Chapter 1. Falling in Love

 

§1-1. Infatuation

 

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.”— Dorothy Parker[1]

 

Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machine —so we often hear statements like this:

 

Citizen: Of course machines can do useful things. We can make them add up huge columns of numbers or assemble cars in factories. But nothing made of mechanical stuff could ever have genuine feelings like love.

 

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 and ought not be explained in such ways! Listen to Pablo Neruda:

 

" ...love has to be so,
involving and general,
particular and terrifying,
honoured and yet in mourning,
flowering like the stars,
and measureless as a kiss.” — from ‘Extravagaria’

 

What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something we want to understand, or should we see such poems as hints that we don’t really care to probe into it? Hear our friend Charles attempt to describe his latest infatuation.

 

“I’ve just fallen in love with a wonderful person. I scarcely can think about anything else. My sweetheart is unbelievably perfect—of indescribable beauty, flawless character, and incredible intelligence. There is nothing I would not do for her.”

 

On the surface such statements seem positive; they’re all composed of superlatives. But note that there’s something strange about this: most of those phrases of positive praise use syllables like ‘un’, ‘less’ and ‘in’ —which show that they really are negative statements describing the person who’s saying them!

 

Wonderful. Indescribable,
------ (I can't figure out what attracts me to her.)
I scarcely can think of anything else.
------ (Most of my mind has stopped working.)
Unbelievably Perfect. Incredible.
------ (No sensible person believes such things.)
She has a Flawless Character.
------(I've abandoned my critical faculties.)
There is nothing I would not do for her.
------ (I've forsaken most of my usual goals.)

 

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 she actually says:

 

“Oh Charles—a woman needs certain things. She needs to be loved, wanted, cherished, sought after, wooed, flattered, cosseted, pampered. She needs sympathy, affection, devotion, understanding, tenderness, infatuation, adulation, idolatry—that isn't much to ask, is it Charles?” [2]

 

Thus love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments—even when, as Shakespeare said, we still may be partly aware of them:

 

WHEN my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.

 

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 Feynman’s words:

 

“That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you don't know too much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all the difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.”— 1966 Nobel Prize lecture.

 

What does a lover actually love? That should be the person to whom you’re attached—but if your pleasure mainly results from suppressing your other questions and doubts, then you’re only in love with Love itself.

 

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

 

Citizen: So far, you have spoken only about what we call infatuation—sexual lust and extravagant passion. That leaves out most of the usual meanings of ‘love’—such as tenderness, trust, and companionship.

 

Indeed, once those short-lived atrtractions 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 we’re attached:

 

Love, n. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy) manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment. —Oxford English Dictionary

 

Yet even that larger conception of love is too constricted to cover enough, because Love is a kind of suitcase-like word, which includes other kinds of attachments like these:

 

The love of a parent for a child.
A child's affection for parents and friends.
The bonds that make lifelong companionships.
The connections of members to groups or their leaders.

 

We also apply that same word ‘love’ to our fondness for objects, events, and beliefs.

 

A convert's adherence to doctrine or scripture.
A patriot's allegiance to country or nation.
A scientist's passion for finding new truths.
A mathematician's devotion to proofs.

 

We thus apply 'love' to our likings for things that we treasure, desire, or fill us with pleasure. We apply it to bonds that are sudden and brief, but also to those that increase through the years. Some occupy just small parts of our minds, while others pervade our entire lives.

 

But why do we pack such dissimilar things into a single suitcase-like word? It’s the same for our other ‘emotional’ terms; each of them abbreviates a diverse collection of mental states. Thus Anger may change our ways to perceive, so that innocent gestures get turned into threats, and alters the manners in which we react, to make us more inclined to attack. Fear too 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:

 

When a person you know has fallen in love, it's almost as though someone new has emerged—a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It's almost as though a switch had been thrown, and a different program has started to run.

 

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:

 

Why do I waste so much of my time?
What determines whom I’m attracted to?
Why do I have such strange fantasies?
Why do I find mathematics so hard?
Why am I afraid of heights and crowds?
What makes me addicted to exercise?

 

But we can’t hope to understand such things without adequate answers to questions like these:

 

What sorts of things are emotions and thoughts?
How do our minds build new ideas?
What are the bases for our beliefs?
How do we learn from experience?
How do we manage to reason and think?

 

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.

 

What is the nature of Consciousness?
What are feelings and how do they work?

How do our brains Imagine things?
How do our bodies relate to our minds?
What forms our values, goals, and ideals?

 

Now, everyone knows how Anger feels––or Pleasure, Sorrow, Joy, and Grief —yet 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 understand?

 

“Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind,
Describe or fix one movement of his mind?
Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend,
Explain his own beginning, or his end?”

 

How did we manage to find out so much about atoms and oceans and planets and stars—yet 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 electro-magnetic events; then Einstein reduced all those and more into yet smaller formulas. All this came from the success of those physicists’ 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 processes. However, that strategy never found small sets of laws that accounted for, in substantial detail, any large realms of human thought. So this book will embark on the opposite quest: to find more complex ways to depict mental events that seem simple at first!

 

This policy may seem absurd to scientists that have been trained to believe such statements as, “One should never adopt hypotheses that make more assumptions than they need.” But it is worse to do the opposite—as when we use ‘psychology words’ that mainly hide what they try to describe. Thus, every phrase in the sentence below conceals its subject’s complexities:

 

You look at an object and see what it is.

 

For, ‘look at’ suppresses your questions about the systems that choose how you move your eyes. Then, ‘object’ diverts you from asking how your visual systems partition a scene into various patches of color and texture—and then assign them to different ‘things.’ Similarly, ‘see what it is’ serves to keep you from asking how that recognition relates to other things that you’ve seen in the past.

 

It is the same for most of the commonsense words we use when we try to describe the events in minds—as when one makes a statement like, “I think I understood what you said.” Perhaps the most extreme examples of this are when we use words like ‘you’ and ‘me,’ because we all grow up with this fairy-tale:

 

We each are constantly being controlled by powerful creatures inside our minds, who do our feeling and thinking for us, and make our important decisions for us. We call these our Selves or Identities—and believe that they always remain the same, no matter how we may otherwise change.

 

This “Single-Self” concept serves us well in our everyday social affairs. But it hinders our efforts to think about what minds are and how they work—because, when we ask about what Selves actually do, we get the same answer to every such question:

 

Your Self sees the world by using your senses. Then it stores what it learns in your memory. It originates all your desires and goals—and then solves all your problems for you, by exploiting your ‘intelligence.’

 

.

Figure 1- 1

 

A Self controlling its person’s Mind

 

What attracts us to this queer idea, that we don’t make any decisions ourselves but delegate them to some other entity? Here are a few kinds of reasons why a mind might entertain such a fiction:

 

Child Psychologist: As a child, you learned to distinguish among some persons in your environment. Later, you somehow came to conclude that you are such a person, too—but at the same time, you may have assumed that there is a person inside of you.

Psychotherapist: The Single-Self legend helps makes life seem pleasant, by hiding from us how much we’re controlled by all sorts of conflicting, unconscious goals,

 

Practical Person: That image makes us efficient, whereas better ideas might slow us down. It would t