1-1 Infatuation
Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machineâso we often hear such statements as this:
No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical waysânor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness.
What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we donât really want to know more about? Hear our friend Charles attempt to describe his latest infatuation.
On the surface such statements seem positive; theyâre all composed of superlatives. But note that thereâs something strange about this: most of those phrases of positive praise use syllables like âun,â âless,â and âinââwhich show that they really are negative statements describing the person whoâs saying them!
Our friend sees all this as positive. It makes him feel happy and more productive, and relieves his dejection and loneliness. But what if most of those pleasant effects result from his success at suppressing his thoughts about what his sweetheart actually says:
Thus, Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishmentsâeven when, as Shakespeare said, we still may be partly aware of them:
We are equally apt to deceive ourselves, not only in our personal lives but also when dealing with abstract ideas. There, too, we often close our eyes to conflicts and clashes between our beliefs. Listen to Richard Feynmanâs words:
What does a lover actually love? That should be the person to whom youâre attachedâbut if your pleasure mainly results from suppressing your other questions and doubts, then youâre only in love with Love itself.
Indeed, once those short-lived attractions fade, they sometimes go on to be replaced by more enduring relationships, in which we exchange our own interests for those of the persons to whom weâre attached:
Yet even this larger conception of Love is still too narrow to cover enough, because Love is a kind of suitcase-like word, which includes other kinds of attachments like these:
We also apply that same word Love to our involvements with objects, feelings, ideas, and beliefsâand not only to ones that are sudden and brief, but also to bonds that increase through the years.
Why do we pack such dissimilar things into those single suitcase-words? As weâll see in Section 1-3, each of our common âemotionalâ terms describes a variety of different processes. Thus we use the word Anger to abbreviate a diverse collection of mental states, some of which change our ways to perceive, so that innocent gestures get turned into threatsâand thus make us more inclined to attack. Fear also affects the ways we react but makes us retreat from dangerous things (as well as from some that might please us too much).
Returning to the meanings of Love, one thing seems common to all those conditions: each leads us to think in different ways:
This book is mainly filled with ideas about what could happen inside our brains to cause such great changes in how we think.
1-2 The Sea of Mental Mysteries
From time to time we think about how we try to manage our minds:
But we canât hope to understand such things without adequate answers to questions like these:
In short, we all need better ideas about the ways in which we think. But whenever we start to think about that, we encounter yet more mysteries.
Now, everyone knows how Anger feelsâor Pleasure, Sorrow, Joy, and Griefâyet we still know almost nothing about how those processes actually work. As Alexander Pope asks in his Essay on Man, are these things that we can hope to understand?
How did we manage to find out so much about atoms and oceans and planets and starsâyet so little about the mechanics of minds? Thus, Newton discovered just three simple laws that described the motions of all sorts of objects; Maxwell uncovered just four more laws that explained all electromagnetic events; then Einstein reduced all those and more into yet smaller formulas. All this came from the success of those physicistsâ quest: to find simple explanations for things that seemed, at first, to be highly complex.
Then, why did the sciences of the mind make less progress in those same three centuries? I suspect that this was largely because most psychologists mimicked those physicists, by looking for equally compact solutions to questions about mental ...