The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (11 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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Learning to Think for Yourself
 
Ulysses ascendant. Remembrance of things
past and future. Why everything important that
you know you must have learned for yourself.
Mirroring the world, mustache and all, one step
at a time. Where was I? A moveable feast.
 
He had never dwelled on memory’s delights.
Impressions slid over him, vivid but ephemeral. A
potter’s vermilion; the heavens laden with stars that
were also gods; the moon, from which a lion had
fallen; the slick feel of marble beneath slow sensitive
fingertips; the taste of wild boar meat, eagerly torn by
his white teeth; a Phoenician word; the black shadow a
lance casts on yellow sand; the nearness of the sea or of
a woman; a heavy wine, its roughness cut by honey—
these could fill his soul completely.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES,
The Maker
(1960)
 
 
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
—LEWIS CARROLL,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865, ch. 5)
 
Ulysses Ascendant
 
The greatest hero of
The Iliad
, mighty Achilles, was not a happy man. One does not exactly expect to hear much about happiness in an epic in which the earth before the walls of Troy periodically “runs red with blood” and in which Scamander, the god of a nearby river whose course Achilles stops with bodies of dead Trojans, pleads with the hero to do his “grim work” on land.
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Still, even against that bloody backdrop, Achilles stands out as a particularly dour fellow, whose repertoire of moods is limited to sulking, brooding, mourning, and being beside himself with rage. There is exactly one occasion on which Homer calls him “glad”: when his mother, the goddess Thetis, presents him with armor wrought for him by Hephaestos, the blacksmith and artificer to the Olympian gods.
The most remarkable part of that armor,
The Iliad
tells us, was the great shield, which Hephaestos covered with images of the earth, the heavens, and everything in between—the moon, the sun, and the stars; cities (one at peace and one at war with its neighbors), fields, vineyards, pastures, animals, and people. Curiously, the world carved on the shield did not appear to be frozen in time: night and day followed each other, and animals and people went about their business, cattle and sheep grazing, lions hunting, dogs running about and barking, youths dancing with maidens, men making war, and women cooking.
As a sight to behold, the Shield of Achilles had different effects on different people. Achilles’ own retainers, the Myrmidons, cowered and would not look at the god-wrought armor, yet two of the defenders of Troy, Aeneas and Hector, who dared face the wrath of Achilles on the battlefield, were unfazed by the glamour of his shield. What was it that determined a person’s response? To anyone looking at the shield, the entire world and its ways would have been revealed in an instant by the craft of Hephaestos. The terrible experience of having the weight of the world thrust upon one’s shoulders would leave undaunted only the wisest, who have the intellectual courage and mental strength to bear it, and the stupidest, who lack the ability to discern the nature and extent of the burden.
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The story of the Shield of Achilles reaches a conclusion of sorts in Book XIII of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. After Achilles is killed by an arrow that strikes him in the heel, an assembly of Greek chiefs tries to decide who should inherit the divine armor that he no longer needs. Only two contenders emerge: Ajax Telamon, the strongest and fiercest among the Greeks now that the great Achilles is gone, and crafty Ulysses, the protégé of Pallas Athena, the war-like goddess of wisdom. Knowing better than to try to outdo Homer, the father of all war correspondents, by describing an actual fight, Ovid imagines Ajax and Ulysses sparring over the spoils with words, not swords. The rhetorical duel that ensues is a testament to the mastery of brain over brawn, expressed in no equivocal terms. In the speech that wins him the armor, Ulysses notes, first, that his exploits and merits in the war that ended with the ruin of Troy exceed those of Ajax, and second, that the Shield of Achilles would be wasted on Ajax:
For that dull soul to stare with stupid eyes,
On the learn’d unintelligible prize!
What are to him the sculptures of the shield,
Heav’n’s planets, Earth, and Ocean’s watry field?
The Pleiads, Hyads; less, and greater Bear,
Undipp’d in seas; Orion’s angry star;
Two diff’ring cities, grav’d on either hand;
Would he wear arms he cannot understand?
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Those of us who root for Ulysses in this dispute (perhaps because our own livelihood derives from brains rather than brawn) will be happy to learn that Ovid’s conceit—the assumed relationship between an all-encompassing representation of the world and wisdom—has solid support from cognitive science.
We now know that the burdensome knowledge of what the world is made of and how it works
is
wisdom, in a computationally concrete sense. Insights that are continually distilled from one’s accumulating history of experiencing the world, one episode at a time, keep adding to the burden of knowledge, yet knowledge that leads to understanding definitely has its payoffs. The ability to sustain the process of
learning the world
is both a precondition for practical wisdom and its happy consequence: insight breeds insight, and wisdom reveals knowledge to be rewarding, while making its burden feel lighter and the bearer happier. The cognitive faculty that makes all this possible is memory.
Remembrance of Things Past and Future
 
