The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (22 page)

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Authors: Shimon Edelman

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Extrapolating this state-of-the-art search technology into the future leads us to the idea of a software mind spinning off an autonomous avatar that is sent off into cyberspace to carry out tasks on behalf of its originator and that eventually returns to be reintegrated into it, along with the stories and experiences it brings back. This idea, which I recently encountered in a science fiction context, probably has its roots in Chapter 13 of the Book of Numbers, which describes how twelve men sent by Moses to spy out the land of Canaan return with their stories to their respective tribes, who have been waiting in the Paran wilderness. The repercussions of the stories told by the spies are dire: the news of Canaan, which all but two of the spies described as “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof,” makes the people rebel against Moses and Aaron and clamor for a return to Egypt, for which they are condemned to wander in the desert for forty years.
The point of the story you are reading right now is not merely that stories can be causally potent but that they can become incorporated into Selves. This is a strong claim, for which a correspondingly strong example is in order, and it would be hard to find a better one than that of a Self who is
all
narrative: Ulysses. In Book XIII of
The Odyssey
, the Ithacan’s own facility with language earns him divine praise. After he tells a particularly ingenious pack of lies about his purported origins to Athena, who appears to him in a mortal shape, she drops her disguise and pretends to chide him—
Whoever gets around you must be sharp
and guileful as a snake; even a god
might bow to you in ways of dissimulation.
You! You chameleon!
Bottomless bag of tricks!
—only to note that he and she are two of a kind in that respect. No matter that this and other stories about Ulysses may be a far cry from the real, historical king of Ithaca; Homer’s narrative makes him come alive and makes us treat him (automatically and instinctively, because that’s what we’re wired to do with stories) as a person—on par perhaps with some remote acquaintance or a long-dead relative, whose would-be thoughts about certain things we may be able to imagine and whose imagined behavior may influence our own.
23
As befits a cognitive representation and a complex meme, a story that is part of the narrative Self is an active entity: not a page of sheet music, but a wandering musician peddling a tune—as Hume might have put it, a citizen of the republic of soul. The dynamics of the mind—the music of the soul—arises from many such entities acting in concert.
24
Its beginnings, in an embryonic nervous system that is just starting to resonate to the world outside itself, are modest; its potential for development and learning is immense. As one travels through life’s “vale of soul-making,” so poignantly perceived by Keats, the republic of soul grows populous and its music takes a distinctive form. To understand the functioning and the full representational range of its dynamics is to understand how and why
this
is what it feels like to be alive.
Being and Time and Zombies
 
Echoing the ancient wisdom according to which the proper road guide to happiness is self-knowledge, Paul Bloom recently observed: “We used to think that the hard part of the question ‘How can I be happy?’ had to do with nailing down the definition of
happy
. But it may have more to do with the definition of
I
.”
25
Happily, instead of merely defining
I
, we can now do much more: we can
explain
it.
The explanation that has taken form in this chapter includes, but is not exhausted by, the executive and the narrative components of the Self—aggregates of computations over a web of conceptual representations of the world, ultimately rooted in statistical patterns of perception and action. The hitherto missing component is the
phenomenal
Self: what at this very moment—now!—it feels like to be me.
For a physical/computational system, there being something (rather than nothing) that
it is like to be it
happens to be a rare mark of distinction. For instance, it most probably doesn’t feel like anything at all to be an anvil, whether it rests quietly on the ground or is busy computing its trajectory after being pushed off a castle wall by a ballistics officer. Likewise, intuition insists that being a marmot, or even an ant, must feel like something. Cognitive science is just beginning to understand, in computational terms, the nature of the scale of capacity for phenomenal experience, at the bottom of which are systems that are capable of none, such as rocks and plants, and on which an average human occupies some intermediate rung.
It seems that a system’s capacity for experience is determined by the intrinsic distinctions that exist among categories of its own states—which, in a cognitive system, represent the states of the world of which it is part. The breaking-down of states into categories must be intrinsic to the system because its experience is. Not only is it up to me to perceive and feel the way I do: an examiner situated outside my brain would have to work very, very hard even just to establish through observation that I am conscious and am having phenomenal experiences, let alone figure out what they are.
26
The identity between a system’s ability to serve as a vehicle for phenomenal experience and the intrinsic categorical complexity of its state space implies that any experience is inherently extended in time. In other words, the moment-to-moment content of experience must consist of the system’s
trajectory
through its state space. Freeze time, and all systems with the same number of distinct elements—neurons in a brain, grains of iron in an anvil, or whatever—become functionally equivalent in principle, insofar as their state spaces have the same dimensionality; let time roll, and only those systems whose intrinsic dynamics afford it—brains, but not anvils—proceed to have experiences.
27
The categorical distinctions among the brain’s possible trajectories through its state space arise from dynamical constraints inherent in the connections and prior states of its neurons. What it is that it feels like to be me is determined, therefore, moment by moment, by my entire nervous system’s functional anatomy and physiology and by its interactions with the rest of the world (including, of course, the history of such interactions, which has contributed to shaping my effective Self). Phenomenal qualities that send this system on distinct trajectories get experienced as such, in any experiential domain.
For me, some such qualities are the apricot color of yesterday’s sunset, as distinguished from the cranberry color of today’s; the velvety explosion of taste of an Australian Shiraz from the Barossa Valley, as distinguished from a subdued French Médoc; and the feeling of satisfaction that comes at the end of a long bicycle ride, as distinguished from a long ski run. In comparison, on the level of phenomenal experience I cannot relate at all to qualities that my cognitive system, for one reason or another, conflates, such as the appearance of two St. John’s wort flowers that differ only in the ultraviolet; or the taste of a Château Plagnac from 2005 and another one from 2006; or the feeling of opportunity evoked by two configurations of pieces on the game of Go board.
Seeing that improved discernment is a frequent (albeit by no means obligatory) side effect of accrued experience, we begin to understand how people’s sensitivity to the so-called small things in life, both good and bad, and their capacity to enjoy those sensations that feel good can grow with age. Clearly, the richer my conceptual structures, the richer my phenomenal experience, and the closer it is to the ultimate reality—something that we can only know through our experience and that may therefore be usefully defined as the sum total of all possible ways to experience the world.
28
But why is it, you may wonder, that the process of discernment—the state of the cognitive system ascribing a trajectory through a structured space of possible representations—should feel to it like anything at all? Why is it that the dynamics of discernment is what makes the system’s perception of the world experiential? Such doubts about the identification of experience with the dynamics of intrinsically structured state spaces are understandable: because of how difficult it is to ascertain from the outside that a given system has any experiences at all (let alone experiences to which one can relate), philosophers customarily treat reductive phenomenology—explaining experience in less than mysterious terms—with extreme skepticism.
A much-used theoretical construct in philosophical phenomenology is a zombie, which by definition is a human being in all respects of composition and behavior, except one: it is incapable of experience. Because such beings are conceivable, the argument goes, all attempts to reduce experience to something that is not already obviously experiential, such as computational processes in the brain, are undead on arrival.
This line of reasoning is, however, without merit. The apparent conceptual possibility of something or other is not a sound foundation for understanding the world. For instance, my ability to imagine an electron without charge attests to my disregard of the corpus of knowledge generated by physics rather than to the epistemological status of any physical theory. This example is particularly apposite because, on the reductive account that is being offered here, experience is just as inherent and essential a characteristic of the dynamics of certain computational systems as charge is of the electron.
29
Its vaunted conceptual possibility aside, a species consisting entirely of experience-lacking zombies would be at a serious evolutionary disadvantage. The members of a species that lacked all phenomenal experience could know no pain or pleasure and would therefore be indifferent to the environment’s ongoing appraisal of their actions. Collectively, such a species could still learn (through selection by early demise, which is likely in the case of drastically underperforming individuals in the wild), but it could hardly compete with species that engage in collective lifelong learning from experience, guided by the felt consequences of individual actions.
That Which We Are
 
