The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (26 page)
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Authors: Shimon Edelman
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Although such lapse of judgment is not without precedent, an excuse for it is still needed. The precedent I have in mind is Lem’s volume
A Perfect Vacuum
(1971/1999), whose opening chapter is a mind-numbingly virtuoso review of the book of which it is part (and which otherwise reviews works that are strictly nonexistent), as well as a trove of excuses for its own existence. Mine derives from the observation that the earlier version of me, which had set out to write
THoP
a couple of years ago, and the later version, which has finished it and is now well into the second paragraph of this review, are not one and the same person. Time and experience change people, and a protracted struggle with a book is bound to take its toll on the writer, even if in the end it is the writer who wins. While the present reviewer and the author of
THoP
may be related to each other (in the same sense that Ulysses who is being ferried back to Ithaca by the Phaiakians is related to the younger Ulysses at Troy), they cannot be identical. As Heraclitus would have agreed, the same you cannot step twice into the river.
A Perfect Vacuum
(1971/1999), whose opening chapter is a mind-numbingly virtuoso review of the book of which it is part (and which otherwise reviews works that are strictly nonexistent), as well as a trove of excuses for its own existence. Mine derives from the observation that the earlier version of me, which had set out to write
THoP
a couple of years ago, and the later version, which has finished it and is now well into the second paragraph of this review, are not one and the same person. Time and experience change people, and a protracted struggle with a book is bound to take its toll on the writer, even if in the end it is the writer who wins. While the present reviewer and the author of
THoP
may be related to each other (in the same sense that Ulysses who is being ferried back to Ithaca by the Phaiakians is related to the younger Ulysses at Troy), they cannot be identical. As Heraclitus would have agreed, the same you cannot step twice into the river.
The author of
THoP
seems to have understood that. Although in the end he sides with Tennyson’s hero, who is about to set sail again, his version of Tennyson’s key line does not rule out the possibility of another happy return to Ithaca by a latter-day Ulysses, yet again changed by his voyages. One is left to wish that
THoP
were a bit more explicit about that.
THoP
seems to have understood that. Although in the end he sides with Tennyson’s hero, who is about to set sail again, his version of Tennyson’s key line does not rule out the possibility of another happy return to Ithaca by a latter-day Ulysses, yet again changed by his voyages. One is left to wish that
THoP
were a bit more explicit about that.
In the psychology of mind, the idea of a changing, growing self that is being constantly shaped by experience has its roots in the radical empiricism of Ernst Mach (1886) and William James (1912). Given how central this idea turns out to be in
THoP
, it is a pity that the author did not do more to place it in an appropriately developed historical context. Doing so might have imparted a more meaningful narrative structure to this loosely connected series of essays, which could have in turn supported an inclusive survey of the relevant scientific literature instead of the haphazard selection that did make it into the book’s endnotes. Even more importantly, an orderly exposition of the science behind the book’s arguments would have probably prevented crucially important points from being relegated to the endnotes, as when the discussion of multiple realizability of phenomenal experience—a question on which both consciousness and happiness, human and machine, are predicated—got compressed into one sentence, buried in an end-of-chapter remark (Chapter 6, note 26).
THoP
, it is a pity that the author did not do more to place it in an appropriately developed historical context. Doing so might have imparted a more meaningful narrative structure to this loosely connected series of essays, which could have in turn supported an inclusive survey of the relevant scientific literature instead of the haphazard selection that did make it into the book’s endnotes. Even more importantly, an orderly exposition of the science behind the book’s arguments would have probably prevented crucially important points from being relegated to the endnotes, as when the discussion of multiple realizability of phenomenal experience—a question on which both consciousness and happiness, human and machine, are predicated—got compressed into one sentence, buried in an end-of-chapter remark (Chapter 6, note 26).
Despite the promise we were made back in the author’s note all those pages ago, to “[set] aside the conventional divisions between science and the humanities,” the book’s literary and other cultural examples are as scattershot and idiosyncratic as the scientific references it offers. Instead of requiring the bewildered reader to mentally juggle Homer, Shakespeare, flying marmots, cameo appearances of movie comedians, lovesick yeast, and whatnot, the author should have staked out a well-defined, unitary cultural reference space to augment the space of scientific concepts that he set out to map. Naturally, one is prompted to conclude that the idea of writing up something along the lines of
The Happiness of the Simpsons
had failed to indulge the author’s pretensions to erudition and his addiction to the absurd, the signs of which crop up all too often in his writings.
