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25
Oct

The Cognitive Domain is Where Ghosts are Real

by Dr. Sean Guillory

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win” – Stephen King

Link to photo source and What this photo is about

Let’s start this Halloween-themed piece of writing with a confession: I don’t know what the cognitive domain is. 

I know: sheer heresy.

I work with the cognitive domain a lot (got it in my job title and I work with organizations like the IPA whose primary mission is focused on this space), but still, some of the hardest questions that I can get are “What is the Cognitive Domain?” and “Where is the Cognitive Domain?” (and unfortunately these are usually going to be the first questions that someone new to this work would want to ask).

Now, there are some good definitions for the cognitive domain to put forward for consideration (I think the best one routinely cited by national security writers comes from Paul Ottewell’s “Defining the Cognitive Domain” paper), but in my opinion, none of them really explain the “Where” and “What is it” well.

There’s also a more complicated question that I haven’t seen mentioned in the cognitive security/warfare thought leadership circles that is important to address: “What is the material proof that the cognitive domain is real?”. This may come off as a ridiculous question based on the experience of being a human and having ideas and having those ideas understood when you share them, but even though it feels ever-present to one’s conscious life, where can a person show this “obvious” thing to other people without having to ultimately trust the self-reported experience? It’s the same thing as trying to prove that dreams are real: even with extensive historical records and one’s personal experiences with them, there’s no material proof that other people actually dream beyond the trust one puts on the self-reports. Sure, dreams have been frequently studied, and interesting correlations have been found in neuroscience (including recent attempts by scientists to use sounds to trigger specific experiences in a dream) but until technology gets to the “Being John Malkovich”-level of experiencing another person’s embodied experiences, the experience of dreams (or the cognitive domain) is dependent on the foundation of trust in the self-reports of other people.

I recognize that these Hard Problems of Consciousness the Cognitive Domain (What is, Where, Is it Real?) are a bit radical (even the thought leaders that challenge the need to include the cognitive domain in operations planning don’t challenge the existence of the domain itself), but this seems like the right time of year to share with you the questions that keep me up at night. Like I said at the beginning of the paper, I still don’t have the answers, but in the holiday spirit, let me give you a Halloween-themed fun-sized treat that I hope can get us to the sufficient answers someday:

The cognitive domain is where ghosts are real.

By that spooky phrase, I don’t mean that there is a sort of paranormal function in our cognitive beliefs (if that’s what you’re looking for, check out this literature review). I mean that when planning operations that use elements typically associated with the cognitive domain, planners need to treat the elements that the targets truly believe are real as “functionally real” even if the planners don’t believe they are real. Let’s unpack this a bit before going into examples:

  •  By “elements” of the cognitive domain, I again unfortunately don’t have a good definition, but I do have a morbid hypothetical about an Unconscious Universe that I frequently use to see if it would be a cognitive domain element or not: if all higher-level cognitive beings were erased from the universe (obviously humans, but I don’t know where the line should be drawn for the rest of the animal kingdom), would said element still exist or not? I find this intuition pump handy in differentiating the more information-based elements that would still exist without cognitive beings (e.g., written language, data infrastructure, laws, etc.) from the cognitive-based elements that would not exist without cognitive beings existing (e.g., thought, belief, deterrence, norms, etc.).
  • By “functionally real,” I am not saying that the planners need to necessarily act like the target’s beliefs are 2+2=4 levels of true or to prioritize the target’s beliefs over beliefs that planners feel that they have much more justified evidence on. I am saying to acknowledge and understand a target audience’s beliefs as much as one can and to be open to using those beliefs in cognitive security operations planning like they are functionally real.

