Mental Bugs and Parasites
If a mind could make changes in how it works, it would face the risk of destroying itself. This could be one reason why our brains evolved so many, partly separate systems, instead of a more unified and centralized one: there may have been substantial advantages to imposing limits on the extent to which our minds could examine themselves!
For example, no single Way to Think should be allowed to have too much control over the systems we use for credit assignment—because then it could make itself grow beyond bound. Similarly, it would be dangerous for any resource to be able to keep enforcing its goals, because then it could make the rest of the mind spend all its time at serving it. The same would apply to any resource that could control our systems for pleasure and pain—for any resource that found a way to completely suppress some instinctive drive might be able to force its person to never sleep, or to work to death, or to starve itself.
While such drastic calamities are rare, a great many common disorders do result from the growth of such ‘mental parasites.’ For many human minds do indeed get enslaved by the self-reproducing sets of ideas that Richard Dawkins entitled “memes. ” Such a collection of concepts may include ways to grow and protect itself by displacing competing sets of ideas.[206] (I should note that many such sets of beliefs are so widespread that they are not regarded as pathological.)
However, many people are so clever that, when their minds get occupied by those ‘mental parasites,’ they may invent or find some social niche in which they can ‘make a living’ by recruiting yet other minds to adopt those same sets of strange ideas.
[Another class of bugs: thinking too much and getting in circles.] Nevertheless, the problem of meandering is certain to re-emerge once we learn how to make machines that examine themselves to formulate their own new problems. Questioning one’s own “top-level” goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile—unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile? How could one decide when a question is properly answered—unless one knows how to answer that question itself? Parents dread such problems and enjoin kids to not take them seriously. We learn to suppress those lines of thoughts, to “not even think about them” and to dismiss the most important of all as nonsensical, viz. the joke “Life is like a bridge.” “In what way?” “How should I know?” Such questions lie beyond the shores of sense and in the end it is Evolution, not Reason, that decides who remains to ask them. (from “Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious.”
To protect themselves from such extremes, our brains evolved ways to balance between becoming too highly centralized, or too dispersed to have much use. We had to be able to concentrate, yet also respond to urgent alarms. We still needed some larger-scale organization because no much smaller part of us could know enough about the world to make good decisions in all situations.
Why don’t we have more bugs than we do?
In the evolution of our brains, each seeming improvement must also have brought additional sorts of dangers and risks—because every time we extended our minds, we also exposed ourselves to making novel types of mistakes. Here are some bugs that everyone’s subject to:
Making generalizations that are too broad.
Failing to deal with exceptions to rules.
Accumulating useless or incorrect information.
Believing things because our imprimers do.
Making superstitious credit assignments.
Confusing real with make-believe things.
Becoming obsessed with unachievable goals,
We cannot hope to ever escape from all bugs because, as every engineer knows, most every change in a large complex system will introduce yet other mistakes that won’t show up till the system is moved a somewhat different environment. In any case, such failures are not uniquely human ones; my own dog also suffers from most of those bugs.
Each human brain is different because it is built by pairs of inherited genes (each chosen by chance from one of the parents). Also, many of its smaller details depend on other events that happened during its early development. So an engineer might wonder how such a machine could possibly work in spite of so many possible variations.
In fact, it was widely believed until recent years, that our brains must be based on some not-yet-understood principles, whereby every fragment of process or knowledge was (in some unknown manner) ‘distributed’ in some global way so that the system still could function in spite of the loss of any part of it. Today, however, we know that many functions do depend on highly localized parts of the brain. However, the arguments in this book suggests a different solution to this: we have so many different ways to accomplish most important jobs that we can tolerate the loss of some skills, because we may be able to switch to another.
In any case, each human brain has many different kinds of parts, and although we don’t yet know what all of them do, I suspect that many of them are involved with helping to suppress the effects of defects and bugs in other parts. Consequently, it will remain hard to guess why our brains evolved as they did, until we build more such systems ourselves—to learn which such bugs are most probable.
§9-6. Why makes feelings so hard to describe?
We usually don’t find it hard to compare two similar kinds of stimuli. For example, one can say that sunlight is brighter than candle light, or that Pink lies somewhere between Red and White, or that a touch on your upper lip is somewhere between your nose and your chin. However, this says nothing about those sensations themselves. Instead, it is more like talking about the distances between some nearby towns on a map—while saying nothing at all about those towns.
Similarly, when you try to describe the feelings that come with being in love, or from suffering fear, or when seeing a pasture or a sea, you’ll soon find that you are mentioning other things that these remind you of, instead of what those feelings are. And then, perhaps, you will come to suspect that one can never really describe what anything is; one can only describe what that thing is like—or what that that thing reminds you of.
For example, if I were to ask about what Red means to you, you might say that this first makes you think of a rose, which reminds you, in turn, of being in love. Red might also remind you of blood, and make you feel some sense of dread or fear. Similarly Green might make one think about pastoral scenes and Blue might suggest the sky or the sea.
I have mentioned all this to emphasize the complexity of what can happen when a person attends to the sight of a single color or the sensation of a single touch. However, as many philosophers have complained, those remindings don’t seem to describe or explain the experience of seeing that color or feeling that touch. Indeed, some present-day philosophers regard this to be one of the hardest problems they have tried to face: Why do people experience events—instead of just simply processing them. Listen to one such philosopher:
206
Richard Dawkins,