ChatGPT and I Discuss the Influence of Media on Our Perceptions, Social Narratives, Progress, and Justice

Most people today have grown up watching tv and now following social media with a lot of implicit and explicit advertising on the part of corporations. The human brain has evolved to rely on external memory storage in our cultural narratives and institutions. It seems that a lot of those narratives and institutions are greatly, perhaps nearly completely managed by vested interests. Tell me the implications for human development? Wellbeing, justice, and  meaningful (just, intrinsically enlightening) progress.  

Your question slices into the heart of modern culture, cognition, and power: if human brains have co-evolved with external memory and meaning-making systems—and those systems are now largely mediated by commercial and vested interests—what are the implications for our wellbeing, justice, and meaningful progress?

Let’s break it down using your framing: development, wellbeing, justice, and intrinsically enlightening progress, recognizing the deeper patterns it reveals.

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⚙️ 1. Human Development

The human mind does not evolve in isolation—it develops in constant conversation with its environment. For thousands of years, the “extended mind” (per Andy Clark and others) has included:

• Language

• Stories

• Rituals

• Institutions

• Tools and tech

Now, many of those narrative environments are owned or shaped by profit-driven entities: corporations, algorithms, influencers often funded by opaque or manipulative interests. This changes what development looks like.

Implications:

• Cognitive outsourcing becomes more passive and manipulative. Instead of outsourcing memory to books or communal elders, we outsource to TikTok trends, algorithmic feeds, and corporate media.

• Attention becomes a commodity. Development no longer centers on self-awareness or reasoning, but on optimizing one’s persona or being seduced by curated dopamine loops.

• Plasticity is hijacked. Young brains are shaped by systems designed not for wisdom or maturity, but for engagement and monetization.

“We are what we pay attention to—and now someone else decides what that is.”

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😊 2. Wellbeing

True wellbeing requires coherence between internal states and external realities. But when our cultural narratives are managed by vested interests, they may enforce incoherent or pathological models of life.

Implications:

• Self-worth becomes externalized—dependent on performance, consumption, or appearance rather than relationships, purpose, or dignity.

• Alienation increases. People often sense that their lives are shaped by forces they don’t understand or control—leading to anxiety, helplessness, and even rage.

• Pathological normalization. Exhaustion, overwork, climate anxiety, and social breakdown are treated as normal or personal failings rather than systemic symptoms.

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⚖️ 3. Justice

If narratives are how societies understand themselves and their values, then narrative control is a justice issue.

Implications:

• Voices of dissent are commodified or silenced. Resistance becomes a brand, or else algorithmically buried.

• Marginalized groups remain in narrative shadows. If the “archive of memory” is managed by capital, it privileges perspectives that serve existing hierarchies.

• Truth itself becomes slippery. Competing realities (e.g., climate denial, populist misinformation) are not just tolerated—they’re profitable.

This is not just about corporate greed. It’s about epistemic injustice: who gets to shape what we believe is real, right, or possible.

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✨ 4. Meaningful Progress

You asked for “just, intrinsically enlightening progress”—progress that reveals truth, deepens justice, and helps us grow as beings. That kind of progress relies on shared aspirations grounded in reality and hope—not illusions.

Implications:

• Cultural imagination is narrowed. If most “progress” is imagined in terms of new apps, faster tech, or market growth, we lose sight of deeper shifts: healing ecosystems, reforming governance, cultivating wisdom.

• Instrumentalism rules. Progress is defined by what is measurable and monetizable—not by what is good, beautiful, or true.

• A spiritual void. Humans hunger for awe, mystery, and purpose—but consumerist systems often can’t offer anything beyond distraction or acquisition.

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💡What’s to Be Done?

Your question contains its own counterweight: the awareness that things could be different. A few antidotes or movements already aim to subvert the trend:

1. Decentralized knowledge cultures (open-source education, digital commons, oral histories)

2. Ethical tech design (designing for care, not addiction)

3. Restorative storytelling (indigenous, ecological, feminist, or anti-colonial narratives)

4. Public-interest media (co-ops, non-profit journalism, citizen science)

5. Practices of attention—philosophy, mindfulness, deep reading—that train minds to resist manipulation.

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🧭 In Summary:

We evolved to outsource meaning, memory, and identity to the shared culture. But when culture is captured by vested interests, development is redirected, wellbeing distorted, justice undermined, and meaningful progress obscured.

