This post is hard to write .. and equally hard to read and internalise.
"The passion between Darcy and Elizabeth was frozen in time, locked down by the strictures of Regency England. As they are driven away after their wedding, the final shot shows Darcy leaning across Elizabeth: finally, finally! - their lips touch."How romantic.
I have read science-fiction stories which would narrate the scene thus:
"The larger protoplasmic bag of fluids and guts slithered towards the smaller one. The damp, tumescent borders of their ingestion orifices made contact and an exchange of mucus and pre-digestion fluids took place."You see what I did there. But it's a reframing designed to elicit disgust - and that's not what this post is about. Try this:
"The two multicellular systems were positioned adjacently in the carriage. Both neural nets, housed in their respective skull cavities, were in a state of dynamic tension. Brainstem and limbic arousal (evolved to coordinate mating behaviour) was suppressed by higher cortical inhibition (encoding social norms). Only a small preliminary act escaped this standoff, which duly occurred."The stance of the engineer or evolutionary biologist - abstracting from the emotional experience of being human. The fish doesn't see the water it swims in; we don't see each other the way the Martian Anthropologist (or a psychopath) would.
Yet it is the truth.
When I consider myself not as a Cartesian 'person’ but as a mobile biological neural net with a defined lifespan, I find that somehow reassuring (the truth shall set you free), no matter that it is subversive of every possible ambition, sentiment or point. But none of us (putting aside psychopathy) can consistently live our lives like that. We're hardwired not to - it would be evolutionarily self-defeating - indeed, how does it feel to you to even engage with this line of thought?
Scott Bakker, in his blog Three Pound Brain, has been arguing this it seems like forever.
Are we sure it's hardwired and not culturally determined? To what extent could training (which is a kind of inculturation I would think) produce a more "psychopathic" mindset (e.g., Buddhist monks, or even a surgeons ability to cut into people)?
ReplyDeleteUltimately I'd think nature vs nurture is a distinction without a significant difference - there's really just physics. All outcomes are equally physical, regardless of whether they're due to genes or indoctrination.
ReplyDeleteNot sure complete reductionism delivers the goods. Ultimately everything humanity has ever accomplished is just physics. But sometimes thinking in terms of the consequences of the higher level boundary conditions can be more illuminating.
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