The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (14 page)
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Authors: Shimon Edelman
BOOK: The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life
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You Can Talk to Me
Preeminence above a vole. Replicants abroad.
The digital revolution. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
A garden of forking paths. Dependencies all
the way down. It takes a village.
You can talk to me.
You can talk to me.
You can talk to me.
If you’re lonely, you can talk to me.
—THE BEATLES,
“Hey Bulldog” (1969)
“Hey Bulldog” (1969)
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Tsúi Pên conceived it.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES,
“The Garden of Forking Paths,”
Ficciones
(1941/1962b)
“The Garden of Forking Paths,”
Ficciones
(1941/1962b)
The Odyssey
, as one of its best translators, Robert Fitzgerald, noted in a postscript, is “about a man who cared for his wife and wanted to rejoin her.” For three thousand years now, this story captivates listeners and readers not just because it brings the hero through spectacular hardships to a happy end, but also, perhaps, because it presents a puzzle. On several occasions during his ten-year journey home, Ulysses could have renounced adventure and avoided further adversity by settling down with one of the many willing women he met, some of them, like Nausikaa, mere kings’ daughters, others, like Kirke and Kalypso, immortal. Why did he persist?
, as one of its best translators, Robert Fitzgerald, noted in a postscript, is “about a man who cared for his wife and wanted to rejoin her.” For three thousand years now, this story captivates listeners and readers not just because it brings the hero through spectacular hardships to a happy end, but also, perhaps, because it presents a puzzle. On several occasions during his ten-year journey home, Ulysses could have renounced adventure and avoided further adversity by settling down with one of the many willing women he met, some of them, like Nausikaa, mere kings’ daughters, others, like Kirke and Kalypso, immortal. Why did he persist?
Young Nausikaa, admiring Ulysses as he passes on his way to the feast in his honor in the hall of her father the king, simply bids him remember her when he is safe at home again. The goddess Kalypso on her island, though, demands an explanation when it is her turn:
Son of Laërtes, versatile Odysseus,
after these years with me, you still desire
your old home? Even so, I wish you well.
If you could see it all, before you go—
all the adversity you face at sea—
you would stay here, and guard this house, and be
immortal—though you wanted her forever,
that bride for whom you pine each day.
Can I be less desirable than she is?
Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals
Compare with goddesses in grace and form?
To this the strategist Odysseus answered:
My lady goddess, here is no cause for anger.
My quiet Penelope—how well I know—
would seem a shade before your majesty,
death and old age being unknown to you,
while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
As this conversation winds down, Kalypso, who has been ordered by Zeus to let go of Ulysses and help him sail home, promises to get to it first thing in the morning. That she does, but not before they do one more time what they have been doing every night for years, ever since Ulysses was washed ashore on Kalypso’s island: they go to bed.
Although the idea of an undying beauty being let down and left flat by a mortal is bound to resonate with any human audience, our enjoyment of the story would be incomplete if the mortal’s motives were entirely opaque to us. That they are not: those of us especially who know what it means to have a home and a soul-mate have pretty good intuitions as to why Ulysses spurned the offer of immortality in favor of returning to Ithaca and his Penelope.
The mind of Ulysses cannot be understood solely in terms of abstract principles, no matter how large these loom in Kalypso’s calculus of desire. A side effect of the Greeks’ creating their gods to personify basic drives—the just Zeus, the angry Poseidon, the war-like Ares, the smutty Aphrodite—is that the entire Pantheon sitting in caucus may find it hard to fathom a mortal soul, especially if Athena is on vacation. By making Ulysses an offer he can refuse, the nymph Kalypso thus acts very much in character.
Kalypso’s bid would have better chances for success in a Beatrix Potter universe, with all the humans replaced by rabbits, frogs, or perhaps talking fish. In all vertebrates, social behavior traits such as gregariousness and monogamy are shaped by balancing the same few endocrine factors. For instance, the relative abundance of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin in certain key areas in the brain determines whether a species is monogamous or not. This is why prairie voles that lose a mate never take on another one, whereas montane and meadow voles sleep around like it’s the 1960s.
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One suspects that an account of a prairie vole’s odyssey on his way back home from a war instigated by the misbehavior of a bunch of meadow voles would be an epic bore.
1
One suspects that an account of a prairie vole’s odyssey on his way back home from a war instigated by the misbehavior of a bunch of meadow voles would be an epic bore.
