How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 11: The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

Chapter 11 – The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

I have returned with another lesson for, you, my hypothetical newborn baby. This is my eleventh lesson and like many of these lessons you will be able to find in this series of what will be 100 lessons, you might find this lesson counter-intuitive. That is why I am going to discuss this topic of emotions in some detail. Let me say, though, that you have been incredibly patient with my long intense lessons and I appreciate your stamina. Then again, after all, you are only a hypothetical baby standing in for my fantasy might time-travel back to warn my younger self some of these things. On second thought, maybe I should leave my younger self alone to figure things out on his own because half the fun is in figuring it all out, right?

There is a long and false history of emotions that continues to this day. It goes like this. There is Reason over here and Emotions over there and they are completely different things even though they are both experienced, sometimes simultaneously, by each human animal. This false dichotomy goes at least as far back as the dualist Rene Descartes, who famously declared that the human mind is separate from the animalistic human body, yet they are somehow yoked together at the specific location of the human pineal gland. Descartes has been highly influential. Although he did not believe that the mind was a divine soul (and religions attacked him for this), many religions have embraced dualism, the entities denominated as the body versus the “soul.”

How is it that so many people are so convinced that the mind is not merely a physical function of the physical body? Historically, they taken educated guesses based upon the scant information that is available. Most of the thinkers weighing in on this topic did not have the benefit of critically important information. Further, most of people convinced of dualism rely on introspection, though cognitive scientists now know that introspection is not a reliable or valid way to determine what is going on "under the hood."

But let’s get back to the false dichotomy of Reason versus Emotion. This dualist approach is confidently and ubiquitously asserted by earnest looking people. This false story seems plausible because emotions do sometimes cause us to lose control. Emotions sometimes do scramble our thoughts. We sometimes need to tamp down emotions, so we can get our head clear. And sometimes, it is only after we set the emotions aside can we seemingly use Reason alone to think clearly. In my work as an attorney I have heard many people claim that it is critically important for judges to be unemotional so that they can make rational legal decisions.

Cognitive scientists almost unanimously disagree. Over the past few decades, old models of cognition that failed to consider the ubiquity of emotions have crumbled. Modern writers and scientists challenging the old models include Daniel Kahneman whose long litany of cognitive fallacies and heuristics have reshaped how we see ourselves. Kahneman’s “prospect theory," for example, has severely crimped economists’ “objective standard” of homo economicus. It turns out that we are much less logical than we’d like to believe. Even our understanding of how words carry meaning is undergoing a sea change. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, best known for their work on conceptual metaphor, have made a strong case that meaning is thoroughly embodied—we understand meaning with our entire emotion-permeated bodies, not with dispassionate brains. The past few decades have not been kind to the long-held idea that a word can have a singular “objective” word meaning that is universal and independent of the emotion-permeated bodies that use that word.

Consider also the many insights of Daniel Goleman, found in his 1995 best seller, Emotional Intelligence. His five components of “emotional intelligence” (self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy and motivation) are key to one’s ability to succeed as an attorney.

Moral Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has painted each of us as cohabited by two personas. This moral intuitionist approach posits that our first (and most dominant) persona is a big elephant ("automatic processes, including emotion, intuition"). The second persona is a much less influential lawyer-like elephant rider, who is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant decides, including dishing out reasons to convince others. Haidt’s approach, bolstered by many experiments, is that "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second." In sum, “The Emotional tail wags the rational dog.” Haidt approvingly quotes philosopher David Hume who, in 1739 wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio disagreed, as set forth in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994). Damasio has delivered substantial evidence demonstrating that emotions must, of necessity, permeate everything we say and do. In Descartes’ Error, Damasio turns Descartes’ model of human beings upside down (p. 128):

The apparatus of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical, does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, traditionally presumed to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.

Failure to see this extensive integration of thought and emotion, Damasio writes, is “Descartes' error.”

What are emotions? Damasio distinguishes emotions from feelings. 

In everyday language we often use the terms interchangeably. This shows how closely connected emotions are with feelings. But for neuroscience, emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli. When we are afraid of something, our hearts begin to race, our mouths become dry, our skin turns pale and our muscles contract. This emotional reaction occurs automatically and unconsciously. Feelings occur after we become aware in our brain of such physical changes; only then do we experience the feeling of fear.”

