A Hammer To Do

My latest favorite professor Robert Sapolsky at Stanford keeps reminding that humans as a species are "terribly confused". He does this to illustrate both our unique situation with regards to consciousness and with the fact that genetically (and, ultimately, behaviorally) we fall smack in the middle between the two clear extremes - a tournament species and a pairbonding species.

The topic of this entry is confusion. More specifically, the bewildering fact that people on the whole put themselves through more bad experiences, rather than good. Key word here is on the whole. I know this stuff is controversial, but hear me out. Fight against any propensity to consult the brain with a question: "Do people actively sabotage themselves all the time?" and/or having it answer: "No, not really." Your brain would fail you if you did, same as it would fail you if you asked: "Brain, are there more words with letter e as the third letter rather than the first?" - it would say that there are not merely because it does not store words by their third letter. Same it is with peoples behavior, in our brains what we do (and everyone else does) is not stored by relevance but by volume, and I am not talking about volume. 

By sheer frequency we would seem to take good care of ourselves - most of us don't try to quickly and spectacularly ruin our lives by, say, sewing an extremity off. We do not seek pain and what pain finds us might be attributed to the universe being a hostile place for living organisms. Most of us try to eat regularly and healthily (or at least something that is not outright deadly), exercise, and grow both intellectually and spiritually.

But it is also undeniable that people routinely engage in behaviors that harm them, especially if the harm is removed in time. Most vices fall into this category and few people are without them. How many man-hours of headache are endured a year because of overuse of alcohol? How many life-years lost because of smoking? How many enlightened lives foregone because of having offspring? I hope you see what I did there? :p

Assuming you accept the premise that people on the whole act not in their best interests, here is a metaphor. People are tools, instruments. Hammers, too, are tools. As tools, hammers are quite useful, especially in construction. But, lo, being useful is not useful to hammers themselves, no, not at all! Every time a hammer is used, every time it behaves, if you will, it is at its own expense and with no gain to itself. No matter the price and quality of a hammer, it is entirely expendable, and should it happen that it can hammer no more, another hammer will be found to get the job done. For all the hammer's altruism, he is never rewarded. If hammers were to become conscious overnight, would it not pose an ethical problem? Would construction practices be reconcilable with hammers that can perceive themselves and, possibly, feel quite nauseated by all that banging against surfaces, if not outright tortured? 

People are tools, just like hammers, for getting a job done. It is a most unfortunate situation that we are conscious at it.

But two questions should bother you: what made us, and for what job to be done, the profound questions of three-year-olds and clergymen. The answer to these methaphor-coated questions is that evolution made us - we exist because genes can duplicate themselves quite reliably, but not without error. Our job then, what we are used for, is reproduction, carrying our genetic masters in our comparatively enormously giant bio-robotic bodies and having them copied, imprinted into the next generation (of bio-robots, as their "software").

And what are conscious hammers to do if not stop participating in beatings?