Foundations #1(III) - The evolutionary history that informs our thought

Remains of the Aqueduct of Nero - Giovanni Battista Piranesi, c 1760-78

Introduction

We are currently adrift.  This is not news to anybody even passingly familiar with Western thought since the 19th century, and though it has gone on so long that the latest generations are inured to this state of affairs I believe it remains the primary challenge of our civilization.  We do not have a center, and without one we cannot make meaningful progress. 

"It is bizarre how very little of twentieth
century science has been assimilated into
twentieth century art." - C.P. Snow (1959)

This condition is made worse by that homegrown rift in our intelligentsia: the two cultures.  To put it quite bluntly, science got us into this.  We did not philosophize or theologize ourselves into this new, uncertain world; we were dragged into it by a series of discoveries that, in time, have become stranger than we can imagine.  Historically, it has been the function of the humanities to assist in making sense of expanded human knowledge, to give musical or visual or literary expression to what otherwise remains an uninterpreted, and hence human-meaningless, world.  It is a crucial charge that civilization cannot survive without.  But they have deserted this post, for what once merely required personal experience, a keen reflection on one's own life and interactions, is no longer sufficient.  In the age of science armchair philosophizing is now wholly insufficient, for what must be addressed are not the trickle-down misinterpretations of our theories but the theories themselves.  Otherwise such ideas are obsolete before they are even conceived. 

Yet now we are in a state where these two critical functions have been siloed off from each other.  Scientists are by and large left ignorant of the humanities in their training; they do not know, really know, the heights of human achievement.  To attempt to explain away Michelangelo by saying art is a function of mate attraction is absurd, and only serves to highlight how woefully inadequate science is as a system of meaning.  By comparison the humanities seem to keep themselves willfully out of touch with the latest findings.  Or even findings that are decades old.  Or really any science at all.  Why this is... I have historical speculations, but on the whole I find it lamentable, and certainly not justifiable, that so many writers and artists want to "say something" about humanity and society while not having the slightest inkling of biology, anthropology, or even history.  Only psychology escapes this oversight, and that is because everyone styles they are already an expert on it.

"The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos
seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for
the chaos of modern art." - Kenneth Clark (1969)

What are we to do about this?  Personally, I believe that just as science got us into this science will have to get us out... but that there is still much to do in the meantime.  On the research end, many of the old stumbling blocks have been disassembled; the extremes of reductive materialism, the selfish gene, and behaviorism, paradigms almost entirely incompatible with what one might call human values, have since given way to more expansive theories.  Modern science is far more amenable to the humanities than fifty or one hundred years ago, and it is why I believe at this juncture it is possible to contemplate healing the rift. 

That, then, is my purpose with this series of posts.  I want to start picking up the pieces of our culture that we have so thoroughly disassembled, and in the process provide the basis for a meaningful outlook.  In the process I will lay forth my own best attempt to link reality together top to bottom, and through this provide, if not a final answer, an example of how I believe it may be done:

3) The evolutionary history that informs our thought
2) Processes and patterns
4) The evolutionary history that informs our society
5) Ethics and education
6) The evolution of society, government, and culture
1) The relationship of reality to experience
7) Aesthetics
8) Spirituality

Yes, they are out of order; sometimes that is the best way to present things.  So, without further ado, let us begin rebuilding. 

 

III - The evolutionary history that informs our thought

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
-Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975)

What are humans?  What is it like to be human?  In addressing the nature of the universe it may seem strange to start here, in medias res, rather than with with a philosophical foundation.  This was how I approached it in my initial drafts, sinking the metaphysical piers and building upward from there, but the more I reflected on the problem the more I realized humans are where we must begin.  I the writer and you the reader are human, and although the great thrust of scientific thought has been to remove us from the center of the universe, an anti-anthropocentric mania that extends even down to the verbiage of scientific papers ("an experiment was conducted" rather than "we conducted an experiment", as if to emphasize that the universe would do all it does without us), I believe this approach has its limits.  In time we will reach them.

Moreover, I am also a biologist, and natively a biologist at that.  It is, you could say, part of my temperament, and just as the thought of the last few centuries has been informed and deformed by metaphors from physics, so mine is inextricably shaped by the themes of biology.  It is simply how I perceive the world, and it has served me well.  Beginning with the biological worldview, then, I want to digress first on two emphases found in all human thought, which due to my acquiring them in studying art history I will call the Classical and the Romantic. 

The Ideal City - Luciano Laurana or Melozzo da Forlì, c1470

Digression #1: Classical and Romantic

The ancient Greeks were enamored with the idea of perfection.  Arete (ἀρετή), "excellence", was their characteristic word for both something that was what it was and doing what it ought to be doing to its best effect; the ἀρετή of a knife was to cut, and in cutting well it demonstrated ἀρετή.  Purpose and excellence, distilled to essence, are one and the same.  Plato is the supreme expression of this attitude, for having wholly abstracted his Forms away from their material manifestations he has made the entire world a subordinated reflection of the Ideal.  It was a belief that was to have long echoes in the Christian, and hence European, tradition.

Artemisian Bronze - artist unknown, c450 BC

In art, this outlook manifested itself as an attempt to see clearly, but in seeing clearly see through the particulars to the general.  Such was the grounds for the Greeks' masterly art: an art dedicated to realism yet always in the service of finding the underlying perfect order.  Beauty in this light is objective, a standard, something which does not vary from individual to individual but is defined in an almost mathematical sense (it may have been codified this way explicitly, but unfortunately the relevant writings have been lost).  This is why when looking at fifth century statues they seem largely devoid of personality: it is because they are.  Variation has been scrubbed from them as an impediment to expressing the ideal athlete, the ideal politician, or the ideal god.  They are what they are and doing what they are doing without equal.  Perfect.  Yet still, they are observed with keen anatomical detail, humanized, and so escape degeneration into abstraction where the mind rapidly loses its way.

