Fascinating. Regarding the fabulation involved in brain-separated states: I was reminded of the Roman Seneca, who wrote in Letter 50 about a poor woman who was losing her sight, but instead blamed poor lighting in her room - this turned out to be the first recorded account of Anton's Syndrome, which combines vision/hearing loss with cognitive inability to recognise same, instead generating explanatory fabulation. Seneca makes the metaphorical point that we're all subject to a range of 'blind spots' and exculpatory fabulation - as you also observe!
Tommy, you absolute mad scientist of human weirdness. You just turned a deep-dive into moral heuristics, disgust psychology, and the fragility of self-awareness into a damn psychological rollercoaster, and I respect the hell out of it.
Because yeah—our brains are out here running on a system of invisible, pre-programmed rules we barely understand, while we convince ourselves we’re making rational decisions. We’re a bunch of contradictions in meat suits, slapping together post-hoc justifications for gut reactions that probably served some evolutionary purpose 100,000 years ago.
The spit thing? Perfect example. Logically, we know it’s just our own damn spit, yet some ancient part of the brain screams contaminant, contagion, danger! Like it’s suddenly turned radioactive the moment it leaves our mouths.
And that incest dilemma? Yeah, society didn’t get to where it is by sitting around running cost-benefit analyses on every cultural taboo. Some things just feel wrong, and that feeling runs deeper than language. And when we try to explain it? We throw spaghetti at the wall and call it philosophy.
But the real kicker here—the split-brain confabulation—that’s where it gets existentially disturbing. Because if half a brain can make up an entire justification out of thin air, what’s the full-brain version of that doing to us every single day? How many of our beliefs, our moral stances, our identities are just the conscious mind reverse-engineering bullshit explanations for instincts we don’t fully understand?
It’s equal parts fascinating and horrifying. We are not the unified, logical creatures we pretend to be. We are a pile of competing impulses, gut reactions, and mental shortcuts, all duct-taped together with whatever story seems most convincing at the time.
But yeah, I’m still not drinking my own spit. Some programming is just too deep to rewrite.
Is it okay to ask for a favor as a dedicated reader? Substack has this annoying feature that resubstacking while highlighting more than one paragraph is way more complicated that I can manage. And it is just that there are too many paragraphs from your posts that I like to highlight in resubstacking them. Is it possible at all to combine shorter paragraphs when the ideas are closely related?
Yeah the app is really annoying about restack quotes across paragraphs. It's easy to do on desktop (but I get that that's not a great solution if you're reading on mobile).
I'm not keen on losing the ability to use paragraph breaks for emphasis (which I know I do often), but I'll try to err on the side of combining for the sake of restackability. I actually just went and combined two paragraphs in my upcoming post that I think will have restack-quote potential based on this feedback.
“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.“ Chesterton in his autobiography Orthodoxy
Some of us require no clean cup to recognize constant disgust, ha [not a diss]. The incest thought experiment layers birth control to highlight visceral discomfort and works because it highlights how little direct control we have over our fleshy vessels. Perhaps if evolution equipped us with perfect control over our immunity and our plumbing, things would be clearer. We must rely on technology, of varying clumsiness, to assert any degree of control over 'the cogs of the machine', which simply turn. Whether an inherit risk (to health, safety, warmth, hunger, thirst) suggests anything like room for sociopathy is to ignore the static platform on which the 'game' or 'show' occurs at all. Have just one potato chip. Deny sharing, better yet ... share too much. Murder a questionable CEO. Reason the tracks required to wrestle with clever trolly after trolly after trolly ... eventually, maybe sometimes, it becomes clear just how funny, pretty, lovely, tasty, numbing, disturbing, and disgusting life appears behind the contorted perspective of being human. IDK, this is just me rubbing my belly while tapping my head.
The Haidt thought experiments always bug me. Dismissing people's moral reactions because they mention what could have happened is very silly, no? "John drove drunk. But he was very careful and nothing happened. Was it immoral?" Why is it irrational, or post hoc, to say driving drunk is immoral even if you took precautions?
