Notes on 《How the Mind Works》Ch.8 —— The Meaning of Life

In this final chapter, Steven discusses mankind's higher callings: art, music, literature, humor, religion, and philosophy.

Arts:

• Art are fascinating but biologically functionless activities, they are nonadaptive by-products based on the critieria for biological adaptation.
• People pursue the arts because that art is the proof of status.
• People evolved pleasure-circuts that gave them trickles of enjoyment from the art.

Music: As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. Then why music is pusued? Steven suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.

• Language: Music has been called "heightened speech," and it can literally grade into speech.
• Auditory scene analysis:When we hear harmonically related tones, our auditory system is satisfied that it has successfully carved the auditory world into parts that belong to important objects in the world, namely, resonating soundmakers like people, animals, and hollow objects.
• Emotional calls: melodies evoke strong emotions because their skeletons resemble digitized templates of our species' emotional calls.
• Habitat selection: some of the stripped-down figures and rhythms at the heart of a melody are simplified templates of evocative environmental sounds.
• Motor control: Repetitive actions have an optimal rhythm which is the universal component of music. We get moderate pleasure from being able to stick to constant rhythmic pattern, Music recreates the motivational and emotional components of movement.

Movie/Literature:

• provide delight
• simulate a triumph over tragedy.
• give obvious strategic advantages in the games of life: gossip is a favorite pastime in all human societies because knowledge is power.
• supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them.

Humor:

• Laughter is a form of communication: it is noisy not because it releases pent-up psychic energy but so that others may hear it.
• Laughter is involuntary for the same reason that other emotional displays are involuntary: The brain broadcasts an honest, unfakable, expensive advertisement of a mental state to convince an audience that an internal state is heartfelt rather than a sham.
• Laughter is a signal of mock aggression
• Humor is often a kind of aggression.
• Humor is also a prized tactic of rhetoric and intellectual argument.
• Humor begins with a train of thought in one frame of reference that bumps up against an anomaly: an event or statement that makes no sense in the context of what has come before. The anomaly can be resolved by shifting to a different frame of reference, one in which the event does makes sense. And within that frame, someone's dignity has been downgraded.
• What is humor for:
• Humor can be an anti-dominance weapon.
• Dominance is impotent before a mob who are united by humor.
• Humor is an effective weapon that forces people, at least for a moment, to agree to things they would otherwise deny.
• Kidding is a precision instrument for assessing the kind of relationship one has with a person.

Religion:

• Religion is a desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success—medicines, strategies, courtship, and, in the case of the weather, nothing.
• Religious concepts are human concepts with a few emendations that make them wondrous and a longer list of standard traits that make them sensible to our ordinary ways of knowing.
• Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Philosophy:

• Some philosophical enigmas baffled human for millennia like:
• consciousness in the sense of sentience or subjective experience
• the self
• Free will
• meaning
• Knowledge
• morality
• Our thoroughgoing perplexity about these enigmas may come from a mismatch between the very nature of these problems and the computational apparatus that natural selection has fitted us with.
• Our bafflement at the mysteries of the ages may have been the price we paid for a combinatorial mind that opened up a world of words and sentences, of theories and equations, of poems and melodies, of jokes and stories, the very things that make a mind worth having.
• Philosophers try to clairfy these problems, chip off chunks that can be solved, and solve them or hand them over to science to solve.
• The computational aspect of consciousness (what information is available to which processes), the neurological aspect (what in the brain correlates with consciousness), and the evolutionary aspect (when and why did the neurocomputational aspects emerge) are perfectly tractable, thus can help us make progress and eventually reach a complete understanding.