Vitruvian Man - Leonardo, c1490

As it was the rediscovery of this humanistic mode of idealized thought that helped ignite the Renaissance, the latest turning of the wheel in our civilization, its fruits became known collectively as Classical.  Artistically it is made manifest everywhere in the 15th century's search for beautiful, harmonious, mathematical order, and it gave new impetus to the Medieval search for God's universal order which had preceded it.  

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light."
-Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

But the ultimate expression of Classicism is not art or philosophy but science.  Or, more precisely, physics; and, to appropriate Walter Pater's phrasing, all science has aspired to the condition of physics (or Freud: we all have physics envy).  It is little wonder too; that an entire semester, an entire universe, may be written down on the back of a notecard in the form of a few equations is a marvel of reductive elegance.  Rocks, trees, cars, people; it doesn't matter what you're talking about, they all follow the same rules.  The discovery of the complete interchangeability of bosons must have been breathtaking.  It is the mode of thought that has fully erased all individuality from its subject and replaced it with perfect generalities, and even now physicists search for a fundamental theory of everything in the mindset that, having found it, we will have acquired the ultimate truth.  All else is stamp collecting.

Albion - William Blake, c1795
(and boy did Blake hate Newton)

Yet despite science tilting our civilization in favor of Classicism, it has not ruled unopposed.  There have been many dissensions, the latest and most remarkable of which is the movement known collectively as Romanticism.  Romanticism isn't a singular creed and therefore defies any general summary... which is precisely what it is all about.  Turn your mind for a moment to the 18th century, that heyday of the Enlightenment where all the educated minds of Europe basked in the afterglow of Newton and his demonstration of what human reason can accomplish.  It seemed like the darkness of millennia had been dispelled and that, with a judicious application of the same generalizing principles, all human endeavors could be put aright.  I find myself rather sympathetic to the idea, until I reflect on what happened: rigid academism in the arts, lifeless codification in ethics, and ultimately the French Revolution in politics, which still remains the last word in what happens when you believe that society can be run by reason alone.  It is no surprise that under such a unipolar ideology some people felt the need to dissent.  They were the Romantics.

Cannibals Gazing at Their Victims
- Francisco Goya, c1800
(though "sympathetic" is not a word one would
ever choose for Goya's attitude toward man)

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the Romantic attitude is to note that they were the first to paint the depraved and insane with any sympathy.  While of course there had been deformities in painted subjects before (Leonardo was a great collector of ugly human specimens), these were treated with a kind of disdain.  They were a failure of human physiognomy and included only as an example of how we ought not to be.  But the Romantics studied them, as well as a variety of other blighted human conditions, with a kind of morbid fascination.  Here was variation that, by its very existence, was a rebuttal to the neat, orderly world that they found so suffocating.  From this and a hundred other wellsprings they drew their strength and declared that the multifarious irrationality of life could not be summed up in generalities or "ideals".  Nor should it, for such a search was just not myoptic but, in a sense, immoral, in how it seemed to dismiss experiential variety.  A bit of an extreme reaction perhaps, but inevitable given the strength of the Classical impulse which had come before it, and, if these last sentiments sound familiar, it is because we are still living through the long aftereffects of this anti-rational rebellion.

Anatomical drawing - Unknown, 19th century

But what has this to do with biology? Biology rests at the intersection of the Classical and Romantic approach to science.  While the Classical approach has been marvelously effective in physics, it has been less so in other sciences (hence, again, their envy).  As one ascends the ladder of increasing complexity from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology to anthropology/sociology/history the weakness of adhering only to generalities is made manifest.  The history of the human sciences is a graveyard of grand theories.  But biology is different.  Biology has had success with central unifying ideas... but not so much that it is possible to dispense with the disruptive details.  Even to this day there is a lively disagreement between scientists working in systems biology who characterize living creatures like electrical circuits versus ecologists who derive no greater joy than finding some new, strange creature that does not fit our preconceived notions.  No matter how encompassing, every theory seems to find its exception in a particular organism.

The engine for this variety is evolution.  In theory it is simple, and indeed the field of population genetics has not only been able to derive key features from first principles, but apply these to make enlightening predictions concerning the direction, rate, and even limits of evolution under various conditions.  One only has to work in a biological anthropology lab as I did to discover firsthand that we can estimate the size of human populations hundreds or thousands of years ago based solely off of signatures left in our modern DNA.  Nowadays we know not only where we came from, but also, within some error, when, how fast, and in what numbers we came.  It is the kind of oracular power that should properly cow anybody who fancies science is "just another theory."

Vitruvian Ape - "Green Wizard", date unknown

Yet evolution is also one long string of contingencies.  A mountain range splits a population and it becomes two separate species.  A predator spreads into a new region, applying novel pressures.  A mutation occurs, an essentially random event that yet provides crucial material for future possibilities.  All this adds up to the fact that evolution is historical: the past informs the future but you never know what will happen until it does.  Because of this, evolution is better thought of as a tinkerer than an inventor: it rarely creates anew, but rather uses what is at hand to solve immediate problems.  Legs come from fins, ear ossicles from jawbones, and milk from modified sweat glands (to say nothing of the molecular examples).  We are endless kludges most beautiful, intricate and elegant yet full of stop-gap measures that have been grandfathered in from earlier forms. 

It is this tension, I believe, that gives biology much vitality and flexibility as a model for thought.  The physical scientific habit, to reduce everything only to its general tendency, is powerful but not omniscient; it forces the variation of the world to be treated, in statistical parlance, as "residuals", which is a mathematical way of calling it random and uninformative noise.  A purely Classical attitude.  It is a sign of science's maturation that it has expanded beyond this, and begun to ask more seriously whether variation is as important as the central tendency.  United, they are what give true depth to thought.  I have never forgotten the impact that Varieties of Religious Experience had on me, not just for its information but the profound pluralism which William James brought to the subject.  He was not against generalization, but as he observed wryly, "Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much respect."  He is a bright light in psychology before it grew dim under decades of reductive misanthropy.

