I can tell Comic Con is going on, because suddenly the interwebs is full of leaked superhero movie trailers, gleeful enthusiastic fans, and transcripts of celebrity nerd panels. In this one, Joss Whedon gets asked that simple question, “What is the meaning of life?”, and he starts out well, but then screws up.
“You think I’m not going to, but I’m going to answer that. The world is a random and meaningless terifying place and then we all—spoiler alert—die.
Yes. There is no “meaning” of life. Grasp that, and a whole lot of things make sense. But stop! Don’t mess it up!
Most critters are designed not to know that. We are designed, uniquely, to transcend that, and to understand that—I can quote myself—a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”
Dang. He had to ruin it with nonsense about “design” and human exceptionalism. When you talk about design, you are implicitly implying a meaning: that we have a purpose, which is to transcend the fundamental reality of the universe. We don’t have that purpose, and we don’t transcend anything — some of us are just really good at deluding ourselves into believing that we do.
I don’t escape the random, meaningless nature of the universe, or accept it any better than a dog getting hit by a car, or a rabbit getting mauled by a dog. In fact, I don’t see any difference between how a dog and a human respond to confronting the tragic indifference of existence at all. Except that we talk a heck of a lot more about it.
Whedon added that “the main function of a the human brain, the primary instinct, is storytelling. Memory is storyelling. If we all remembered everything, we would be Rain Man, and would not be socially active at all. We learn to forget and to distort, but we [also] learn to tell a story about ourselves.”
He’s right about the imperfection of memory, but leave it to a professional storyteller to try and tell us a story about how the main function of the human brain is storytelling.
What is the main function of the human brain? I’d have said “to keep you alive,” since if it fails to do that then all other functions are irrelevant. But that doesn’t distinguish it from any other organ, and I realise it is disingenuous on my part, because I would have answered for the heart “to pump blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system,” which facilitates keeping you alive.
So specifically what is the most important thing the human brain does, and is it the same most important thing for all animals with brains?
I don’t know about “main function”, but I’ll agree with Whedon that story-telling is immensely important to us. Composing narratives — social, scientific, religious, whatever — about our environment is how we explain it to ourselves. The Big Bang, the primordial solar nebula, abiogenesis, evolution and the geological ages, is a narrative just as much as the religious creation myths it superseded. So are the stereotypes we hold about other people — there’s the implied outline of a plot when we classify a someone as a typical [negative adjective] [noun designating race/ethnicity/social class/gender/sexuality/religion]. Even the names of the standard logical fallacies imply a standard narrative — that person did thing of type X, just fill in the details. Our addiction to narrative is why religious myth is so compelling.
Rather like we have been conditioned to not use the dreaded L-word when describing our politics, we self-censor the word “evolve” and instead reach for the inappropriate “design” because believers use it. So, Josh, repeat after me: “We evolved to understand that we will die.” Say it 10 times more. 10 more. OK, now go and sin no more.
I think a large part of the brain is devoted to ‘story telling’: one way of tuning a learning engine is by testing it with data and we generate lots of possibilities to test our self programming rather than checking the effect of sticking our heads in the lions mouth empirically. Repeating these tests to others gives us storytelling and triggering tests in each other can be educational and fun.
Definitely not design as such but it works quite well and can be a lot of fun. We can reproduce the species without fun as so many religions seem to insist but I know what I’d favour.
Eggmoidal @3 — Though replacing “design” with “evolve” highlights the other problem, that we can’t really say that the human brain evolved for that reason; it could just be an unintended consequence of selection for mates who tell good stories, and mates who like having stories told to them.
I’m getting on a bit and I’m still trying to find a cemetery that will accept my desired headstone epitaph: Now the rot sets in. [Cemetery managers want you take everything so seriously.]
Judging by what he said further, I would assume Joss Whedon is simply talking about storytelling and human interaction here. I’m pretty sure “we talk a heck of a lot more about it” is pretty much his entire point. We tell stories and because they’re not real, it’s transcending reality.
It sounds to me like he was just saying the meaning of life is human solidarity. Doesn’t sound like there’s much practical disagreement here, more about semantics.
Influenced by Daniel Dennett, I think there is a concept of design consistent with evolutionary thought. It is design that is arrived at accidentally and endorsed retrospectively. And it has resulted in brains capable of modeling the future (a critical survival skill). Which is story-telling.
Callinectes, #1:
Hm. Without overthinking it too much, my first answer would be something along the lines of “to interpret and integrate sensory cues and coordinate the appropriate responses to them… to keep you alive”. Or maybe wording it differently: to take everything in, make some sense of it, and put something out. Putting it this way I think the function “story-telling” is covered too.
And yeah, in this sense it would be the same for all animals with brains.
Another way to put it that would raise my hackles less is that brains model the world: while a simple nerve net might be sufficient to generate outputs in response to inputs, more sophisticated brains build abstract models of the world around us in order to predict what will happen next and plan responses.
That’s a kind of story telling too, and in that sense, the primary purpose of a specialized chunk of nervous tissue is about creating a story/model that helps the organism understand what’s going on around it.
Of course, that further removes it from an exclusively human domain. Then insects also have a model of the world, a story that revolves around patterns of pheromones and the distribution of food and how to dance when you meet a conspecific.