In Descartes’ Error, Damasio introduced the cases of Phineas Gage (long dead) and “Elliot” (a living patient), who both suffered brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal area of their brains.

Gage’s brain damage occurred when a metal tamping rod was accidentally shot through his brain during a blasting operation (he recovered and lived many years). Elliot’s damage occurred as a result of a brain tumor. They were both left with high level intellectual functioning but little ability to experience emotion.

[Gage] seemed to be like a child, with no stable sense of what was important and what was not. He was fitful, intemperate, obscene. It was as if he didn’t care about one thing more than another. He seemed bizarrely detached from the reality of his conduct. So he could not make good choices, and he could not sustain good relationships .

Elliot had been a good role model, husband and father before his tumor. After the tumor, he was:

weirdly cool, detached, and ironic, indifferent even to intrusive discussion of personal matters- as if such remarks were not really about him. He had not previously been this way; he had been an affectionate husband and father. He retained lots of cognitive functions: he could perform calculations, had a fine memory for dates and names, and the ability to discuss abstract topics and world affairs.” After surgery, “he was even less able to care about things or to rank priorities. He could stick obsessively to a task and perform it well; but on a whim he might shift attention and do something completely different. Intelligence testing showed him to be a superior intellect. His emotions were askew, though. He could no longer set priorities or make decisions. He had no sense of the relative importance of any situation.

Elliot could think but he couldn’t judge value. “[T]the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”

Gage and Elliot each became somewhat like “Mr. Spock.” Many people would think of this as a potentially good thing, because always-under-control Mr. Spock is one of their favorite TV characters. They also believe that emotions inevitably lead to “irrational” behavior. The conventional wisdom is that people lacking emotions would be more clear-headed and therefore capable. What happened, though, is that both Gage and Elliot suffered severe impairments of judgment. Though they both appeared intelligent after their injuries, they were completely incapable of making sensible personal and business decisions in the absence of emotions.

Damasio also studied other patients and found that people with flat affect were incapable of making decisions. He found that pure rationality is helpless to make decisions. Rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us. He found that emotions are a necessary condition to allow rational decisions to be made, even purely “logical” decisions. “Rationality” describes the way brain-damaged people make decisions. Even “our most refined thoughts . . . use the body as a yardstick.” He was convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality were therefore incorrect:

I had been advised early in life that sounds decisions came from a cool head … I had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude, and when I thought of the brain behind that mind, I envisioned separate neural systems for reason and emotion … But now I had before my eyes the coolest, least emotional, intelligent human being one might imagine, and yet his practical reason was so impaired that it produced, in the wanderings of daily life, a succession of mistakes, a perpetual violation of what would be considered socially appropriate and personally advantageous.

Damasio was convinced that reason was “not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotion and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better.” He found that a reduction in emotion correlates with irrational behavior. This “counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.” The bottom line: pure reason is not sufficient for meaningful decision-making.

It is not only the separation between the mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is just as fictional. The mind is embodied in the full sense of the term, not just embrained. The study of the mind is the study of the entire body: the neural processes that are experienced as the mind concern the representation of the body in the brain. Our minds critically depend on our human bodily existences.

Damasio asserts that “Somatic markers” comprise the emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we then use for our daily decisions. These markers record emotional reactions to situations. Somatic markers work as emotionally-weighted indicators, steering us away from or toward choices, based on past experience. It’s not that we can necessarily recall the specific past experiences that formed our system of markers, but we feel them and they allow us evaluate some options over others. These emotion-laden markers help us to rank our options.

The brain does not merely record advance in the world but “also records how the body explores the world and reacts to it.” Even though these neurological processes may occur in various portions of the brain, people "experience and act on them in a unified coherent manner: the records that bind together all these fragmented activities "are embodied in ensembles of neurons” Damasio refers to as “convergence zones,” where

The axons of feedforward projecting neurons from one part of the brain converge and join with reciprocally divergent feedback projections from other regions. When a reactivation within the convergence zones stimulates the feedback projections, many anatomically separate and widely distributed neuron ensembles fire simultaneously and reconstruct previous patterns of mental activity.