"One can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in."
-Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)

Pikaia gracilens, the basal vertebrate, c505 mya

Going forward this is the attitude I will take.  Through evolution I will speak much of how humans are, but recognize that what I am describing is a baseline, the equivalent of a central tendency.  Not all humans fit these generalizations and some would even seem to defy them; these cannot be ignored.  Yet our evolutionary past is still with us and it shapes everything.  To completely abandon the search for human universals is ultimately to cease to care about the evidence, and then, in a great irony, to spin the most all-encompassing, and the most baseless, theories the mind can conceive of.  After all, being so unschooled in assessing the data it is easy to recapitulate the mental errors we have so assiduously learned to avoid.  Such is what happened to Romanticism and its anti-rational offspring in the 20th century, and such is what always happens when humans lose touch with the concrete and attempt to operate wholly in the abstract.  The facts are where we must begin: we are living creatures, and without evolution biology does not make sense.  Therefore, neither do we.

The Ideal Habitat - The Lion King, 1994

Humans can be briefly described as a species adapted to the patchy, unstable environment of the Pleistocene savanna.  Because the copses of trees were spread out, being arboreal like most primates was not feasible.  In time we became proficient walkers, where if not faster than most animals (we only have two legs to accelerate with rather than four) we are really quite efficient over long distances.  This tenaciousness remains the basis of bushman hunting to this day: we don't outrun gazelle, we just keep after them until they collapse from exhaustion, unable to match our constant pace.  In order to manage the heat this generates we sweat, a hairless trick that saves salts and allows for better breathing compared to panting.  But this forces us to drink far more than mammals of comparable size, reinforcing our nomadic abilities as a means to locating water, and also being the reason that until the taming of the horse and the invention of the wheel civilization was unable to spread into the vast, dry steppes of Asia.  We had to get other animals to carry the water there for us.

Above is a standard evolutionary description, and while I delight in such chains of causation I must also admit that it tells us remarkably little about what it means to be human.  This is a common weakness of such stories; they help explain the odd little details of life, but are wanting in greater significance.  I think it is because at this point in our culture we identify remarkably little with our bodies.  Even without the religious framework to back it up, we nonetheless experience life as though we are a disembodied mind-spirit occupying an ancillary life-support mechanism; only the first is really "us".  Moreover, describing what we were evolved to be seems to fall fully short of what we actually are; being a thirsty biped I am quite marvelous at carrying water, but I certainly do more than that.

So what kind of explanations would feel substantial?  Those that most directly address the two linked, and co-defining, aspects of our inner lives: our mental processes and our social connections.  Here I will be addressing the former, the latter being the subject of a later post.  

Fitness Beats Truth: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Stereotype

Motor coordination: contracting pectoralis major
Behavior: throwing a ball
General intent/context: playing a game

Much of animal behavior research rests on identifying discrete behaviors.  That is, while action may appear continuous it is often possible to dissect it into a series of behaviors, situated above motor coordination but below that of general intent.  Some simple, reflexive examples are the freezing of rats in response to fearful stimuli and proboscis extension in bees as a sign of positive interest; as these are innate, stereotyped behaviors we can use to reliably assess what the animal is "thinking" about the situation.  This, however, is only the beginning, as behaviors are often used in coordination to achieve a greater end.  In my own field of myrmecology (ant studies), an ant's reaction to outsiders is scored on a scale of increasingly hostile behaviors: ignoring/avoiding, mandible gaping, lunging, biting, and ultimately gaster flexion (i.e. trying to sting).  These behaviors all form components of a general attack suite, with the presence of the most aggressive being a good indicator of the ant's DEFCON level. 

However, most behaviors, even those that are appropriate in the same situation, work at cross purposes to one another (try washing your hair and body simultaneously in the shower sometime).  In one of those horribly educational early neurological experiments, cats were lobotomized and their behavior observed.  What we found was that without a cortex they were unable to settle on a coherent set of behaviors, instead rapidly swapping between activities such as grooming and hissing at the slightest provocation, almost to the point of randomness.  When pursued simultaneously these behaviors are counterproductive; trying to take care of one's body while simultaneously appear threatening at best wastes energy and at worst results in death.  Therefore, it is crucial that an organism not only possesses the behaviors necessary to survive, but that its nervous system is able to select among them them the most appropriate for the circumstances and repress the rest.

Comparison of two ant brains:
when neural tissue isn't needed it is lost
(Gronenberg and Liebig 1999)

But here we run into a constraint: neurological tissue is energetically expensive.  It is the most expensive tissue type, in fact, and any time the cognitive demands on a species are lessened it rapidly (in evolutionary time) loses the excess.  To perhaps overplay my research specialty: the queens of socially parasitic ants, or those which infiltrate the nests of others and lay their eggs, rapidly lose the need to dig, groom, or take care of their own young.  Consequently, despite being closely related to their hosts their behavioral repertoire is greatly diminished and their brains are proportionally tiny.  Remarkably, in other ant species where the workers can become temporary queens ("gamergates"), their shift to reproduction is associated with a reduction in brain mass: workers have to deal with a complicated world, but queens don't have to do anything but sit in the nest and lay eggs.  In ants the royalty are designedly stupid.  Amazingly, when this temporary queen is demoted back to worker she promptly regrows her atrophied lobes, making us wonder if we can ever learn to copy that trick with medicine.

Good ideas, disorganized book
Read his "Visual
Intelligence" first

Clearly, in the world of biology it is best to avoid maintaining unnecessary behaviors and their associated decision-making apparatuses if you can.  They cost too much.  This is the basis of one of the most fascinating ideas I have encountered in my life, Donald Hoffman's provocatively-named "Fitness Beats Truth."  He substantiates it mathematically in a co-authored paper, but the gist is that when a simple-but-efficient system, which sorts things into but a few categories, is pitted against a subtle-but-expensive one, capable of much greater discrimination, the simpler one "wins."  That is to say, in evolutionary terms being as simple as possible (and no simpler) has greater fitness, and is in the long run a superior approach if you need to be just right enough about the world to get by.