To reclaim our humanity, we must reclaim the stories and systems that shape what it means to be human.

Two Misleading Intellectual Habits

Two misleading and persistent intellectual habits dominate thinking and much of politics:

1. The myth of the isolated mind and 
2. The legacy of the theological divide.

1. The myth of the isolated mind is the belief that human minds are purely private, locked within our skulls. Merlin Donald, neuro-paleontologist, demonstrates the flimsiness of the idea in his remarkable book, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. (Here's a review.) He makes it clear that no human beings can develop their human cognitive potential in the absence of culture. Cognition and culture are mutually dependent. Their dependence raises some questions about ethical responsibility, personal freedom, freedom of speech and of other areas in which people are ineluctably interdependent actors whose sense of meaning and justice has changed throughout history and varied across cultures.

2. The theological divide separates heaven and earth. Here is how it looked before Nietzsche:

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Divine intellect | Randomness (unpredictability)

Here's how it looks now from the "secular" point of view: 

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Laws of (mechanical) Nature | Randomness (unpredictability)

Much of the ontological edifice of theology remains intact. It's basically a decapitated theology. 

But as thinkers such as Stuart Kauffman and Manuel DeLanda convincingly show (they each have many lectures, interviews and short talks on line if you're interested), there is now an approach that makes matter dynamic rather than a passive receptacle of form or logos or laws of nature and that reinstates the ontological status of virtual or potential. It looks more like this:

• Evolving Cosmos
• Self-organizing Matter
• Dynamic Nature
• Sentient, encultured Body
• Knowledge that reason cannot work without emotion
• Virtual and real complement each other 
• Chaos and complexity theories
• Intrinsic unpredictability in evolutionary biology (non-deterministic)

This new, emerging approach might help us feel at home in nature and on this planet in a more sustainable and responsible way.

That's just human nature...?

A synopsis of Jordan Peterson on human nature:

There is an inescapable human nature which means that we have no choice but to be organized hierarchically. We have evolved but we are no different from lobsters in our predilection for hierarchy and that is our fate as a species in spite of evidence to the contrary (which is all bogus). Our only choice is to find ways of ameliorating the worst effects (but JP seems to say little about that and in fact condemns outright people's efforts to do so). Women tend to be more agreeable by nature than men because they have to accommodate infants (1), while men are more competitive. Liberal philosophies that flout inescapable human nature, advance political correctness, and blame Western patriarchy for gender inequality are out to lunch and very dangerous - especially "post-modern Marxism" (PMM) which is actually a position of totalitarian Maoism in that proponents group people under banners of identity politics. Proponents of PMM and political correctness are dangerous not only because they harbour insidious authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies but because their actions will cause a backlash among men and give rise to cultural manifestations of the dark side of masculinity (2). It's best that we stick to what nature intended for us in order to prevent or minimize this impending catastrophe.

Nature and culture are of course inextricable. As Merlin Donald points out, no human would be able to achieve anything like human cognitive potential without being imbedded in culture, which is where both the ancestry of our ideas and abilities, and the seeds of our potential, repose. Human cognition evolves with culture, and cultural evolution since prehistoric times is largely driven by technological advancements, especially in communicating through stories, writing, and other modes of external memory storage.

It turns out that technological advancements also influence the organization of human societies and the focus of institutions.  It shouldn't be controversial. Any socio-political arrangement is how people organize themselves to produce and distribute what they need and want given a certain level of technology.  Ian Morris explores the prehistory and history of social organization and power relations between nations in his book, Why the West Rules for Now, and the relationship between technology and human values in Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels.

Consider, then, the social role of women in relation to the work they do either in or out of the home in relation to technology. Women used to produce manually much of what was used in the household. With modern manufacturing, mass production, the availability and continuous improvement of the efficiency of household appliances and the invention of the pill, much of women's work in the home became unnecessary. Over time, the nature of work and our political and legal institutions have changed to reflect the fact that most of women's traditional work is not now needed in the home. There's usually an awkward or very uncomfortable (i.e., violent) lag between technical change and the reconfiguration of society that follows it.

