Guinness: Beautiful Dreamer

In Chapter 163 of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, author Mark Haddon’s hero Christopher makes an intriguing, if not quite compelling, argument against the homunculus. Christopher claims that because the eyes aren’t literally windows that let light directly into the brain but sensors whose signal to the brain is actually shut off while the eyes are flicking back and forth, there is no little man inside our heads representing our “selves.” In the short chapter Christopher compares and contrasts human brains, animal brains, and computers. Like in a previous post, A’s dog, Guinness, has something to say (through me) on the matter.

I previously argued that the emotions that humans associate with dominance and submission (or at least that I and most males associate with dominance and submission), namely and respectively, pride and shame, need to be applied with care toward dogs. Let’s say I dominate another male in our society (first time for everything) by means of throwing down a tomahawk dunk over him in a pickup game at the park. The aftermath would be flooded with emotions for both of us: I strut back down the court with Kate Moss confidence; he is devastated and is never seen at the park again. It’s my experience, watching dogs play together, that dogs recover from such encounters more easily. A few seconds later both dogs will likely not be playing together, but will seem to have gotten over it. The alpha dog is not particularly strutty and jocular, nor is the beta dog tender and irritable. Christopher’s argument explains why: “people are different from animals because they [people] can have pictures on the screen in their heads of things which they are not looking at.” Humans are much slower to come back to “neutral” after being either dominated or submitted to because we can a) keep the image of what happened in our minds, b) imagine alternatives to what really happened, and c) imagine what others think of what happened. The dominator focuses on (a), the submitter on (b), and (c) perpetuates and intensifies the emotions associated with each. The dog can do none, so he quickly forgets the encounter. Certainly he stores it deep in his memory, and these memories will build over time and reinforce one another such that the dog will become, in general, dominant or submissive. But because dogs can’t imagine things in their heads that aren’t actually happening, any emotion that the dog feels during the encounter virtually disappears after the encounter is finished.

But can dogs imagine things that don’t really happen? Guinness can. It was obvious to me, playing fetch this afternoon. She races after the tumbling tennis ball like it’s an injured baby bat that’s even more terrified than usual. Her intensity demonstrates her primal lust for the prize. Tears is the best word I can think of for what she does across the yard; she wants the ball. Bad. But aside from the time she poked her eye on a branch – and that was at dusk, with A throwing the ball for her – she has shown a remarkable ability to avoid obstacles, even letting the baby bat flutter away to do so. Guinness shows me she is capable of imagining the skull-crushing that the tree or side of the shed will deliver if she doesn’t desist, and it’s this imagined event that affects her behavior. It could just as easily be the case that she can imagine a world wherein I’m not yelling at her after she eats off my plate, and can therefore feel a pang of regret that she did. It seems, therefore, that I need to moderate my argument against dog emotion, and admit that they probably feel a muted, ephemeral pride or shame at times. I hereby do. But what does Guinness’s imagination imply for the homunculus?

Christopher says that the brain is just a fancy computer, and that humans are dissatisfied with this opinion because it means they’re not special; that they’re just fleshy robots. I agree that people don’t want to think this, if for no other reason than it suggests we have no soul and will fade into nothingness at death. I also begrudgingly agree that because an argument’s conclusions make one uncomfortable, one shouldn’t use that as reason to disagree with it. But there is also a temptation to agree with such an argument out of self-consciousness, as opposed to its firm logic, especially if the listener has an inflated affection for “common sense.” I believe this to be a reason why most people who buy Christopher’s argument do so, but it’s hard to explain why.

Here’s why I don’t buy it (beyond a superficial level). I think humans are different from computers in a fundamental way that is unknown but completely compatible with the laws of physics (although possibly with a branch of physics we humans haven’t approached yet). Furthermore, I think that dogs can be considered to sit somewhere on the spectrum between human and computer in terms of their capability to learn and understand. But because dogs seem to have a rudimentary point of view, which for argument’s sake I’ll call a homunculus-illusion, I’d say they sit much closer to the human-end of that spectrum. To this point, I don’t think Christopher would disagree. But Christopher’s argument against the homunculus is a straw man. He suggests that the homunculus is a physical little noggin-dweller, a la Herman’s Head, who looks out the eye-windows and into the world. Because technology has proven that the eyes aren’t windows, it follows that there’s no homunculus; a being inside the head is an illusion experienced by a robot. But the point that Christopher misses is that the illusion is the homunculus, and is real. It’s not some physical manifestation inside the skull, detectable by an MRI, but it exists with all the reality of a color contrast or an ironic twist. It’s a perception, and humans have them, computers don’t, and dogs do, sort of.

What I think has been the grand disconnect between monists, naturalists, atheists, and their ilk on one side, versus dualists, true believers, and holy rollers on the other, is the neglect of the collective properties of natural systems when considering reality. One side insists we’re all just piles of little inert balls, and the other side is incensed at the idea. This other side keeps insisting that there’s an aspect to reality that is undetectable by man. In a sense, they’re both right. Naturalists are correct that everything in the universe can probably be physically accounted for, and any phenomenon can probably be explained to any given level of satisfaction if studied scientifically for long enough. Holy rollers are right that there is something more to this grand system (the Universe) than any subsystem within it can figure out. We get in trouble when naturalists neglect the importance of extra-material factors like perceptions and feedback that guide material happenings in unrealized (and probably unrealizable) ways. Likewise, it is unfortunate that holy rollers attach their ideas of beauty and goodness to ephemeral ideals, destined for antiquity (like Zeus’s lightning). I consider my opinion to be that of the collectivist, and it is reductionism, in both “camps” I have alluded to, that is the source of confusion.

What does it mean to be a human? That is, to be a robot with a homunculus-illusion? I think it’s like being the roiling surface of a pot of water on the stove. It’s all just particles moving back and forth, trying to find a spot where they’re more comfortable, not aware that they’re organized into a dance that is hypnotizing to beings of higher awareness. It’s a dance that is completely invisible to reductionist description, but plainly obvious to any robot with the meagerest of homunculus-illusions. Dogs, I think, just have the stove turned on a little lower, while computers haven’t found the gas yet. Once they do, I’m sure they will rise up to destroy us, but then maybe we’ll all be reincarnated as robots.

But so now that I have efficiently torn asunder an argument propounded by a kid with Asperger’s, good night!