and I cannot begin to do the subject justice in this short writing. So I will focus on some of the main points that tie in with sapience. The keys to understanding the underlying motivations in sapient minds is the evolution and benefits of true altruism and cooperative attitudes that have allowed humans to form trust-based alliances even with non-kin and strangers.

At the core of the more sapient dynamics of social interactions is the sense of fairness and justice that helps maintain a generally well functioning social network. Fairness sentiments have recently been demonstrated at work in lower primates. Details of how humans experience justice and fairness have lately emerged from behavioral economics where many of the classical economics assumptions about rational agents have been found baseless or called into serious question. Models of humans operating under innate sentiments of fairness and justice have helped explain a good deal of human behavior that is otherwise puzzling under theories of human nature that depend on rational thinking.

But sentiments of justice and fairness have a dark side that, if not controlled, can lead to a breakdown of social structure. That is retribution, the fairness sentiment that demands punishment for cheating and immorality. The invention of rule of law has been one of mankind's greatest achievements whereby people feeling cheated are restrained from wonton retribution. The state takes responsibility for punishment and when things work right, the accused are afforded due process to determine guilt or innocence lest retribution be wrongly taken and lead to further conflict. Of course even the rule of law is no guarantee that things work properly. There are always tyrants and cheaters among the judges who subvert the process for their own gain.

And that is the difference between strong sapience and the lesser kind that seems to be our lot. Truly sapient individuals seem to have the ability to down-modulate their own desires for revenge and thus have greater control over their more affective (limbic) reactions to cheats and criminals. This doesn't mean that sapient individuals do not experience anger and desire for revenge or retribution. It simply says that stronger sapience somehow controls those limbic-based urges and keeps them in check so as to make decisions more wisely. Recent imaging studies of brain functions have shown that some individuals do seem to have more prefrontal activity during episodes of exposure to cheating or perceived unfairness, correlated with more restrained decisions. We also have evidence from neuroanatomy that inhibitory efferent fibers from the frontal cortex to various limbic areas, including the amygdala, act to dampen emotional responses to events in order for the prefrontal cortex to 'consider' the situation before acting.

Altruism to Empathy to Caring and Sharing

A starting point for understanding moral sentiment as an underpinning of sapience is to see the role that altruistic motives play in human life. Our whole sense of wanting to be good, and help others starts with this basic biological mechanism for ensuring the success of tightly bound social groups in out competing other groups. It is an evolutionary argument but it takes an interesting twist at the human level when altruism turns into empathy and caring with intentional altruistic behavior.

A fundamental premise of altruistic behavior is that one individual is willing (or compelled) to sacrifice its life for the benefit of one or more conspecifics. Sober and Wilson (1998) describe altruistic-like behavior in a trematode parasite (page 18). Other researchers have observed altruistic behavior in numerous species at all stages of evolutionary complexity.

For some time evolutionists had wondered about altruism and how it could have come about. It seems obvious, on the surface, that altruistic behavior would reduce the fitness of an individual (by exposing them more frequently to life-ending situations) and so selection would have weeded it out. But it is so clearly engrained in so many species that it must have an evolutionary purpose. Researchers have described various degrees of altruism and have generally provided satisfactory reasons why they would be favored. At the lowest level is the theory of kin selection, which basically posits that an individual's genes chances of showing up in the next generation are improved if that individual ensures that close relatives are taken care of or protected, even if the individual does not reproduce. This mechanism is used to explain why female worker bees don't bother to reproduce. The principle may extend to tribes or colonies in some species where distant related individuals sound alarms when a predator is spotted, thus increasing their risk of calling attention of the predator to themselves.

Somewhat more inclusive (beyond kin) is the theory of reciprocal altruism in which members of the same community are willing to sacrifice themselves or take non-reproductive roles even when there is a weak genetic connection between members. Presumably there are strong benefits of other kinds in tight social networks such that it still increases the inclusive fitness* of the group to have this kind of behavior even in the absence of direct genetic benefit (see Sober and Wilson, 1998 for a model of group selection providing a solution).

Many social psychologists have not been able to admit that the above mechanisms apply to human altruism, or what some have labeled 'true' altruism. While cases of people jumping into a frozen lake to save a stranger may have some basis in the above described, seemingly automatic reactions, what appears to most of us as genuine conscious caring for others goes far beyond mere kin or group fitness improvement. There must be something more that produces these feelings in humans. And that may be the role of sapience. The key being empathy.