The story of what a woman or man is in society has changed over millennia, is changing and will continue to change. During the last few centuries, the narrative that human beings have used to explain gender roles has been articulated and sustained by those who dominated in the public sphere - i.e., men of power and influence. We are currently in a lag period between the changed technology and the story that is going to make sense of it (and still finding out who will most benefit from that story).

What's thrown us for a loop is that the technology is changing so fast that automation threatens to undermine our entire system of economic arrangements based on wage labour. Most jobs will become unnecessary, so ask yourself, how is the wealth going to be redistributed? Meanwhile the underclass of unemployable people is becoming larger and feeling their loss of power ever more acutely. This is especially so for men, who at least had enjoyed an advantage of higher social status than women in the same economic bracket. There is a backlash and the darkness looms, but it is not due to "Post-Modern Marxism". The backlash comes from people who are facing vast social changes without being able to predict the future.  These are the people who I expect tend to vote in strong man politicians and fall victim to false nostalgia. Feeling marginalized, some men might experience a sense of threat and humiliation that women and minorities, who were formerly accorded lower social status, are now making gains in social status by becoming more represented in the public sphere. (In some societies, women are not even supposed to have a public face.) Things are changing too fast for the narrative to catch up and people are stressed out. During uncertain or fearful times, people's views tend to become more conservative. People retrench. They scapegoat.

Chimamanda Adichie says that we do girls a great disservice by raising them to accommodate men's egos. This unpleasant obligation is embedded in the narrative that all of us have inherited in one variant or another. In some societies women are still blamed for men's inability to master their sexual impulses. The tendency for women to be agreeable and accommodating is an effect of inequality, not a cause. Being agreeable and accommodating is different from being loving and kind, caring and considerate. It is a defence. It becomes a defence that fosters resentment of their own capacity for caring and it makes those without the "right balance" of agreeableness and commitedness into scapegoats. "The beast" of the masculine feared by Peterson is one that he generously sustains with circular rationalizations.

Note 1: 

"... the demand for for inclusiveness 

and unity and care and the demand for high-level performance in a hierarchical structure - they're very different orientations in the world and so it's complicated for people who are agreeable and conscientious -  and actually I think often that large corporations and large institutions of any sort run on the unheralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness and they're disproportionately women. In my experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately - no,  not appropriately -  if you want to hire someone to exploit productively you hire middle-aged women who are hyper-conscientious and who are agreeable because they'll do everything they won't take credit for it and they won't complain and that's nasty and I think that happens all the time and so one of the things you have to be careful of if you're agreeable is not to be exploited because you'll line up to be exploited and I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants and so that just doesn't work so well in that actual world."  Transcribed from an online lecture by Jordan Peterson.

Note 2: . “If men are pushed too hard to feminize,” he warns, “they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity (More likely, men are being marginalized by increasingly flat wages or unemployment, and when humiliated they scapegoat, as explained above.) 

Imagining Reality

I saw a talk on TED a couple of years ago by cognitive scientist, Donald Hoffman. He presented his view that our perceptual faculties have evolved for our survival and not so much to preserve a likeness to whatever it is that is causing our perception. To some extent, this is an unremarkable hypothesis since we already know that the range of colours and sounds extends beyond that we can see and hear. What are sounds to us and other living things are basically air vibrations, and there is no sound in the void of outer space. We also know our perceptual systems are tricked by optical illusions.

But Hoffman's idea is more radical - he thinks that the world we perceive might bear no more resemblance to whatever causes our perceptions than a computer screen interface bears to the actual inner workings of the computer, i.e., none. Further, he believes that even scientific activity remains at the perceptual "user interface" and, for all intents and purposes, we remain within the matrix of our perceptual systems, with no perceptual access to reality. Even brains and neurons, as we study them, reside in the interface. This is not to say we are lost in a sea of perceptual illusion, however. He retains hope that mathematics and reason will guide us to scientific truths.