“Brain and Language,” Scientific American, 89-91 (September 1992).

Far from being a limitation or distraction, then, emotion is an integral part of cognition. Emotion constructs and maintains the somatic markers that allow us to evaluate the desirability of our actions.

In Damasio’s view, our entire experienced world is thus filled with emotional peaks and valleys that constitute our map of what matters to us. There are no purely objective rational thoughts. Every thing on this inner map is infused with an emotional valence that pulls us toward it or pushes us away. Without this all-encompassing emotional map, no amount of analytical intelligence, not even a great intelligence, has the capacity to care about the world enough to employ logic or reasoning abilities. He makes the strong claim that not only does the intellect interweave complexly with our emotions. That is why pure rationality is helpless to make decisions and rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us.

Since I’m an attorney let’s imagine that Star Trek’s Mr. Spock went to law school, he would make a terrible lawyer because he would be at a loss to care about anything. He would further lack the capacity to know what anyone else cares about or even to care about what anyone else cares about. Even Spock’s great knowledge base and his sense of logic would leave him at a complete standstill. He would not know what to do next without an biologically-based emotion-sculpted landscape to push and pull him in various directions based on (oftentimes subconscious) survival needs.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 11: The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

I’m back again with more advice for a hypothetical newborn baby. This is my tenth lesson on how to thrive in the complex world.

You will be surrounded by people who insist that there are clearly defined “right” and “wrong” things. This dichotomy doesn't work very well, of course, because many things are not clearly right or wrong and sometimes they seem both right and wrong or neither right or wrong, depending on who is calling the balls and strikes. Many people will tell you that they have “figured things out” with a formula or a set of holy commandments and they will offer to help you understand what you should or should not do in your life. Your default setting should be to not trust any of these people.

Let’s start with the claim that human animals can use their “reason” to figure our right and wrong. The problem is that the brain was not designed to pursue the truth. Rather, it was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. The evidence is everywhere; reason often fails to deliver rational results—behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for exposing many of the heuristics, fallacies and biases—you can delve right in (after you learn to read) by picking up a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Not only is Reason often not helpful. It is often detrimental to rationality. People “systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions.” Reason tends to “seek justification and not truth.” Human reasoning is severely distorted by the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and reason-based choice. Here is an excerpt from an article by Mercier and Sperber, “Why Humans Reason”:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes

So beware of the claim that reasoning will figure out what is right or wrong.

Also beware of that you can figure out morality by referring to simple principles like the Golden Rule. First of all, no, the Golden Rule wasn’t invented by Jesus (as many people will tell you). It has been around since at least 2000 BC. Please notice that there is something weird about The Golden Rule. Must we really make reference to what we would want in order to understand that we should be nice to others? Why shouldn’t the Golden Rule be shorter, something like “Be Nice” or “Don’t be a dick”?

Watch out for people who tell you that people need the promise of heaven and threat of hell in order to live a worthy life. That is a particularly insane way of looking at humanity. If you are kept in in line only by the threat of hell, you are one fucked-up person. How about just be good to others for the sake of being a good person?

Watch out for people who tell you that rules will guide you with regard to morality. Rules cannot do any such thing. If one can determine morality based on reason or rules, the people who believe in rules should please tell me: How shall I calculate the amount of money it would be appropriate to give to the next homeless person I encounter? What do the Ten Commandments say about whether to give the homeless person any money at all?

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle ferociously attacked the idea that rules can form the basis for any moral system. As Aristotle explained in detail, there are simply too many exceptions to even the most basic moral rules; we often kill, steal and covet in ways that are socially applauded. In order to actually apply any rule, we need to invoke (often subconsciously) a set of meta-rules for deciding when and how to apply that rule, and a meta-meta system of rules for knowing how to apply those meta rules, etc. Written sets of rules are intrinsically incomplete; they are always subject to further elaboration and explanation. The application of rules thus amounts to a fuzzy eternal regress, the end result of which is that we are actually self-legislating, though we project the rule onto our conduct as our infallible authority.

