Something Basic

Before I got involved in this whole architecture thing, I got a BA in psychology. Because I was drinking at the time I forget almost everything I learned. I remember some of the perceptual illusions and the stress-performance inverted U. Mostly I remember the freak cases.

Every once in a while a person will suffer a completely bizarre brain injury - and the psychologists of the world go bat shit probing and prodding them. The one I remember best was a person who had part of their brain severed in a car crash. It was still in their head (the damaged part of their brain) and still working fine but it wasn't attached to anything else. Like a computer without a modem. The particular portion of the brain that was isolated from all the rest was responsible for emotional reactions (or generating emotions or dealing with the output of the emotions part, I forget which). The point is that person effectively lost the ability to emote. He became like the perfect Vulcan.

He could still perform all the manual tasks he had mastered before the accident. And his performance on cognitive tasks wasn't much reduced. It suffered a bit because the victim didn't have any desire to solve cognitive problems and was almost impossible to motivate. The researchers would ask him to do something and either he did it (compliance as a vestigial learned behaviour) or he ignored them.

What makes the case so bizarre is the effect the injury had on the victim's life. You might imagine he'd become like Spock, a clear thinking, logical mofo. But he didn't. He lost the ability to do almost everything - including simple tasks like feeding himself - with any reliability. Think about it, how do you decide what to eat? You ask yourself what you want, or how much effort you want to put into feeding yourself. You make decisions based on priorities and those priorities are not established cognitively (as the car crash victim proved). They are established emotionally.

Mr. Car Crash Victim is a perfect example of a thing we learn that makes us so uncomfortable we all agree to pretend we never learned it. A more famous example of this is G. G. Berry's paradox - "least integer not describable using less than nineteen syllables" - doesn't seem like a big deal but Russell ignored it when he wrote Principia Mathematica. What Mr. C. C. Victim demonstrates is humans think much less than we'd like to think we do. Most of what we do is not the result of logic, training, behavioural conditioning, or reasoning. It is motivated by emotion. "I think therefore I am" is much less accurate than "I emote therefore I am."

So what's the big deal? Why should we care about this? What difference can it possibly make?

Reflect honestly for just a few minutes on the nature of human emotions and the answer should become clear.

People say shit like, "Kids are so cruel" because the fat kid gets picked on. I'm not saying that's ok. But I will say it isn't cruel. It's mean. Kids get angry and because they don't really understand it, that anger tends to splash around a lot. If you're near an angry kid, you're going to get some of it. But it's just anger. As they get older they learn dominance and submission. That's when they flirt with cruelty. But they aren't socialized enough to react against that socialization. They are recreating what they see in the adult world - hierarchy based on power. That's the limit of their cruelty; as soon as the hierarchy is established they go back to being normal. Kids don't have hate in the pure savage way adults do. I don't know when they learn that.

Adults are savage as fuck. We all possess some element of monstrosity within us. We do all we can to ignore it, to pretend it doesn't exist but it is there. Everything awful that we can imagine in others exists in some part in you and in me.

Why focus on the most savage aspects of humanity when we are capable of great dignity and compassion? I think the reason I keep thinking about this shit lately is there is an expectation (an unbelievably naive one) that people will behave well. That we want to do the right thing and protect the environment and stop sweat shop labour and make a fairer society. I believe we do want those things (so long as they don't conflict with stronger and more immediate desires) but the expectation is dangerous. Because we also want to watch the world burn.

This is going to lead me back to zombies and vampires. I'll save that for another post.