My wife, Eve, has been staying with me for three weeks, and will be here through the month of November. Those of you who’ve been keeping track will know that we haven’t lived together for three years, although we’re best friends. 

History: I found after two years of retirement that I wanted a much simpler life, and have been living in an apartment ever since. Eve preferred living in our house, but has been exploring the West by RV for about a year and a half, and decided to rent the house for a few months. When she discovered that she needed to return to Oakland to renew her driver’s license, she decided it would be a good time to get some oral surgery done, too. Then there’s Thanksgiving and her grandchild’s birthday–two years old this year–so she decided on a somewhat extended stay. With the house unavailable, I volunteered my apartment, so here we are, with her in the bedroom and me on the living room futon, quite cozy.

You may imagine that we both had to make some adjustments, and the first indication for me was noticing some annoyance with her at minor inconveniences. Since my primary form of meditation is simply to pay attention to the contents of consciousness from moment to moment, I became aware of this annoyance–which has become a rare emotional experience for me–fairly quickly. 

It used to be much more frequent, and when it arose, my response in those days had been to identify with and reinforce it, recalling other similar occasions and “building a case” against the person associated with the annoyance. Howie calls this kind of identification, “Taking birth as an annoyed person.” Marvin Minsky might call it switching to a different sub-personality. Whatever you call it, I find the state of being annoyed unpleasant, and would like to switch to a more enjoyable state as soon as possible.

I have written before about smiling as a mood-altering technique, and fortunately, it soon occurred to me to apply it to this situation. I started smiling at the first blush of annoyance, and wonderfully, it worked. As I’ve mentioned before, there seems to be a connection between emotions and the neurons that produce the muscle contractions of smiling.

In some circles, this kind of mood-manipulation would be considered repression, an avoidance of some underlying psychological problem that needs to be “worked through.” I agree that understanding one’s emotional reactions is well worth exploring, but there is a kind of general understanding that can be applied to specific reactions that doesn’t require minutely examining each one–which often results in nothing more than rationalization, justification, and identification with the reaction. 

The general understanding is this: whatever I’m feeling, it is a result of my biological propensities as modified by my personal history. With different propensities and a different history, my reactions would be different, sometimes in radical ways. All such reactions are accidents–chance associations of circumstances–and viewing them in this way lets me identify much less with these reactions as “who I am.” 

This perspective allows me to ask of any emotion that sweeps through my brain, “Does this feeling enhance my well-being? Does it increase my enjoyment of life? Does it prepare me to better handle some future circumstance?” If the answer is no, then why should I be controlled by an accident of history if I can replace unpleasant emotions with joy, simply by smiling?

Eliminating my annoyance in this way doesn’t alter my preferences. Life is much more complicated with Eve here, and I relish the thought of my future solitude. In the meantime, I can enjoy her presence without annoyance–I’m getting real hugs these days instead of virtual ones. We are best friends, after all–we have many things in common–and we know, understand, and accept each other more than any other human being we’ve ever known. There’s something to be said for that.

A Happy Accident

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If you’ve read or listened to much of my stuff, you’ll know that one of my major interests is in how the brain constructs our reality, and how understanding that can affect the way we think of ourselves and who we are. Tom’s piece fits right into that interest and brings in the dimension of lucid dreaming that I haven’t talked about. Anything that erodes our conventional, erroneous view of human reality is right up my alley of course, and Tom fleshes out this idea in his usual clear and engrossing way. I highly recommend reading the piece. He includes other references that are also well worth pursuing.

Here is a teaser that states my main focus:

“As people learn about lucid dreaming, an interesting fact about the brain will become known: it is a virtual reality generator. But an even more remarkable fact is waiting in the wings: waking experience is virtual reality too.”

The Perry talk brings in still another point of view: the reality of video games versus the reality of real life. I wrote a comment on it for the TED site which I’ll reproduce here with additional comments. Some of the ideas are borrowed from Tom Clark’s article and his references:

Video games are not the only source of virtual reality in town. As Highland said in the video Perry showed, a good insurance commercial can create experience real enough to bring tears to those of us who become easily immersed. The same is true of books and movies.

