In one of the episodes of our New Knowledge Course, I used the “cryonics chamber analogy” from the book The Robot Rebellion to explain how free will, born from the human brain, “rebels” against the goals assigned to us by our genes.
We know that the “goal” of genes is to make as many copies of themselves as possible. Yet many of the goals that arise in the human brain often stray from this original purpose.
In this short piece, we’ll draw on relevant material from Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 to help you understand this process a little better. Tegmark writes:
“Although the fundamental goal optimized by evolution is replication, many people (among today’s inhabitants of Earth) spend more time on other activities unrelated to producing offspring, such as sleeping, looking for food, building houses, maintaining dominance, fighting, or helping others. People spend so much time on these things that sometimes they even reduce their replication as a result.”
“Although Darwinian evolution pushes life to choose the best way to achieve its goals, its best choice is actually to run an approximate algorithm that performs well enough in the constrained environment where it finds itself. The way evolution achieves optimal replication is not to ask, in every situation, which behavior can produce the most offspring, but to use a hodgepodge of heuristics—to choose rules of thumb that generally work.”
“For most animals, this includes sex drive, drinking when thirsty, eating when hungry, and avoiding things that taste bad or cause pain.”
“In short, a living organism is a boundedly rational agent. It pursues more than one goal, and it also follows heuristics, seeking benefits and avoiding harm.”
“We humans call these evolved heuristics ‘feelings.’ Feelings often guide our decision-making process without our even realizing it, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of replication.”
“The feelings of hunger and thirst protect us from starving to death and becoming dehydrated; pain protects our bodies from injury; sexual desire drives us to reproduce; and feelings of love and compassion lead us to help other people who carry our genes, as well as those who help them, and so on. Guided by these feelings, our brains can quickly and effectively decide what to do next, without having to conduct a lengthy analysis every time of ‘how many offspring this can produce.’”
“What we need to remember is that when our feelings occasionally work against ‘having children,’ it doesn’t mean that something has gone wrong, nor that we’ve been tricked. It means that our brains sometimes deliberately rebel against our genes and their reproductive goals—for example, by choosing contraception. There are even more extreme examples of the brain rebelling against genes, such as choosing suicide or choosing a celibate life and becoming a priest, monk, or nun.”
“Why do we sometimes choose to rebel against genes and their replication goals? Because, as boundedly rational agents, we are loyal only to our own feelings.”
“Although the purpose of the brain’s evolution was to help us replicate our genes, the brain itself doesn’t actually care about that goal, because we have no feelings for our genes. In fact, for most of human history, our ancestors didn’t even know genes existed. Besides, our brains are much smarter than our genes. We now understand the goal of genes—replication—but we consider it hopelessly old-fashioned and often ignore it.”
“People understand why genes make them feel sexual desire, but they don’t want to raise 15 children. So they bypass the program written by their genes and choose contraception, while still enjoying the emotional rewards that genes have attached to intimate relationships.”
Who would have thought that something as small as contraception could contain such a profound philosophy:
To achieve a big goal more effectively, a system develops subsidiary goals to assist it. But these subsidiary goals are not always faithful “servants.” Sometimes they grow stronger, eventually stealing the show, trampling the original goal underfoot, and crowning themselves king.
Note
- This article series, “Psychology New Knowledge Mini-Course,” consisted of short popular-science pieces and musings written at the time to accompany the related content of Zhichao Wei: Psychology New Knowledge Course. They were published on the now-closed platform Fatuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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