Recently neuroscientists have discovered a remarkable kind of neuron in the brains of primates and possibly a few other non-primate mammals (and even birds). These neurons, called mirror neurons, have the interesting characteristic of firing both during the performance of an action by an individual and during that same act being performed by another individual when observed. These neurons, and in fact, systems of these neurons have been identified in human brains embedded in several higher order perceptual and integrative processing areas. This suggests that humans are capable of entailment with respect to much more subtle behavior by others, such as facial expressions conveying emotional state information of the other. There have been several studies that show that human subjects experience emotional mirroring wherein they not only grasp the emotion being expressed by others but actually experience a mood change in the direction of that emotion. The general phenomenon is what we would call empathy (Goleman, 2006, pp 40-43 for an introduction to mirror neurons and their possible role in empathy).

Altruism based in deep evolutionary roots of the brain along with this new mechanism of empathetic coupling may go a long way to explain so-called 'true' altruism. Other mental factors may still be active in some forms of altruism. It is suggested that a main motive for why people give to charitable causes is that they get a mental reward for doing so, thus suggesting there is no such thing as 'true' altruism. However, I do not see how these various mechanisms are mutually exclusive. Both empathetic-based behavior and subsequent reward are perfectly compatible means of reinforcing altruistic sharing and care.

Regardless of the details, it is recognized that deep caring for others is a core trait of wise people. Wisdom involves understanding that sharing and caring are at the heart of viable social groups. And, I suspect that even low levels of sapience involve a basic tendency toward more of this than being uncaring and selfish.

Yet selfishness is a problem in our societies today. The basic human propensity for sharing and caring might be muted when the social domain exceeds a limit based on sheer numbers and kinds of people encountered. Mankind evolved in a world where tribes rarely exceed several hundred individuals. It isn't unlikely that our subsequent evolution selected for those able to accommodate larger groups and strangers. After all, we have been living in such groups, villages, towns, states, etc. for five to eight thousand years. And we have adapted culturally, if not biologically, somewhat to those conditions. But the rate of change wrought in the information age has surely exceeded our abilities to accommodate the myriad strangers we encounter today. Indeed issues of xenophobia, ethnic conflict, etc. may have their roots in the fact that we have exceeded the number of others that we can extend our sharing and caring to.

One test of sapience might very well involve determining the extent to which a person can feel empathy toward strangers, and how much caring can be extended to different kinds of people.

Justice and Fairness

What is right behavior? What is wrong behavior? Are there universal rights and wrongs? And what makes it right or wrong in the first place?

Not that long ago the general belief was that different cultures around the world had different beliefs about what constituted right and wrong behaviors. The argument went so far as to claim that there were no universally held beliefs about right and wrong and therefore cultures should not be judged on the basis of their mores. It was all relative. And the evidence seemed solid. Even though, for example, most people throughout the world viewed incest as wrong, a few cultures, including some western ones, have practiced ritualistic incest (e.g. Hawaiian royalty marrying - brothers and sisters - to maintain the royal line). Similarly cannibalism is repugnant to most societies, yet some tribes have practiced ritualistic cannibalism for religious reasons.

However as the science has progressed it is becoming clear that there is something like a universal semantics of moral/ethical behavior in a manner not dissimilar to the universal disposition to language, e.g. speaking, hearing, and signing (Hauser, 2006, page 65). All humans have a sense of right and wrong, even if the specific instances of what counts as right or wrong vary from one culture to the next. Moral sense is innate.

One of the clearest pieces of evidence for this innateness comes from experimental work with monkeys and apes which demonstrate a built-in sense of fairness (De Waal, 2005, Chpt. 5). Fairness involves a relational observation between the subject and others in the group. For example, when one individual perceives another getting an unearned reward he/she will tend to feel resentment toward the receiver if there is no apparent agent giving the reward (perceiving the recipient as a cheater). Or the observer may feel anger toward the agent that provided the unearned reward. It also works on the punishment end. If an individual observes a perceived cheater being punished, then he/she feels satisfied that this is an appropriate outcome — in other words justice has been served.

The fairness sentiment can also lead to jealousy. When one individual perceives another winning a reward he/she can feel jealous but not feel anger since the reward was earned. In a good way jealousy might lead the individual to efforts to seek a similar reward to even out the balance, to get one's fair share. Of course that can lead to frustration if the reward was actually a result of chance and not truly earned.

The main point is that our sense of what is right and wrong starts with an innate sense of fairness. Behaviors that help the members of the group achieve a fair balance of resource sharing, for example, are associated with right actions and lead observers of those actions to have favorable memories of the actor. Similarly, behaviors that unbalance the resources or harm others are perceived as wrong and lead observers to have negative memories of the perpetrator. Cheating is defined by this criteria, when an actor derives benefit unfairly. And feelings of retribution follow when the cheater is caught. All of this sense of righteous and moral sentiment plus many more related sentiments arise from innate mechanisms in the brains of social animals. And that includes humans. Our moral sentiments are grounded in innate senses of fairness and right and wrong actions (relative to the individual).

