Category: philosophy

The Emotion of Collective Intention

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Collective intentions make me cry sometimes, and I’m not sure why.

We often think about intentionality as individuals, but we can also form and execute intentions as groups as well. So individually, I intended to write this blog post. Most of the goals and the things that I do are my own individual intentions and choices.

But then sometimes . . .

I do things that are beyond just me. There are things that we have to do together. For example:

  • Sports. Not only playing the game but also cheering for a team. Or even things like running a race together.
  • Games. Board games, card games, other games that we do together.
  • Music and singing. I often accompany the organ and piano to people who are singing and creating music together. There are also concerts where everyone is singing along and creating something.
  • Family. We need to coordinate a lot, support each other, work towards common goals and values.
  • Conferences and classes. Listening together, asking questions, having those conversations.
  • Volunteer work. Helping out others as a collective group.
  • Some religious practice.
  • Political protest.

As a philosopher, I’ve studied collective intention a bit, but usually philosophers talk about the mind and agents and reasons and phenomenology and things like that. It gets sort of technical.

But my experience with collective intentionality is often incredibly emotional and perhaps aesthetic. I find it beautiful and moving. I end up crying sometimes, and I’m drawn to both participate in that collective intention, and to watch others do it.

I don’t think I’m alone. A lot of our entertainment is focused on watching collective intentions. Sports games. Parades. Music performances. Flash mobs. Not only is most entertainment a result of group intentions, but that collective intentionality is the thing that entertains us.

Collective intentions seem intertwined with art and beauty in some way. There is something incredibly moving about witnessing a group musical performance, and I feel more emotional watching group performances than watching an individual perform.

I’m not sure it is exactly aesthetic, or some other emotional experience.

Is it something more about function? Is it because we are social creatures? Are we somehow acting in some higher and more perfected way when we work together? Or maybe it’s about morality and sentiment? Feeling that this is the right thing?

I don’t know right now. But I do know that I seek out groups and group intentionality quite a lot. It’s a huge and important part of my life, and I am a happier person when I am not just doing my own thing, but I am intentionally working with others.

And the most moving, the most emotional experiences I’ve had in my life are almost all about groups of people, acting together. They seem really, really important, even if I don’t understand why.

Light in the darkness

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I think I figured out what I want to write my dissertation on: it’s somewhat focused on self-interest, but also on altruism. I’m really curious about if we need to be self-interested or not. Do we need to take care of ourselves? Is it necessary that we worry about our own well-being? What about the people that sacrifice so much for the service of others?

Christmas time has always been a time of service for me. Sometimes I feel weird about it–I’m buying presents for my kids and spending so much money on my own family–but I also want to help other people too. I hear of some people who give all their Christmas money to others, while I find myself giving my children more presents than they really need (or even perhaps want). I wonder if I could be doing more good.

We visit Giving Machines. We contribute to charities. We take tags off the Giving Tree in the elementary school lobby and I have my kids pick out presents for others. I look at service projects in my community and try to sign up–play the piano at a hospital, clean up after an event, volunteer at the food pantry, make blankets.

And then my kids get sick and I have to cancel half of the things I volunteered for so I can stay home and take care of them. I feel conflicted about what is self-interested and what is serving others: did I volunteer just so I felt good about myself? Or because I felt it as a duty, but I didn’t really want to do it? Or did I genuinely care about someone besides myself?

I worry sometimes about the impacts I have on others. I have the biggest impact on my own children. I want them to learn to look outward. I make cookies and bring them to neighbors. I send out Christmas cards, but I am afraid I have forgotten people. I go and visit elderly friends and tell them I will return to visit another time because the visit is never long enough.

I tell my daughter that happiness comes in the service of others. But I don’t think I serve other people in order for me to feel happy. Instead, I serve them because I want them to be happy. And my own happiness comes as a by-product. It may be impossible to make someone else happy without making yourself happy as well.

How much do I need to give? How much do I want to give?

I look at the holiday displays people make and I wonder for a moment if all that money could have been given to charity instead. Yet, if everyone did that, we would not have the light filling up the dark space of December. And I love Christmas lights.

Perhaps there is simply enough to do all of it–to give presents to my children, to donate to charity, to help other people, to enjoy the twinkling colorful lights. Perhaps our time and money are not as scarce as we sometimes believe, and there is more than enough.

But that isn’t quite right, because sacrifice is necessary. Sacrifice is praiseworthy and good and beautiful.

I remember all the stories in my life about sacrifice: My grandma sewing clothes for my mom and surprising her during a meager year. My mom searching to give me a Furby, despite the fact that they are sold out everywhere. My husband buys a friend his only Christmas presents of the year, and even though it is a simple fruit cake, they share it gladly.

When there is scarcity, people give in service to others, even though it requires sacrifice. They prioritize others about themselves. And that is right. That is light.

I hear people on Instagram telling me that I should prioritize myself at Christmastime. That I can ask for presents and spend time for myself. But I don’t want to. I want to connect with others so much more than I ever want to receive for myself.