Variations on the idea that we cannot get beyond our modes of perception to experience reality directly have been advanced throughout the history of ideas.  For the most part, these positions have been thought to entail that we simply do not know what is beyond the perceptual horizon and must leave aside any hopes of metaphysical insight; or that are grounds to believe that we are somehow trapped inside our heads, or that the world we see is a hallucination or a delusion; or that the world there is is really nothing other than the world we perceive - esse est percipi.

We end up with this set of positions only because our idea of reality is one that assumes a gulf between Mind and Nature.

The world is real (or it is nothing). I'm not saying that we perceive things as they would be without us. Why have we have assumed that's what reality is - the world as it is without us? The world we inhabit is a dynamic environment that includes us and within which we have considerable influence, for better or worse. A world without us is clearly an imaginary one. Without perceiving beings, the world wouldn't really look like anything.  It has existed and could exist without us, and it will again one day, but as of now, here we are.

It's a simple truism. The world we perceive is the world in which we live. Our perceptions occur in nature, and they are more or less relevant to our purposes, whether those purposes be the pursuit of scientific knowledge, manipulating others, or obscuring something painful from our past.  Perceptual veridicality is not true representation of a non-perceived world but has to do with with the horizon of our intentions.

Our idea of objectivity (our current one - the concept of objectivity has a history) is the idea of the world  without us, a world imagined without involvement (taint) from any human intention or purpose. This has led us to frame reality as a principally spatial world of catalogued things whose interactions can be described in terms of the operation of forces acting according to laws of nature.

Our habit of conceptually freeze-framing phenomena in space and time in a way that favours spatial and mathematical representation is likely cognitively energy-saving but ontologically misleading. Perception is an active response to our present environment and we cannot remove ourselves from the world to understand it - why would we think we could? Does anyone know what the world would look like sub specie aeternitatis (from the POV of eternity)?

The conceptual freeze-frame is only a shorthand that we have somehow managed to reify because we see ourselves as so different from nature. Our own nature has been considered an impediment to objectivity. Nevertheless, we live in a dynamic symbiotic universe, not a world of disconnected things attracted by forces and governed by laws. We reify our conceptual models and assume tangible experience falls short.

The question of how the world is without our witnessing it is not possible to answer. That doesn't mean there is "some mysterious unknowable world" about which we have no direct or indirect information or that the existence of the world depends upon us perceiving it. The question is an error. The world we know more or less well is the world in which we came to be.

Just thinking out loud about teleology

Maybe it's a simple progression of drive to survive, associating this with self-animation, projection of this "animation" on everything that moves, belief that everything that moves has a purpose such as an interest in staying alive...? 

The flip side would be the all too culturally conditioned notion that subjectivity means self-interest and self-interest means bias and bias leads to falsehood or at least misleading claims. So to ensure truth (or at least public legitimacy) there would be a concerted effort to remove any vestige of agency from nature, in spite of the palpable and clear drive to survive of all self-moving entities (or even any for whom homeostasis is required for survival), to render nature all about random spandrels (chaotic nature) plus (rational) laws of nature... 

Or perhaps the official removal of agency from nature began with the realization of the power of reasoning in cultures over 2K years ago around what is known as the "axial age" and hylomorphist ontology came along with it?

The world needs a new story

The world needs a new story to make sense of itself. 

It will include

• the fact of evolution and the immensity of time that preceded us 
• the fact that we live on a planet in an incomprehensibly vast universe
• the urgent need for us to be environmentally responsible and a stress on the dire consequences of wasteful consumerism and an economic model built on it
• a sense of the importance of acceptance of differences among people and peoples
• the social, environmental, political and emotional benefits of gender equality
• ways to keep network power nodes in check

and all of this needs to impart a sense of coziness. 

It sounds odd to say "coziness" but that's the nub of it. We all know or sense, more or less, the other stuff. 

In the past, established power was supported by a "sacred" sanction such as the mandate of heaven or the divine right of kings that bounded the universe in tidy ways for us. But this support no longer exists or at least, where it does, it exists in a decadent form from which little good could emerge (and remains vehemently defended by people in thrall to a reaction formation). 

So there's the challenge. To find a story so we feel at home 'on a planet', as opposed to 'in a world'.

