I’ve been reading some interesting things in the brief moments between when I arrive home and when I am sucked involuntarily into sleep each night, and they’ve got me thinking.
Specifically, I’ve just finished reading two books on complexity theory: The first, an exploration of the life and work of Godel, and the second a layman’s summary of the work of Gregory Chaitin. I’ll write something up about the material later; however, Chaitin’s book especially has sparked some questions that have been sitting in the back of my head for a while.
He did this with a comment that was largely irrelevant to the thesis of his book. The comment was that emotion (specifically love) is a product of evolution. I’m not disputing his claim, and it is easy to construct reasons that justify it. For example, humans have a long gestation period, in the course of which we learn a multitude of things that will make us exceptionally viable in the long run. Having parents that are fiercely attached to each other would conceivably increase the likelihood of surviving this period of relative vulnerability.
This sort of reasoning can bleed into other areas of more general mechanistic thought. While there is a lot of work out there that shows that certain aspects of our universe are completely random (again, appealing to Chaitin), one can still imagine that a human being may literally be no more than the product of its environment. In such a conception of the Way Things Are, a human life can be viewed as a trajectory through time, where this trajectory is affected by external events and by the intrinsic random factors already mentioned. Any reactions, musings, feelings, intuitions, etc. that one experiences over the course of one’s life are a function of these inputs and of one’s unique physiology (which itself would change as a result of processing these inputs). Thus, while a human may be a system that is too complex to have deterministic and predictable behaviours, under this system there is little notion of autonomy, free will, and other things that we generally like to attribute to ourselves.
Now, I am not claiming that this is the case. However, let us for the sake of argument assume that we really are no more than biological machines in some large interactive system. The first objection that a normal person would probably have to such a claim is that it is dehumanizing, in the sense that it devalues many of the qualities that we consider to be definitive of our species. The question I would like to explore is this: If we assume that we, as humans, have emotions only because they give us an evolutionary advantage, and respond to situations based on a history of past physical inputs instead of inspiration from some immutable soul, does this really devalue the human experience?.
In essence: If Joe and Mary fall in love because some biological subsystem in each of their bodies has recognized an opportunity to produce viable offspring, is their love any less beautiful because of it? How does one even define a quality such as ‘beauty’ in such a world view?
I’m sure that people out there have tried to come up with answers to these questions. If you have any pointers, please let me know. And of course, comments are always welcome.