That connection means that I do receive: I am invited, included. Others wrap presents for me and put them under the tree because they love me. And I receive that with gratitude.

No moment of my life is about myself. It is always about someone else, above giving and serving and helping and maybe, maybe making someone else’s life just a little bit better. Whenever I have pursued my own self-interest just because of my own selfish desires (and it happens more frequently than I want to admit), it has drained my life of purpose and led to unhappiness.

The light that shines in the darkness is that we love each other, and that we are loved. We celebrate Jesus Christ who loved us so much that he gave everything to us. In ever gift I give and receive, I remember the greatest gift, a light to the world.

No right answer: it’s not an optimization problem

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The great majority of all our decisions are not between right and wrong, where there is only one good pathway to take.

Our decisions are often between one good option and another good option. Sometimes they are between five bad options and no good options. Sometimes we have no idea how many options we have, and we just pick something that’s good enough.

I have had the hardest time making decisions regarding my kids’ extracurricular activities. I am actually grateful I live in a smaller town so there are less options. But even with the few options I have, I feel like I have to figure out how to optimized my child’s potential so that they can both be happy and also become the most capable that they can be.

But choosing extracurricular activities is not an optimization problem, where there is one best answer. I don’t have the necessary information to optimize, because my kids are young and I don’t know if they will like something or not. They have to try it out first. And skill is not just built on natural talent, but also grit and determination, so sometimes I have no idea what a child will actually be good at. There are too many factors, many of them are just chance.

It’s not that my child and I will choose the path that will make them the best version of themselves; we’re just choosing between different versions, and there is no way to determine which version is better.

Acrobatics, choir, drama, soccer, basketball, swimming, art, coding, crafting, fishing, archery–any option is fine, really. There is no right answer. They just need to try something, hopefully find one thing that they sort of like, learn how to work hard and do their best. It doesn’t matter if we decide to play soccer, or take dance lessons, or whatever.

I do think there can be some choices that would be problematic: involving my child in too many extracurricular activities, for example, so that we have more to do than we are able to accomplish. Another problematic option would to have my kids do no extracurricular activities and then give them unlimited screen time.

But in the middle, there are just a ton of options and I can’t tell which was is the absolute best, so we just choose something and hope for the best and make adjustments as needed.

Relatedly, this attitude has helped with menu indecision. I used to view menus as an optimizing problem where I would try to order the thing on the menu that would give me the most pleasure for the least amount of money. But I didn’t have the information that made this possible (usually I haven’t tried anything on the menu yet). So I stopped viewing ordering food as an optimization problem.

It’s an exercise in exploration instead: I’m just going to try things out. I will dislike things. That’s part of the uncertainty of life.

Narrative Motivation

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I recently read Narrative Economics by Robert J. Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. In that book, he talks abut how viral narratives can change people’s behavior–which changes the markets and economy. He suggests that economists should really be paying more attention to common narratives.

I’ve also been researching and thinking about motivation lately. In Drive by Daniel H. Pink, there are three types of motivation: Type 1 is getting what you need (you cold think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or just that when you feel hungry, you want to eat). Type 2 is incentives, or rewards and punishments. Type 3 is intrinsic motivation, which is basically doing things that we just like to do, and working towards flow and mastery.

But that seems incomplete. For example, suppose that I clean my home well right before I go on vacation. I’m not doing it because I need anything. I’m not doing it because of some sort of reward–I’m going to be gone, so I don’t get to enjoy the clean home. I’m not doing it because I am intrinsically motivated to clean, as I don’t like cleaning. So why do I clean my home?

Because I believe in a simple narrative that I learned growing up: you leave your home clean. I saw my mom clean our house before vacation. So I do the same things. That’s just what you do.

I think a lot of what we do is not about what we need (a lot of those needs are already met), and not about incentives (while there are natural consequences to our actions, we do a lot of things without considering consequences), and not about intrinsic motivation (because I am constantly doing things I don’t really like to do). We do things because we believe narratives. Narratives like:

  • Parents play with their children.
  • Moms are in charge of keeping the house clean.
  • Grass is green.
  • Good people help others.
  • Every meal needs a protein, grain, and vegetable.
  • People in my family get good grades.
  • Successful adults buy houses.
  • To do lists need to get done.

These aren’t long stories, but short things that we’ve picked up from society. We’ve learned from parents, friends, family, neighbors, communities, social media, articles, books, movies, TV, etc., etc. We are all building the stories of our lives from these short narratives about what is normal or what you should do actually direct a lot of our behavior.

We can’t always change the narratives we believe in. But we can change what we pay attention to. We can build our values. We can spend time with different people. We can have transformative experiences. And all those experiences build our story, and the narrative that we believe in.

What are your narratives that motivate you?

Also: this idea is new and I think it might be a good idea, but I’m still working on developing it! Please share all your thoughts you have: questions, confusions, disagreements, agreement, etc.