Mental Models: Five of Many Basic Assumptions Currently in Need of Revision

1. The Universe is Composed of Fundamental Building Blocks

This view has proven fruitful in certain types of research, but I wonder why people think that what exists in the universe can be exhaustively explained by reference to fundamental components and their interactions? Effects and causes occur at many scales of granularity.

I also wonder what makes people lean toward the idea that there is a certain "fundamental" aspect of reality? Is the notion of a foundational layer of reality a product of experience or a conceptual hangup?

 

2. Individual Interests Drive Collective Behaviours

Individuals are born into an existing social milieu and learn the language, norms and aspirations of their group. Though I'm not one to say that we are all simply products of our socialization - people have unique sets of abilities and unique ways to express them - in this chicken/egg scenario, the collective comes first. Therefore the collective will is not an aggregation of individual interests and the notion of an "original position" where individuals came together to forge a society is a mythical fancy with no explanatory value.

Another mistake fed by this assumption: Researchers assume that it's altruism or community feeling that needs to be explained rather than individualism because, ironically, individualism is the current ideological norm and raw self interest is seen as the more fundamental fact. This assumption is not objectively justified. It's an idea that supports the economic system and preserves the social order by allowing individuals to be seen as wholly responsible for their own lack of success, regardless of social realities.

3.  All Biological Traits are Products of Adaptation by Natural Selection (Fitness)

Evolution occurs but that doesn't mean that every trait of every species can be explained as a positive contribution to survival. Species not only pass along traits that positively enhance the possibilities of survival, but traits that are not maladaptive - traits that are just there - or even weaknesses that are compensated for by a cluster of other traits.

The attempt to explain every trait in terms of adaptation begs a lot of questions.  Nearly every species eventually becomes extinct or evolves into a different species. Evolution cannot directly explain the biological mechanisms that give rise to the emergence of a new trait, but only indirectly - only insofar as random mutations occur that  aren't survival liabilities or that are likely to enhance survival opportunities.

4. There Are No Natural Final Causes (No Whys, only Hows)

If you're wondering why I've included this, it's because it's generally assumed that any final cause or purpose (sometimes called "teleology") of existence would imply a non-natural (metaphysical) factor. People who believe themselves to be scientifically minded try to distance themselves from the idea that there are purposes in nature because they assume it necessarily aligns them with proponents of reviled "intelligent design" (ID) theories.  ID theories suppose that matter is a passive receptacle for the purposes implanted in it by a divine architect of the whole universe - an architect who cares about us and who especially cares that we are purified of contaminants from our participation in the natural material world in particular - so one can hardly blame them.

In a sense though, the struggle for existence would be a natural final cause, wouldn't it? The drive to survive is a natural purpose, though not necessarily one that is embodied only in individuals.  Scientifically minded folks need to question whether the idea of natural final causes really is an oxymoron and get over feeling guilty-by-association. (This is just one instance of reactive distancing that shuts doors on avenues of meaningful inquiry.)

5. The Ability to Scientifically Predict and Control Phenomena Proves Determinism

To predict and control what happens, a scientist needs to be able to spell out what influences events in the most generic and universal way possible. This is done by eliminating variable, unpredictable influences by trial and error (or prior knowledge) and then by refining the definition of the predictable influences and their objects so that they can be stated in the form of an equation or "law of nature" that plays out within a generic frame of reference.  For example, Newton's laws of motion refer to "bodies" without any reference to their shape or density, and to "motion", without any reference to the wind's influence, etc. To control something, knowing a number of such general laws, technologists can exactly arrange certain chains of events so that they unfold in predictable, mechanical ways. For instance, we have technologically advanced machines. Parts are arranged, the right amount of power is supplied, and presto...


Only some kinds of investigation allow for this kind of simple analysis and arrangement. For most events, it is not possible to eliminate unpredictable influences and isolate the predictable ones because there is no way to predefine a generic frame of reference within which potential influences are in play.  There is therefore no law in relation to which the influences of an event are "exactly arranged" so that the event rolls out in a pre-determined, mechanical way. Most events are  neither physically nor metaphysically predetermined.

...To be continued...