There is a modern tangible analogue to illustrate Aristotle’s concerns about the application of rules. It’s the American legal system, which relies upon thousands of common law cases to enable the interpretation of even simple-seeming Constitutional concepts (e.g., “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech . . .”). The thousands of common law cases end up being the big tail wagging the little First Amendment dog, so much so that no one can legitimately claim to understand the First Amendment without having studied hundreds of pages of case law. In both moral dilemmas and the legal system, it’s often not a matter of simply “invoking” or “applying” a rule; rather, it’s about making sense of the rule in a particular situation after spending substantial energy to understand the rule, and then working hard to achieve an equitable result in the context of the written law.

Thoughtful people know that rules don’t guide moral behavior. Much more often, they are the post-hoc justification. Law Professor Steven Winter has studied rules at length, concluding that " there's a lot more space than we'd think in 'following the rules."'

[T]he real world of human action is too varied and complex to be captured by any set of categorical structures. It is not so much that every rule has a few comers that do not quite fit, as it is that life's diversity and complexity cannot be contained within square comers. Indeed, as long as we treat categories as rigid little boxes, any set of boxes we devise will be either too few to do like justice or too many to be workable.

Winter quotes Stanley Fish, who wrote: "Every rule is a rule of thumb."

Philosopher Andy Clark also points out the significant limitations of moral rules:

The attempt to condense [legal] expertise . . . into a set of rules and principles that can be economically expressed by a few sentences of public language may thus be wildly optimistic, akin to trying to reduce a dog's olfactory skills to a small body of prose.

Clark reconceptualizes rules as "guides and signposts" that enable collaborative exploration "rather than as failed attempts to capture the rich structure of our individual . . . knowledge." Researching prior cases provides a menu of suggestions for discussing and collaborating (through briefing and oral arguments) to attempt to resolve difficult legal issues.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic. We haven’t even discussed Kant’s hopelessly flawed categorical imperative or the equally flawed theory of utilitarianism. That said, I hope I have disabused you of any temptation to explain morality in terms of “reason” or “rules.”

Beware, too, that those people who most often claim to know how to calculate morality are living lives all-too-similar to the rest of us in terms of selfishness versus altruism.

We aren’t done talking about We’ll talk more about morality later, especially Jonathan Haidt’s engaging discussions regarding social intuitionism and the multiple moral foundations.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things

Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things

OK! I’m back with more advice for a newborn baby. This is my ninth lesson on how to thrive in the complex world. Baby, as you have probably figured out, I’m giving you the advice that I wish I had learned earlier and easier. I’m spoon-feeding you, but not with baby food. I'm feeding you with lessons I learned at the school of hard knocks.

What should you be doing when you are very young? You would think that I would tell you to work hard to do some really big and important things, but I’m going to suggest the opposite: You should get busy learning lots and lots of little things. These countless little things will enable you to accomplish big things decades later.

In the context of natural selection, Richard Dawkins once used the metaphor the problem of scaling the extremely high sheer cliff of Mount Improbable. Here’s how this metaphor came to be. People are amazed at the human eye (as they should be—-see Chapter 7) but they erroneously conclude “It’s impossible that such an amazing thing could evolve! It would be like a human being jumping thousands of feet into the air in order to get to the top of a sheer cliff.” Dawkins then lays out the clear evidence that many extremely simple eyes were actually probable in early life forms. He then describes the steps by which very simple eyes could be improved incrementally, in thousands of ways over millions of generations. There is no need to leap thousands of feet to get to the top of the sheer front cliff of Mount Improbable. That’s because you can drive around to the back side of Mount Improbable where you will find a long inclined hiking path you can use to walk slowly up the hundreds of switchbacks to get to the same high point of the mountain. Thus, there are two different methods to get to the top, one of them impossible (leaping) and the other achievable with determination and time (hiking a longer path of switchbacks).

I’m 65 years old now and I’ve done some a few things that have impressed some other people. Every one of those difficult things took a large number of mundane-seeming and achievable skills and years or decades of time. I learned countless numbers of smallish achievable things that added up over the decades. Things like learning how to read in the first grade, or learning to play a C chord on a guitar, or learning how to use a computer mouse, or learning how a camera aperture works. My “secret weapon” is that I’m a scrapper—I don’t give up. I grind away on something until I figure it out or until I’m exhausted. I’ve learned many things by sheer grit and experimentation. After decades of doing this, I have accumulated a large took kit of skills that can be used for achieving complex things like being a lawyer or composing music or raising children or publishing a book of my digital art. My “secret” is that I have exploited “compounding” to my advantage.

