Last night I dreamed I was at a gathering of some kind at the beach, only there was no beach visible. We seemed to be next to the main Oakland Post Office, and I was standing at the back of the crowd, with a speaker on the podium. Someone had hired a flutist who turned out to be a goth, with multiple piercings, leather, studs and spikes everywhere. She played well, though, and after a brief performance joined her girlfriend at the back of the crowd, who gave her a friendly cuff of congratulations, which started a general round of rough-housing, ending up with the two of them wrestling quite vigorously but happily on the ground right in front of me. The woman who had hired her was quite distressed, and had the two of them removed from the area, at which point I abruptly woke up.
The first thought that popped clearly into mind was, “Why am I awake?” Followed by, “It (my brain) must not have found that dream particularly interesting.” On checking my vital signs, I found that I probably needed to pee, and on my short journey from the bedroom, to the bathroom, to the kitchen for a couple of sips of the smoothie I keep in the fridge for such occasions (I pee 5 or 6 times a night—high fluid intake—another story,) I was thinking that my perplexity about why I had awakened was really appropriate to every moment of the waking day.
From moment to moment, the brain is analyzing our situation, comparing it to past experience, and coming up with behaviors that seem to be appropriate. Since we are social creatures, one of the things the brain needs to do is to devise a story that can be told to justify whatever behavior it has come up with so that our social identity is maintained or improved. This is essential to our well-being.
The problem is that the brain doesn’t know how it decided on any particular behavior. The computational process is so complex, and carried out by so many scattered parts of the brain—none of which knows what it is doing or why—that no one part of the brain can comprehend the whole process. As a result, figuring out why one behavior came up instead of another is a guessing game, even for the brain itself, and yet it needs to construct a story—something to tell the neighbors.
How this process works can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in Michael Gazzaniga’s work with people who have had some of the connections severed between the two hemispheres of their brain. The non-speaking part of the brain can be shown a stimulus which the speaking part can be aware of only by the emotional reaction of the mute one—it can’t know the specifics of the stimulus. Despite this lack of information, the speaking part will come up with what seems like a plausible reason for the reaction, if asked—its social need for justification is being served.
Those of us who still have intact brains have more information to work with, so we can make more informed guesses about why we’re doing what we’re doing, but we’re still largely in the dark. There’s no way to grasp the details of the processing that produced the behavior.
So why did I wake up at that particular time last night? I don’t know, any more than I know why I’m writing this sentence. I can give you an answer that will make me sound noble and high-minded, but who knows? Maybe I’m just trying to attract a better class of friends.
I would like to keep the level of my ignorance clearly in mind. I would like to remember that I’m floating along in a sea of neural processes that are beyond my comprehension, just guessing at where I am and how I got here.
I’ll leave you with something I told Laura in The Letters, Part 4:
There is a story about a rabbi in the old country. Every day this Cossack would see the rabbi walking down the same street at the same time, and one day it occurred to him to ask, “Hey Rabbi, where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” the rabbi answered.
“I see you every day going down the same street at the same time and you tell me you don’t know where you’re going?”
“I don’t know,” said the rabbi.
First the Cossack was annoyed, then he was angry, and finally he took the rabbi off to jail. As he was closing the cell door, the rabbi said softly, “I told you I didn’t know.”
In the ultimate sense none of us know where we are going, but if you are talking to a Cossack, it is expedient to speak in terms that he understands. This is what the Zen folks call “acting according to circumstances.”
In public, pretend you know where you are and where you’re going.
You’d Better Have A Good Reason For This
[...] an earlier post: “I would like to keep the level of my ignorance clearly in mind. I would like to remember that [...]