I’m always fascinated by news articles about humans helping animals. Like in the foto above where a large group of people helps a stranded whale. Why do they do this? The answer is not obvious. There is no moral law which would oblige us to help a large - and therefore possibly dangerous - animal in distress. It seems that humans for some reason enjoy to do this kind of activity. They want to feel the happiness of the freed animal swimming back into the ocean. But this would mean that humans do this actually for themselves, to enjoy a feeling of pleasure. Maybe you think now: „pleasure is not good. It would be better it they helped out of responsibility“.
But as we will see soon, the mechanism I describe here is in fact very old and makes perfectly sense. It's called compassion.
In two past blog posts I have tried to study the psychology of the interaction of two people with computational and mathematical methods. The results indicate that high levels of experienced pleasure are possible if the two interacting persons 1. try to induce pleasure in each other and 2. if both persons are very compassionate (in the sense that they experience the other persons pleasure / pain too). There is also empirical evidence that interactions between group members can amplify experienced emotions (e.g. people enjoy to visit huge open air concerts etc.).
I believe that the fact, that we are able to feel other people's pain and pleasure is in fact a very elegant method chosen by evolution to implement cooperation. Let me explain in more detail what I mean.
Early humans probably lived in small groups and cooperation was one of the most important survival strategies for the group. Maybe the equally important intelligence evolved even primarily to make cooperation at complex tasks possible.
Cooperative behavior could be also implemented using a set of pre defined (i.e. genetically „preprogrammed“) rules which make sure that the behavior of individuals is aligned with the interests of the group. This is probably the way simple animals like ants implement cooperation. But such a „moral firmware“ would be very inflexible and would have to be extremely comprehensive to account for the almost endless situations in which humans can find themselves.
The idea implemented instead by evolution is much more elegant, flexible and powerful:
- There is a „pleasure“ experienced by the individual (can be also negative = pain) which serves as an objective function for the individuals success. E.g. if we are thirsty and drink water we feel great. This is our reward for having found water. This is an old „pre cooperation“ feature (even a crocodile has it) on top of which cooperative behavior could be built.
- Now cooperative behavior is implemented simply by making the individuals feel the pleasure of other individuals as well. Therefore instead of the individual pleasure, the sum [1] of all the pleasures of the group members is experienced. This sum now serves as a new objective function. This requires - of course - that each group member maintains a reasonably accurate model of the state of the other members in its brain.
- Now all the group members simply use their intelligence to optimize this new objective function.
This solution has several important advantages:
- It automatically incentivizes behavior which is in the interest (i.e. rewarding/pleasurable->beneficial) of all group members.
- Optimizing an objective function using an optimizing algorithm (human intelligence) is a very clearly defined process. In many cases each individual can calculate alone which actions are suitable to reach the common goals. Often no communication (like negotiations, coordination etc.) is required. This alone is a huge advantage.
- The optimization process is only controlled by intelligence and therefore effective solutions can be also calculated in extremely rare or exceptional states (where even a huge set of „moral firmware“ rules could not provide effective guidance). This is due to the fact that true intelligence generalizes.
- It does not require culture. Culture is a set of behaviors that is learned by the group over time and transferred from generation to generation (by demonstration and teaching). Culture takes a lot of time to develop and is a comparatively complex (and therefore fragile) construct.
Let’s look a a very concrete example: sex between two people. We all know: it’s complicated and people can get hurt. Therefore we try to apply our moral and a lot of communication to avoid doing things which could hurt our partner. But we also know: the realm of human sexual desires is extremely complex and often contradictory. And often (and unfortunately) it’s the „immoral“ things which are most fun („sex is only dirty if it’s done right“). Using this current approach, sexuality has become today a complicated minefield and some of us don’t even dare to indulge in it anymore.
Now let’s apply our ancestor’s approach to the problem. They did not have time - yet - to develop a sophisticated moral. But they also did not need one to be happy!
I believe they were simply compassionate. And if you are compassionate the rule becomes very simple: whatever brings you most pleasure is the best thing to do (for both!). Therefore even if you desire to do something unusual or something which might hurt in another context it simply must be the right thing to do (in the sense that it brings pleasure for both).
If you are optimizing the echo of your own lust reflected from your partner it’s very difficult to do something wrong.
In this example we see how compassion allows for creative and unusual (and therefore often vastly superior) solutions.
In addition, compassion also allows to act fast and without verbal communication.
Another - more subtle - example: two friends are talking about a problem the first of them has. The second feels that the problem could be solved by telling an inconvenient truth. Telling this truth would therefore - at least for a short time - create pain in the first person. Now our moral tells us that it is „wrong to cause pain in other people“ (a simple static rule which is appropriate for many situations, but not for all). Therefore the second person will not mention the inconvenient fact. And this is - of course - simply bad for the first one.
The moral free „pleasure + compassion“ solution on the other hand yields much better results: the second person would be greedy to feel the first persons substantial relief some time after telling the truth and would therefore not hesitate to mention it.
And what has all this to do with paradise? It's very hard for us to imagine today that this feeling of pleasure, which we try to control so hard in a hundred ways and which we consider seductive, lewd and dangerous, was once a highly efficient guiding compass: to do the right thing, our ancestor simply had to do what they liked. I think such a state deserves the name paradise.
Now if the „pleasure + compassion“ solution is so powerful and even much more enjoyable, why did humans abandon it (at least to a large extent) and replace it with moral?
We tend to think that the reason must be that people are too cruel in their natural state and therefore their cruelty must be controlled by moral. As we will see soon: most surprisingly exactly the contrary is much more likely to be true: we invented moral to be able to introduce - in a controlled way - cruelty into our society. Moral allowed us to disable compassion, optimizing only our own pleasure, without falling into an abyss of chaos.
It's therefore very logical that today, that humankind is standing close to an abyss, moral presents itself as a remedy again. Many of us demand more rigid moral these days to save our species and the planet. But moral will serve us only on the way over the cliff down to hell. Our only way to save ourselves, I believe more and more, is to restore compassion. Then we won't need moral anymore.
But the fact that humans still do help whales in distress, shows that the feature is still functional in modern humans. And evolution sure did not invent it to be used on whales. This could be extremely useful to imagine a better future for humankind.
If you want to understand how we managed to lose compassion, read my next blog post
[1] The process is most likely much more complicated. But the „sum“ probably sums up the whole thing quite well.
Illustration by GUM
Image: Shutterstock, Neil Bradfield
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