October 5, 2009

• Science is far too awesome to be entrusted to the unenthusiastic.

  It always disappoints me when I attend
  a lecture about scientific topics that are actually endlessly
  fascinating and full of depth and beauty, delivered as if they were
  dry and mechanical pebble-counting. This does a deep disservice to
  science, and is no doubt a major reason why the majority of people
  don’t understand and appreciate science. (Furthermore, science needs
  to reclaim the word “awesome”; it ought to mean not
  “pleasant, likeable, impressive”, but indeed inspiring
  of awe. The Horsehead Nebula is
  awesome in a way that
  no fashion statement or sports stunt could ever be.)

  Today the topic was perception, and
  particularly perceptual distortion.

  First we were treated to a series of
  diagrams of neurons, labeled with appropriate terminology. I agree
  that everyone should know what dendrites and axons are, but I
  strongly suspect that anyone who has passed high-school biology
  already knows this, and furthermore the conceptual understanding is
  far more important than memorization of the terminology. Science is
  far better served by “All your thoughts are really patterns in a
  bunch of these little squishy fiber things” than it would ever
  be “Here we can see the synaptic bouton of a cholinergic neuron
  in the process of firing its action potential.” (I am reminded
  of Feynman’s criticism of biology: He gave a guest lecture in a
  biology course, and was explaining what the gastrocnemius muscle is
  and what nerve fibers project to it, when a student explained that
  everyone already knew that. He wrote later that this moment made him
  realize why biology was so many centuries behind physics: Everyone
  was memorizing names instead of understanding concepts.)

  Later we received dry, monotonous
  descriptions of perceptual failures in insects and sea slugs, so we
  could all feel superior in our primate neural complexity, thinking
  “Haha, stupid bug; he thinks that orange bottle is a female.”

  Here’s how I would
  teach perceptual distortion. Perhaps I’d start with that one
  slide about the mismatched-mating insect, let the class feel superior
  for a moment; but an instant later I would shatter these presumptions
  with what follows.

  

  This
  is not a human face. In your high-level prefrontal cognition, you
  realize this, and you think it’s silly that I point it out. But if I
  asked you to point out to me where the “eyes” or the
  “mouth” are on this image, or what “emotion” the
  image is expressing, you would all agree—despite the fact
  that this image consists entirely of two dots and two curved lines,
  and has almost nothing to do with eyes, mouths, or emotions. You
  see in this image a human face and human emotions because your brain
  is programmed to see these things; a dog would not see a face here,
  and a lizard could not even perceive any kind of organized image
  beyond a plane of light and color. You see a “smiley face”
  because your brain is programmed to detect human faces with maximum
  sensitivity, even if that produces false positives.

  
  

  This
  is not a human female. Again, you realize this on some level, and
  thus you laugh, but think about it: This is not a human
  female. Ceci n’est pas une pipe!
  It’s a good visual approximation of a human female, but it is not
  a human female, and if you are a
  human male you cannot possibly mate with it and produce offspring.
  Yet no doubt many parts of your brain and endocrine system are
  reacting to it as if it were real. There are other images I could
  project onto your retina which would so stimulate the
  human-female-detection subsystems of your perceptual system that you
  would actually become physiologically aroused, just as if you were
  actually in close sexual contact with a real human female. Indeed,
  pornography, one of
  the most lucrative industries in the world, subsists entirely upon
  this kind of perceptual distortion. Females are hardly immune, but
  they seem to prefer lexical rather than photographic pornography:
  Hence, the wild success of the romance novel. In
  the extreme, some people can actually be brought to orgasm
  by visual and auditory stimuli
  with no actual physical contact. Many others, indeed the majority of
  people, can be sexually aroused by stimuli that are quite different
  from what would actually improve their genetic fitness—masturbation
  and oral sex, for instance. Indeed, perhaps non-heterosexual sexual
  orientation is the result of a kind of perceptual distortion: No
  human male can successfully mate with any other human male, but that
  doesn’t stop us from trying. Nor should it, so far as I can tell. One
  last example.

  
  

  This
  is not an extraterrestrial lifeform being dispatched with a powerful
  assault rifle—indeed, as far as we know there are no such things as
  extraterrestrial lifeforms, and we certainly have never dispatched
  any with powerful assault rifles. Yet when viewing images like this,
  we can feel, at least for a few moments, as if they are real; we can
  take great pleasure from dispatching extraterrestrial lifeforms with
  advanced weapons, despite the fact that all we are really doing is
  interacting with images projected by a computer screen. Nor is this
  phenomenon limited to video games; music, art, literature—any joy
  and beauty we experience in these pursuits is entirely the result of
  our brains being fooled into
  thinking that what we are doing is good for our genes. The reason so
  many artists, nearly all of them male, have made work based on nude
  human females is precisely that their brains were trying to replicate
  the experience of a nude human female—exactly the sort of
  experience that would have been likely to spread their genes. Freud
  wasn’t right about everything, but he definitely was right
  about this: All human arts are fundamentally expressions of the
  sexual drive, the evolutionary drive to reproduce.

  Does this undermine art? Many have
  thought so, but I don’t. (Freud didn’t either.) One can still achieve
  great pleasure from a work of art, even knowing that the symmetry one
  admires in the art is admired because we are bilaterally symmetric
  organisms, and the gentle curves stimulate our brains as if they were
  the curves of another human body.

  Indeed, it can be argued that as much
  as our arts reflect the structure of our bodies, they reflect the
  structure of the universe itself. We are not bilaterian by accident,
  we are bilaterian because our universe is of the kind in which
  bilateral symmetry works exceedingly well. We may seek order and pattern
  because it benefits our genes, but it benefits our genes because life
  itself is fundamentally ordered and patterned in a way that rock and
  gas and empty space are not. Science itself is at least in part a
  product of our genes; we need certain genetic and biological
  capacities in order to even comprehend logic and mathematics and
  desire exploration and knowledge. We evolved to do science; science
  is adaptive. Yet the reason that science works is that it actually
  reflects the true nature of things; science is adaptive because it is
  true. It can be argued that the scientist is in a surprisingly
  literal sense making love to the universe.

  Still, fundamental questions are
  raised, about meaning and value and
  truth. What value is a poem, if it is our equivalent of the peacock’s
  tail? What value is a theorem, if it is an exaggeration of the
  songbird’s call? What value is a nation, if it is the multiplication
  of a chimpanzee’s clan? Philosophy has much to say about cognitive
  science—but cognitive science has just as much to say about
  philosophy.

  “Stupid bug”?
  I think not.

  • 5:49 pm
  • 21 Comments