Why are we here?

Darwin:

• Natural selection is about survival
• Natural selection rewards tiny changes
• Natural selection explains how but not why
• We are here only long enough to pass on our genes
• This is the reason we are here

Richard Dawkins provides an answer to this existential question from a scientific perspective. Dawkins argues that we appear to be breaking Darwin’s rules through technological progress. What does this mean? In Dawkins view, evolution explains how we came into the world with the basic goals to survive or reproduce. But we freed ourselves from spending all our time passing on our genes. The thing that freed us from our genes was also the result of natural selection: the human brain. Natural selection rewarded a genetic advantage. Our brains got bigger and evolved the ability to set goals. We evolved the capacity to seek, to strive, and to set up short term goals in support of long term ones. The brain also gained the capacity to ask why. We were no longer content with what nature told us to do. Language became a tool. We adopted purposeful behavior through the communication of goals that benefit more than an individual. We accelerated the pace of evolution through technology which is currently evolving millions of times faster than genetic evolution. We created a technological world that enabled us to move faster, alleviate hunger, and cure disease. We started living longer. We invented with purpose. There was no purposeful design in nature. Powered by our technical progress, we explored the universe. We looked across the vacuum of space, backward in time to the birth of the universe. At the other extreme we looked at sub-atomic particles. We dissected the living cell and unraveled the digital code of genes. We hacked ourselves.

Dawkins explains that we provide the purpose in a universe that would otherwise have none. We are in charge. Why we are here resides in us.

The Emotion Machine: Consciousness

The word consciousness troubles Minsky in Chapter 4, The Emotion Machine, as do other words that are often used to describe what's going on inside our brains. Minsky calls them “suitcase words”. That is, words that have been around for centuries and carry too much meaning, like intelligence or cognition. These words point to multiple levels of mental activities, but too often over-simplify rather than explain. Suitcase words need to be unpacked. Chapter 4 argues that suitcase words may also preserve outdated concepts. Long ago, it was thought that a “vital force” explained life in living organisms. A vital force simply infused with the body of an organism to give it life. This belief was widely held before biology explained life as a massive collection of different processes that go on inside cells and membranes replete with intricate biological machinery. Consciousness, Minsky argues, doesn’t explain what happens inside the brain any more than the vital force explains what happens inside living organisms. It’s simply an outdated concept.

Also, an insight about brain evolution in this chapter suggests that the structures in our brains are massively redundant as “large parts of our brains work mainly to correct mistakes that other parts make” because “while some structures worked well in earlier times, they now behave in dangerous ways, so we had to evolve corrections for them.” This is one reason Minsky thinks human psychology is so difficult, because for every rule of thought that psychologists define, there are long lists of exceptions, given our evolutionary brain baggage. As soon as I find a good example of a dangerous behavior that evolution has corrected, I'll capture it.

The Emotion Machine

Read the first two chapters of The Emotion Machine, Minsky 2006. Chapter 1, “Falling in Love”, explains love in mechanical terms and argues that machines could possess the capacity to fall in love, simply by abandoning their critical faculties and forsaking most of their usual goals: “Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments.” Love is a state in which the usual questions and doubts about someone are suppressed. Minsky describes the emotions we usually associate with love: passion, devotion, allegiance, affection, companionship, connection, as a variety of processes, that once triggered, lead us to think in different ways:

When a person you know has fallen in love, it’s almost as though someone new has emerged--a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It’s almost as though a switch had been thrown and a different program has started to run. 

Minsky questions our understanding of loaded words such as emotion. We can’t learn much from a dictionary definition of  the word because a definition only hides what is really a “range of states” too complex to comprehend. He explains mood changes, say from angry to happy, as highly complex mental state changes. And mental states, in Minsky's theories of the mind, are based on the use of many small processes.

The idea of an instinct machine is introduced in this chapter. Minsky explains that three things happen inside an instinct machine: it knows how to recognize situations through sensors, it has some knowledge about how to react to them, and it uses muscles or motors to take action. In an instinct machine, sensors activate motors.

In trying to understand an emotion, an old question, what are emotions and thoughts? should be replaced by what processes are involved in an emotion?

The Emotion Machine

Started to read The Emotion Machine, by Marvin Minksy, first published in 2006. I remember the first time I read about Minsky. It was in Steve Levy’s Hackers, the chapter about the old days at MIT, during Richard Greenblatt’s sophomore year when he wrote a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-1:

Someone like Marvin Minksy might happen along and say “Here is a robot arm. I am leaving this robot arm by the machine.” Immediately, nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between the machine and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control, and figuring a way to create a system where the robot arm knows what the hell it is doing. Then you can see your offspring come to life.

- Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 1984