Evolution doesn't care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring.

This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves.

After writing that, I came across a mention of Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, in another book that I was reading. That spurred me to pull Wright's book off of the Buddhism shelf in my office bookcase and start re-re-reading it. 

(Often I can tell how many times I've read a book by the different highlighting colors in it, as I used to bounce back and forth between various colors; now I favor yellow almost exclusively.)

Heraclitus famously said “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” For me this applies to re-reading books. They seem fresh every time I do this, because while the book has stayed the same, unlike a river, I've changed.

Now that my daily meditation consists of guided meditations from Zen master Henry Shukman via his The Way app on my iPhone, I figured that I should remind myself why Buddhism is true, according to Wright. 

Early on in his book, page 6 to be precise, Wright -- who has written a book about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal -- talks about why pleasure always fades (a basic tenet of Buddhism) from the perspective of evolution.

Here's the basic logic. We were "designed" by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation -- things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put "designed" in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn't a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process.

Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they're the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators.

So, as a kind of thought experiment, it's legitimate to think of natural selection as a "designer" and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? 

In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense.

1. 1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
   2. The pleasure shouldn't last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn't subside, we'd never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That's no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
   3. The animal's brain should focus more on (1) the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you'll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you'll be full of ennui and wishing you'd majored in philosophy.

If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.

Natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, after all, it just "wants" us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

In another chapter, "When Are Feelings Illusions?," Wright provides useful advice about how to tell when a feeling is productive in a broader sense than how natural selection views productive -- basically as doing things that keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation.

I certainly could relate to his examples.

Like getting angry at a driver who is following me too closely, even though it is unlikely that I'm in any danger from him (such drivers are usually men, in my experience). I'm reacting as natural selection intended when someone threatens my life. Except in modern times, our lives rarely are truly threatened by other people. They just irritate us.

So my feeling of anger is an illusion of sorts. It isn't a reflection of how the world truly is, but as how my feelings believe it is, since evolution favors feelings that aided in survival more than feelings that reflected truth.

Of course, Wright points out that some feelings do indeed reflect the truth about reality. If I jump at the sight of a large snake, that's a good thing, as some snakes are poisonous. (I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California where rattlesnakes were common and jumping at the sound of a rattle was a very good thing.)

Obviously, this chapter hasn't been a blanket indictment of human feelings. Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well; they don't much distort our view of reality, and they help keep us alive and flourishing.

My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers -- all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation -- inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don't, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don't.

And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It's in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally "designed" to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

Comments

[sant64]

"Like getting angry at a driver who is following me too closely, even though it is unlikely that I'm in any danger from him (such drivers are usually men, in my experience). I'm reacting as natural selection intended when someone threatens my life. Except in modern times, our lives rarely are truly threatened by other people. They just irritate us."

I can relate to this example, as not long ago a driver was sort of tailgating and blew his horn at me. I reacted by going into road rage mode,, even pulling over to see if he wanted to try conclusions. He kept on going and nothing came of it. But I was extremely angry, with an anger that persisted for most of the day. I finally cooled down when I began to question my reaction to what had actually happened: Someone blew their horn at me, and I was ready to fight and die over it. Over someone blowing their horn.

It made me think of a story related to Neem Karoli, Ram Dass' guru. Neem Karoli was telling a story about the meaning behind the Hindu name of one of the Western devotees, and one of them got extremely upset at the story, believing that it portended murder, and ran away. Neem Karoli was flabbergasted at this, and wondered aloud "Why does he think that way"?

I've found this a useful mantra of sorts. "Why do I think this way"? Applied to gross reactions to life's events, the question usually produces an "I should be this afraid or angry, because i....i....," and find there really was no valid reason for my emotional reaction. It was just a story. As Buddhist teacher Dipa Ma said, Buddhism is finding out that the mind is just a bunch of stories we tell ourselves.

Side note: I have to say I've experienced women tailgaiting just as much as men. And one of my first Buddhist teachers was a woman who was authorized as a Zen Master. And she was a habitual tailgater.