Shane Parrish of Farnham Street notes that “Compounding” is a concept commonly used in the realm of finance. It refers to making interest on your interest, a phenomenon familiar to anyone trying to retire. Parrish notes that compounding is also a useful concept when applied to things outside of finance.  In “The Mundanity of Excellence,” Daniel F. Chambliss makes the case that numerous low-level skills can be leveraged into extraordinary achievements. In fact, he reminds us that great talent can happen only when we stand on the shoulders of numerous sub-talents. Excellence is the icing on the cake of mundacity:

Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on. Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games. The winning of a gold medal is nothing more than the synthesis of a countless number of such little things—even if some of them are done unwittingly or by others, and thus called “luck.”

I completely agree with Shane Parrish and Daniel Chambliss. Anything impressive that I’ve done is the result of 1,000 tiny things I’ve worked on much earlier in my life.That has included numerous little failures as well as work-arounds. I did these things because I have always been curious, energetic and relentless. Frankly, I have never done anything impressive that didn't take more than a decade of work that was then aggregated.

But here is a warning: Compounding can run in the opposite direction too. Enormous failures start with little missteps. Here’s one that is based on a real life story with which I’m familiar: “Hey, my wife had surgery and she has some leftover opioid painkiller. What the hell, I’ll try one and see how I feel.” Fast-forward five years and that person has a long history of sliding into many bad habits. He lost his focus and his will to achieve. He also lost his self-made business, destroyed his relationship with his kids. His only driving passion became his quest to find new ways of getting high.

I’ll end on a high note: One of the biggest ways compounding benefits you is the many small things you do to improve your reputation. As the saying goes, a good reputation is hard to earn and easy to lose. After you’ve spent your entire life trying to be trustworthy, truthful and kind, you’ll find that your reputation opens new doors for you, over and over. It’s easy to forget, though that this “superpower” of a good reputation was something you assembled over decades through truth-telling, hard work and kindness. Similarly, good health is usually the result of hundreds of mundane-seeming habits and routines.

Again, my advice to you is to aim low. Do lots and lots of little things. The world is your playroom. Practice many low-level skills and master them. Decades later you will be able to aggregate these into what other people think of as a super power, even though you know better.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 8: How and Why to Choose Friends

Chapter 8: How and Why to Choose Friends.

Hello again, newborn baby! This is our 8th conversation. I am your self-appointed mentor, telling you things that you’ll need to know in order to make some sense of all the crazy things you are going to see on Planet Earth. Equally true, I’m telling you about the things that I wish I had learned when I was very young.

Today we’re going to talk about friends, which seems like a rather friendly topic if there ever is such a topic. But I’m going to shoot straight about friendships and this straight talk is probably going to make me seem mean-spirited.

First of all, what is a friendship? A friendship is a partnership, a two-way street where the two friends invest time in each other’s lives and keep each other in their realm of concern. There are many flavors of friendship and they are all good and well as long as the friends are happy with each other. When choosing friends, you’ll want to consider the purpose of spending time with each other. Some people merely want a card-playing partner (and not much more). Others want to hang around supporting each other as they both raise children. Others want art or craft friends. Others want friends with whom they can go to movies, shows and sports events and chit chat about those events. Others want honest, probing and thoughtful conversation about the meaning of life. Some of us actively seek out friends who will give us the unvarnished truth (as they see it), challenging us in direct but kind ways, serving as a sounding board so we don't fall off the rails regarding our world views.

Friends are extremely important to each others' happiness, making it critical that we show patience and kindness to our friends. That said, for self-preservation, there must be limits to your loyalty, as I will discuss below.

Second, how does one make friends? For most people it’s mostly a matter of luck. You bump into other people in school or work and one way or the other you end up doing things together, thus “cementing” the “friendship.” You’ll hear that you should be loyal to your friends. You should be the one willing to stick with them thick and thin and if your friendship is a good one, you’ll be even willing to help your friend bury the body, so to speak. Even though this method sometimes helps to find others to hang around with, it’s not an efficient method and it often comes at a great cost. I’m going to suggest a completely different approach for making friends.

