ludimagister

The familiar “computer metaphor” that halfheartedly likens the brain to a computer must be discarded: it is unnecessary and in fact inappropriate, because the mind is computational in a literal sense. It is easy to explain the concept of computation in plain terms: it turns out that every physical process computes something. Which physical processes are cognitive processes? Those that operate on representations—internal stand-ins for objects and events that are external to the system in question.

To establish the relevance of computation to cognition, we need to consider examples of perceptual, motor, and other tasks that can only be solved by crunching numbers, some of which stand for various entities external to the brain and others for its internal states. It turns out that all of the mind’s tasks are like that. More generally, minds evolved to support foresight, which brains compute by learning and using the statistics of the world in which they live.

Thus, the mind is best defined as the bundle of computations carried out collectively by the brain’s neurons. Because the same computation can be implemented by different physical means, nonbiological minds are revealed as a distinct possibility. This line of reasoning, supported by hard evidence from cognitive sciences, exposes the mind-body problem as an artifact of old ways of conceptualizing cognition that can be safely dismissed.

It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous, so most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr. and Ms. Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best. In black grouse the females are perfectionist, the males indiscriminate. In a monogamous human society, neither sex can afford to be either perfectionist or indiscriminate. Mr. Average chooses a plain woman, and Ms. Average chooses a wimp. They temper their idealist preferences with realism. People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: The homecoming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks. So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: “What on earth can she see in him?” we ask of a model’s dull and unsuccessful husband, as if there must be some hidden clue to his worth that the rest of us have missed. “How did she manage to catch him?” we ask of a highflying man married to an ugly woman.

The answer is that we each instinctively know our relative worth as surely as in Jane Austen’s day people knew their place in the class system. Bruce Ellis showed how we manage this “assortative mating” pattern. He gave each of thirty students a numbered card to stick on their foreheads. Each could now see the others’ numbers, but nobody knew his or her own. He told them to pair up with the highest number they could find. Immediately the person with 30 on her forehead was surrounded by a buzzing crowd, so she adjusted her expectations upward and refused to pair up with just anybody, settling eventually for somebody with a number in the high twenties. The person with number 1, meanwhile, after trying to persuade number 30 of his worth, then lowered his sights and went progressively down the scale, steadily discovering his low status, until he ended up taking the first person who would accept him, probably number 2.

The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others’ reactions to us. Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher. But it is worth it to get off the Red Queen’s treadmill before you drop.

A new species of philosophers is coming up: I shall venture to baptize them with a name that is not free of danger. As I unriddle them, insofar as they allow themselves to be unriddled, for it belongs to their nature to want to remain riddles; these philosophers of the future may have a right, it might also be a wrong, to be called “tempters.” This name itself is in the end a mere attempt and, if you will, a temptation.

Are these coming philosophers new friends of “truth”? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for every man—which has so far been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations. “My judgment is my judgment: no one else is easily entitled to it”—that is what such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say of himself. One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

Men have given to themselves all their values. They did not take it, they did not find it, it did not come to them as a voice from heaven.

Only man assigned values to things in order to maintain himself—he created the meaning of things, a human meaning! Therefore, calls he himself: “Man,” that is: the evaluator.

Valuation is creation. Hear this, you creators! Valuation itself is of all valued things the most valuable treasure.

Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear this, you creators!