Now this is not a very pleasant conclusion to the intellectual but it explains much about how we think. Organisms have a limited suite of behaviors and therefore it serves no purpose to be able to resolve the world into categories more fine than can be used in choosing the correct actions.  All animals come equipped with some innate behaviors to cover the basics, and most can add to these through experience (yes, even insects can acquire new behaviors, thank you very much!).  Humans have elaborated this capacity for learning yet further, augmented as it is by cultural transmission, but we still approach the world in fundamentally the same way: classify a situation by its most salient/important aspect, and then employ, either together or in sequence, the appropriate subset of behaviors while repressing the rest.

Figuring out which behavior is correct based on
simple visual cues, and definitely not pursuing both at once
(De Fraceschi et al. 2016)

Let's say you are walking down a dark alley at night.  You will likely be on your guard, having "decided" that the potential for danger is most relevant; subsequently you may walk more quickly, avoid making any unnecessary noise, and frequently turn your head to keep watch on your surroundings.  Perhaps you catch yourself thinking about how that piece of broken pipe, normally completely unimportant, could make a good weapon.  Some of these may be innate behaviors, given that physical peril is a common evolutionary concern, but if you've spent enough time around dark alleys (or just watched movies) you'll have likely picked up a few habits.  

If somebody steps out of the shadows with a knife and menacing intent the situation changes; you are no longer looking for danger, you have identified it and now have to figure out what to do.  But notice, at that moment everything shifts.  You stopped walking and froze, you ceased to worry about making noise, and your eyes are now firmly fixed on this potential threat; what was previously appropriate no longer is, and in fact must be actively inhibited as some of them (such as letting your eyes wander) could be lethal.  What you do from here depends on many factors, and you may attempt to flee (if you think you're close enough to safety to escape unharmed), fight (if you think you can win or if fleeing has no chance), call for help (again, suppressing the previous behavior of being quiet), or maybe beg (we'll return to propitiation later).  Some of these work together (fleeing and calling for help) while others (fighting and begging) probably won't. 

A curious book about
reacting in new ways

And... that's about all that comes to mind.  Theoretically you could do a million different things in this situation, but most of them won't help, and given the urgency now is not the time to experiment.  The more threatening the situation the less we are likely to consider alternative courses of action than those we know and feel comfortable with, and many of those have strong instinctual underpinnings.  Yet even when not faced with such a desperate situation this is how we navigate most of our lives, moving from circumstance to circumstance, identifying them in turn and employing the few tricks we have learned to achieve our ends.  

To see this exposed in the raw, we can turn to the neurological case of a man who, when presented with simple cues, would immediately go through with related actions.  If shown a bed he would make it then lie down, if in front of a sink he would reflexively wash his hands or brush his teeth.  The ability to assess his need for an action was missing, and what was left were the remaining systems on automatic, simplistically identifying situations and executing the behaviors he had learned were appropriate to them before.  And since most of life is routine, that is how it is lived: not by decision but habit.  How often have I stepped out of the shower realizing that I didn't once pay attention to what I was doing, and have to double check that I did indeed wash my hair.

Which all this would perhaps be more curious than problematic if wasn't also the reason why humans resort so tiresomely to crude simplifications and stereotypes.  We have a continual need to classify our experience, and we can save a lot of time and effort in doing so if we not only reduce the number of categories, but identify the "essence" of situations, objects, and people based on readily-available indicators.  It is the core of all our discriminatory -isms.  This is enhanced by our social tribalism (again, to be touched on in the future), but I believe that its root lies much deeper in the very nature of biological cognition.  The impulse for categorization and simplification is ancestral, and it is pervasive.  The more you watch your own reactions to life the more you come to see how relentlessly it operates.  Luckily we can be somewhat educated out of these habits, but our evolutionary history is set against us in this task, and the effort it takes and the ease with which we revert should not be underestimated.

 

Relationship of emotion (here called "Survival Circuit") and feeling ("Subjective Emotion")
(Taschereau-Dumouchel et al. 2022)

Emotions: What's Going On?

To the above there may be some response, "Yes, but humans have intuitions, they have feelings, and those cannot be explained by evolution."  Yet this distinction rests on a misunderstanding of what emotions are, and in the last few decades we have made great strides in understanding this aspect of our nature.

A book everyone
should read

First, a pair of contrasting definitions: emotions vs. feeling.  In common language they mean essentially the same thing, but in technical parlance they are not synonymous.  Emotions are certain operations performed by the brain, feelings are our experience of those operations.  For instance, to decide that you are in danger is to activate what is often somewhat inaccurately called the "fear circuit", and this sets in motion a variety of physiological and cognitive responses to being in danger (elevated heart rate, activated sweat glands, and increased vigilance).  This is emotion at work.  But then you experience fear as well, that quasi-physical shuddering of your conscious mind which has its own particular valence and complex tree of associations.  This is feeling.  These are not the same thing, for it is entirely possible, as demonstrated once again by neurological cases, to have a functional emotional system and yet not feel anything.  We even experience this normally sometimes, such as when our brain picks up on a subtle cue for danger and we only later notice and feel we are nervous.  Because feelings seem to follow from emotions, and like all conscious phenomena are not readily locatable within matter, the general scientific attitude has been to treat them as epiphenomena.  I, too, will be focusing on emotions rather than feelings in this section, but I wish to make it clear that feelings can feed back on emotions as well, and that any strict hierarchy between the two is unwarranted.