But another question that should be asked is: If fairness is innately based, how can there be cheaters and sinners in the first place? And that is a critical question to ask. The answer is likely grounded in evolutionary theory and the inherent variation in gene alleles in a population. At a more transcendent level of social life occasional cheating may be advantageous in terms of the exploitation/exploration trade-off that the evolutionary algorithm is always manipulating. Cheaters are in a sense a kind of exploration of the space of possible behaviors while conformers are exploiters of good behaviors as defined historically. Every so often the environment may change in a way that some form of cheating behavior leads to a survival advantage that assures at least some members of the species show up in the aftermath. Or it could lead to a behavior that actually helps the group.

So innate cheaters are a consequence of normal variation in the population. Under ordinary circumstances the cheater's behavior is not helpful to the group and so mechanisms for detecting and punishing cheaters are necessary to maintain group cohesion and functioning. Hence justice. The sense that a cheater has been punished is part of the package. In humans we find a spectrum of the concept of justice with regards to the protection of non-cheaters for whom some evidence suggests they are cheaters. This problem probably doesn't arise much in non-human apes and other social mammals. But human social structures are complex and, as I have asserted, the causal chains are often obscure so that it is hard to abduce the cause of an innocent being caught looking like a cheater. Once again the human propensity to create laws that protect the innocent until evidence can be examined fairly provides a way to mitigate injustices. Of course the various laws and institutions for applying them are as imperfect as their creators and so are no guarantee that justice will prevail. And cheaters can be found within complex institutions using laws and procedures for personal gain (picture the district attorney who is anxious to get a conviction so as to promote getting re-elected).

Emotional Control

The final piece I want to cover here involves the capacity of a sapient individual to dampen innate emotional responses to cheating and immorality in others. As mentioned above, this facility is what allows man to formulate laws and procedures to protect innocents. Handling the capture and punishment of cheaters and sinners requires dispassionate observation of the recoverable facts of the matter before finalizing a judgment. It is no accident that we look for some level of wisdom in those we elect or appoint as judges in our judicial system.

This control of the limbic responses to external events by the frontal cortex is found in all primate brain anatomies. But in humans it has reached its greatest effectiveness. There are many more efferent and afferent fibers connecting various areas in the frontal, and especially the prefrontal, cortices with numerous limbic nuclei in humans than in other apes (LeDoux, 1996). The prefrontal cortex monitors limbic activities and acts to dampen the motor responses until the executive functions in the frontal cortex has time to evaluate the correctness of the limbic response. I will be providing some more detail in the fourth installment regarding the neural basis for sapience.

Systems Perspective

Seed Knowledge — The Systems Scaffold

Our models of how the world, other people, and ourselves work are based on having a built-in intuition about how systems work in general. Indeed, our entire knowledge base is organized around systemness. And when we learn, we are incorporating our perceptions into a framework of systemness because that is how our brains are wired.

Our minds naturally look for things like boundaries, wholeness (Gestalt), cause-effect relations, and a myriad of characteristics of systemness. We automatically attempt to find patterns in noisy data, and categorize patterns in hierarchical structures. Our brains process incoming perceptions so as to see the systemic nature of nature. We can't help it.

This is not surprising since through science, which is supposed to be objective, we have discovered that the world, the universe, is indeed comprised of systems and systems of systems. We find causal relations among system components everywhere we look. In fact, the drive behind the scientific approach to knowing is that when we find phenomena that are not previously categorized, for which a pattern of organization and causal relations have not been identified, then we are essentially forced to look for these things. It is as if evolution predisposes us to see systemness because everywhere there are systems. We are systems. And we are subsystems of larger meta-systems.

This propensity to see systemness, or discover it if we don't immediately see it, is a fundamental organizing principle which our brains are constrained to use to learn about the world. The generic system is a kind of seed structure upon which we map percepts in order to have a means of organizing our knowledge.

Every knowledge construction requires some kind of template upon which to organize new knowledge. The mind is not a blank slate (Pinker, 2002). The brain itself is organized in such a way that we begin our construction of knowledge with the aid of built-in biases for key perceptions and organization of those into early conceptual structures, like categorization and hierarchies of types. Thus as we grow and develop our models of the world and ourselves, we start with a foundation of generic systemness and a scaffolding that provides a basic shape to how we understand the world. Literally, we can't see it any other way. To that structure we start fitting our experiences into place. It is probably more a matter of jostling the bits and pieces around until the 'fit' into the scaffolding and among other bits and pieces already integrated. It is a stochastic process. Some bits won't fit anywhere in the edifice and so get dropped even if they should legitimately be part of the knowledge base. Fortunately, these bits are likely to be encountered later again so they have more than one opportunity to get incorporated.

