The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (10 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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Internal dynamical models of the world are the richest and most intricate of the many sources of information that interact with the mind’s grand map and help it shape the battle plan. Because they extend into the future—or rather, into the many simulated possible futures that build on past experience and interact with present actions—the grand map describes, over and above the concrete spatial disposition of the immediate environment, an abstract space of possible actions and consequences. Computationally, the influence that the mind exerts over behavior thus reduces to navigating a labyrinthine web of cause and effect. Imagine yourself standing at a crossroads in this maze; where would you go next?
The Value of Everything
 
The executive function of the mind is often referred to as the closing of the perception-action loop, which makes it sound as if there is a single perceptual item on the agenda that inexorably leads to a single action. In reality, the task of connecting perception to action via the grand map has all the characteristics of a holy mess. As should be obvious by now, the work of the mind’s war cabinet is never complete: far from being static, the grand map is constantly updated. The dynamics of the update cycle reflects external events (as when danger looms or an object of some other kind of potential interest comes into view), as well as the mind’s own internal needs. All these processes flood the map with content, which cannot all be dealt with at the same time. Getting the virtual ducks in a row is therefore a necessity, and so the grand map includes, in addition to information about objects, their locations relative to one’s vantage point, their expected behavior, and the potential actions that can be directed at them, estimates of their
value
.
Although the relative value of various goals or courses of action can be pondered (and often
is
pondered, ad nauseam, as in the case of a certain prince of Denmark whose native hue of resolution was sicklied o’er with a pale cast of thought), in natural cognition valuation does not always require deliberation. Indeed, value is a common by-product of experience, including experience that, over evolutionary time, helps shape the animal’s genome. Being a distillate of experience, value is fundamentally a matter of statistics (which, as noted before, does not mean that valuation is never certain, but rather that value-based decisions deal with the ubiquitous uncertainty of life using the computationally appropriate means). A handy example of the statistical underpinnings of value is found in the pattern of judgments people make of faces—by far the most important class of perceptual objects for social primates.
Prompted by the common saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, experimental psychologists had human subjects rate the attractiveness (which is a kind of value) of composite faces that had been generated by a computer program by averaging carefully aligned photographs of real people. These studies found a strikingly strong correlation between the perceived degree of attractiveness of a composite face and the number of individual photographs that were averaged to produce it. The beauty of a face, as it were, proved to depend on its location in the subject’s face space: the closer a given face is to the center of the statistical distribution, the more attractive it seems.
26
Insofar as the statistics of experience vary between individuals, beauty is subjective. A face that causes my heart to skip a beat may appear to you as plain—or worse, if you and I are of different species. (This knowledge almost manages to spoil for me the scene in Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
in which Gimli, son of Glóin, declares Queen Galadriel to be the “fairest”; a Dwarf could never see an Elf as anything but hideously ugly.) For stimuli other than faces, certain characteristics of perceived attractiveness, or value, do seem to be widely shared, perhaps because they are determined by computational factors that are common to all sentient beings. For instance, the few existing studies of landscape valuation by human subjects suggest that complexity, openness, and water features contribute to scenic beauty and attractiveness.
27
Although no comprehensive computational theory of scenic beauty exists as yet, my guess is that a major determinant of such beauty will turn out to be novelty, along with a perceived promise of novelty, such as offered by a new vista and a mountainous landscape, where every turn brings new tidings. Even hobbits, renowned for their deep love for the modest and cozy Shire, fall for grand vistas when they see them; hence Bilbo’s self-confessed longing for Rivendell: “I want to see mountains again, Gandalf—
mountains
.”
28
In
The Water of the Wondrous Isles,
William Morris, from whose work Tolkien drew much inspiration, imagined a young woman’s first glimpse of a mountain range thus:
At last the trees failed them suddenly, and they came forth on to a wide green plain, all unbuilded, so far as their eyes could see, and beyond it the ridges of the hills and blue mountains rising high beyond them. . . . When Birdalone’s eyes beheld this new thing, of a sudden all care left her, and she dropped her rein, and smote her palms together, and cried out: Oh! but thou art beautiful, O earth thou art beautiful!
29
 
Things Get Interesting
 
The appearance on the grand map of the mind of value, over and above mere information, is literally what makes life interesting, both for better
and
for worse. Merely singling out an object of desire automatically devalues other objects, just as perceiving something as worthy of avoidance makes the alternatives more appealing. To withstand evolutionary selection pressures, valuation processes must draw upon observables: it would be stupid (and in the long run suicidal) to attach to an object or a course of action a value that does not in the least depend on it. This means that valuation is not an afterthought or an add-on but an integral part of natural perception: all that you see, all that you hear, all that you taste, touch, smell, and feel is weighed for its potential value to you.
30
To be of use in guiding behavior, the values carried by all the perceived objects in the environment and by every action that it affords must be expressed in a common currency, so that they can be readily compared. It turns out that our brains do indeed maintain representations in which chunks of information and fragments of action plans are brought to a common denominator and used to guide behavior on a moment-by-moment basis. For obvious reasons, the emerging discipline that studies this process and the representations it deals in is called neuroeconomics.
31
We saw how natural it is to think of the representations used by perceptual processes as spaces (as in the face space theory). We now know that motor actions, being represented as patterns of numbers over which similarity relations hold, admit the same formalism: just as a face can be thought of as a point in a face space (spanned by some stored exemplars), so an action is a point in an action space, which likewise arises from experience. Now join perception and action together and throw in value; what you get is an abstract “value terrain” in which locations stand for perception-action bundles and elevation represents attraction—the deeper and steeper the attractor valley, the more powerful its draw.
This insight implies that the mind’s grand map, far from being flat, is shaped by external affordances and by internal desires and fears into a convoluted landscape that steers behavior like the bumps and pegs in a pinball machine. The buckling of the value landscape that is no longer indifferently flat into domains of repulsion (hills) and attraction (valleys) sets in motion the pursuit of happiness.
The notion of happiness implicit in this observation is radically minimalistic. For happiness or misery to emerge, indifference must be broken, and so the pursuit of one and, symmetrically, the avoidance of the other can be regarded as the ultimate source of motivation. No matter what else can be said about happiness, whenever you find yourself motivated (that is, being moved) to do one thing rather than another—a predicament that incorporates what we perceive as choice—happiness is the prime mover.
This incipient computational understanding of motivation brings with it a measure of insight into the stuff that happiness is made of and reveals why it is so notoriously fickle. The value terrain whose shape steers behavior is itself constantly reshaped by a multitude of factors, not the least of which is novelty. Let us return to Shakespeare’s Verona, to the Capulets’ ball. Romeo, being a Montague, is not invited, but he sneaks in nonetheless, prodded by Benvolio (whose mocking of the lad’s sincere, albeit mercurial, ardor suggests that Shakespeare was being somewhat sarcastic in naming this particular character):
BENVOLIO
At this same ancient feast of Capulet’s
Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so lovest,
With all the admired beauties of Verona:
Go thither; and, with unattainted eye,
Compare her face with some that I shall show,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.
 
