My Heart is Hurting for Yoooouuu

You know you’ve fully subscribed to literary realism for far too long when you read sentences such as

Intelligence may reside in the brain, but inspiration comes from the heart. (paraphrase from a quote, author forgotten)

And you do not understand them. Sentences such as these confuse you, and your first response is to wonder just how this author got by in his or her biology classes… until you realize that it is you, not them, that may be missing something.

Oh riiight, the HEART! Locus of all things passionate! I get it! And then you feel very proud of yourself for momentarily emerging from your little non-fiction reality just long enough to drink in the sunlight before you make a mad dash back inside.

It’s better in here, really. In my reality, you just don’t say things like that and expect to get away with them; blatant, useless metaphors are discarded as quickly and painlessly as the first draft of last night’s Bentham paper. Try again, please! But this time, let’s put motivation and inspiration back in the brain, where they rightfully belong, and please stop stealing emotional outputs – it’s really not nice (and someone may believe you).

So we end up with this

Intelligence may reside in the brain, but inspiration also comes from the brain.

Not as interesting, no. So what is it that was captured by the first sentence that this sentence fails to obtain? Well, let’s see. In the first sentence, we’ve removed inspiration as having any structural (i.e. brain) origination. This is important, because by doing so we’ve removed any genetic influences that may have been imposed, as well as any structural developments that may have occurred over the course of one’s lifetime, whether through learning or environmental influences and so on. Effectively, we’ve eradicated the past.

Ooh! Now we’re getting somewhere really interesting. So the first sentence is saying that no matter how inspired your parents may have been, and no matter how inspired or passionate YOU may have been up until this very moment, and whatever your intelligence or background or anything else, there could always be residing within you either a) a latent potential of inspiration or b) an ability to GENERATE inspiration. Point being, you are not confined to any pre-ordained, or what we call deterministic, ability potentials (and the author may even be saying that inspiration isn’t an ability so much as it is a gift, or a blessing, but since I can’t think of any words that don’t imply a someone who is giving this gift or blessing, I think I’ll stick with the heart-as-generative-source idea as spelled out in the sentence in question).

The idea of generation, I think, is the most important one. It implies that we have an ability independent of our input-output models of emotional reaction, one that stands alone, dignified, as a pure “energy” source unfettered by mundane issues such as desire and instinct. Inspiration cannot be dampened by previous failure; it is not modified from person to person by way of brain-structural differences. It is pure and boundless.

So it turns out that this first sentence has a very deep message: you are not the product of your genetic heritage, nor are you the product of your environment, your up-bringing, or anything else. You are only of your own making.

Ok. From what we’ve seen, this deconstruction has led us into The Really Hard Problem (or as some people like to call it, The Really Really Hard Problem), which basically (and crudely) states this: if all of our mental activity is just a result of neural activity, aren’t we necessarily led into a deterministic universe? Where do we put free will? Do we toss it out the window? Are all of our choices merely illusions, where they just feel like choices, even though we really “couldn’t have done otherwise”?

Shit. This entry is turning out much longer than planned. I’m going to preface the rest of this by reminding all of you that there have been innumerable books written on this topic and if you want a pretty good introduction then read Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves,” and that even though he doesn’t satisfactorily answer the question at the end it’s still a pretty good read ok here we go:

Since scientific exploration, specifically the origination of physicalist explanations that slowly pushed the need for a supernatural god out of the picture, we’ve grown more and more uncomfortable with our identity as a free and special agent in this world. The idea that our brain is not just the source of our “more special” abilities, such as the ability to decide and particularly to love, now makes us question even our role as autonomous agents: how much of what we’re doing is something that we decide? Where is meaning if every action that we take can be traced back to the involuntary firing of neurons, the firing of which is completely and utterly pre-determined? Are we really just fancy vehicles for our genes, whose only goal is to reproduce?

There are so many questions, and I have to go sort snails now. I just want to throw in a very simple idea: we have a tendency to automatically assume that science has told us a definite story. That by understanding that our entire personalities are based “in our brain,” so to speak, we have understood something finite. Just, everybody, please remember that we’re working on it – there is so much more to be known, and it’s really very much more complicated than it all sounds. I know, this isn’t an answer to anything, really, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind. Rest assured that you are much more mysterious than scientific articles will have you believe (it’s because they’re so dry, really; they refuse to use those metaphors that make you so happy), and also much more complicated and interesting than religious fundamentalists would also have you believe.

Got it? Have a good Monday.