The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (23 page)

SYNOPSIS

 

The mind learns the world of which it is part by seeking patterns of statistical dependencies among experiential particulars, starting with premises and subject to constraints that are defined by genetic endowment and epigenetic development. From these particulars, which may be represented fleetingly or stored in episodic memory, arise the generalities that populate conceptual memory. To be useful for understanding and prediction or for forethought (which is the overarching functional requirement of any mind), concepts encode distilled causal knowledge about the world.

A persistent cluster of such conceptual knowledge accrued by a mind becomes the effective Self, which is part of the larger web of cause and effect that constitutes the reality we face and governs behavior within the constraints imposed by that reality. Being both social and articulate, we use language to augment our effective Selves with narratives, which, on a different level, also encode specific episodes from our own and from other people’s personal history, as well as general knowledge about how the world works. Just like the causal strands of the effective Self, the stories that make up the narrative Self extend out into the world beyond our skulls.

Learning the code that one must live by is hard work for which we, as creatures that are subject to evolutionary pressure, are rewarded with transient effort- and success-related happiness—not because we are entitled to it, but because creatures that are thus rewarded learn better and are less likely to go extinct. To be happy, or for that matter to have any kind of feeling toward a percept, a thought, or an action, a cognitive system must have a capacity for phenomenal experience—a capacity that is predicated on certain structural qualities of the representation-space trajectories that the system’s state can follow. Insofar as feelings are included in the evolutionary causal loop, creatures like us, which take life personally by virtue of constructing and using phenomenal Selves that feel, have a competitive edge over zombies that by definition do not (which explains why the latter are such a rarity in real life).

The coalition of Selves that is the mind uses its collective causal knowledge of the world to exercise forethought and to plan its own behavior by conducting simulations of likely scenarios and weighing its options. Simulating the world, complete with gravity, fruit-laden apple trees, other people, and perhaps a snake slithering through the grass, sounds a lot like setting up a virtual reality environment. This concept, which used to be owned by computer graphics experts, is now familiar to every gamer, but even if you are a veteran computer game player, you may be in for a surprise. What your mind takes to be the rock-bottom reality of the kind that is supposed to exist outside the gaming console is virtual in exactly the same sense that the simulated world inside the game is.

As a quick case in point, try to reconcile in some other way the single, uninterrupted, wide-angle quality of the visual world that you see with the fact that you are looking at the world through two eyes. The wide-screen visual experience that we are used to is virtual: it is the product of intensive computation, whose purpose is to recover depth cues from the two slightly disparate arrays of data provided by the eyes; when this or other computations that feed the mind’s virtual reality fail, illusions follow. The mind’s virtualized representation of the world encompasses not just the world’s perceptual qualities: as we learned earlier, decision-making scenarios and action plans, as well as entire bundles of processes that represent certain parts of other people’s minds, are also simulated.

Having realized that, you’re but one step away from the epitome of self-knowledge: understanding the true nature of your Self. The bottom line, then, is this: the Self, along with all of its perceived and remembered attributes—anything and everything that is included in the feeling of being you—is a product of the brain’s virtual reality engine. This virtual Self is computed and put in charge of the situation purely for reasons of good governance, that is, efficient and purposeful control of the brain’s life-support system—your body.

 

Prometheus goes on parole. Alexander meets Diogenes in Corinth. History is made in Bishopsgate. Peace is struck in the republic of soul. Ulysses leaves Ithaca again.

You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart.