The Short Version

I have written about love here, and talked about it in Bare Brains, as a perhaps necessary inducement to human reproduction, created by evolution, of course. That kind of description is not conducive to romance or poetry, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the emotion in the same way that we enjoy the taste of food, even though that, too, evolved because it enhances the survival of genes.

David James Duncan doesn’t discuss love in the down-to-earth terms of evolution, but more as an enhancement to the quality of life. His beautifully written piece that I read this morning, “Cherish This Ecstasy,” in the July, 2008 issue of The Sun, ends with a poem:

I find myself caught

in the endless act

of being

loved.

This poem brings to an end an ecstatic rush through emotion-laden descriptions of peoples’ experiences, mostly Duncan’s, and mostly with birds. Birds have appeared in poetry fairly often, and ironically, it seems to me, their behavior is even more tightly programmed by evolution than ours. Perhaps their association with love has something to do with the way humans so often feel compelled by that emotion: totally lacking any ability to act other than as their passion dictates.

I’ve had my share of passion-driven moments, and they were certainly memorable, but now that I’m in the “golden years,” I have learned to enjoy—even cherish—the ecstasy, without being driven by it.

Duncan’s poem suggests that there are at least two points of view from which to experience love. He uses the expression, “being loved”—being the object of some unspecified person’s or entity’s love—rather than feeling love as directed toward something outside oneself.

I’m reminded of the frequently encountered, unrequited yearning to be loved, and the classic advice that you have to give it away to get it. I’m not sure that I can distinguish, in myself, any difference between the emotion experienced in loving or being loved. It’s the same warm, fuzzy glow in either case, sometimes intense enough to bring tears.

What sort of stimulus provokes the emotion varies with one’s history, but I think that with practice we can learn to experience it more often, in more varied circumstances. A key, I think, is empathy. If we can find any point in our life where we felt love, either outgoing or incoming, then we can imagine how other people feel—the chemistry of the limbic system is fairly universal. Then all we have to do is look around at other human beings who seem to be experiencing love—mothers with babies are pretty reliable—and use that as a stimulus to recall whatever experience we may have had. The more often we immerse ourselves in that chemistry, the easier it is to reproduce, and we can learn to experience it in the presence of other human beings even if—and perhaps more importantly, especially if—they don’t seem to be experiencing it themselves at the moment.

Most importantly, we can learn to experience love in the presence of that human being who is always and unavoidably available to us: ourselves. We can be—simultaneously and reliably—both the object and the giver of love. It’s a worthwhile skill to develop.

You may have forgotten that the title of this post is “Love and the World Wide Web.” I’ve covered the “love” part, and as for the Web, my new site is up! I had great fun redesigning it, and I “love” it…

Email me.

I Love This, Too

	Enter your search terms
	Web www.rentine.com Submit search form

A few years ago, Eve named one of my subpersonalities “Mr. Fussy,” and sometime after that, another one got the name of “Mr. Beaver.” (I explained my tendency to turn off water faucets behind her as due to sharing with beavers a built-in aversion to the sound of running water.) In my last post you met “the one who laughs,” who shall henceforth be known as Mr. Amusement.

So Mr. Diligence, the one who keeps us all focused on the goal of the moment, has been in charge for what seems like weeks, but last night at about 3:00 AM, Mr. Cogitator took the stage and kept the rest of us awake for almost an hour. The only way to get him to shut up was to promise to give him full reign to write this post if he would wait till a reasonable hour.

Mr. Cogitator is now the “me” of the moment, and what “I” was thinking about earlier this morning was a particular passage in Marvin Minsky’s book, The Emotion Machine, that has been bothering me since I first read it. But first the good stuff.

One of his most amazing and wonderful insights (Mr. Enthusiasm here) is the way he clarifies this idea of subpersonalities I’ve been using. The book is littered with examples and variations on this theme, and this is one of my favorites:

“…everyone undergoes changes of mood in which one exhibits somewhat different sets of intentions, behaviors, and traits. Then, whether those shifts are persistent or brief, the subpersonality that is now in control may activate a set of views and goals for you, which, for the moment, you may believe to be the views and goals of the ‘genuine’ You.”(p.307)

These shifts happen throughout the day, and for most people they are taken for granted without having any impact on their ideas about the nature of their “selves.”