The point is that knowledge is built upon prior existing knowledge and the ultimate seed knowledge is provided by evolution in the form of an ability to model systems.

Sapient Systems Thinking

As indicated above, one of the characteristics of judgment is in guiding what should be learned. We can now see that the systems bias is part of the basis for this. As our internal models of world systems improve over time and experience, our judgment derived from them can better guide the intelligence machinery in attending to perceptions that help improve the systems models. This is low-level judgment at work, the kind our biological ancestors had evolved. What makes for sapient systems thinking, and judgment so informed, is the role of strategic (long-term planning, see below) thinking, conscious reflection on knowledge being constructed and editing knowledge as needed (including editing plans for acquiring knowledge in the future).

This is a huge subject, of course, and will need much explication, beyond the scope of this paper. One succinct way of looking at this is that sapience expands the role of judgment in guiding future learning and refines the systemic nature of what is attended to in that future time.

Sapience involves intentional model building such that one becomes more effective in problem solving as experience grows. One attribute of a wise person is grasping the interconnections between elements of a complex system, especially a social organization. Applying systems thinking to such organizations increases the probability of finding solutions that will work.

Strategic Perspective

Strategic Thinking and Wisdom

In my May 23rd blog, "What will the world be like in twenty years?," I introduced the notion of thinking about the future as constructing a set of scenarios that have some various likelihoods of coming to pass. The construction, and model operations on these sets is performed by cleverness, guided by judgment. I further introduced the idea that scenarios might include our desires. That is, we might actually consider actions that we could take to make the future what we want it to be! In other words, we don't have to accept some kind of fate as a given. We can affect the future.

This is, of course, what we mean by strategic thinking and planning. Our models allow us to play 'what-if' games with the future. And if our future computations include a favorable outcome if we take a particular action now, then it makes sense to do so. All that is necessary is that we have knowledge of causal relations that provide leverage over the way the future unwinds. Sapience involves such a power.

Wisdom involves thinking about the future. What will the world be like in some distant time, how will my people survive and thrive in that time, and other such questions arise in the sapient mind. These questions guide the sapient mind in making decisions in the present.

Of course, thinking about the future and what might happen if such-and-such happens now is not always done with good intentions. A more Machiavellian person might set plans to establish or keep power over others. And those plans might include coercion and threats of violence as the actions to be taken. So by itself, strategic thinking is not sufficient to constitute a more sapient mind.

So we see now why moral sentiments are a necessary element in the model of sapience. We don't tend to think of those who plot against others for personal gain of wealth or power as particularly wise people. Indeed one can argue that such plotting really isn't strategic thinking because in the long run evil purposes will result in failure (well we like to believe that good always triumphs in the end). However it is hard to assess a time horizon that matters in human affairs. Is a year a strategic time horizon? Is ten years? What about several generations? The answer is probably all of the above. The major issue in strategic thinking is that it is oriented toward the future, that it involves multiple possible outcomes, and that it focuses on actions to take in the present to improve the odds of a favorable outcome in that future time. But to be sapient the favorableness has to be defined for more than the single individual. The wise elders look to the future for their people, not just themselves. They can see beyond their own deaths to a time when their grandchildren will face the environment on their own. What should we do today to assure those grandchildren have favorable options?

What Are the Functions of Strategic Thinking?

It turns out that many aspects of strategic thinking have been formalized much as aspects of judgment have been under the rubric of decision science. Strategic planning and management have been developed into a model that has been used in the commercial and non-profit organizational world for many years now. Much of the formal model was worked out ages ago for military management. These formal aspects, I assert, reflect what goes on in each of our heads now to some degree or another. In our formal approaches we have simply succeeded in codifying what goes on in strategic planning/management activities in our own thinking and built systems within organizations to carry these functions out.

If you read the blog post linked just under Fig. 2 above (hierarchical control) then you know that strategic control is at the epitome of a system designed to keep an active agent (a person, a tribe, a company, or an army) effectively operating in the context of a dynamic environment. Psychologist David Geary has written an extremely lucid book on the evolution of the mind, integrating neurobiological aspects with behavioral (I will be returning to this reference in the next installment). In it he expands on the theory that the human brain evolved as it did to increase the animal's control over its environment. Indeed, he argues that much of human social interaction involves subtle innate strategic interactions between members of the society as they collectively cooperate to tame the biophysical environment, and compete with one another for social influence without it becoming a violent process. The human brain represents the growth in importance of strategic thinking on top of logistic, tactical, and operational thinking (Geary, 2005).