What if someone you loved (e.g., your sister) asked you to find some good friends for her? Would you really follow such a haphazard approach, or would you do your best to use a Machiavellian approach, doing some serious work to identify people with excellent habits and character (much as you would if you were looking for a romantic partner). Further, if one of your sister’s friends took a bad serious turn--they became wealth obsessed or proudly addicted to chemicals that changed them for the worse--would you tell your sister to be “loyal” and stick with that deteriorating person through thick and thin because “once a friend, always a friend”? I sincerely hope not.

I would offer these two basic rules regarding relationships: A) Don’t expect a person to change and B) don’t expect a person to not change. My point here is a simple one: people can become more and less compatible with each other over time but, sometimes friends fall horribly out of sync and the relationship becomes painful. Similarly, someone you wrote off in high school as a knucklehead might have proceeded to get an “A” in the School of Life,” which you noticed, with some shock, when you had a chance meeting 20 years after high school--they dramatically changed for the better. So always keep your eyes open for the ebb and flow of a relationship and never rule out redemption. As you know, I often quote Nietzsche. In the following passage he discusses what he calls “star friendship.”

Star friendship. We were friends and have become estranged. But that was right, and we do not want to hide and obscure it from ourselves as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each of which has its own goal and course; we may cross and have a feast together, as we did--and then the good ships lay so quietly in one harbor and in one sun that it may have seemed as if they had already completed their course and had the same goal. But then the almighty force of our projects drove us apart once again, in two different seas and sunny zones, and maybe we will never meet again--or maybe we will, but will not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we had to become estranged is the law above us; through it we should come to have more respect for each other--and the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our different ways and goals may be included as small stretches--let us rise to this thought!

I would advise the following: A) carefully pick who will be in your friendship circle, B) constantly evaluate each other for “fit” as the years go by and, C) without apology (but usually with sadness) distance yourself from friends that are no longer working out. Loyalty is not (always) a virtue. Don’t believe the people who say you must, for ever and ever spend your unreplenishable 1,000 months of life with people who are no longer a good fit. Most important of all, in order to have good friends, you need to be a good friend and this will require an investment of your time and energy into the partnership of friendship. You'll need to listen as much as you talk. You'll need to show through your actions that you care about the relationship.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 8: How and Why to Choose Friends

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Hello again, newborn baby. I’m here again to give you advice on many important topics. This is our seventh visit, the seventh chapter to this 100-chapter story.

Today we are going to talk about your amazing human animal body. First of all, you don’t have a body. Rather, you are a body. “You” is shorthand for trillions of cells that somehow work together. When “you” decide you are hungry, that is actually trillions of microscopic cells coordinating their separate energies into a few macroscopic actions: crying for milk, sucking and then swallowing the milk. How did that miracle of coordination happen? Honest people don’t claim to know.

All of this is pre-verbal for newborns like you—done without the use of words. This seemingly makes you brilliant but actually this puts you into the same predicament as chimpanzees, pigs, mice and earthworms. Your amazing body almost entirely takes care of itself without needing any words at all. And when you finally develop language, you’ll have only the illusion that those words are pulling the strings, whereas your words are only an epiphenomenon. Whenever you “decide” to say “hello,” something else made you “decide.” Your words don’t cause your words, because that would be an eternal regress. We will save the rest of this dangerous topic for another day, however.

People think they know their bodies, but they know almost nothing. We don’t even know how it is that “we” control our breathing or how the body does this automatically when “we” ignore it. We don’t even know how we think thoughts or imagine the ocean. We don't know how we keep from falling over as we run down the sidewalk on our two peg legs. We don’t even know how it is that we are able to start peeing. Or how we digested yesterday’s meal.

Some people will protest and claim that we do know a lot of things. I agree. We know a LOT of things and it is wonderfully useful to know those things. This knowledge allows us to invent smartphones, medicines and rockets. But we never get totally to the bottom of anything. We think we are explaining, but we are only describing. As I was once told by philosopher Andy Clark, “An explanation is a description that makes us feel good.” We have only thin explanations in a deep world. As Nietzsche said,

Just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

Maybe we don't fully and deeply understand anything but certainly we can make things, right? Not really. We can only rearrange things. As Carl Sagan said, ““If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Making things worse, when we do rearrange things, they always eventually fall apart, as Heraclitus noticed thousands of years ago.