Memory imparts to a mind a kind of sophistication that can never be attained merely by being very good at real-time “war room” data processing. The mind’s war room is busy at all times with the pressing need of deciding what to do next. The decisions that steer behavior take shape there through constant give-and-take among the internal representations of perceptual qualities, motivational drives, and action affordances. These intelligence items, which all originate in the more or less recent past, interact with each other and come to a head during what William James called “the
specious
present”—“no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.”
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This “look in two directions” is sustained through the action of memory. Inasmuch as the representations that it deals in are momentary and fleeting, the grand map in the mind’s war room is like a mirror that reflects all things as soon as, but only for as long as, they face it. Adding memory to the “mirror” stretches the mind’s representational capacity from the immediate present to the past, and thereby to the future: the mirror becomes capable of reflecting also the shape of things to come.
But getting information back from the future is utterly incompatible with the foundations of contemporary physical theory, so what does remembering the future—that is, having foresight—actually mean in practice? It appears that an explanation of this bit of seemingly physics-defying magic has been discovered by J. R. R. Tolkien, who worked it into a scene from
The Lord of the Rings
that involves, very appropriately, an Elvish Mirror (with a capital M). In this scene, the Lady Galadriel offers Frodo a look in the Mirror, but warns him that
the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, [and] things that yet may be.
 
Just as the Mirror of Galadriel shows those who dare look into it things that
may
be, not things that
will
be, so does foresight. In full compliance with the laws of physics, foresight is never about the actual future, only about
possible
ones—or rather, the
likely
ones, given memories of the past. The magic of the Mirror is thus revealed to be merely advanced information-processing technology, whose glamour is wholly due to its computational sophistication.
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In a world that is predictable often enough and closely enough, the technology of foresight works by scouring memories of the past for patterns and trends that may apply to the future, turning retrospection, as it were, into prospection. Such learning from past experience happens over a range of time scales. The shortest of these may span just a fraction of a second, as when you mentally project the path of an incoming tennis ball into the future and move your racquet into a position to intercept it. The longest time scale on which learning happens is evolutionary. By driving some members of our species out of the genetic pool, selection pressure made it fractionally more likely that those who remained (a group that includes all of your ancestors and all of mine) were somewhat better at predicting whatever it was that made the difference.
Why Everything Important That You Know You Must Have Learned for Yourself
 
Evolution, then, is a kind of learning—the kind whose fruits are fully entitled to be called hard-won (not by you, though, if you are any good, as well as lucky). Having realized that evolution promotes the collective amassing of knowledge by various species, we may find it hard to resist the lure of drawing a crisp distinction between “innate” and “acquired” knowledge, one derived exclusively from the history of the species’ interaction with its environment and the other relying on the individual’s experience. Is a typical human’s knowledge of the world mostly innate or mostly acquired? It may seem that after 3
.
5 billion years of evolution, everything about this planet that is worth learning would have already been learned and assimilated into the genome of an adequately brainy species.
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It turns out, however, that the very concept of innateness—let alone the idea that much of what we know is innate—is deeply and irreparably flawed. (Good thing, too, given how terminally ennui-inducing a world would be where virtually everything important that you know was already known to your parents.) One problem with it is that the folk notion of purely innate knowledge is quite impossible to pin down in rigorous scientific terms, mainly because gene expression (which happens throughout the lifetime of an organism) and cognitive development (both embryonic and postnatal) are utterly dependent on interactions between the genes, the rest of the organism, and the environment .
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This interaction occurs as the individual’s complement of genes works together with the precision protein-building cellular machinery, which grows a body to specification and keeps it alive. Because the brain, along with the mind that it gives rise to, is part of the body, genes necessarily also help shape cognition. They do so by constraining the structure and interconnection patterns of brain areas and also, on a very local level, by constraining how synapses through which neurons connect to each other change their signal transmission properties in response to the statistics of neural activity (which ultimately relates to experience).
The “language” of connection patterns is, however, too coarse to code information that would be directly useful in generating context-sensitive future behavior from the individual’s concrete past experience. For that, it is not enough to have the right neurons connected to each other: the synaptic weights at each connection must be set to very particular values. And yet, on the level of synapses, the direction of information flow in learning is the opposite of what genetic determination would predict. For example, the so-called immediate early genes kick into action in response to certain neural activity patterns (and help lay down memory traces of those patterns), rather than the other way around. All this makes the genome a very poor conduit for specific behavior-related knowledge.
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Even if the neurocomputational limitations on coding specific experiences did not conspire to prevent detailed knowledge from being smuggled across generations through the genome, it would still not be a good idea for a species to bet everything on knowledge that is prepackaged into a newborn’s genetic endowment. Encyclopedic knowledge about the old days becomes more of a burden than an asset in a world that is changing rapidly enough. Yes, some very important properties of the universe, from the parabolicity of the trajectories of falling objects to the succession of seasons, are timelessly predictable, but other, no less important properties are subject to drift that needs to be tracked if foresight is to remain feasible.
Ironically, it is evolution itself that consistently brings about the fastest and most profound reordering. The pace of environmental change is, most of the time, glacial, compared to the constant pressure punctuated by spurts of cutthroat competition brought about by the interaction of the various species that share an ecological niche, or of the members of the same species that compete for increasingly scarce resources as it gains ascendancy and its population grows.
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