Sticking with the tailgating analogy, and on the other side of this topic of discerning truth and reality, it bears mentioning that tailgating isn't merely an annoyance but a crime, a traffic violation. And tailgating is deemed a crime because it's been proven to be dangerous to not only the person doing it but to every other driver nearby. Some concern over safety is a legit fear. And so I believe tailgating isn't a casus beli, but nor is it a behavior to be passively endured. These days I try to heed the Dhammapada's dictum that aggression is never remedied by aggression, as well as the words of a friend who said "I just pull over and let them by."

[October]

Natural selection ia taken care by science
Evolution of what? Is defined not by scientific inventions but spiritual jumps
In to loops od wandering thoughts.
Escaping these loops is distributed every where
Point is to see

[Appreciative Reader]

“Early on in his book, page 6 to be precise, Wright -- who has written a book about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal -- talks about why pleasure always fades (a basic tenet of Buddhism) from the perspective of evolution.”

Makes sense, all of that. It does add up, completely.

--------------------

…Some further thoughts:

Coming from that perspective, without a doubt “spirituality”, at least when taken to its full conclusion, ends up becoming an evolutionary dead end, or at the very least a disadvantage in terms of evolution, no?!

Here’s how I’d answer that question, that I posed myself just now: More than one answer, and perhaps all of them might apply, to an extent:

1. If that were so, then that is no bad thing! That is kind of the point of this thinking. That evolution isn’t concerned with our happiness. And if we, in following our own happiness, end up going where evolution does not want us to go, and actually end up at an evolutionary dead end, well then, that’s no bad thing, necessarily, is it? Why must we necessarily keep on keeping on, and perpetuating humanity for ever and ever, if that is achieved only by perpetuating strife and disharmony and unhappiness for us as individuals?

2. But, in any case, it probably won’t actually come to that, will it? I’m guessing only a very few can actually go all the way, as the Buddha did. I guess the vast majority will, at best, only go some of the way, just enough to temper dysfunctionality somewhat, and but not enough to end up negating the propagation-of-genes thing.

3. If we didn’t end up tempering this dysfunctionality of all-out strife, then, given our complex social organization, of us humans, and particularly given our technology, we’ll likely end up simply obliterating ourselves! So that, this tempering of the dysfunctionality (#2 above) is probably what might end up making the difference between extinction and continuity. So that, indirectly, this tempering of the blind push of evolutionary pressures, might indirectly end up actually furthering the cause of evolution! (So that, in that sense, some individual Buddha voluntarily relinquishing the drives that might further his own genes, is in effect no different than some individual sacrificing themselves for the community, as ants and bees are known to do, either directly, or else indirectly by becoming impotent “drones” or whatever, even as the queen bee takes care of the propagation part: and thus, indirectly, actually end up aiding propagation and survival, and therefore evolution, for humanity as a whole.)

…Yeah. Kind of adds up, all of that, no?

[Appreciative Reader]

Two examples come to mind, of people that started out in near-identical situations, but that ended up following diametrically opposite courses, perhaps the most striking contrast that one can think of, across time and across geography: On one hand, the Buddha; and on the other hand, Chengiz Khan. (Apparently he's the most prolific progenitor that we know of. Apparently near 10% of all of Mongolia was fathered by him, and --- wait for it --- a half percentage point of actually the entire world!)

Like I said, two completely diametrically opposite examples of what "success" might amount to. (And yes, there are certainly some who do, quite literally and without any trace of irony, look at the Chengiz Khan model of success as an ideal, and one worth emulating as best one can.)

[Ron E.]

Thanks Brian for reminding me of Wright's book which I bought in 2021. Have just retrieved my copy from the loft and re-read the first few pages, so will have a fresh look at it.

[Jimmy]

What is life but a thin membrane stretched over a river of ecstasy. - Jurgen Ziewe

[sant64]

The stand for Massie over Trump by countless conservatives proves we are not GD cult members.