Would it be immoral to drive drunk on an empty private track? What if they used a self driving car that would take over if they drove dangerously? The analogy is pretty flawed because the two scenarios aren't the same at all! No one is instinctively against drunk driving! They are against it because they understand it can bring harm
Here's an alternative to the brother and sister scenario. Two brothers are in their 70's, and have been in a loving sexual and romantic relationship for the last 40 years. They are very happy. They live in the woods alone to escape the judgement of others, and rarely, if ever, come into town. On the rare occasion they do interact with someone else, they never mention they are brothers. Their family has all passed, and they don't feel the need to have any friends because they enjoy each others company so much.
My moral reaction to this scenario is very different than the brother and sister scenario. I am opposed to the brother and sister, but in this scenario my reaction is "live and let live." The risk feels distant and no longer relevant, whereas in the brother and sister case the risks feel very large.
I don't notice much real difference. I think its just because you fleshed out the circumstances better and got is into their heads better. The story there makes it a lot more sympathetic than if you had just said '70 year old brothers have sex'. You could concoct an equally good story about the brother and sister
The "just had sex" story is very different than "in a long term happy romantic relationship" story. The former is risky because no one knows the potential consequences. In the latter, we already know the consequences of their actions, and the outcome has been positive for both participants.
In my work, we interview experts in domains like firefighting, law enforcement, medicine, social work, etc. These experts are often very bad at explaining why they do what they do. Sometimes they'll tell us that have ESP, a sixth sense, a Spidey sense, etc. We have to be careful and ignore their "why" explanations as post-hoc.
But just because their "why" explanations are bad does not mean their actions are unreasonable. Their "sixth sense" is triggered by things in the environment they noticed, and so we get them to focus on what they saw, heard, felt, etc. When we do this, we often are able to figure out the underlying rationality of their intuitions.
I see a similar thing going on here. There can be an underlying reason to the moral reaction, but Haidts methodology is not sufficient for actually getting at that reason. Just like if we only asked experts why did what they did, and they responded with "ESP."
Oh My. Thanks for the interesting start to my morning. I have actually been spending a bit of time thinking about this moral behavior/olfactory-gustatory relationship. There is so much to unpack, starting with a lot of research in NS on this topic.
How does natural selection result in a behaving creature that doesn't eat its own waste or have sex with its siblings? How does natural selection result in a creature that does not want to launch right into one of Tommy Blanchard's articles before setting ones stomach with some bland cereal?
Mike Bruzenak (SpeedOfSound@AnswersInAtheism) if you remember me.
I really enjoyed Iain McGilchrist’s the master and its emissary to explore the right/left brain divide in a philosophical way. He’s a neuroscientist too, so it’s super solid.
Excellent post! On the topic of spit and the automatic disgust response, it's fun to notice when the system gets a half signal. Tip a glass of water too quickly while drinking, and you may have to correct, and then some of the water flows from the mouth back into the glass. Notice how the mind briefly wonders whether to be disgusted and spit the whole thing out, or just keep chugging. At least in my case it resolves to keep chugging, because it still feels like clean fresh water.
For the rest, I'm sure there's a fine exploration waiting to be done on the relationship between disgust and sexual kinks. The modern saying "no kink shaming" is a good indication of a newfound area of non-judgmentality. Can't really say anything from experience though, I'm as vanilla as it gets.
And I don't know if I'm an outlier, or maybe it's just because I have no siblings of my own, but I can't seem to muster even a faint judgment on the brother/sister pair. Life's short and weird, if that's their thing, let them explore. Weirder things go on in the world and no-one bats an eye.
About 30 years ago I corresponded with the then-director of Mantak Chia's Taoist Retreat in North Carolina. He bragged that he would spend a couple weeks every year, alone in a cave with only his own urine to drink. Tibetan political prisoners are also forced to drink their urine as the CCP tortures them. Amazingly, this was not the nastiest thing done to them. #SaveTibet.org
Fascinating. Regarding the fabulation involved in brain-separated states: I was reminded of the Roman Seneca, who wrote in Letter 50 about a poor woman who was losing her sight, but instead blamed poor lighting in her room - this turned out to be the first recorded account of Anton's Syndrome, which combines vision/hearing loss with cognitive inability to recognise same, instead generating explanatory fabulation. Seneca makes the metaphorical point that we're all subject to a range of 'blind spots' and exculpatory fabulation - as you also observe!