We appear to be dynamic patterns rather than bodies. The stuff of the universe moves in and out of us, yet somehow the pattern and form our bodies more or less remains. We are thus like flames, though far more complex. We turn bananas into poop to assist our largely subconscious effort to pass our genes to the next generation. How's that for complexity, especially when we figured out how to transport our bananas to our city from 1,000 miles away by using a flying aluminum tube?

We like to say that we understand basic things like how our body works, but that is mostly to keep our sanity. We say lots of things to reassure ourselves, yet we don't even know how our words convey meaning from person to person. We blithely accept words as substitutes for deep understanding because we must. We are experts at concealing our ignorance of our own bodies. Nietzsche had a lot to say about this self-ignorance:

Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body, in order to confine and lock him within a proud deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.

Now, back your body. It is more complex than you will ever be able to imagine, multiplied by fifty trillion. Your liver is an immense chemical factory packed into one side of your abdomen and it works extremely well even though we don’t have any deep knowledge of how it works. We notice correlations and we attribute causation, but the magic is in the complex fluid movements and as we drill down from biology to physics to quantum physics, the ultimate “things” we would like identify as the objects of our explanations smear into wave patterns.

OK. Maybe that is too esoteric. Let's simplify. Have you ever considered your ankles? Mundane ordinary ankles. They are a collection of bones so small you can almost wrap your hand around them, yet they hold up your body all day long and they can last for 100 years. Even one ankle can hold up your entire body weight, even if you hop. How is that possible. If they get injured they usually fix themselves. How is that possible?

How is it possible that the body is so good at patterns of actions such as peristalsis, vomiting, sneezing and orgasms, where the body orchestrates a complex cascade of mini-actions? And we haven’t yet mentioned the brain, three pounds of such “mind-blowing” complexity that it allows us to fire up our memory and imagine walking through our house! We can generate mental representations in such exquisite detail that we can find our keys while lying in bed with our eyes closed! “I left my keys on the back porch!” And it doesn't help us to blithely say that our brain is like a computer. Our brain does not work like a modern computer. It doesn't have architecture anything like a computer. Further, everything thought we think is infused with emotional valence.

Instead of working like a store-bought computer our brain seem to run on connectionist architecture that excels at pattern matching. We’re “good at frisbee, but bad at math.” That’s another observation by Andy Clark. We have thinking meat in our brains. How does meat think? How is that possible? If all of this unnerves you, perhaps you would rather conclude that thinking goes on somewhere other than in a body, perhaps in a disembodied soul. That is a dramatic fail.As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio concluded: "There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body."

We have immune systems that are factories of natural selection (and much more) within our own bodies. They identify and neutralize complex threats without requiring us to think about those threats. How powerful are immune systems? When someone dies, their body starts to “rot” within a few hours. But the bugs and microorganisms that devour bodies at death are always trying to devour our living bodies too, but bodies, relying on their immune systems, usually beats the invaders decisively. That’s how powerful your immune system is. Without a functioning immune system, a newborn baby like you would never make it to two days of age.

On a microscopic level, there is probably a lot more going on in our bodies than we even want to know. Yesterday, for example, you were oblivious that your body defeated pre-cancerous cell that would have replicated and killed you in a year. Again, it’s probably a really good thing that “you” aren’t needed to keep your body running well. If you were in charge of your body, all of the harrowing microscopic things going on underneath your skin would scare the shit out of you and you wouldn’t have a clue about what to do about any of this.

As you grow up, look at your hands often and marvel at them. Think about how amazing they are, giving you the power to grasp and sense and fight and caress. The hand: a multi-function tool if there ever was one. Your hands are all the evidence you need that your body is extraordinary.

And now please note that we’ve only discussed a few of your amazing body parts. There are hundreds more, including your tiny ear bones which, millions of years, ago served as jaw bones in our reptile ancestors.

Take care of your body. It’s more amazing than anything a science-fiction writer could imagine. Be good to it. Thank the stars that you inherited something so incredibly complex and functionl that defies deep explanation.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body