Inside Out (2015) is surprisingly
accurate for a popular film

Which gets me to the next important point: what are emotions?  I have already hinted what they are above, and the simplest answer is that they are assessment systems.  Note the plural: systems.  There is no unified emotion center, no one locus which gives rise to the six basic emotions (there may be more; this is currently a subject of debate).  Instead you can think of each of these as a specialized apparatus, designed to sift the vast streams of incoming information and come to a specific, useful conclusion (note the confusing reusage of terms for feelings):

1. Am I in physical danger?  Fear.  
2. Am I in immunological danger?  Disgust.  
3. Are things not going my way/Am I being treated unfairly?  Anger.  
4. Are things not going my way/Have I lost something?  Sadness.  
5. Are things not as I anticipated/Do I need to reassess?  Surprise.  
6. And... whatever happiness is doing.  

Happiness is oddly difficult to define; all the other basic emotions are dealing with a problem, and the skewed balance toward negative emotions reinforces that evolution cares very much about fitness rather than truth and well-being.  Happiness just seems to be things going our way for the moment, a threat-negative assessment that lets us know it is safe to be generous (the "feel good, do good" phenomenon).  But that is certainly not how it feels, and I leave it to other writers to explore that topic.

The limbic system (orange) is commonly associated
with emotions, although it is not really a system proper.
Note that the hippocampus, crucial in memory formation,
is closely related to these emotional centers.

Now, these systems are more evolutionarily ancient than those which serve conscious thought.  They are more thoroughly integrated into the brain's total circuitry and can command more channels of data.  Because of this they are set up to be parallel processors par excellence: emotions don't just assess the valence of objects or events one at a time in isolation, they come to a conclusion via integrating our entire current status at once.  This is why our judgements can vary so much based on what has recently happened to us: we don't need to know about things in themselves to survive, we need to know what they mean to us in the moment, and the only way we know what they mean to us in the moment is to incorporate our general status to give it context.  As I once read, when you're nauseous Mad Magazine is as good (to you) as King Lear, and often very much better, since your whole system has neither the energy nor inclination to exert itself.  We have a habit of viewing this as a failure of objectivity, but from the perspective of evolution it is not a malfunction; it was a correct assessment of what they would mean to you in your state, and therefore a feature of the system.

It is worth pausing here to emphasize the connection to fitness-beats-truth above.  Our behavioral repertoire is limited, therefore we only need to resolve the world into a few categories.  Emotions are systems designed to categorize things.  They are the middleman of the process, having evolved to detect the common survival-salient aspects of our surroundings and then return suggestions for an appropriate response.  And what strong suggestions they are, for they carry the weight of all the information we have access to backed by the force of evolutionary necessity; it is often quite feeble to attempt to "argue" with them, for there is a power when out of the deluge of unfiltered, unsorted input that our conscious mind could never hope to organize they return a single, final, confident judgement: "I am in danger."

Just a visual reminder that I'm focusing on basic
emotions, but they are just part of a larger system
(Manriquez Santos et al. 2018)

Now, there are several side effects of emotional organization that add a great deal of confusion to the human experience.  The first one I'd like to discuss, and which commonly causes the emotions to be regarded as anti-rational, is their tendency to favor the past and neglect the future. But this is not quite their fault.  

Some of the major dopamine pathways
(Reneman et al. 2018)

Adjacent to emotions is our reward-seeking system, or as popularized the pleasure-dopamine system, and its goal is to reward us for doing what is good for us (or what was good for us in our evolutionary past).  To fulfill this role it has close ties with associative learning, our most basic means of connecting a behavior to its outcome (positive or negative).  However, associative learning operates on short time scales, typically on the order of minutes; we easily learn that touching our hand to a stove will instantly burn us, but we're slower to put on sunscreen before sitting on the beach for hours.  In order to link an action to a distant positive reward it must be accompanied by a continual drip of dopamine while working toward the final burst of pleasure (by comparison, we have no equivalent system for negative "rewards"; hence the prevalence of skin cancer).  Without this neurochemical reinforcement organisms will not do anything that takes prolonged effort because their nervous system doesn't "see the point."  That the debilitating motor symptoms of Parkinson's Disease are the result of the death of dopamine-producing neurons suggests to me that, at the most fundamental level, we literally cannot be motivated without it.  Joy's soul lies in the the doing and how we are to be kept engaged with our modern lifestyle of convenience, where we have removed the majority of the chase from our pursuits, is a question yet unanswered.

But all this seems strange.  Why the workarounds?  Why isn't our reward-seeking system set up to be motivated by the future in the first place?  The simple answer is that because most organisms cannot imagine the future.  They operate by forging associations in the moment and storing what they have learned for use in future moments.  The vast majority of future-oriented behaviors, like stashing nuts for winter, are evolutionarily-honed behaviors enacted by the reward-seeking system.  Otherwise a squirrel can't learn from what hasn't happened yet.

Seeing, imagining, and hallucinating are all remarkably similar
in the brain (Weizmann Institute of Science, after Hahamy 2021)

To move beyond living in the moment is a comparatively recent trick, acquired by humans and perhaps a few other species, and therefore is rather incompletely integrated.  We appear to accomplish this feat by running our perceptual systems in reverse: for example, in order to imagine the future our visual cortex fires as though we are seeing it.  Treating this self-generated scenario as though it is actually happening in the present, our emotions can give their evaluations just like they would for any other piece of input.  Such a method can provide motivation, but like any new feature it is very tricky and full of bugs. "Overconvince" yourself in the process of imagining a stressful future and you become stressed now... for no purpose (another perennial modern problem).  Too much intensity can also teach you to not think about the certain scenarios at all, learning instead to avoid unpleasant thoughts rather than unpleasant consequences.  But as we've all experienced, if we "underconvince" ourselves about the future we discount it entirely.  And since we've gained the ability to simulate the past along with the future, we're prey to continually reliving events that are no longer happening.  Our emotions can certainly be implicated in all these errors, but it is a collective guilt of our entire brain that it's just not built to handle anything other than the present moment.  After all, despite the vaunted power of the rational mind to project the future, how often is it actually right?  Less than we'd like.  We could have used a few million more years of software development.