I hadn't heard of this case, very cool! Thanks for pointing me to it!
Tommy, you absolute mad scientist of human weirdness. You just turned a deep-dive into moral heuristics, disgust psychology, and the fragility of self-awareness into a damn psychological rollercoaster, and I respect the hell out of it.
Because yeah—our brains are out here running on a system of invisible, pre-programmed rules we barely understand, while we convince ourselves we’re making rational decisions. We’re a bunch of contradictions in meat suits, slapping together post-hoc justifications for gut reactions that probably served some evolutionary purpose 100,000 years ago.
The spit thing? Perfect example. Logically, we know it’s just our own damn spit, yet some ancient part of the brain screams contaminant, contagion, danger! Like it’s suddenly turned radioactive the moment it leaves our mouths.
And that incest dilemma? Yeah, society didn’t get to where it is by sitting around running cost-benefit analyses on every cultural taboo. Some things just feel wrong, and that feeling runs deeper than language. And when we try to explain it? We throw spaghetti at the wall and call it philosophy.
But the real kicker here—the split-brain confabulation—that’s where it gets existentially disturbing. Because if half a brain can make up an entire justification out of thin air, what’s the full-brain version of that doing to us every single day? How many of our beliefs, our moral stances, our identities are just the conscious mind reverse-engineering bullshit explanations for instincts we don’t fully understand?
It’s equal parts fascinating and horrifying. We are not the unified, logical creatures we pretend to be. We are a pile of competing impulses, gut reactions, and mental shortcuts, all duct-taped together with whatever story seems most convincing at the time.
But yeah, I’m still not drinking my own spit. Some programming is just too deep to rewrite.
Such a fascination article as usual. I find the moral and social emotions so interesting, because of the cultural diversity impact.
Plus the self-narrative that drifts over time because of how our memory works.
Much to ponder from this. Thanks!
What an excellent article to read on my lunch break.
This was great.
Is it okay to ask for a favor as a dedicated reader? Substack has this annoying feature that resubstacking while highlighting more than one paragraph is way more complicated that I can manage. And it is just that there are too many paragraphs from your posts that I like to highlight in resubstacking them. Is it possible at all to combine shorter paragraphs when the ideas are closely related?
Yeah the app is really annoying about restack quotes across paragraphs. It's easy to do on desktop (but I get that that's not a great solution if you're reading on mobile).
I'm not keen on losing the ability to use paragraph breaks for emphasis (which I know I do often), but I'll try to err on the side of combining for the sake of restackability. I actually just went and combined two paragraphs in my upcoming post that I think will have restack-quote potential based on this feedback.
Thank you. Looking forward to the next post
“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.“ Chesterton in his autobiography Orthodoxy
Some of us require no clean cup to recognize constant disgust, ha [not a diss]. The incest thought experiment layers birth control to highlight visceral discomfort and works because it highlights how little direct control we have over our fleshy vessels. Perhaps if evolution equipped us with perfect control over our immunity and our plumbing, things would be clearer. We must rely on technology, of varying clumsiness, to assert any degree of control over 'the cogs of the machine', which simply turn. Whether an inherit risk (to health, safety, warmth, hunger, thirst) suggests anything like room for sociopathy is to ignore the static platform on which the 'game' or 'show' occurs at all. Have just one potato chip. Deny sharing, better yet ... share too much. Murder a questionable CEO. Reason the tracks required to wrestle with clever trolly after trolly after trolly ... eventually, maybe sometimes, it becomes clear just how funny, pretty, lovely, tasty, numbing, disturbing, and disgusting life appears behind the contorted perspective of being human. IDK, this is just me rubbing my belly while tapping my head.
A great piece! You got me thinking again!
The Haidt thought experiments always bug me. Dismissing people's moral reactions because they mention what could have happened is very silly, no? "John drove drunk. But he was very careful and nothing happened. Was it immoral?" Why is it irrational, or post hoc, to say driving drunk is immoral even if you took precautions?
Yeah I agree, they aren't clear cases of non-rational judgments as Haidt et al want, and other researchers have taken him to task on exactly that.
