Theory (short)

The map is not the territory.

No organism is capable of direct apprehension of reality. The best any organism can do is to form an abstract model suspended in consciousness based on the limited inputs of their senses. A human’s model of reality is limited by the human’s truncated ability to smell, a human’s complete absence of sonar, a human’s complete absence of whatever (magnetic resonance?) sense allows birds to migrate thousands of miles to places they as individuals have never been, a human’s inability to taste and parallel process as an octopus, a human’s limited wavelength visual and audial perception… Need I continue?

So denial is unnecessary to the human failure to perceive some reality. Being an organism is sufficient.

Anonymous is correct in asserting that reproduction among atheists counters MORT theory of denialism. That’s not to say humans aren’t also in denial.

Human cognition is also limited by the trade-off between rapidity of response and slow, considered correctness. The evolutionary success of the former has selected for heuristics we now recognise as cognitive biases and logical fallacies. The only reason cognitive biases and logical fallacies now plague us rather than benefit us is that we’ve literally grown too big for our britches.

MORT is not necessary to explain our denial of death. Nor are sloth or ignorance. Selection for the rapid response of heuristics is sufficient.

Denial could also be explained by our ultra-social nature – most of us get so absorbed in social interaction and status competition that nothing else, including death threats, matters. Mourning and grief also can be explained by our ultra-social natures. Our capacity for empathy and socialization probably co-evolved with our extended infancy and therefore extended maternal nurturing. There is nothing in this world like breastfeeding a helpless baby.

Our extended theory of mind also derives from the need to care for a helpless non-verbal infant. Mothers have to figure out what the baby needs now. Does baby need feeding? Cleaning? Burping? Bouncing? Rocking? Sleep?

It goes further than this with our control of fire. We are the only animal that requires pre-digestion for our main caloric intake. Yes, there are foods we can eat raw, but not the foods that provide sufficient calories and fats to sustain our oversized energy-hungry brains. Like mama birds who regurgitate food into their chicks’ gaping beaks, mama humans control fire (and fermentation organisms) to predigest food for weaned children, exhausted hunters, ourselves, and our elders. We are the ones most susceptible to depressive realism. We are the empaths. We infantilize men by predigesting their food for them. Is the way to a man’s heart through his stomach? Is being fed humanly erotic?

What I’m suggesting here is that the extended theory of mind did not have to coincide with some special instinct for denial. It coincided with increasingly helpless infants, increasing duration of helplessness, the feminine mastery of fire, the feminine social compulsion to nurture, and the masculine permanent infantile dependence upon predigested food. Maybe that masculine inability to mature is what predisposes men toward the heuristics that manifest as denial. Could masculine immaturity be due to the truncated Y chromisome?

Eve tasted the fruit first. The sugar in the fruit is the chemical bond of potential fire. It’s the energy with which woman nurtures man. It is the paradox of power — for fire is power — and dependence — for humans are dependent upon predigestion. Deprive us of cooking and you deprive us of food.

Hi Rob

I have enjoyed reading your site and its great articles. I’m in 100% agreement about overshoot, poeple’s denial about energy, limitations of technology etc. (all the ‘obvious’ stuff).

There’s no doubt people (in general) are in denial about the role energy (specifically FF) has played in creating their current, comfortable lifestyles (at least in the West), and about how this is in no way sustainable.
However, it’s a bit of a leap to go from there to saying ‘people deny reality because evolution selected for brains that deny reality’.

There are several reasons to object to MORT:

Taking ‘reality’ to mean our direct experience of the physical world – if someone believes they can fly, jumps off a cliff and lands on rocks, then their denial of reality (that they can’t fly) has removed them from the gene pool. This contradicts MORT’s assertion that reality denial confers some evolutionary advantage.
MORT’s premise (that development of large brains causes depression and risk aversion, leading to an evolutionary dead end) is wrong headed. If increasing cognition (of the physical world) gave an evolutionary edge, there’s no reason it would stop just because of death awareness. The limit on brain size in humans is due to the limit on head size that can pass through the birth canal.
The widespread denial that inspired this site is a cultural phenomenon. Beliefs (including religious ones) spread or die out for non-scientific reasons, not evolutionary ones. Denial of the reality of overshoot, environmental destruction etc. is just another belief. There’s no need to try and force it into some elaborate theory – that’s just overcomplicating matters.
In order for reality to be denied, there must first be some agreed definition of what it is. MORT falls into the same trap that athiests do. The only logically sound position to take on either ‘reality’ or ‘God’, is the one people seem to fear most, namely: ‘I don’t know’.
To say otherwise is to assume knowledge you can’t possibly have.

How do you know the true nature of reality? How do you know you’re not a brain in a jar in an alien lab in Alpha Centauri, with wires feeding in electrical impulses that gives you the illusion of living a life on Earth?
At the deepest level, there is no way to prove what reality is – therefore, there’s no way to either affirm or deny it.