The Happiness of the Simpsons
had failed to indulge the author’s pretensions to erudition and his addiction to the absurd, the signs of which crop up all too often in his writings.
Conspicuous in its omission from
THoP
is a philosophical take on the issues of interest—an omission that is all the more inexplicable in the light of the key role played by philosophy, throughout the ages, in humanity’s attempts to make sense of its own existence. Granted, the author has announced elsewhere (Edelman 2008c, p. 262) his allegiance to Quine’s idea that there should not be first philosophy, yet he seems to be not entirely consistent in this stance, quoting from philosophers he approves of when it is convenient and glossing over those of whom he does not. His choice of philosophers is, incidentally, skewed toward the East (Hume and Wittgenstein both being increasingly seen nowadays as espousing Buddhist views; cf. Kalansuriya 1993; Scharfstein 1998)—a curious inclination, seeing that in the cultural domain the author’s examples are all Western. (For instance, out of the eight literary works listed in Chapter 1, note 4, seven originate in European or American culture.) I wonder whether or not there is still something that he can do to avoid being charged with Orientalism.
THoP
is a philosophical take on the issues of interest—an omission that is all the more inexplicable in the light of the key role played by philosophy, throughout the ages, in humanity’s attempts to make sense of its own existence. Granted, the author has announced elsewhere (Edelman 2008c, p. 262) his allegiance to Quine’s idea that there should not be first philosophy, yet he seems to be not entirely consistent in this stance, quoting from philosophers he approves of when it is convenient and glossing over those of whom he does not. His choice of philosophers is, incidentally, skewed toward the East (Hume and Wittgenstein both being increasingly seen nowadays as espousing Buddhist views; cf. Kalansuriya 1993; Scharfstein 1998)—a curious inclination, seeing that in the cultural domain the author’s examples are all Western. (For instance, out of the eight literary works listed in Chapter 1, note 4, seven originate in European or American culture.) I wonder whether or not there is still something that he can do to avoid being charged with Orientalism.
On reading over these pages, I fear I have not called sufficient attention to the book’s many virtues. It includes a number of fine distinctions. (A few of those are clearly borrowed from classical sources, such as the penultimate paragraph on p. 180, which is from the conclusion of Borges’s (1935/1962a) review of
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim
by Mir Bahadur Ali, but then Borges himself, in that very review, refers to such borrowing practice as “honorable.”) I shall refrain from expounding on those virtues, lest I be accused of undue partiality toward the author of
THoP
.
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim
by Mir Bahadur Ali, but then Borges himself, in that very review, refers to such borrowing practice as “honorable.”) I shall refrain from expounding on those virtues, lest I be accused of undue partiality toward the author of
THoP
.
Indeed, seeing that he and I are related, I feel I have to make an extra effort to prove that I am not doing his bidding. To that end, I shall reveal a little secret that I inherited from him: when he set out to write
THoP
, he had been motivated solely by what he perceived as a compulsion to create a book-sized home for the mangled quote from Tennyson’s
Ulysses
with which
THoP
ends—a line that he had thought would in itself be a worthy, yet too elliptical, message to the reader.
THoP
, he had been motivated solely by what he perceived as a compulsion to create a book-sized home for the mangled quote from Tennyson’s
Ulysses
with which
THoP
ends—a line that he had thought would in itself be a worthy, yet too elliptical, message to the reader.
The experience of writing
THoP
has changed his—my—mind: the book’s message, along with its real ending, is, I now believe, wholly contained in Christopher Logue’s poem with which it opened:
THoP
has changed his—my—mind: the book’s message, along with its real ending, is, I now believe, wholly contained in Christopher Logue’s poem with which it opened:
You ask me:
What is the greatest happiness on earth?
Two things:
changing my mind
as I change a penny for a shilling;
and
listening to the sound
of a young girl
singing down the road
after she has asked me the way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The quartet of questions reproduced in the author’s note were jotted down while I was hiking down Harris Wash, a tributary of the Escalante River in Utah. For paper, I used the back of a receipt from Escalante Outfitters, the best outlet for topo maps, local beer, and homemade sausage and goat-cheese pizza in Escalante, which is the Utah equivalent of Panamint Springs, California. There is no place like the great deserts and canyonlands of the American Southwest for keeping one’s mind focused on the really important things in life.