In humans, the standard-issue vertebrate social behavior network is topped with a huge information-processing apparatus, which makes life interesting. Equipped with a brain that has computational capacity to spare, versatile Ulysses is neither slavishly monogamous nor willfully, or even just willingly, promiscuous. Behind his happiness with Penelope (who is often called in
The Odyssey
περíϕρωυ, “very thoughtful”), there is another power, which deals in information. This power is an active informational
being
, which lives in symbiosis with humans but not with voles or any other species on this planet. To such beings we rent out real estate in our brains in exchange for assistance in love, war, and general procurement of fun. The product of the symbiosis between these beings and our brains is language.
Replicants AbroadThe Odyssey
περíϕρωυ, “very thoughtful”), there is another power, which deals in information. This power is an active informational
being
, which lives in symbiosis with humans but not with voles or any other species on this planet. To such beings we rent out real estate in our brains in exchange for assistance in love, war, and general procurement of fun. The product of the symbiosis between these beings and our brains is language.
Information, as everybody knows, wants to be free—which may sound like a pipe dream, given the fondness of human institutions and societies for corralling and policing it. One of the few glimmers of hope for the freedom of information is for it to assume the initiative. When chunks of knowledge turn out to be capable both of propagating themselves and of adapting to the quirks of their hosts, information comes alive.
The meaning of “life” being simply self-replication with occasional heritable changes, there is no difference to speak of between a chunk of information that causes its current host to make it available for pickup by a new host, and a virus, which hijacks the transcription machinery of the infected cell to make copies of itself and release them into the wild, where they can infect other cells. The word for such a live chunk of information, coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, is
meme
(pronounced so as to rhyme with “gene” ).
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meme
(pronounced so as to rhyme with “gene” ).
2
A perfectly good, if not entirely elementary, example of a meme is
The Odyssey
—a complex sequential pattern of information with a long lineage. Its many ancestors, all slightly different from each other, originated and survived in the brains of roaming rhapsodes. With the invention of the new cognitive technology of writing, which allowed memory to be outsourced, one of the versions committed to paper became canonical.
The Odyssey
—a complex sequential pattern of information with a long lineage. Its many ancestors, all slightly different from each other, originated and survived in the brains of roaming rhapsodes. With the invention of the new cognitive technology of writing, which allowed memory to be outsourced, one of the versions committed to paper became canonical.
Its continued appeal to members of the host species ensures that the
Odyssey
meme is allowed to replicate, with the number of copies having long ago surpassed the number of people who ever had a chance to hear it sung. Although its very popularity caused it to become immutable, it keeps spinning off other, no less complex, memes that are anything but limited in their content and style, ranging from James Joyce’s
Ulysses
to Zachary Mason’s
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
. There have even been some attempts to harness Homer’s heroes to the chariot of popular science.
Odyssey
meme is allowed to replicate, with the number of copies having long ago surpassed the number of people who ever had a chance to hear it sung. Although its very popularity caused it to become immutable, it keeps spinning off other, no less complex, memes that are anything but limited in their content and style, ranging from James Joyce’s
Ulysses
to Zachary Mason’s
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
. There have even been some attempts to harness Homer’s heroes to the chariot of popular science.
Standing back from these examples, one realizes that the idea of borrowing from the classics to bolster one’s own writing is now itself a meme (a love child of plagiarism and homage, as it were). This little discovery in turn suggests that the concept of “meme” is a meme too, one with which I may have just infected you—unless, that is, you have already been infected, or else are highly skeptical and hence immune, skepticism being the mind’s first line of defense against virulent concepts.
Does this mean that there is a meme behind every exchange of information out there? To distinguish between empty meme-talk and a genuinely explanatory conceptual move, we should ask who benefits from the transaction in which meme involvement is alleged. If the suspected meme clearly profits from what is going on, by becoming more successful in its bid for self-propagation, the memetic explanation stands. This is true even if the host, other memes, and other hosts benefit too: unlike the giving of tangible goods, passing on information does not imply having to part with it. A meme’s involvement is, however, particularly strongly suspected if everybody else finds themselves inexplicably worse off when the dust settles. An extreme example of such a selfish meme is an information pattern that codes for a polarizing, proselytizing, martyrdom-endorsing religion, which can cause you not merely to try to infect other people with it but to die trying, just as it settles comfortably into the brains that became available to it through your efforts.
