Long AnglesHey, I finally wrote that thing! It's been a couple months, but better late than never, right? XD To start with, a couple quick warnings. First, I’m an atheist, and not really the spiritual sort either. As such, this is all written from an atheistic perspective, (And a very particular one at that), and I worry that those of you who don’t share that perspective might find it uncomfortable to read? That’s not to say that you shouldn’t read it, but you should know that and be prepared for it.
Second, I'm going to base a lot of this in science thats not fully established and that I don’t entirely understand, so some of it will likely end up being wrong - probably at least 10%. It should be interesting and thought provoking and a decent learning experience though, and I hope to get the broad strokes right, so I'm gonna go ahead with it anyway. Just make sure you take everything with a grain of salt, alright?
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So, let's talk about human nature. What /is/ human nature? That is to say, what does it mean to be human, when you get right down to it? What holds true between all of us? What is our common ground, our unifying experience? I think I can answer that. But first, I need to explain a few very important but very complicated concepts.
The first is evolution. Evolution is the primary force responsible for bringing us into existence. It is, you could say, the closest thing we have to a creator. But, it is not a kind creator, not a gentle creator, not a considerate creator. You can read more about it here, if you’re curious:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god
To give you the short version, the evolutionary process has a lot of shortcomings. It has no thought, no sense of morality, no ability to plan for the future. Genes which currently cause their frequency to increase will do so, genes which don’t, won’t. Morality and long-term planning don’t enter into it, those are human inventions. Worse still, the only factor that evolution cares about is whether your genes propagate and survive. So a gene that increases the chance of you having children at the cost of making you miserable is a winning gene, so far as evolutions is concerned.
But, evolution does have some advantages too. In passing on the benefits of intelligence, evolution passes too on it’s limitations. Never will evolution miss some counter-intuitive idea because it “didn’t think of it.” Never will it become locked into a single strategy because thats all it’s familiar with. Never will it continue to fail because it’s too stubborn to admit it’s wrong. Nothing is too strange and weird for evolution to imagine, because evolution does not imagine. Shrimp that fire high power bubble bullets to knock out or kill prey, or even to tunnel into solid rock to make homes for themselves? Sure, why not. Birds that give up flying and become amazing swimmers – at the south pole, one of the coldest places on earth? Go for it. Plants that reproduce by surrounding their seeds in delicious fruit and /inviting them to be eaten/? Sounds like a killer strategy, lets use that everywhere.
Why does this matter to us, you might ask? Because this is where we came from. We evolved. We emerged from the filth and the muck, brought forth by thoughtless amoral evolution. It gave us all our strengths - and all our weaknesses. It gave us the strength in our bones, the power in our muscles. It gave us reflexes, and stamina, and intelligence too. Even the morality and foresight it lacks, it managed to give us. But it also gave us a host of flaws.
For example, did you know that our eyes are backwards? That is to say, the blood vessels and neural wiring required to make our eyes are actually placed /in front/ of the lenses. We can’t normally see them because our brains edit what we see to remove them, (Yes, really!) but there are various tricks to make the shadows visible, if you want to google the problem. Same thing with our blind spots – thats where the neural wiring passes through the lenses to reach our brains. Which, again, edit the image to conceal the defect and preserve overall vision quality.
There’s more, but I don’t want to make this too long, so I’ll just leave a link to this article: https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-most-unfortunate-design-flaws-in-the-human-body-1518242787
Next, let me talk about Predictive Processing. Predictive Processing is a hot new theory in neural science, not fully confirmed but very promising, and I personally think it sheds a lot of light on the subject. It states that the brain doesn’t just wait to receive sensory input, but is constantly creating and updating it’s own theories and models (or ‘predictions’, if you will), and checking them against the incoming data, and then using the resulting error to adjust and respond. This is actually a fairly common technique in data processing and compression – match the data against another set of data and only transmit the difference. It can save you a lot of bandwidth. Now, why is that important? Because bandwidth, and processing in general, are a limited resource that you can never have enough of, for reasons that will be discussed later. This impacts the way we think about and interact with the world in a number of different ways.
For example, it’s theorized that this is used not just to understand the world, but drives us to interact with it in certain ways. You see something out of the corner of your eye but you’re not sure what it is, what do you do? You turn your head to get a better look. Or, to get even more crazy, for motion, it’s been suggested that first we adjust our model of where our limbs are, and then the bits of our brain responsible for actually controlling them adjust their positions to match. In essence, adjusting reality to fit the models, not just the models to fit reality. Some even suggest that uncertainty reduction and error minimization are the fundamental, ultimate drives of the brain, and everything else is hacked in as a secondary drive, by hardcoding it’s prediction. So our brains will always generate the prediction “Not Hungry”, and anytime our body disagrees and says “No, actually, I am hungry”, we get predictive error and the only way to resolve it is to go eat something. Same with sleep, health, etc, etc.
Again, this is still just a hypothesis, but I’ve heard it fits the evidence pretty well. Even the physical structure of the brain supports it. Most of the actual “thinky bits” of the brain are around the outside, while the inside is mostly supporting infrastructure. To use a metaphor, most of the computers are on the outside, while the inside is mostly maintenance hallways, power lines, data lines, coolant pipes, that kind of thing. This means that bandwidth for transmitting between different sections is at a premium, so spending some computation making predictions so you can transmit less information is worthwhile.
What this means for us, is that much of our brains are not under our conscious control. They work autonomously, trying to minimize predictive error in their various ways. And of course, as with anything, especially anything evolved, they have their flaws. Depression, mania, basically any mental condition worth complaining about is the result of this process failing.
☭⚑ Comrade Angles ⚑☭
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Comrade Angles
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