Intro Mind Notes, Week 13: Arts and Religion
(HMW, Ch. 8)

A. The Puzzle of The Arts

1. Human artistic and recreational behavior (music, literature, movies, theater, video games, painting, academic study, sports, religion, philosophy, humor, gossip etc.) seems pointless from the point of view of natural selection since none of these activities obviously improves your reproductive potential. Why do we value these activities and claim they are really what make life worth living?
   
2. One possible answer is that the arts are a way of displaying status. They demonstrate wealth and intelligence, both qualities sought by a mate interested in choosing the best genes for his/her offspring and interested in promoting their welfare. Pinker finds this idea unconvincing. He points out that culture is found at all social levels. So it is not just a display for powerful elites.
   
3. Pinker thinks that one secret to the problem is that natural selection created mechanisms that cause us to take pleasure at certain activities. Given this human reasoning abilities can be used to seek ways of obtaining these pleasures that have nothing to do with what they were selected for. For example, humans have found drugs that directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain and so some people become addicted to those drugs. But being able to take drugs was not the reason pleasure centers evolved. So many of our cultural activities have no direct explanation in terms of natural selection. They are mere accidental byproducts.
   
   

B. The Arts

1. In the section on emotion, Pinker explained that natural selection is responsible for our taking pleasure in seeing landscapes that are good habitats for humans. Humans with this emotion will tend to seek out places that are good for their survival. Pleasure humans take in seeing other (preferably semi-naked) humans (typically of the opposite sex) also has clear advantages in promoting reproduction. So one way to explain our interest in art is that paintings depict the very visual scenes that cause us pleasure. Although seeing pictures in a museum does not have reproductive advantages, what prompts us to like to see these things does.
   
2. This does not explain non-representational art. Pinker thinks we like abstract patterns because our visual system takes pleasure in clarity and color variety and is distressed by images that are dark, murky or fuzzy. So colorful art that has nice clean edges will be pleasing. (This does not explain why people would like Rothko, however.)
   
3. Our pleasure at music is harder to explain. Pinker finds that pleasing music follows a complex set of rules on digital data. Furthermore melodic structure is compositional; melodies are formed from phrases which are in turn formed from subphrases and so on until finally we get to the individual notes. Music is a kind of language, and listening to linguistic structures and decoding them should be pleasurable to an animal which must put energy into the hard task of language learning. Humans will find pleasure in decoding any system of sounds that follows a any system of rules resembling language. Harmonious pitches have simple ratios one to another. Even infants seem to recognize and appreciate harmony. The tonal analysis that our ear performs to identify sounds from a single object is sensitive to tones and their overtones, which form harmony. So our sound understanding mechanism should prefer sounds with harmonic relationships over ones that do not. Pinker mentions many other sources for our interest in music, including emotional signals in animal calls, and pleasures one takes in rhythmic motor control.
   
4. Our interest in theater, literature, and movies may be related to the human need to imagine fictional social situations so as to appreciate their consequences. Pleasure in exercising this ability would be very helpful to an animal than must navigate a social world to mate and protect itself from violence. Often theater literature and movies serve an instructive purpose, allowing the "viewer" to understand the consequences of actions similar to those viewed. Pleasure in these forms of art may also be related to the human interest in gossip. Gossip is pleasurable because it provides useful information about the status of other individuals in a group. The pleasure we find in gossip can also be obtained by presenting fictional stories which serve as topics of gossip.
   
   

C. Humor

1. Laughter is one of the oddest behaviors. No other animal laughs. Why do we find pleasure in it? Why is laughter contagious? You might say it relieves stress. But what is the reproductive advantage of relieving stress? Furthermore is it really true that humor relieves stress? Doesn't it also cause stress?
   
2. Pinker points out that chimps make a noise similar to laughter when they play fight. Pleasure in play fighting is adaptive because it trains the animals in skills they need for actual fights. But a signal is needed to allow an animal to know the difference between play fighting and the real thing. By this analysis, laughter is the human signal for play aggression - aggression in either physical or verbal form.
   
3. Pinker mentions other functions for humor. Humor is a tactic to overcome dominance by deflating the status of the oppressor. Since laughter is infectious it can be used to unite an oppressed group against dominance by a minority. Humor can also be used to cement friendships by signaling that any aggression between two friends is only play.
   
   

D. Religion

1. Religion typically requires faith in beliefs that are difficult to accept. Why would this have selective advantage?
   
2. Pinker's view is that religion is a mechanism to hold dominance of one group against another. For example, ancestor worship reinforces the power of the old, for they can threaten the young even after their death. Shamans use tricks to convince others of their special powers.
   
3. Another important feature of religion that Pinker mentions is that it typically promises success: better health, wealth, protection or eternal happiness in an after life. Humans are desperate for miracles that will produce these goods. Any group that promises such miracles can perpetuate itself in a culture. They need only present themselves as experts in a secret form of knowledge.
   
   

E. Philosophy

1. Why have philosophers so far have found so few few solutions to such philosophical problems as free will ? (Problem of free will is as follows. We all think that we are capable of free actions, actions where we are in control. But if naturalism is right, all our thoughts are controlled by physical events, and conform to physical law. Therefore we are not in control, the natural world is in control instead. The problem is to find some way to reconcile the thesis that we are in control with naturalism.)
   
2. Pinker suggests that the reason philosophical problems are so hard is that they are exactly the problems that a human brain is by its very nature unable to solve. Why should natural selection have selected for a brain that is capable of solving all mysteries? The mysteries may be unsolvable because they lie outside what a symbolic information processor is equipped to deal with.