Whereas detecting phenomenal experience from outside the system that embodies it takes some hard work in psychophysics and reverse engineering, from the inside it feels most immediate (that is, in no need of mediation). To us humans (and for a number of functional-anatomical reasons, likely to all animals with the standard vertebrate body and brain plan), it also feels
personal
. Right now,
these
perceptual experiences and
these
thoughts about them are mine, and so are
these
fingers, which are moved by me over the keyboard of a notebook that also happens to be mine, but in a less immediately felt manner.
A careful examination of the personal qualities of the phenomenal Self reveals four functional ingredients: spatial perspective (I perceive myself to be
here
, right behind the bridge of my nose); ownership (these experiences belong to me); agency (I am the originator of my thoughts and actions); and selfhood (at the core of this throng of experiences is an experiencer that is me). This analysis is supported by studies of pathological cases in which some of those ingredients of the phenomenal Self malfunction and by psychological studies that temporarily induce such malfunctions in the laboratory. For instance, an out-of-body experience can be induced in perfectly normal subjects by having them view (through computer-connected goggles) the back of a virtual human being stroked with a stick, while their own back is stroked in synchrony with the virtual setup. This simple procedure causes the subjects to perceive themselves as located way out in front of their actual physical bodies.
30
The possibility of subverting our sense of spatial perspective by means of virtual reality manipulation is very telling: it draws our attention to the undeniable fact that the reality we inhabit is virtual to begin with. Indeed, were it not, how could I be looking out at the world through what to my sense of sight seems to be an oval opening in the front of my face, while my sense of touch (as well as common sense) tells me that what’s really there is my nose? The realization that the mind deals in virtualities has been with us for some time, but now it comes to a crunch: the mind’s
I
is virtual too (hence the title of this chapter).
The computational processes that jointly amount to a simulation of the experiencer are quite straightforward. The spatial perspective is provided by a combination of directional optical sensing from two vantage points (the two eyes) and fusion of the two sensed images into an integrated, map-like representation that includes viewer-centered simulated depth information. The sense of ownership and agency stems from an ongoing comparison between perceptual outcomes predicted through simulation (what it would look and feel like if this arm is indeed mine and if I decide to move it thus) and actual ones (what it in fact looks and feels like). As to the core Self—the dweller at the virtual unitary vantage point, the owner of the body, and the puller of its strings—it is merely a useful illusion that conveniently ties together these three privileged streams of experience into a single causal knot.
The illusion of the phenomenal Self as the unitary experiencer, decider, and actor is useful for the very same evolutionary reason that phenomenal experiences are. It is this virtual entity that serves as a causal bottleneck for the world’s responses to one’s actions, taking the blame for the entire extended system’s failures and credit for its successes, translating these into practical cues for improving one’s running score, and thereby ultimately making learning from experience possible on the level of an individual and not just the species.

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