Value and the search for order

There is a word that the neuroscientists use when talking about why a certain series of circuits or group of circuits in the brain is activated. The word is value. There are pathways in the brain that have survival value. So when a stimulus comes in and the brain has 50,000 different ways of responding to it, some of those are useful for survival and some of those will either prevent survival or mar survival, and the human brain, in classical evolutionary pattern, will pick the one that is healthiest, that gives greatest pleasure. So I think of this as natural selection in a form, in an emotional form, and I think it is almost like choice because when you’re talking about selection in the brain, there are processes of choice. The brain has a way of evaluating what is best for the organism. And what is best for the organism is not just survival and reproduction but beauty, but an esthetic sense.

It’s an unconscious process, but what we know about unconscious processes are that for every conscious process there are 8 million zillion trillion unconscious ones, and they are in fact what will eventually determine what’s conscious and what we can understand. So again, to reiterate, this is a process of natural selection. A stimulus comes in. There are many, many ways of responding to it. Some of those ways are counterproductive, some are kind of ordinary, and some really give satisfaction and enhance the richness of our lives. And without knowing it, our circuits are choosing those, and this is what I feel is human spirit.

It’s exciting. Here are these 75 trillion cells, and every cell has hundreds of thousands of protein molecules in it and they are constantly interacting with one another in what would appear to be chaos. And in fact, if you were to be able to lower yourself into a cell, you’d be terrified because it would seem so chaotic. If it had sound, you couldn’t live with it, it would be so noisy. And yet what is actually occurring is that these reactions are all counteracting threats to the survival of that cell. And I think that there is within the human organism, only the human organism because of our cortex and our ability to process information, I think that there is an awareness of the closeness of chaos.

And I think there’s a lot of evidence for that, including cultural evidence. I think often about the polarity of our thinking. I talk about good and evil, and one of my favorite examples of this is something I extracted from my own background, which is the principle of the good inclination living in balance with the evil inclination, and one must make that choice at all times. Now, the Greeks, who expressed it as chaos versus cosmos, already, without knowing anything about cells or anything about how the body really worked, they had a sense that there was an order up there in the universe, but we live in chaos. And we can use the example of the cosmos to seek the reassurance of that stability. And you know and I know we all listen to popular music, and if we listen carefully we’re always going to hear the heartbeat in the background.

Now, the spirit, for all of its wonder and the good that we associate with it, also has base qualities and has a dark side. I think it has to do with the nearness of chaos, which is always a temptation. It’s like the butterfly and the flame. We are tempting ourselves with evil, we are tempting ourselves with that which is destructive, and we, to some extent, succumb to it. If you talk to psychoanalysts about severe neurotic disease, they often talk about the personality that skates to the edge and then rescues itself from the edge. We are so tempted to go to hell with ourselves, as it were, that’s a theological expression, that we actually do come near it, even recognizing the other pole. And this is what the Greeks meant when they were talking about Eros versus Thanatos, the love and life sense against the death sense. I don’t think it’s in very many of us to deliberately choose destruction, but we play with it and it licks us and burns us and can ruin lives. So this is all part of that polarity that I was talking about, the fear of chaos, which makes us look for order.

~ by Natalie on 8 May.