Returning to the alternate reality of this book—Julie Simmons-Lynch deserves special thanks for reading and commenting on early drafts of several of its chapters. I realize that being an early adopter has its disadvantages, and I appreciate her daring.
I thank all my friends from Ithaca for making it such a great place to play with ideas—even if some of those do not pan out. (Here I have in mind the intriguing, yet ultimately barren, idea, which came up in Chapter 2, suggesting that the ferocity of a laboratory animal might have something to do with its performance as a ballistic missile. I borrowed it from Dr. Larry Taylor, via my esteemed Cornell colleague Barb Finlay.) A discussion with another colleague, Alice Isen, helped me think about the relationships between happiness and cognitive processing (Chapter 7). Not all such discussions happen on campus: James Cutting told me about the link between dopamine receptor properties and long-range human migration patterns (Chapter 7 again) while we were riding a chair lift at our local ski hill. I find skiing with people in the hope that some of their knowledge will rub off on me to be a fun way of combating my scientific narrow-mindedness, and Ithaca happens to be a good place to indulge in this mode of self-improvement.
Given my predilection for extracurricular activities, I would probably never have started working on this book if it were not for Ben Mauk, who is responsible for what proved to be an effective initial impetus for it, and Björn Merker, who generously shared with me his thoughts on world conquest and self-conquest, thereby helping me convince myself that the last paragraphs of Chapter 7 (which were the first that got written) were worth expanding into a book. I thank Jim Levine for finding a good home for my manuscript, and I am also very grateful to my editor at Basic Books, T. J. Kelleher, for timely encouragement, which helped me bring this work to completion, and for good advice, which made completing it so much more enjoyable.
Finally—the pursuit of this project (and of much else) would have been devoid of happiness were it not for Esti, Ira, and Itamar, to whom I owe more than I can ever thank them for.
NOTES
1
By 2003 or so, it became apparent to me that the most recent available conceptually unified and convincing PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK was
Human Information Processing
by Lindsay and Norman (1972). I now teach cognitive psychology from a book titled
Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works
(Edelman 2008a).
By 2003 or so, it became apparent to me that the most recent available conceptually unified and convincing PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK was
Human Information Processing
by Lindsay and Norman (1972). I now teach cognitive psychology from a book titled
Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works
(Edelman 2008a).
2
I refrain from defining HAPPINESS and refer the reader instead to a characteristically informative and entertaining overview of what philosophers, scientists, and normal people usually mean by it, offered by Daniel Gilbert in his book
Stumbling on Happiness
(2006), pp. 31–38. Gilbert remarks that “asking what happiness
really
is . . . is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit.”
I refrain from defining HAPPINESS and refer the reader instead to a characteristically informative and entertaining overview of what philosophers, scientists, and normal people usually mean by it, offered by Daniel Gilbert in his book
Stumbling on Happiness
(2006), pp. 31–38. Gilbert remarks that “asking what happiness
really
is . . . is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit.”
3
Some of the literary examples that come to mind in connection with the idea of LIFE AS A JOURNEY AND A HOMECOMING are:
The Odyssey
by Homer;
Journey to the West
by Wu Chengen; the
Josephus
trilogy by Lion Feuchtwanger;
Magister Ludi
by Hermann Hesse;
The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again
and
The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien; and the
Wizard of Earthsea
cycle and the unique gem of a book titled
Always Coming Home
by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Some of the literary examples that come to mind in connection with the idea of LIFE AS A JOURNEY AND A HOMECOMING are:
The Odyssey
by Homer;
Journey to the West
by Wu Chengen; the
Josephus
trilogy by Lion Feuchtwanger;
Magister Ludi
by Hermann Hesse;
The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again
and
The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien; and the
Wizard of Earthsea
cycle and the unique gem of a book titled
Always Coming Home
by Ursula K. Le Guin.
4
John Keats used the phrase “SOUL-MAKING” in his journal-letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 21, 1819, reprinted in Strachan (2003). The idea that human flourishing, or eudaimonia, is intimately connected to human nature has been discussed at length by Aristotle in
Nicomachean Ethics
(350 B.C.E.). For a modern perspective, see Irwin (1991) and Nagel (1972).