Uncertainty and Belief

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We don’t know as much as we think we do. We are often mistaken and wrong and we need to rethink some of our beliefs a lot.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about uncertainty and correcting beliefs. But I also have been reading and thinking about commitment too. Sometimes we want to commit to beliefs, and hold to those beliefs, even when other people say we’re wrong.

I think it’s a miserable existence to only believe in what is supported with a proper meta-analysis and scientific consensus. Science can be great. But science is not the most important way we gain belief.

I believe there is truth, truth that is not relative. But I truth cannot always be discovered through the scientific process. There are many ways to discover truth, and to hold on to truth.

We learn through living. We learn through relationships and connection with others. We learn with experience. We learn sometimes through faith and action and seeing what works out and what doesn’t.

I want to be open to new beliefs, to updating what I think is wrong. But I am also committed to certain beliefs–beliefs on how to be a good person, how to raise my family, and how to live my life. Those aren’t the sort of beliefs I want to rethink over and over again. I just want to hold on to them and keep trying to live up to them.

I pray every morning and every night, and my prayer is often that God can guide me and that I can hear Him in my life. There are moments when I feel something that cannot be adequately explained except to say it is divine, that it comes from a power outside of myself. That is what I am committed to. That is what I believe.

So I will be a skeptic, sometimes, and I will be a scientist, sometimes, and then most of all, I will be a mother and a wife and a daughter and a friend, and my commitment to the most important beliefs will guide me to become an even better version of myself.

Graduate School

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I have started graduate school. As I walk around campus, I look for people who are my age, and I don’t see many of them. Most people there are younger than me, and many are older than me as well. Sometimes I do feel a bit out of place–I know that there are graduate students my age, but I am settled in my life in a way that feels very unique: happily married, owning my own house, raising four kids.

Sometimes I feel a bit strange going to school. Unattached to my children, I somehow have transported myself to where I was 13 or 14 years ago, and yet I am not the same person. I think about them often, and I feel more alive and more of myself when I look to them.

But now I exist where people don’t know me as a mom of four children. By way of introduction, they want me to state my area of research, something that I am still figuring out. I’m not really figuring out what I want to study–I’m just figuring out the terms of how to categorize it. “Practical reason,” I finally decide to say, and then I add, “And economics,” just because it’s interesting. And I still very much like economics, and find myself slipping an economic term into a philosophy paper because different fields of study aren’t really that different after all.

There is always too much to learn, but I try to be a bit mindful of my time and my resources: I can’t go after every interesting idea and topic, but yet there are so many interesting ideas and topics.

It is a strange thing to tell people that you are getting a Ph.D., but in philosophy. As if the two things cancel each other out somehow. Smart, but completely unpractical. I get to spend years of my life writing things that no one will read, learning things that not many people care about.

But it fits me right now. And every time I learn, I want to maintain in the back of my head: how is this practical? Why would I care about it? Why would other people care about it? And hopefully, find some element of something useful and true in the sea of everything.

Personal Experience vs. Reasoning

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Pretend that you’re a young college student, and you go into a class about the universe. And you learn about how massive the universe is and how much space there is. You learn that you can never travel faster than the speed of life. Your professor very convincingly argues that aliens can’t exist–and even if they do exist, they would be too far away to ever hear from.

Now let’s say at home, you’ve taken up a radio hobby, but one day, you start getting weird interference and you end up intercepting very strange noises you can’t interpret. You start transmitting back on this frequency basic information–like how the weather is and what day it is and all of that. For quite a few years, you transmit back and forth on this frequency, and you start to understand the person on the other end, who gradually learns English and tells you that they are an alien.

Well, of course, aliens don’t exist, so this must be a prank. But the alien gives you instructions on how to conduct a few simply experiments that allows you to see amazing things that you can’t explain and goes beyond current scientific reasoning.

Reasonably, aliens can’t exist. And yet, your experience is starting to tell you something totally different. You’re talking to an alien. The alien is talking back to you. You’ve see amazing things that seem at the very least highly improbable.

What would you believe?

If you had to trust your own personal experience (the things that happened to you and the things that you witnessed) or a well-reasoned argument, which would you believe?

If you saw a blue tree, but then heard a really good argument that there can’t be blue trees, would you think that your experience was wrong, or would you take the person with the really good argument and try to show them the blue tree?

I often trust my own experiences more than I trust reasoning. Reasoning can often be based in incomplete information, and no matter who convincing an argument may seem, it is almost never perfect.

But sometimes my experiences are fallible too. Sometimes my senses deceive me. Sometimes I don’t remember right. I have to use my reasoning too to make sense out of my experience.

So they both have to come together. I want personal experience and reasoning. I can’t just learn about something–I want to experience it too. If I learn about a location, I want to go there. I want to meet people. I want to have conversations. I want to see and hear and feel what something is like. And when I experience something, I want to know the reasoning behind it.

Certainty is difficult to achieve, and when my experience and my reasoning don’t line up, I sometimes have to press forward and keep hoping that I will learn more in the future. I’ll figure out how I could talk to aliens, even though it seemed scientifically impossible.