The difference between these kinds of virtual reality and physical reality is that we can step away from the video game, movie, or book, and become aware of the technology that produced the experience. It is impossible, however, to step away from the brain, which is the technology producing our experience of “physical” reality. All our experience happens in the brain, and the only difference in the varieties of experience is the kind of technology that provides the brain with it’s material–books, TV, movies, video games, or none of the above.

Some people can read a book and maintain awareness of the author’s style, intent, vocabulary, etc., while they’re reading, and some people can watch movies or play video games with a similar level of awareness of the technology that’s controlling their sensory inputs. It is more difficult to experience dreaming or ordinary waking reality with the same level of awareness of how the brain is translating its inputs into a model of the outside world. 

Our experience of the physical world is as virtual as anything else, except for the kinds of constraints involved. In a novel, we’re constrained by the author’s skill and our own past experience–the emotional and physical repertoire we bring to the book. We’re constrained by the technology and programming of the video game and movie as well. In our everyday virtual experience, we’re constrained by the limitations of our sensory apparatus, and by the stimuli the physical world gives our brains to work with–we can’t see magnetic fields; we can’t see through walls.

Although we can never experience reality directly, we can become more aware of the technology that produces the virtual reality that we live in–our brain. We can become more aware of its limitations–optical illusions can baffle it–and we can become more aware of how our history has programmed our brains. Our parents, schools, friends, culture, etc. have instilled ideas about what is real and important. The sciences of sociology, psychology, and neurology can  help us gain perspective on the forces that have produced our current reality, and offer ways of enlarging on prior programming.

Tom Clark brings up an extreme version of seeing through the mechanisms of our brain’s reality models, the example of Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest of the Vietnam War:

“Possibly their monastic training had permitted them to attain the direct realization that waking experience, in particular the experience of self, is indeed a construction, such that they were no longer controlled by pain or the thought of death. Perhaps they had awoken, at least to some degree, from the “dream” of the waking virtual world.”

I have no interest in being capable of self-immolation, but I do make an ongoing attempt to be aware, from moment to moment, of the brain processes producing my experience. I would like for my everyday experience to be lucid in the way that dreams can be; to be aware, as it happens, that my experience of reality, including my self, is virtual. 

Techno-Dream

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“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

That’s from Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the first world war, quoted by Roger Cohen in a great column in today’s New York Times. If you look at how we got into the war in Iraq, you’ll see that things haven’t changed much in the last century.

In another of Kipling’s poems from the same period, we see that the origins of financial crises haven’t changed much either:

“In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul:”

Cohen’s theme is the difference between reality on the one hand, and fiction, fantasy, and wishful thinking on the other. When we lose sight of reality, the result is mayhem and suffering of one kind or another. He concludes the piece with a call for realists in the White House. 

I’d like to add that an increase in the number of realists in the general population is not a bad idea either, and for proof of that–if you need any–you should certainly see Bill Maher in “Religulous”. (A great interview with Maher and the director, Larry Charles, is here.)

In spite of Maher’s wonderful sense of humor, I didn’t find myself laughing much. The extent of fantasy, fiction, and wishful thinking in most religions has too many unfortunate consequences for levity, and trying to show believers how out of touch with reality they are is a hopeless task, as Maher’s efforts in that direction demonstrate. His only offer of hope is that, in this country, there are 16 million people who are non-religious, and given the success of other, much smaller minorities in securing their rights, there is reason to think that non-believers might advance their own rights as well–if they got organized.

One of the major difficulties in short-circuiting the deleterious consequences of religion was illustrated in an interview with two young former Mormon’s who fully appreciated the fantasy elements of that religion. When Maher asked why more Mormons didn’t reject these fanciful beliefs, the answer was that to do so was social suicide: rejection by family, friends, and community. 

Therein lies a great difficulty in trying to inject reality into any religion. Renouncing the religion you were raised in often means a loss of social identity, as well as the personal sense of who you are, and that is a difficult prospect to face unless life has prepared you for it. Perhaps our greatest cause for hope is that the march of science and technology will prepare people for this transition to a new identity; educate them in ways of thinking critically, with a greater respect for the constraints of reality. 