Beyond this primary weakness, there are also cluster of quirks that can be hard to deal with.  The first is that several emotional systems can give their verdicts all at once and they need not "agree".  Imagine (but not too convincingly!) that one's mother, who has been in a nursing home with dementia for years, has finally passed away.  The emotions are called forth to assess the situation.  You want to categorize it, simplify it, figure out what single course of action you ought to pursue, but instead you find yourself sad, angry, fearful, and perhaps just a bit happy (to say nothing of more complicated feelings).  The last one in particular may sound monstrous, but the truth is that it was hard visiting her every week, watching her slip away while having to pay the bills that, in a way, allowed it to continue.  Now you no longer must do these things.  You asked of happiness, "Did I derive some benefit from this event?" and its honest answer was, "yes."  You can't blame it (or yourself) for that. 

Comparison of fast and slow sensory pathways
(LeDoux, NY Times, Nov 5 1996)

Another effect that is worth mentioning is that in survival, time is of the essence.  Reacting too slow is as good as not reacting at all when your life is on the line.  This means that our emotions are under pressure to work fast (notice how quickly you feel about something before you can think it through) and this means trade-offs.  A complex assessment takes more time than a simpler one, and while sensory cortices can do their job in a little more than a dozen milliseconds, the offshoot that leads to our emotional centers ("Amygdala" for fear) has its own built-in processing that is even faster ("Sensory Thalamus"); in other words, you don't only feel before you think, you feel before you even consciously see.  But this comes at the cost discrimination; our first impressions are only the gist of the situation.  Not only can this be problematic if we never reflect more deeply on our impressions, it has tragic consequences for police interactions or conditions such as PTSD: a door slamming can easily be mistaken for gunfire by your emotions, and before it is even possible to know it you can be triggered into action.  Again, in evolution better safe than sorry, even if it makes you miserable (and others dead).

Scene from Gunslinger Girl (2003); this is not the
last time it will make a showing in these essays

Which brings us to the last oddity, and that is that our conscious selves are entirely ignorant of the inner workings of the emotions.  They have a great number of inputs and internal connections but their outputs are comparatively slim.  In this way we are like a senior manager asking for feedback from teams under us; not being privy to their sources of information, or present at the meetings which discussed and debated the issues, we know only their final verdict, take it or leave it.  If we think we know the source of our emotions then we are wrong, or at least have mistaken our deductions (no matter how accurate) for first-hand knowledge.  It is really only life and art that teaches us to interpret ourselves, as otherwise we are quite without a user's manual.  

Speaking of deductions, how does the intellect/thought relate to the emotions?  Like feeling, I have skirted the issue thus far simply because we have a less thorough grasp of it.  But we do know a few key details.  We know there is a difference between intelligence/thinking and consciousness, and that most of our "thought" (or "intuition", if one wants to call it that) occurs outside of consciousness.  This gets referred to somewhat generically as subconscious "processing," and though clearly linked to both conscious thought and the emotions the precise nature of the relationship is uncertain.  We also know that, unlike the emotions, intelligence is at least somewhat united into a singular system; while people may have specific aptitudes, there is well-documented general intelligence factor ("g") that is applied to the variety of mental tasks that we face.  And, contrary to popular perceptions, this faculty is not only highly heritable, but positively correlated with socioeconomic status and well-captured by one's IQ score, implications that we have yet to come to grips with as a culture.

As dryly dutiful as J.S. Mill was prone to
be, but not lacking in insights

However, these are tangents.  To refocus specifically on conscious thought, vaguely defined as holding things in our mind's eye and puzzling them, there is one important difference with emotions that should be remarked on: it is linear.  Our attention can only handle one activity at a time (which makes multitasking an illusion, and a rather expensive one at that since significant time is lost in "recalibration").  If it runs up against any sufficiently complicated task it must either break it into smaller pieces, which we all experience when trying to learn a new mental skill, or pass it to the subconscious (emotional or otherwise) for clarification, and which seems its ultimate destination in any case.  Just compare one's reaction to art with one's explanation of that reaction: the art itself generates the multifarious response that touches the disparate corners of our being, while our analysis can only imperfectly express its reasoning in discrete terms.  The intuition-emotions understood it better, and the conscious intellect is forced to take its jumping off point from them.  It reminds me of J.S. Mill's description of Carlyle, that the latter "saw many things long before me, which I could only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove..."  Yet the intellect can sometimes prove it, and as its individual steps are exposed to evaluation we can better assess the appropriateness of our judgements; the emotions are not always right, they are merely convincing in their forceful eloquence, and being able to feed back our rational understanding is of great assistance in correcting them (and Carlyle certainly could have used an editor).  

Coming to the end, it is fair to admit that I have acted as an apologist for the emotions, and by extension intuitions, in this section.  This is because they are usually contrasted with rational thought, and then subsequently elevated or maligned depending on one's ideology.  But this approach is founded on ignorance, and therefore it bears repeating: the emotions are evolutionarily ancient with some unfortunate quirks/faults but this does not mean that they are essentially anti-intellectual or anti-rational.  Like the rest of our subconscious mind, they handle more information at once than the conscious intellect can, and as a result our entire lives depend on them.  Their inscrutable immediacy may give them a sheen of unassailable truth but this is an illusion; they are the output of analysis, an analysis which may be right or wrong (or neutral) and which can be improved.  As such, there is no fundamental opposition between thought and emotion.  That philosophical debate is settled.  They each have their limitations and may come to separate conclusions, but they are not entirely separate; thought relies on emotion to guide it and emotion may be educated by thought, and it is only when the whole process is brought into alignment that a full human being is produced.

The Treachery of Images - René Magritte, 1929

Metaphors: They're Like Similes, But Not

"If evolution is a masterful tinkerer then our minds learned well at its knee." 