John Keats used the phrase “SOUL-MAKING” in his journal-letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 21, 1819, reprinted in Strachan (2003). The idea that human flourishing, or eudaimonia, is intimately connected to human nature has been discussed at length by Aristotle in
Nicomachean Ethics
(350 B.C.E.). For a modern perspective, see Irwin (1991) and Nagel (1972).
5
Many of the DETAILS that I have omitted can also be found in my earlier book,
Computing the Mind
(Edelman 2008a).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2Many of the DETAILS that I have omitted can also be found in my earlier book,
Computing the Mind
(Edelman 2008a).
1
Among the books that make a point of revealing the most important “secret” of COGNITIVE SCIENCE to their readers are: Warren McCulloch’s
Embodiments of Mind
(1965), the definitive collection of McCulloch’s academic papers and essays, including the famous 1943 paper with Walter Pitts that establishes an equivalence between Turing machines and networks of formal neurons; Marvin Minsky’s
The Society of Mind
(1985), a profoundly insightful speculation on the nature of the mind by one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence; Drew McDermott’s
Mind and Mechanism
(2001), a modern look at natural and artificial intelligence; and my own
Computing the Mind
(Edelman 2008a).
Among the books that make a point of revealing the most important “secret” of COGNITIVE SCIENCE to their readers are: Warren McCulloch’s
Embodiments of Mind
(1965), the definitive collection of McCulloch’s academic papers and essays, including the famous 1943 paper with Walter Pitts that establishes an equivalence between Turing machines and networks of formal neurons; Marvin Minsky’s
The Society of Mind
(1985), a profoundly insightful speculation on the nature of the mind by one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence; Drew McDermott’s
Mind and Mechanism
(2001), a modern look at natural and artificial intelligence; and my own
Computing the Mind
(Edelman 2008a).
2
A computational analysis of the LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION problem can be found in Adelson and Pentland (1996).
A computational analysis of the LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION problem can be found in Adelson and Pentland (1996).
3
The story of THE OMEN AT AULIS is told in book 2 of
The Iliad
, lines 301–332. The main events described in
The Iliad
unfold over about seven weeks of real time, but most of it deals with just four days.
The story of THE OMEN AT AULIS is told in book 2 of
The Iliad
, lines 301–332. The main events described in
The Iliad
unfold over about seven weeks of real time, but most of it deals with just four days.
4
An account of ARISTOTLE being confounded by the story of the interpretation of the omen at Aulis is given by Marcus Tullius Cicero in Wardle (2006), p. 283.
An account of ARISTOTLE being confounded by the story of the interpretation of the omen at Aulis is given by Marcus Tullius Cicero in Wardle (2006), p. 283.
5
CAUSATION is in principle problematic but in practice well founded. A definitive early treatment of causation—both its philosophical prob-lematicity and its empirical resolution through statistical inference—was offered by David Hume in
A Treatise of Human Nature
(1740). The full text of the
Treatise
is available online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
CAUSATION is in principle problematic but in practice well founded. A definitive early treatment of causation—both its philosophical prob-lematicity and its empirical resolution through statistical inference—was offered by David Hume in
A Treatise of Human Nature
(1740). The full text of the
Treatise
is available online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
6
Because “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of EVOLUTION” (Dobzhansky 1973), this book of necessity resorts to evolutionary arguments. In appealing to evolution as an explanatory framework, I adopt Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s (2007) extension of the standard Darwinian “modern synthesis”:
Because “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of EVOLUTION” (Dobzhansky 1973), this book of necessity resorts to evolutionary arguments. In appealing to evolution as an explanatory framework, I adopt Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s (2007) extension of the standard Darwinian “modern synthesis”:
In
Evolution in Four Dimensions
(2005) we identify four types of inheritance (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbol-based), each of which can provide variations on which natural selection will act. Some of these variations arise in response to developmental conditions, so there are Lamarckian aspects to evolution. We argue that a better insight into evolutionary processes will result from recognizing that transmitted variations that are not based on DNA differences have played a role. This is particularly true for understanding the evolution of human behavior, where all four dimensions of heredity have been important.
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