Science implies the connectedness of everything, although unfortunately that connectedness is not emphasized as often as it could be. In our interdependence with everything else through the dynamic processes that move the universe, it is possible to forge a vision of ourselves, an identity, that unites all of humankind rather than dividing us into opposing sects as religions do. 

Tom Clark does a great job of presenting that kind of reality-based view of ourselves and of our relationships with each other and the encompassing universe. Here is his introduction to a wealth of resources on the subject:

“Although naturalism may at first seem an unlikely basis for spirituality, a naturalistic vision of ourselves and the world can inspire and inform spiritual experience.  Naturalism understands such experience as psychological states constituted by the activity of our brains, but this doesn’t lessen the appeal of such experience, or render it less profound.  Appreciating the fact of our complete inclusion in nature can generate feelings of connection and meaning that rival those offered by traditional religions, and those feelings reflect the empirical reality of our being at home in the cosmos.” 

Among those resources are several that refer to Buddhism or enlightenment, which points up Buddhism’s lack of supernatural fantasies compared to most other organized religions. Perhaps that and the fact that Buddhists are not advocating anyone’s annihilation are why Maher’s film makes no reference to them.

Science, technology, education, and communication–more of these could diminish the fictions, fantasies, and wishful thinking that lead to wars and financial crises. 

A Real Beauty

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Although she begins by saying she’s not going to talk about vaginas, her tales of vagina warriors near the end are highly relevant to her main topic: security/insecurity. Women must often risk their security within conventional and repressive social systems to increase their greater security in a new system that honors their rights. 

Eve’s highly laudable efforts toward educating women in their possibilities and legal protections for them, are vital to such transformations, but while she mentions the role of us-versus-them situations in her discussion of security, it doesn’t come up in her talk of the V-Day efforts. 

There is a built in us-vs-them situation in the sexual differences between women and men. These differences are magnified in societies that repress women, but are important factors, even in the most advanced. If we could understand the biological compulsions that are inherent in being a woman or man, we would have another tool in the arsenal against human suffering. 

It amazes me that women volunteer their bodies for the process of pregnancy and childbirth. To imprison yourself in the demands and inconveniences of pregnancy for nine months is a mammoth undertaking, especially when you know that the outcome is a painful birth, followed by a recovery period that can, with complications, last for the rest of your life. Is it any wonder that women are compelled, both biologically, socially, and psychologically, to carefully choose their partner in this endeavor? 

The compulsion to approach reproduction with caution is powerful, and one which, in my limited experience, many women themselves feel rebellious toward. This rebellion results in some women finding fantasies of rape sexually exciting, even though rape in reality is feared and avoided. With someone they trust, they may openly invite and apparently enjoy pretended rape: In being overwhelmed by force, they are temporarily freed from the constraints of caution.  In extreme cases, this rebellion against compulsion may lead women to put themselves in risky situations where rape is a real possibility.

Men, on the other hand, have strong biological compulsions toward reproduction, but without the compulsion of caution. They feel compelled to disseminate their DNA as widely as possible, and let someone else worry about the aftermath. They are often restrained by social conventions, fortunately, but more problematically, they find themselves in a struggle with women, who control access to the object of male compulsion: sex. He says, “Yes,” she says, “No,” and while she often feels resentment and hostility toward his pressure, he feels resentment and hostility toward her reluctance. It is not a situation designed for harmony; it is exactly the kind of us-vs them situation that Eve so eloquently points to as the cause of much insecurity and hostility in general human affairs.

In my case, I was taught as a child that my penis was a disgusting thing, and later, that seminal fluids were the ultimate contaminant. In my early relations with women, their caution gave further proof that my body was disgusting. When I finally encountered women who wanted sex, I was faced with the odd fact of their desire for what had previously been reinforced as repulsive–confusing, to say the least. I have since learned to love this peculiar contraption that has brought me such pleasure and anxiety, but the re-orchestration of my attitudes was not easy or rapid. There were times when I felt outright hostility toward women for what I experienced as rejection and disdain. Rape fantasies and stories of rape were, indeed, sexually exciting; although, fortunately, my inhibitions were well established. 

When I came to understand the biological causes of our sex-related compulsions, the knowledge gained became a new cause in determining my behavior, and my hostility evaporated. I could see that neither women nor men volunteered to be saddled with their respective compulsions, and that we all deserved compassion.