Nelc @5 – A poor choice of wording on my part. By “evolved to” I didn’t mean “evolved in order to” but rather “evolved to the point that”. Can’t you guys read my mind?
Yes, but insects–presumably–don’t perceive their story as story. They act on what they perceive, but they don’t find meaning in it. And (again, presumably, but it’s a pretty safe presumption,) they don’t reflect on their perceptions, let alone mentally rearrange various elements to tell themselves, and each other, new stories.
The human propensity (compulsion?) for story telling doesn’t set us apart from other animals, but story telling does seem to be something we’re particularly good at. It does seem to be integral to humans. We’re driven to try and make sense of the world, so it underlies art, science, and religion. And it serves to help us bond to one another as well.
I think Whedon is saying something true. He expressed his point imprecisely, but hey, he was speaking off the cuff, right?
grumpyoldfart # 6
Put it in Latin.
PZ # 10
I’m saving that to think about, in regards to learning in hermit crabs and other crustaceans. I may quote it, later on.
I read Whedon’s use of the word “design” in the colloquial sense, not as something designed by something for a particular reason etc, but just the casual usage, of picking a single word to describe an intricate object that is functionally operational.
And the bit about storytelling as the brain’s primary function is overemphasis of the current model of how that chunk of brain tissue operates, metaphorically. This image explains how memory works: how memory reconstructs from stored bits and pieces. Even to the part of perception. The brain builds up a complete picture by filling in gaps as the eyes sweep around the field of view. Dreams are the result of the brain “practicing” this functionality.
Of course Whedon wouldn’t get very detail specific of how the brain works chemically/biologically/neurologically/physics/quantum mechanically,etc. His job is a storyteller so his answer will be with that first and foremost. Not to sell himself, but because that’s what his focus is and his viewpoint will be from that direction.
I am sorry, I admit I am a (~somewhat~) Whedon fanboy. I have yet to see any thing from him worth disputing. This latest bit, when asked the attempted “gotcha” of “what is the meaning of life?”, hit me like a real zinger of a response that I hope left the questioner reeling.
Yeah, it’s a shame that the story-telling instinct leads Whedon to use the word “designed” without realizing that it triggers the story-telling instinct in other people to infer a conscious designer. Good irony, Joss. This is how teleological memes propagate.
The appropriate answer to the questions “What is the meaning of life?” is always another question: What do you want from life?
Right. Good. There’s your meaning. Go an achieve that. Done.
Scientists say the greatest achievement we can ever have is to discover things. Story tellers say the greatest achievement is to tell more stories. Song writers are all convinced “love is all you need”. These “higher purposes” all tend to be pretty myopic.
I too dislike the yes of the word design when used in reference to living things but language usage is so often confining and imprecise I cringe and shrug what can I do besides try to be accurate myself.
The question I really have problems is “what is the meaning of life?”
Meaning! ? What is it that has this meaning? It is “life” what the hell is this life? Those who seem to like the question always seem to have a preferred answer of what the meaning is but not even a clue to what life is.
uncle frogy
spell-check and haste conspire to make me sound like an idiot. use not yes
uncle frogy
I checked, and it looks like Marvel has movies planned out pretty much until the end of the decade. The latest one has been planned for mid-2019. It looks like there are a ton of D.C. movies coming out too. I’m wondering if they have any defined end-point for this. Are they just going to keep making these until the sun burns out? Considering how many superheroes the two companies have between them, there’s probably enough material to keep this going for decades.
Emergence @21 — Until they stop making money, I guess.
PZ #10
That’s certainly how the Fodorian representational theory of the mind looks at the human brain, which is currently still the dominant paradigm within neuroscience and cognitive science. However, this paradigm – in particular the idea of complex neural representations – is now heavily criticised by various strands of embodied cognition. A well-known alternative theory is Noe & O’Regans (2001) sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness, which is a serious attempt to explain visual consciousness without reference at all to complex visual neural representations. This might seem a bit bizarre at first, after all we know quite a bit about the sensitivity of different cells to very specific environmental features such as orientation, motion etc. and the retinotopic map on the visual cortex is usually considered proof of mental representations. However, the further you move up the two streams from posterior to anterior areas, the more tenuous neural representations become and Noe & O’Regans argument is that the world is its own best representation and what the brain does is master sensorimotor contingencies rather than build a cognitive map of the world.
When you start talking about insects, the idea of complex representations of the world becomes even more unlikely than in humans, not least because they have far less computational power available to model the world around them. There’s some interesting modelling work done of the navigational abilities of desert ants, for example, which makes use of simple recognition rules rather than building complex cognitive maps or using associative models which are far more computationally expensive and thus implausible. (A model of ant route navigation driven by scene familiarity, Baddeley, Graham, Husbands & Phillipides, 2012).
Incidentally, one of the primary theories of brain function is Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis, positing that neocortex size is related to social group size and complexity. The theory has fairly convincing empirical evidence in relation to mammals, but is very weak in relation to social insects.
So Joss might be on to something about the storytelling, certainly something modern humans do all the time in social contexts. But it’s unlikely to be the case in insects in my opinion.