The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Shimon Edelman
Authors: Shimon Edelman
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mutually beneficial (symbiotic rather than neutral or parasitic), as it is in birdsong. Male birds who sing better get more chances to dazzle a female, leading to the genetic evolution of brains that are better at learning, retaining, and performing songs. At the same time, songs that better fit the existing bird brains and vocal apparatus get more chances to replicate, leading to the (often much faster) cultural evolution of songs that are easier to learn, retain, and perform.
In no other case has co-evolution of memes and their hosts led to a more world-shattering outcome than in human language. In this one species of perpetually hungry, highly social, and highly competitive information processors, which threw in its fate with an initially small band of information packets that proved highly infectious, selection pressure set off a runaway cascade of transgenerational cultural learning. The still somewhat bewildered beneficiaries of the resulting relentless series of cognitive system upgrades—some genetic, but many more others cultural—now find themselves collectively capable of working miracles, such as killing millions of their conspecifics at the press of a button, saving millions by inventing antibiotics, wrecking their home planet, and landing fancy hardware on other planets. 6
We come to share in the cognitive kickbacks of language because learning it, in all its fantastic complexity, is for us mere child’s play. Indeed, language itself is a kind of game that all of us play—a structured activity in which we engage for fun or profit, together or alone . 7 It is, however, a peculiar game. Participation is not a matter of choice: normally developing children get sucked into the language game simply by being their regular social selves around their peers and other people, who already are in the play. Quitting the game once you’re in is not an option either: you can stop speaking to other people and you can stop your ears, but you cannot stop interpretations of what you hear if you do listen (or, in sign language, interpretations of what you see if you do look) from arising in your mind.
Taking the memes’ perspective, we see that language is also a game that plays people. The memes that comprise it are not, after all, passive packets of information. The thoughts and expressions that act as pieces in the language game have a mind of their own, in which they resemble the hedgehogs that served as balls in the Queen of Hearts’ croquet game in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and that had a predilection for moving around without waiting for Alice to strike them with her flamingo. Meme-instigated thoughts hover in the background, intervening whenever possible in actual overt behavior, constantly on the watch for opportunities to express themselves so as to be seen or heard by other potential hosts. A day on which a meme gets its human host to air it is a happy day for it and for the memories of the words and gestures it recruited along the way, all of which receive a nice representational health boost from the exercise.
The word croquet game is by orders of magnitude more complex than any of our other ritualized activities that do not rely on language. The troupe of memes that collectively turn a human into a language player grows well into tens of thousands of active memory traces of all stripes and sizes. Together they impart a ritualized—statistically regular, hence meaningfully learnable and sharable—form to the thoughts that well up and make themselves available for sharing. With a bit of experience and mental agility on the part of the team (the troupe and its host), the outcome of this process can be breathtaking, as the following dialogue amply illustrates:
ROMEO, TO JULIET
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too
In no other case has co-evolution of memes and their hosts led to a more world-shattering outcome than in human language. In this one species of perpetually hungry, highly social, and highly competitive information processors, which threw in its fate with an initially small band of information packets that proved highly infectious, selection pressure set off a runaway cascade of transgenerational cultural learning. The still somewhat bewildered beneficiaries of the resulting relentless series of cognitive system upgrades—some genetic, but many more others cultural—now find themselves collectively capable of working miracles, such as killing millions of their conspecifics at the press of a button, saving millions by inventing antibiotics, wrecking their home planet, and landing fancy hardware on other planets. 6
We come to share in the cognitive kickbacks of language because learning it, in all its fantastic complexity, is for us mere child’s play. Indeed, language itself is a kind of game that all of us play—a structured activity in which we engage for fun or profit, together or alone . 7 It is, however, a peculiar game. Participation is not a matter of choice: normally developing children get sucked into the language game simply by being their regular social selves around their peers and other people, who already are in the play. Quitting the game once you’re in is not an option either: you can stop speaking to other people and you can stop your ears, but you cannot stop interpretations of what you hear if you do listen (or, in sign language, interpretations of what you see if you do look) from arising in your mind.
Taking the memes’ perspective, we see that language is also a game that plays people. The memes that comprise it are not, after all, passive packets of information. The thoughts and expressions that act as pieces in the language game have a mind of their own, in which they resemble the hedgehogs that served as balls in the Queen of Hearts’ croquet game in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and that had a predilection for moving around without waiting for Alice to strike them with her flamingo. Meme-instigated thoughts hover in the background, intervening whenever possible in actual overt behavior, constantly on the watch for opportunities to express themselves so as to be seen or heard by other potential hosts. A day on which a meme gets its human host to air it is a happy day for it and for the memories of the words and gestures it recruited along the way, all of which receive a nice representational health boost from the exercise.
The word croquet game is by orders of magnitude more complex than any of our other ritualized activities that do not rely on language. The troupe of memes that collectively turn a human into a language player grows well into tens of thousands of active memory traces of all stripes and sizes. Together they impart a ritualized—statistically regular, hence meaningfully learnable and sharable—form to the thoughts that well up and make themselves available for sharing. With a bit of experience and mental agility on the part of the team (the troupe and its host), the outcome of this process can be breathtaking, as the following dialogue amply illustrates:
ROMEO, TO JULIET
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too
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