It may be impossible, for now, to disseminate this kind of naturalistic, evolutionary understanding of behavior very widely, but science and the internet march on, and there is hope.

News! Episode One of the Bare Brains podcast is now available as text, searchable and easily quotable. There’s a link in the sidebar, and right here.

Protection, Rejection, Isolation

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“This is as good as it gets.” That was the thought that occurred to me as I was settling into the recliner for a nap, and it gave me a huge laugh. I’m going to explain the cause for laughter Southern style, but if you get bored you can scroll to the end.

After I retired, I was only driving my old 1984 Volvo a couple of times a month; almost everything I need is within walking distance. When Zipcars became available in my neighborhood last year, I decided I could rent if I really needed a car, and I could get rid of the Volvo. California has an early retirement program for old cars, paying $650 and then crushing them.

Still, walking takes time, and most of my errands took me along busy streets, where I was breathing more exhaust than I would like, even though Oakland’s air is fairly clean by urban standards, what with breezes coming in off the bay. Being a little something of a techno-geek, I was looking for a green bridge vehicle between walking and driving, and last summer, after much deliberation, I put together an electric bicycle, on which I got a couple of rides before it was stolen. 

I had ridden the bike just enough to learn that I didn’t feel comfortable riding it on the street, which ruled out electric scooters and motorcycles, which I had also been considering. I decided to get rid of the Volvo anyway, which I did last September. I bought a wonderful little tagalong shopping cart, and found I almost never needed to rent a car. 

But by April of this year, it started bothering me that walking everywhere was eating into my creative time, and there was still the pollution issue. I had ruled out the Segway in my earlier deliberations because of the expense, but there was a dealer across the lake from me, Segway of Oakland, and after taking a tour on one, I decided to spring for it.

I’ve had it almost five months now, and I love it. Besides cutting down the time it takes to get around the ‘hood, I range a little further than I would if I were walking: over to Piedmont, Rockridge, and even a couple of times to the Home Depot in Emeryville. I’ve also taken it on BART over to the city a few times, and gone further than I ever did just walking.

In addition, the more I rode it, the more comfortable I became with it, and the more fun it was to ride, which, unfortunately, led to my current condition.

I had been to the gym, so was a little tired–maybe less alert than usual–and was on my way to Ace Hardware when I encountered a car parked in a driveway, blocking the sidewalk. It’s legal to ride a Segway on the street, but I prefer sidewalks, both to avoid traffic and because it’s more fun with the little hazards I have to avoid. To get around the car, I would have to get one wheel in the dirt and go over a little curb, and the further from the car I got, the higher the curb. My brain decided to get as close to the car as possible, but it miscalculated, and I was going too fast. The right wheel of the Segway didn’t quite clear the underside of the car’s bumper, and when it hit, it stopped, catapulting me onto the concrete. 

I have a very clear memory of everything up to the point of contact with the bumper, but there is a total blank from that moment to the one where I found myself on my left side in the driveway, propped on my left forearm–which apparently took most of the force of impact–watching the Segway roll down the sidewalk till it tilted forward and crashed, unharmed. I have no sensation of flying through the air, no image of the approaching concrete, and no feeling of contact when I landed. It seems very strange to me to have such an experience with absolutely no mental record–oh well…

I got up and dusted myself off as I walked over to retrieve the Segway, and while my left arm was mildly uncomfortable, there was no indication of injury. I finished my errand, and went home to examine myself more closely.

I had some very mild abrasions on my forearm, and that arm was still  a little uncomfortable, but I seemed not much the worse for it till the next day, and the day after, and for three weeks now. It seems I strained every muscle in that arm, upper and lower, and a bruise appeared that wrapped around my elbow and down several inches of the forearm. Over time the bruise went from blue, to orange, to now, a pale yellow. At first, I had a very limited range of pain-free motion, but the arm works fairly normally now except for a limited capacity to bear weight without pain, and some twisting motions of the wrist that bring a jab in one particular forearm muscle.

