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Monday, June 05, 2006
A Nutshell
I fly only occasionally, so I never rack up enough frequent flier miles to make good use of them. Instead, every year or so I end up with an offer to get free magazines, which would be great if it were the ones I actually subscribe to, such as the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, or Reason. Instead, I get a list that presumably appeals to people who fly a lot, which is crazy since those folks don't have to squander their frequent flier miles on something like magazines.
Anyway, I say all this to explain why I have a subscription to Seed. Now that I am an Investor, I would probably get a business magazine, but at the time I thought a magazine about science would be the best of poor choices. It has turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, primarily because it plays to a Leftish mindset that considers itself intellectually superior because it believes in evolution and global warming. (I haven't yet read any articles about whether the science of genetics supports the democratic belief in human equality, or whether there are constants of human nature that transcend culture. Not all science fits this mindset.)
In the April/May issue, however, I ran into an article, written by Geoffrey Miller, that grabbed my attention, mainly because it supports what I believe already. The article's title, "Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens," indicates the topic of the article but not its real substance. Let me cite some passages. First, we have his thesis:
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain's ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.
This is of little interest to me except for the underlying basis that he is extrapolating from, namely life on this planet:
The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biologicalfitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.
The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.
Given the magazine, I was surprised at how conservative his conclusion is:
Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says "Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce."
Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an "irrational" Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratifica tion, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left. Their concerns about the Game of Life will baffle the political pollsters who only understand the rhetoric of status and power, individual and society, rights and duties, good and evil, us and them.
This, too, may be happening already. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our creative-class dreamworlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.
I've quoted more liberally than my reader probably desires or the law allows, but I find so much of the argument compelling. It reinforces for me the recognition that, despite my many leanings toward ancient philosophy and other ancient sources, that I am fundamentally a modern. By this I mean that I have come to support the modern suspicion of our own natural reason. This includes a suspicion of the desires that motivate our reasoning.
The conundrum, however, is that if we learn to work around the ways that we naturally interpret the world and the desires that push us toward that interpretation, we also separate ourselves from our natural ways of belonging to the world. How does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his very soul?
In Moby Dick, Melville speaks to this point. Ishmael, the narrator, has been spending the day squeezing hardened lumps of spermaceti from a sperm whale to get them back into liquid form. Apparently the smell created a narcotic effect, to the point that Ishmael starts imagining something akin to a hippie community of universal love. He follows with this:
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
There is an odd kind of conservatism that emerges from these modern insights. Miller speaks to this point in those final paragraphs praising the "practical minded breeders." Our techniques for manufacturing pleasure and satisfaction must be reconciled to the more mundane concern of survival. Contrary to Miller's thesis in the article, the species itself may not be in any real danger, but cultural accomplishments within the species certainly are. The Biblical injunction of "be fruitful and multiply" may have been directed towards the entirety of the living world, but it most likely was meant especially for the Jewish community. To prosper is to preserve a way of being in the world, and Miller is right to suggest that some ways of being in the world are instrumental in their own extinction. The classical liberal project of the development of the individual meets its proper limit here.
Rousseau has the following to say about good government in The Social Contract:
...I am continually astonished that a mark [of good government] so simple is not recognized, or that men are of so bad faith as not to admit it. What is the end of political association? The preservation and prosperity of its members. And what is the surest mark of their preservation and prosperity? Their numbers and population. Seek then nowhere else this mark that is in dispute. The rest being equal, the government under which, without external aids, without naturalization or colonies, the citizens increase and multiply most is beyond question the best.
I wouldn't assert this point as boldly as Rousseau does, but it is worth thinking about why we might disagree with him. First, we have a belief that the earth is overpopulated. Even if this were true, it would make little sense to want the populations to decrease in those cultures that share your values. Second, we have a notion that the goods of good government go beyond the birth rate and death rate. I am sympathetic to this point too, but it reveals how our concern for quality of life tends to eclipse everything else.
Part of the modern secular project is the quest to overcome death. This itself may be in keeping with our evolved psychology, but it suggests that there is something left over to make our time count for something. However, insofar as our activity becomes further removed from the struggle for existence, the more likely it is to be a form of fakery, or narcissism, as Miller puts it.
I sometimes imagine myself floating down a stream, spread-eagle upon a raft, looking up at the sky. The timbers of this raft, however, are not attached. It is only my weight and my grasp of the timbers that keeps them all together, so I am as responsible for the raft being a raft as the raft is for keeping me afloat. Were I to daydream too long, entranced by the sky, I might relax my grip and have it all come apart. Or, more likely, I might be tricked into thinking that one of the timbers would itself be enough. But no one timber is enough. None of the goods of life can alone sustain our weight, but all of them can be brought to assistance. We cannot stand upon such a raft, but with skill we will not fall from it either. Most of the time we cannot even see it, which is especially dangerous since we must keep it together. It is a precarious journey.
[This is a confused essay, but I've decided to post it with all its confusion. Perhaps later I will clean it up and remove this postscript.]
Eddie 9:23 AM
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