That's a nice phrase, is it not?  I just made it up.  Or maybe it's not that impressive, at least until I explain it further.  But whatever merit one sees in it, what can't be avoided is admitting that it, and this sentence as well, is composed of a cobbled-together series of metaphors.

I am going to start with a strong statement: humans innately understand very little.  But defining "understand" as I am using will take a moment, mixed up as it is with many other connotations.  

As any teacher has experienced, a student being able to speak a sentence is not the same as their understanding it.  Similarly, a student being able to follow through a sequence of steps to solve a problem is not the same as their understanding it either.  Change the circumstances but a little, ask them to move from the specific to the general, from rules to principles, from facts to theories, and they often demonstrate complete inability to apply what they "know" to a novel situation.  Clearly, something is lacking here.  But what is it? 

Examples of carnivores trying to solve puzzles
(Johnson-Ulric et al. 2022)

Once again, comparisons with other animals are of great assistance.  There is a veritable mountain of experiments in which organisms are asked to solve puzzles, usually centering around retrieving otherwise inaccessible food, and for which we have detailed observations concerning their efforts in acquiring it.  And behind all these, there is the question: did the creature just bumble its way into a solution or did it somehow grasp the function of the parts?  When presented with something they want, but cannot reach, animals (including humans) try a variety of behaviors, descending from previously successful to essentially random, in hopes that one will work.  Pull this rope, push that button, restart your smartphone, and maybe something will come of it.  But this isn't understanding; this can be handled by associative learning alone, which is very effective at linking a specific action performed under a specific circumstance to an outcome.  "Ask" the animal to generalize, to see that pulling on the rope operated a lever to open a door, and then offer them the opportunity to press that lever directly, and it is surprising how many fail (or perhaps it is surprising how many succeed).  

Behind this there seems to be the same ill-defined faculty mentioned above, that ability to "reason," and so integrate a piece of information into a sum total model of the world.  "The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else."  Generalization again: where before a rope and a lever were two unrelated things, now they are usefully connected to opening doors under a single framework.  The capacity for doing this seems to be as good of a definition of "intelligence" as any (where, as in the last section, intelligence should not be confused with consciousness), and the mental models produced by this process may be called "understanding."

Conversely, as in the candle problem, we have
a hard time "unlearning" what something is for
once we have categorized its function

Now, this ability to understand relies heavily on the ability to liken new things to old things.  Levers are like ropes now in a way they previously weren't, and this association tells us something about both.  But this begs the question: where does this chain start?  If everything is like something else, then what is it that we understand in the first place?  Like trying to use a dictionary to figure out the ultimate meaning of a word, if every word is defined by other words we need to just know some definitions to get started.  My answer as to how we moor this castle in the sky is the keystone of this section: we start with our bodies and the sensory world which we inhabit.  

The first evidence of how much we rely on our physical existence to understand everything else is our language.  Let's take a moment to review that first paragraph again.  "Made it up," as though I had put the metaphor together with my hands.  "Impressive," as though I had pressed an object into you with force.  "Further," as though, like farther, explanations are a path you proceed along.  "Sees in it," as though you actually used your eyes to evaluate literary quality.  "Avoided," as though an unwelcome concession were equivalent to a bodily collision.  "Admitting," as though accepting an idea were like letting it into a room through a door.  "Composed... cobbled-together...," we're back to where we started, as though words are just rocks that, stuck together, become walls of text.  An entire paragraph describing mental phenomena, those core experiences that make up so much of our lives, is just one long string of "as though"s linked back to the bodily world.  Once you start looking for them, you can't help but clearly see them everywhere.  

A Venn Diagram, for those who have
been out of school long enough to forget

This last sentence highlights another feature of our minds: while we draw on metaphors from all the senses, we are habitually visual in our reasoning.  Emotions may be felt but thoughts are seen.  There is evidence that this is more than metaphor, and that we truly use our visual cortex, a region inordinately enlarged in diurnal primates, to both produce and assess "visual simulations" (like the future) as well as reason through situations with Venn Diagram-like logic.  After all, evolution just loves reusing things, and if we're already putting up this giant bulge of tissue in our heads we might as well ask it to take care of a few other chores around the house.  That IQ tests involve the ability to mentally rotate objects is likely not a coincidence.

But of course, though language may shape the way we think it is not the only, or even the primary, manner in which we understand the world (a misunderstanding that caused much grief in the 20th century); after all, most animals don't speak a word but are quite capable of reasoning after their own fashion.  To do this they must represent the world to themselves in some "code" of neuronal connections, and though we do not know how they experience it, we know how we do: with symbols.

"The art of painting, in its early stages, is concerned with things which one can touch, hold in the hand, or isolate in the mind from the rest of their surroundings."
- Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (1949)

The Uprising - Honoré Daumier, c1860
(According to Wiki, this is the first instance
in art of this motif)

On the surface, symbolism is absurd.  Why would you represent one thing with another?  Why not just represent the thing itself?  Once again, my answer is the same: because we understand very little but our bodily-sensory experience, and are most moved by the symbols that connect directly to that.  If a symbol can do this and unite together multiple ideas into a single "object" then it will serve its purpose well.  An example which comes to mind are the student protest posters I pass every day in the halls.  One of the most popular images is that of the upraised fist, a symbol of popular resistance against oppressive power.  But "power" and "resistance" are vague ideas; even having given them names linked to physical phenomena, we still struggle to turn such nebulous concepts into something we can properly imagine.  What does it actually mean to "resist"?  By comparison, raising our fist is easy to grasp.  We can feel what it is like to make this gesture in solidarity with others, to experience a sense of personal strength and determination augmented by everybody around us doing the same (as well as the latent threat of group violence, a dangerous overtone to this symbol).  In time its usage has added additional cultural connotations, but I do not believe it would have originally been successful if it did not have a bodily connection.  In the end, we know how to use this symbol.

Catacombs of St. Domitilla, c150-200 AD
Fish, anchor, and cross woven together
into a single early Christian symbol.