So as I was settling into my chair for a nap, I did so with ice packs on the upper and lower sides of the left forearm–I ice it down a couple or three times a day, which helps. And yet, I felt blissfully happy, which is my most frequent state of mind, and that’s when “This is as good as it gets,” popped into consciousness, in full sincerity, with no hint of irony, which, I think, is why it brought on laughter.

I have been laughing a lot since the accident, every time I feel a jolt of pain. Even though I would very much prefer not to have that experience, somehow it seems amusing. I would so much prefer not having it that I have been riding much more cautiously these last three weeks. Fortunately, riding the Segway doesn’t require any of the force or movements that cause pain, and I’ve been riding it on my errands, as usual. Riding carefully, and more slowly, is not as much fun, but I realize that I was lucky. I could have broken bones, with any number of more serious injuries than I actually have.

I have probably talked more about adapting to changed circumstances in Bare Brains, particularly Episodes Five and Six, than I have written about here, but briefly: we are all going to get old, if we’re lucky, losing various abilities along the way, culminating in frailty of one kind or another and death. While we have a tendency to pretend that we’ll stay young forever, science hasn’t progressed that far yet, and in the meantime, learning to adapt to loss is conducive to happiness. 

If I never recover from the accident any more than I have so far, I will be happy. I’ve been practicing…

Youth and Age

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These early thinkers fell for a trap I wrote about in an earlier post, “Love, Romance, and Meaning,” the trap of abstract thinking: abstract thinking allows us to imagine questions that don’t have answers. The question, “What is the meaning of life?” takes it for granted that life is some kind of thing, or object, and that objects have an essence that makes them what they are. The problem, then, is that the terms of the question don’t have counterparts in reality: there is no thing that corresponds to “life” in the world that we can perceive and measure. There are organisms that are living, because all their internal processes are interacting in a coordinated way. These ongoing processes define what is alive and what isn’t, not some sort of essence.

I got a new perspective on this issue from an interview with John Peacocke in the Fall, 2008 issue of Tricycle. He’s the one who brought up Socrates, Plato, and the Upanishads, and noted that these kinds of questions are in the realm of metaphysics. The Buddha avoided metaphysical questions, “asking not so much what as how.” 

“The self, therefore, according to this view, exists as a set of interrelated processes rather than as an unchanging thing; so rather than try to find an essence, the Buddha chooses to simply describe a phenomenon, avoiding the essentialist trap.” 

The whole interview is available at the link, and well worth reading.

The Buddha got himself out of the trap, but we in the West are the heirs of Socrates and Plato, and although I don’t remember ever hearing the word “metaphysics” growing up in my little town, the Christian culture there was permeated with metaphysical ideas–notions of entities beyond the realm of science: god, the soul, the holy ghost, heaven, hell, etc. 

While I was relieved of the belief in god by Philip Wylie at the age of 17, I was left with a metaphysical point of view: I thought there had to be some essential meaning in life, god or no god. The residue of that early upbringing made me miserable for years–most of my life, really–which I’ve written about at length in The Journal. 

To think that most of that anguish might have been avoided if I’d grown up Buddhist… But then, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this, and you wouldn’t be sitting there reading it. Ah well…

What Kind of Thing is This?

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Everyone believes in science, at least implicitly, when they step on an airplane, go to the doctor, or make a phone call, but when they look in the mirror, most people, unfortunately, see a creature that is beyond the realm of science. Most of us grow up schooled in seeing our selves as in charge of our bodies and minds, starting with potty training, if not sooner. That teaching, while socially convenient, doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny.

My efforts on this blog and my web site are intended, in one way or another, to help people who are so inclined to develop a more realistic view of themselves which, at the same time, is more conducive to happiness and fulfillment than the traditional point of view. Tom Clark’s efforts are similarly directed, although with a different approach and perspective. He is a much more philosophically accomplished fellow than I, and capable of a remarkable clarity of thought and presentation.

He’s also more inclined to social and organizational activities, and on a recent addition to his web site, has brought together a collection of people whose lives and ideas are wonderfully similar to mine and his. I found it gratifying to read their experiences, and to realize what good company I’m in. I hope you’ll check it out: “Living in Light of Naturalism.”

In addition he’s organized the Center for Naturalism, a non-profit educational organization, and put together a web site with video and audio presentations, among other resources, that is well worth your time.