Would it be immoral to drive drunk on an empty private track? What if they used a self driving car that would take over if they drove dangerously? The analogy is pretty flawed because the two scenarios aren't the same at all! No one is instinctively against drunk driving! They are against it because they understand it can bring harm
Here's an alternative to the brother and sister scenario. Two brothers are in their 70's, and have been in a loving sexual and romantic relationship for the last 40 years. They are very happy. They live in the woods alone to escape the judgement of others, and rarely, if ever, come into town. On the rare occasion they do interact with someone else, they never mention they are brothers. Their family has all passed, and they don't feel the need to have any friends because they enjoy each others company so much.
My moral reaction to this scenario is very different than the brother and sister scenario. I am opposed to the brother and sister, but in this scenario my reaction is "live and let live." The risk feels distant and no longer relevant, whereas in the brother and sister case the risks feel very large.
I don't notice much real difference. I think its just because you fleshed out the circumstances better and got is into their heads better. The story there makes it a lot more sympathetic than if you had just said '70 year old brothers have sex'. You could concoct an equally good story about the brother and sister
The "just had sex" story is very different than "in a long term happy romantic relationship" story. The former is risky because no one knows the potential consequences. In the latter, we already know the consequences of their actions, and the outcome has been positive for both participants.
In my work, we interview experts in domains like firefighting, law enforcement, medicine, social work, etc. These experts are often very bad at explaining why they do what they do. Sometimes they'll tell us that have ESP, a sixth sense, a Spidey sense, etc. We have to be careful and ignore their "why" explanations as post-hoc.
But just because their "why" explanations are bad does not mean their actions are unreasonable. Their "sixth sense" is triggered by things in the environment they noticed, and so we get them to focus on what they saw, heard, felt, etc. When we do this, we often are able to figure out the underlying rationality of their intuitions.
I see a similar thing going on here. There can be an underlying reason to the moral reaction, but Haidts methodology is not sufficient for actually getting at that reason. Just like if we only asked experts why did what they did, and they responded with "ESP."
It is shokingly curious! Human complexity is spice for curiosity!
Thanks for respecting my delicate sensibilities son. Cheers to confabulation & chubby people leaning over bridges!
Oh My. Thanks for the interesting start to my morning. I have actually been spending a bit of time thinking about this moral behavior/olfactory-gustatory relationship. There is so much to unpack, starting with a lot of research in NS on this topic.
How does natural selection result in a behaving creature that doesn't eat its own waste or have sex with its siblings? How does natural selection result in a creature that does not want to launch right into one of Tommy Blanchard's articles before setting ones stomach with some bland cereal?
Mike Bruzenak (SpeedOfSound@AnswersInAtheism) if you remember me.
Thanks, Mike! Yes I remember you and our conversation from a while back 🙂
I really enjoyed Iain McGilchrist’s the master and its emissary to explore the right/left brain divide in a philosophical way. He’s a neuroscientist too, so it’s super solid.
Excellent post! On the topic of spit and the automatic disgust response, it's fun to notice when the system gets a half signal. Tip a glass of water too quickly while drinking, and you may have to correct, and then some of the water flows from the mouth back into the glass. Notice how the mind briefly wonders whether to be disgusted and spit the whole thing out, or just keep chugging. At least in my case it resolves to keep chugging, because it still feels like clean fresh water.
For the rest, I'm sure there's a fine exploration waiting to be done on the relationship between disgust and sexual kinks. The modern saying "no kink shaming" is a good indication of a newfound area of non-judgmentality. Can't really say anything from experience though, I'm as vanilla as it gets.
And I don't know if I'm an outlier, or maybe it's just because I have no siblings of my own, but I can't seem to muster even a faint judgment on the brother/sister pair. Life's short and weird, if that's their thing, let them explore. Weirder things go on in the world and no-one bats an eye.
About 30 years ago I corresponded with the then-director of Mantak Chia's Taoist Retreat in North Carolina. He bragged that he would spend a couple weeks every year, alone in a cave with only his own urine to drink. Tibetan political prisoners are also forced to drink their urine as the CCP tortures them. Amazingly, this was not the nastiest thing done to them. #SaveTibet.org