ROMEO
When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;
And these, who, often drown’d, could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars!
One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun
Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.
32
 
 
It is Romeo’s appearance in disguise at the Capulets’ feast, where he first sees Juliet and where Tybalt overhears him admiring her, that ultimately brings tragedy to the two great houses of Verona.
It may be crass of me to make the point I am about to make right after quoting from a story of such woe, but I would like, nevertheless, to draw your attention to the bright side of human nature hinted at by this example, to wit: if you are after happiness, change is good, even if, for the moment, it is change to the worse—unless, of course, one is trapped inside a Shakespearean tragedy in which everybody is doomed to die before their luck turns to the better. As Tennyson asserts in
Ulysses
, “death closes all.”
33
As we get older, in our bones we feel less for young Romeo and more for Tennyson’s aged Ulysses, who, having striven with gods and brought doom upon Troy, is presently “made weak by time and fate.” This increasingly insistent intimation of personal finitude—surely a human physiological universal—is neatly balanced by a belief in life after death in a state of eternal bliss, a concept that is a cultural universal, inasmuch as it is perfectly intelligible even to people who do not succumb to it.
34
Among the various grounds on which the members of the masses may resist this particular bit of opium, there is the appreciation of how difficult it is for a human being to experience sustained happiness for any prolonged period of time. It seems that there are quite a few folks around who, if the price of bliss is boredom, would choose good entertainment over permanent happiness. Perhaps in recognition of this little problem with the naive promise of Paradise, the path to personal salvation preached by the Buddha has the avoidance of
un
happiness as the key motive, the Awakened One having made it very clear that he did not deem the frequent downsides of life worth suffering for the sake of the occasional up.
The final destination of the pilgrim who sets out on the Buddha’s Eightfold Path is a state of liberation that is nowhere nearly as easy to understand as a simple readmission into Eden. On some accounts, the state of nirvana implies cessation of cognition as we know it. To cease having desires, desirable as it may be in view of this doctrine’s calculus of worldly suffering, means to cease being human.
35
Moreover, the journey to this destination is irreversible, because once it has been attained, the desire cannot possibly arise in the pilgrim to reconsider and return. On other accounts, however, those who walk this path become more, not less, human—not by rejecting their nature, but rather by gaining insight into it and thereby learning to live the way we ought to live, given what we are.
36
In the hope of being able to do just that, it makes sense for us to try to learn some more of what cognitive science can tell us about the computational dynamics of the mind and of happiness. An interim conclusion that goes only a little way beyond what we have already learned in this book, yet that can serve as a bridge to its remaining chapters, suggests itself:
The goal is only a means. . . . Happiness is not in happiness itself, but in running toward happiness.
—ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKY,
Noon: XXII Century
(1964, p. 283)
37
 
 
 
SYNOPSIS
 
The proper way to explain the building blocks of the mind, starting with perception and ending with action, is to consider them as a web of interlinked computations. Although these computations can be very complex (some still elude complete understanding), many are based on simple and intuitive principles, which can be readily illustrated on examples drawn from familiar everyday situations.
In the case of perception, the data that the brain computes with arise from measurements that the senses—vision, touch, hearing, and so on—perform on the environment. The goal of perceptual computation is to recover from those numbers useful representations of stuff that’s happening “out there” in the world, out of the direct reach of the brain’s neurons. For instance, although the visible shape of a sleeping cat changes as it wakes up, uncurls, stretches, and walks away, the cat is never perceived as deforming, because your visual system factors just the right kind of shape variability into the computations it performs in order to arrive at a stable representation of cathood.
Acting on your perceptions of the world likewise amounts to computation—in this case, computing the signals that need to be sent to your muscles so that their joint action makes your body do the right thing. But what is the right thing to do in a given situation? That obviously depends not just on how you perceive the world or how you can act on it, but also on your values, goals, and motives. All of these aspects of you are at bottom just dynamic arrays of numbers expressed by activities of various cliques of neurons, as are perceptual states and possible actions. Their respective values get translated into a common “neuroeconomic” currency, giving rise to a grand map that shapes behavior by making some courses of action more attractive than others.
Computationally, therefore, the unfolding of behavior can be thought of as a ball rolling down a continually shifting landscape of possibilities, always seeking the deepest valleys. This computational understanding of the nature of perception, motivation, and action offers some intriguing insights into the meaning of, and the prospects for, the pursuit of happiness.
 

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