This example also illustrates another benefit of symbols: even more than words (which are really just minced and distilled symbols), they are "fuzzy," with multiple meanings and multiple valences.  This is a headache for their rational dissection but it is a perfect fit for a cross-wired brain always obsessed with context.  Nets of symbols naturally hang together, interconnected, interrelated, and so reinforce each other to form a whole that grants meaning to its parts.  When it comes to symbols, the more associations it has the better.  And when systems of symbols begin to degenerate, as when a society and its worldview degenerate, it is not only the disgraced parts that lose their credibility; like a hologram, their collective brilliance is diminished, and people begin to wonder how it was ever possible to see anything in it in the first place.

"With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind."
-Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (2006)

St. John in the Desert - Domenico Veneziano, c1445-1450
(I'm not being completely fair; some mountains, like
those in Masaccio's The Tribute Money, aren't awful)

But how far can symbols take us?  Obviously very far, given how abstract many of our symbols have become; through symbols and words we have built a conceptual tower of Babel that we imagine reaches the heavens.  But it does not go so high as that.

Take for instance the old advice given to painters that in order to represent a mountain they ought to first hold a rock in their hands and then transfer that image to canvas.  This makes intuitive sense, but it produced a rather limited facsimile; while the early Renaissance made great strides in understanding human anatomy, looking at quattrocento mountains is never pleasant.  Centuries of practice have improved this, and one can now go to an art gallery with the expectation of being impressed, but underneath these embellishments do we really understand mountains better?  In other words, do these paintings represent a visceral, working knowledge of a mountain on its own terms?  No, not really; some mountaineers may have some sense of how long it takes to traverse, but we cannot conceive of its volume, what it weighs, or how long it has been there and how long it will last.  All these things are so far outside the range of everyday objects that we can count or lift that we have no practical-intuitive sense of what they imply, and so they cannot be transferred to art.  A mountain is not a rock.

Transverse Line - Wassily Kandinsky, 1923
(Again, I'm not being completely fair;one only
has to look to a Mondrian for the opposite of disorder)

This, I believe, is what lies at the heart of art's inability to express most of 20th century science.  The universe is bigger, smaller, faster, slower, and more complex than we can understand by bodily feel, and as a result our art has slid precipitously into non-representational abstraction.  Without images, without words or symbols, this can only express quanta of experience in meaningless disorganized befuddlement, something that 20th century painting has done superlatively. Writing and music have followed in their own fashion.

Beyond this the arts have had to surrender to mathematics, a branch of our knowledge that is mysterious in the extreme.  I will not even attempt to answer what it is here, except to note the peculiarity that despite it being the most generalized system of symbols we have (not only are they not derived from particulars, it is debatable whether they are even derived from "reality"), those symbols always stand for one, and only one, thing in a given context.  No ulterior connotations are admitted.  This is what gives mathematics the precision to explore regions where reasoning by analogy dare not tread, yet leaves its statements lacking the fullness of meaning that we derive from "fuzzy" understanding.  Which is not to say that its practitioners cannot understand it, but that it is an understanding not born from bodily experience; there is no royal road to math because there is nothing else quite like it in our lives, and so our only recourse is to learn it de novo.  Which leaves me to wonder whether the term "symbol" is not being misused when referencing both art and mathematics, and whether we have been confused by our words into making connections where none exist.

Sunset, Green River Butte - Thomas Moran, 1915
But the impression which art can give, that the world
is bigger than us and our models, is sublime.

Conclusion

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
-George E. P. Box (1919-2013)

Throughout this essay I have emphasized generalizations and their usefulness.  This is because usefulness is what evolution has driven us toward.  Organisms have behaviors, whether they be innate or learned, and while this would seem to open to them endless possibilities in practice they are limited.  Most behaviors are not useful in a given situation, and even all those which are cannot be pursued simultaneously.  Therefore, we soon learn that only a few behaviors, organized into procedures, are efficacious, and it is through this reduced, often ritualized, selection that we interact with the world. 

Our mental toolkit is built around this limitation.  At all times we attempt to categorize our experience, to designate what type of thing, or what sort of situation, we are faced with in order that we may select the best response from our repertoire.  Emotions address the most evolutionarily conserved and important of these cases, but our entire cognitive apparatus serves the same end.  That's ultimately what the idea of similarity is for: to be able to apply to something new what we already understand about something old, and therefore act appropriately without the effort of learning it once again.  Symbols, metaphors, stereotypes, categories, models, generalizations, they're all linked to this fundamental issue that likeness is a means to an end and that to understand is ultimately to be able to apply.  Evolution had no patience for distinctions without a difference.  This is not an argument for pragmatism, but an observation that our conceptual apparatus was built with a purpose, and that we are almost inevitably out of our depth when we attempt to apply it beyond these limits.

Chimpanzees can learn math as well

Yet my mention of mathematics above should give us pause before we conclude too inevitably in favor of our limitations.  It is true that we are rooted in "physical cognition," and that all understanding may be second cousin to motor coordination in our brains, but this apparatus itself has generalized.  We are capable of taking nearly any mental task and applying to it the same strategy that we use for the physical world around us: of testing behaviors and assessing the outcome.  After all, we had to learn our physical associations as well through trial and error, we are just prone to forgetting this since it lies outside of conscious memory, in that dim era of our infant lives during which we figure out so much.  It would be useless to pretend that later learning which is not so interwoven with every aspect of our selves can compete with these prodigious years, but nonetheless it seems that even if we cannot "understand" something with our bodily metaphors we can nonetheless acquire new systems of pattern-rules to which we can liken things.  We just avoid the effort of doing so if we can ("It ain't natural"), but when armed in this way we can have a "feel" for things that are beyond the reach of hand.

We will return to this topic in the post on social behavior, but for now we will take a detour, for after all this talk of patterns and math, this is where we must go next.

 

Code 912 - Cellular automata from Wolfram Alpha