As for me, I’ve transcribed Episode One of Bare Brains, and am working on getting that up on the web site, the newly designed version of which is causing some difficulty with odd glitches popping up here and there. My knowledge of CSS is far from complete, and I’m afraid the inadequacies of my education are on display till I can patch them up. Stay tuned…

Same Base, Different Directions

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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! If you click the appropriate links to the right, you can check it out. I haven’t taken the old one down yet, so you can compare the two if you’re interested. (The old one is still at www.rentine.com.) I had great fun redesigning it, and I “love” it…

I Love This, Too

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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, then you no longer need to think of pleasure as a ‘basic’ or all-or-none thing. For now 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 re-word 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 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.

Duck Dignity

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I laughed at the error, then laughed at the laughing, realizing that, in effect, one part of my brain was laughing at another part for making a mistake. Then the thought occurred to me that if you have multiple personalities, they can keep each other company, eliminating the need for outside friends, which brought on the biggest chuckle of all.

In The Book of Serenity, there’s a passage:

“There is still someone who laughs, ha! ha!” But tell me, who is it, laughing at what? “If you know this one, your task of study is finished.”(p. 194, 1990)

I puzzled over that for a long time, and I didn’t have an answer that satisfied me until I came to understand how the brain functions, helped largely by Minsky’s, “Society of Mind.”

Applying a modular understanding of the brain to last night’s bout of laughter: as I was prepping the bed, part of my brain was still thinking about the current stage in redesigning my web site, and it was hogging resources (Minsky again, “The Emotion Machine,”) that the bed-prep module needed to execute the correct option. A “critic,” Minsky’s term for one of the brain’s monitoring networks, noted the error and triggered “the one who laughs:” another network. My brain has concluded that laughter is the optimal response to mistakes of this kind, which are brought on by its different goals competing for scarce resources.

Chapter 2, “Attachments and Goals,” in “The Emotion Machine,” offers a wonderfully insightful account of how goals are acquired and modified that has clarified my own thinking tremendously. The Link I’ve given is to a draft of the chapter on Minsky’s website, a valuable read.

One of the things he discusses is how we come to develop models of ourselves, and then how we react with shame when our behavior doesn’t match our expectations, based on these models. “Such feelings frequently come to us when we’re in the presence of those we respect, or those by whom we wish to be respected…”(p. 39) These “imprimers”–people or ideas that we become attached to in the course of our history–don’t have to actually be present: we internalize their values and then react to our own behavior as if they were watching. These attachments, as Minsky says, “… teach us ends, not means–and thus impose our parents’ dreams on us.”(p. 65) And here’s the real kicker: “…when you come right down to it, all our attachments are made to fictions; you never connect to an actual person, but only to the models you’ve made to represent your conceptions of them.”(p. 65)

That last quote is the key to as much freedom from our conditioning as is possible. All the choices we make are the products of our history as interpreted by brain machinery–they are as determined as any other natural process–but our understanding of these processes becomes part of our history, and can alter the effects of the history that came before. If all our attachments are made to fictions, and if we can understand how those fictions were constructed, we can eliminate their painful constituents.

Example: I have felt shame, or at least disappointment, when I have experienced lapses like the one I had last night in spreading the blanket instead of bunching it neatly to the side of the bed. Feeling such emotions is the result of having a model of oneself that entails holding this “self” responsible for paying attention to the task at hand. I no longer have such a model. I see my brain as a device in which numerous goals compete for scarce resources, and there is no “self” in charge of the competition. When resources are allocated in a way that results in mistakes, then there are costs involved: Last night I could have been in bed 20 seconds sooner if the bed-prep module had gotten a little more attention. When the mistakes are more costly, or could be more costly, the brain takes that into account and allocates resources more carefully. The “one who laughs” can be amused by the less costly mistakes–among other things–and the “stern disciplinarian” is triggered when the stakes are higher. Actually, the one who laughs is often amused at the very fact that the stern disciplinarian was called into action.

In either case, “I” am just along for the ride, which reminds me of a song lyric from Kenny Rogers and the First Edition: “I just dropped in (to see what condition my condition was in).”

Smiling, Not Laughing

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