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The least that a religion bug could do for budding martyrs would be to make them happy while they wait for their chance, but even such a halfhearted handout to the host is by no means commonplace. The memes that you put up in your memory space care about your happiness no more than you care about public transportation in your hometown. Sure, it would be nice if it were easier to catch a cab when it rains, or if the trains on your line ran more frequently, but it would be odd for a commuter to become emotionally attached to cab number 1729 or to a particular train on the F line. (The public transport analogy is imprecise because, as noted earlier, you do not leave a copy of yourself in every cab you ride in, but it is otherwise perfectly applicable.)
Because for them you are just a commodity, there is considerable variance in the effects that memes end up having on your subjective well-being. A meme may make you happy, as when you learn that all you need is love (provided that love is indeed there to be had). Or it may leave you indifferent, as when you get to know the multiplication table (a useful skill, but not a particularly exciting one, either way). It can also make you pretty wretched, as when you succumb to the belief that your life is being secretly manipulated by the Illuminati of Bavaria, or when you catch strict Calvinism.
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Nonrandom behaviors, such as deciding that all you need is love and then acting on it, are shaped by memory representations (through an interaction with the environment). Because of that, the spread of a behavior through a population of hosts is a sure sign that the meme that codes for it has replicated itself many times over. As they propagate, memes may undergo mutation because of imperfect pickup, retention, and reproduction of behaviors: an off-duty milkman overhearing the Sermon on the Mount from the next hill over may leave with a firm conviction that it is the cheesemakers who are blessed.
How widespread a given meme eventually becomes in a population depends, in each case, on the processing of information by the hosts and on the dynamics of contagion. As in regular epidemiology, this includes a multitude of factors, from the allure of the meme and the susceptibility of the host to the quality of the environment that the host offers and its ability to reproduce faithfully the behavior in question. A catchy tune or a lifestyle fad may sweep through millions of brains in a few months, or it may fade into the long tail of the infosphere’s popularity chart and quietly proceed to dwindle into nothingness.
A meme would seem to stand a better chance if its replication happens to be tied to the actual primary use of the corresponding behavior by the host. A handy (or rather, beaky) example is found in the evolution of tool use in New Caledonian crow populations, which is cultural, not genetic. It begins with a minor eureka moment: a crow discovers how to shape a screw-pine leaf into a tool, then uses it to extract insects from rain-forest vegetation. Another crow observes and learns, either by imitation or by informed trial-and-error. After some time a population of interrelated memes—variations on the common theme of how to make a tool out of a leaf—has taken over the crow population.
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5
Memes such as memory blueprints for birdsong, whose behavioral manifestation
is
signaling as such, are ideally positioned for insinuating themselves into the memory of additional hosts. Male songbirds sing to impress the females (which in most species remain demurely silent). Adolescent males learn the repertoire of their species (usually quite limited, but open-ended in a few species, such as the sedge warbler or the superb lyre bird) by listening to adult tutors and doing their best to sound like them, while keeping an eye on social feedback from females. In this manner, the bird population coexists with a population of songs.
is
signaling as such, are ideally positioned for insinuating themselves into the memory of additional hosts. Male songbirds sing to impress the females (which in most species remain demurely silent). Adolescent males learn the repertoire of their species (usually quite limited, but open-ended in a few species, such as the sedge warbler or the superb lyre bird) by listening to adult tutors and doing their best to sound like them, while keeping an eye on social feedback from females. In this manner, the bird population coexists with a population of songs.
Just as eking out an existence in the state of nature is always subject to evolutionary pressure (birds competing over mates; song memes competing over memory space in the birds’ brains), so the
co
-existence that is inherent in the meme-host relationship is subject to
co-evolution.
The push and pull of co-evolution is particularly powerful when this relationship is mutually beneficial (symbiotic rather than neutral or parasitic), as it is in birdsong. Male birds who sing better get more chances to dazzle a female, leading to the genetic evolution of brains that are better at learning, retaining, and performing songs. At the same time, songs that better fit the existing bird brains and vocal apparatus get more chances to replicate, leading to the (often much faster) cultural evolution of songs that are easier to learn, retain, and perform.
co
-existence that is inherent in the meme-host relationship is subject to
co-evolution.
The push and pull of co-evolution is particularly powerful when this relationship is mutually beneficial (symbiotic rather than neutral or parasitic), as it is in birdsong. Male birds who sing better get more chances to dazzle a female, leading to the genetic evolution of brains that are better at learning, retaining, and performing songs. At the same time, songs that better fit the existing bird brains and vocal apparatus get more chances to replicate, leading to the (often much faster) cultural evolution of songs that are easier to learn, retain, and perform.
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