And by “ghosts,” well…I do mean a couple of things, including what many folks think of as ghosts, but let me show you what I mean with a couple of historical examples:

  • After World War II, the U.S. government was tasked to help the recently independent Philippines fight the communist anti-Japanese rebel group, the Hukbalahap (Huks). Air Force officer Edward G. Lansdale and the newly formed CIA started to develop a plan not just to fight the Huks, but sway Filipinos from joining them. So what did the CIA do? They turned to Filipino folklore and the story of the Aswang, which you can think of as a sort of vampire. Lansdale’s group would hunt Hukbalahap rebels, and after their deaths, they would puncture holes into their neck, drain the blood from the body, and this would make the rebels and the villagers think that an Aswang attacked the dead rebel. The rebellion was put down within two years of the start of the Aswang operation.
  • Operation Wandering Soul was a Vietnam War-based operation where the U.S. Army would play audio at night (an example being what is now called Ghost Tape Number Ten) of wandering souls on the battlefield. The idea was born from the Vietnamese cultural idea that those not given a proper burial (like many of the soldiers who died in battle) would continue to wander the earth. Results of this operation were seen as mixed, but two other non-spooky effects came from the operation: (1) it kept the adversary up with the audio, and (2) sometimes adversaries would fire towards the sounds, and this would give away their position.

The ghosts can be in the form of monsters that are believed in (like the stories above), or it can also be in the gods that are revered:

  • The story of the Trojan Horse is popularly thought of as the Trojans being fooled by the generosity of the Greeks, but the real reason why they brought the horse into the city was in fear of offending the goddess Athena (see the fate of Laocoön who tried to convince his fellow Trojans to burn the horse).
  • The Persians annexed ancient Egypt with the Battle of Pelusium of 525 BCE by bringing cats (an animal considered sacred to the Egyptians) onto the battlefield and using them as hostages. The Egyptians, being afraid to shoot the cats with their arrows, allowed for the Persians to storm the Pelusium and win the battle.
  • The Ancient Romans had a practice called evocatio where, shortly before attacking a city, the Romans would ritually reach out to the deities of a city to ask for their favor with the promises of even more temples, worship, and renown. On top of the spiritual insurance of avoiding the repercussions of sacrilege, it motivated the Roman army to believe that victory was certain. Evocatio wasn’t just a technique to motivate the side doing the ritual but also demoralizing the opposing side. Many stories of the Old Testament talk about the fear and panic of losing divine support.

Beyond treating ghosts and gods as functionally real, I also wanted to bring up the seemingly opposite entity of the ghost: the black swan. Suppose the ghost is one where to a person the entity appears real, obvious, yet hard to prove it exists. In that case, the black swan is not obvious, seems so unlikely to happen that it usually isn’t considered possible, but one event can undeniably prove that it can happen and show that the conclusion gathered from inductive reasoning was a ghost all along. No one expects billiard balls, rats, donkeys, cigars, the sounds of a crying baby, pagers, or walkie-talkies to explode, but that inference is simply a ghost that is taken for granted as real.

Considering all this, let’s go back to the Hard Problems of the Cognitive Domain. I still don’t know how to answer them. But I’m confident in saying that the ghosts/gods/obvious conclusions of the cognitive domain can possibly be anything, anywhere, at any time. That is probably a terrifying proposition (Happy Halloween!) but note that the acme of a cognitive security attack is either where (1) the target is facing an unknowable, incomprehensible Lovecraftian monster where “The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself [where it] crippled our consciousness so completely” or (2) the target doesn’t notice that anything has changed. Now let’s be real: most cognitive security attacks are closer to Punk’d than Poltergeist, but the principles of working with the ghosts that are believed by the target to be real still applies.

In terms of other functional considerations for working with ghosts in the cognitive domain, let me list a couple (all of them probably deserve a paper of their own, but this paper itself is already running a little long):

So, are ghosts real? Are dreams real? Are gods real? My answer is that they are as real as the cognitive domain is.

What is the cognitive domain? Where is the cognitive domain? Is the cognitive domain real? I still don’t know, but there are a lot of advantages in warfare in treating the cognitive domain like it’s real, so I treat it like a ghost…or a dream…or a…

About the Author

Dr. Sean Guillory utilizes his cognitive neuroscience training to help with cognitive/human domain capabilities within Defense and National Security. He is also a Board Member of the Information Professionals Association.

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