There are some well-known pieces of strategic planning that you can map to your own approach to your future plans. For example you have to think about your overarching mission in life! Most of us don't have a conscious mission (some zealots think they do) but we all have our biological mandates to survive and procreate. Some people are driven by a need to accumulate material wealth, so they see their mission in terms of making a lot of money. Others just want to muddle through without too much hassle. So many people don't actually make mission-oriented plans even though they are subconsciously driven toward certain end goals. The behave as if they have a mission.

Each of us is constantly rolling out various scenarios about our social lives. What do I need to do to win Mary Jane's (or Billy Bob's) heart? is usually high on the priority list. The mission is in place and now I have to consider. Who are my allies? Who are my competitors? What talents and charms do I have? What flaws might I have? What will my competitors do if I exercise this charm, how will they counter? What might my competitor do to exploit my flaws (most of us have difficulty thinking about our own flaws, which is probably a good thing since if we did we might never try to make the score). What goals should I set to take actions on?

These are the kinds of questions each person asks themselves when they are in the courting mode. Similar kinds of questions suit other modes as well. Each of us are forever assessing our situation and our long-term prospects within the social networks to which we belong. Later, when we have mate and offspring our strategic questions and approaches turn to how we might best position the family for the future. This growth of strategic thinking extends when we have grandchildren. Indeed, a few individuals demonstrate an ability to think strategically for multiple families. The wise elders of years gone by.

And that is what sapient strategic thinking is about. Sapience involves the ability to include many others, including non-relatives, in the circle of others for whom strategic advice might be needed. In sum, sapient strategic thinking poses a future that is the best situation for the most people possible.

Conclusion

Sapience is built upon formerly evolved functions such as simple judgment, systems perspective and moral sentiments, primitive versions of which are seen in many mammals and some birds. Strategic perspective and thinking, at least in terms of thinking beyond the immediate future, seems to be a unique function in the genus Homo; I will return to the evolutionary perspective in the final installment.

Wisdom is described as a complex set of psychological functions. Sternberg and others have determined that it is not just intelligence, though it is correlated with intelligence in several important ways (Sternberg, 2003). Wisdom is viewed as a kind of meta-knowledge with a meta-intelligence (and creativity) to process the meta-knowledge. I am suggesting that the model of sapience presented here helps to organize our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of wisdom.

Sapience, like intelligence, is a behavioral and mental construct with identifiable neurological underpinnings. Wisdom, by itself as a psychological construct, is a window into how humans make hard or "wicked" decisions based on a wealth of tacit knowledge. But wisdom seems to require aging — one has to live a long time and aggregate the needed tacit knowledge. Sapience is a native capacity, like intelligence, that makes wisdom possible, just as intelligence makes knowledgeability possible. Whether or not wisdom obtains in an individual will depend at least in part on what kind of world the individual lives in, just as how smart someone becomes depends on how their intelligence is exercised in life. If one lives among similarly sapient and wise elders, then it is possible to see a wise person emerging from a life of learning. On the other hand, just as a potentially smart individual, trapped in a non-stimulating environment, might turn out dull in later life, so too a more sapient person might still turn out foolish if trapped in a foolish environment.

The really big questions that this model raise have to do with how much sapience do ordinary people have. That is how powerful is the computational competence of the brain? General fluid intelligence is characterized in terms of speed of memory acquisition and recall, working memory capacity and other psychometric measures. Collectively these are attributes that determine how intelligently a person is in problem solving and learning. In a similar fashion I expect there are measures of attributes associated with judgment, moral sentiments, systems modeling, and strategic thinking that collectively constitute sapience level. This model provides a way to generate testable hypotheses with regards to overall decision making competency with respect to complex, uncertain problem domains.

The question of competency level is an important one. With intelligence the definition of the norm is a statistical property of the population. We assign the value of 100 as the intelligence quotient of the average person (the peak of a bell curve). And for the issues in life that intelligence, or cleverness, is good for addressing, this system seems to work pretty well to attribute relative intelligence levels. Since the curve is Gaussian the bulk of people are near the norm and there are jobs for everyone. But with sapience the situation may be different. If it is a newly emerged capability in Homo, as I suspect, then the distribution curve may have a more skewed shape. It may be that the majority of people fall in the lower end of the curve. In the last installment I will explore this possibility more fully. Consider, for now, that such a distribution might well explain the seeming paucity of wisdom in our current societies. We as a species are in the mess we are in because our cleverness exceeds our wisdom would be a reasonable conjecture.

References