This is just a specific case of a more general tendency that is central to Minsky’s discussions: that we commonly describe very complex mental processes with simple words—he calls them “suitcase words”—that obscure the underlying complexity; a complexity that we must unravel if we’re to make any headway in understanding how our brains work. This particular simplification of the self he attributes to the “fairy tale” we all grow up with:

“We each are constantly being controlled by powerful creatures inside our minds who do our feeling and thinking for us, and make our important decisions for us. We call these our ‘Selves’ or ‘Identities’—and we believe that they always remain the same, no matter how we may otherwise change.”(p.14)

He goes on to unpack this suitcase and many others, and to suggest why such simplifications appeal to us. He is meticulous, thorough, and wonderfully inventive. Isaac Asimov said Minsky was one of only two people he had ever met who were smarter than himself, and while he never met me, I’m fairly certain I would not have made the cut. Nonetheless, I have a near-fanatic sensitivity to certain lapses, brought on, I think, by growing up poor—which I certainly wouldn’t have chosen if I’d had any other options, so I can’t claim any credit for having it.

Which brings us to the passage that bothers me, which follows a presentation of the idea that, “If a program works in only one way, then it gets stuck when that method fails…”

“This idea is a central theme of this book—and it is firmly opposed to the popular view that each person has a central core—some sort of invisible spirit or self—from which all their mental abilities originate. For that seems a demeaning idea—that all our virtues are secondhand—or that we deserve no credit for our accomplishments… Instead, I see our dignity as stemming from what we each have made of ourselves: a colossal collection of different ways to deal with different situations and predicaments.”(p. 6)

When I read that I thought, “Jeez Marv, you’re not even out of the box and you’re screwing it up.” The alarm bell words were “credit” and “dignity,” of course, but the really tricky ones in that passage are “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” plurals of “I,” “mine,” and “myself.” If there is no “self,” how can it make something of itself?

I finished the book, marking passages and taking notes, and found that elsewhere, Minsky is totally aware of the problems with these words, and is obvious and direct in pointing them out. Still, they are so socially useful, and so engrained in our usage, that he is not as rigorous as I would like. Let me juxtapose two passages–only a couple of pages apart in the book—one of which can be used to clarify the other:

“…when you see the mind as a cloud of conflicting resources…  you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them.”(p. 325)

“…we spend large parts of our lives at trying to tidy up our minds—selecting the portions we want to keep, suppressing others we’d like to forget, and refining the ones we’re dissatisfied with.”(p. 321)

The crucial question for the second passage is, who is this “we” that’s tidying up? The first passage provides the answer. Let me reword the second in terms of the first to show what I mean:

Large parts of our lives are spent in competition between subpersonalities trying to suppress or emphasize parts that each has a different attachment to. Mr. Nutrition would like to suppress memories of meals and dishes that were unhealthy, while Mr. Glutton holds those memories dear, and fondly relives them. The two compete for control of the brain at mealtime, and if the Nutritionist is successful, eventually the memories of giant ice cream sundaes will fade away, replaced by recollections of tasty salads.

I could offer numerous other examples, but Mr. Cogitator has exhausted the forbearance of his companions in this brain, and now, Mr. Photographer is going to have a little fun preparing an illustrative image for you. After that, Mr. Fitness plans on taking us to the gym, after which Mr. Nutrition is taking us out for a healthy salad. Later today, if he’s lucky, Mr. Diligence can muster his collaborators—Mr. Photographer, Mr. Problem-solver, and Mr. Designer—and force the rest of us to continue work on the web site rebuild. (There’s someone in here that would prefer to watch TV and eat chocolate eclairs like normal folks, but he doesn’t stand a chance.)

None of them deserve any credit for their accomplishments, and without credit, there’s no basis for pride or dignity. Mr. Amusement chuckles at all of them, including himself.

Email me.

Duck Dignity

	Enter your search terms
	Web www.rentine.com Submit search form