Sex, Discipline, and Your Refrigerator
It has always seemed to me
that the two great mysteries of the universe are: "Why is there something
instead of nothing?" and "Why do people put locks on their refrigerator doors?"
Long ago, I concluded that both these mysteries must remain forever
unfathomable. More recently, two remarkable works of popular science have
convinced me that it is too early to despair.
First, the refrigerator
locks. Why would any rational creature want to erect an obstacle between itself
and a midnight snack? Midnight snacks have costs (usually measured in calories
or grams of fat), but they must also have benefits--otherwise, they wouldn't
tempt us. We snack when we believe the benefits exceed the costs. In other
words, we snack when snacking is, on net and in our best judgment, a good
thing. What could be the point of making a good thing more difficult?
But people do lock their refrigerators. They also destroy
their cigarettes, invest their savings in accounts that are designed to
discourage withdrawals, and adopt comically elaborate schemes to force
themselves to exercise. Odysseus resisted the Sirens' call by lashing himself
to the mast. I used to have my secretary lock my computer in a drawer every
afternoon so I couldn't spend my entire day surfing the Net.
Economists have tried to
explain such behavior in all sorts of unsatisfying ways. You can say that
people like to avoid making choices--but isn't the purchase of the lock a
choice? You can suppose that our minds house multiple "individuals" with
conflicting preferences--but it's unclear how to turn that into a precise
theory of exactly how many people we're sharing our minds with, and how their
conflicts get resolved. You can throw up your hands and say that some behavior
is rational and some isn't, and this particular behavior is in the second
category--but that's tantamount to giving up without a fight. Or, most
unsatisfying of all, you can simply posit a "taste" for self-control.
The problem with that one is that once you allow yourself
to start positing "tastes" for everything under the sun, you abandon all
intellectual discipline--any behavior at all can be "explained" by the
assertion that somebody had a taste for it. Economist Deirdre McCloskey warns
against hollow triumphs like, "Why did the man drink the motor oil? Because he
had a taste for drinking motor oil!" If you can explain everything,
you've explained nothing.
But in his entirely marvelous book How the Mind
Works , cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggests that we can safely
posit a taste for self-control without opening the floodgates that would allow
us to posit a taste for drinking motor oil. Here's why: Unlike a taste for
drinking motor oil, a taste for self-control confers a reproductive
advantage.
When you snack at
midnight, you get most of the benefits, but your spouse (who cares about your
health and appearance) shares many of the costs. So a taste for locking the
refrigerator in the afternoon--even when you know that, by a purely
selfish calculation, you ought to make yourself a giant hot fudge sundae every
night--makes you more desirable as a mate. Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised
that natural selection favored people with a taste for refrigerator locks.
What about people who aren't looking for mates or who are
already securely married? They have a taste for self-control because their
ancestors (who must have mated successfully or they wouldn't have become
ancestors) had that taste. The bottom line is that it is intellectually
honest to explain behavior by positing surprising tastes, provided those tastes
are useful in the mating game. Presumably the sociobiologists and evolutionary
psychologists have had this idea all along, but economists have been slow to
recognize its significance.
Now as to the origin of
the universe--or, as I prefer to phrase the question, "Where did all this stuff
come from?"--I now believe that everything is made of pure mathematics. I came
to this insight from Frank J. Tipler's book The Physics of Immortality ,
all of which is wonderfully provocative and some of which is convincing. His
point is to take seriously the claims of those artificial intelligence
researchers who assert that consciousness can emerge from sufficiently complex
software. Pure mathematics is pure software and contains patterns of arbitrary
complexity. The universe itself, together with the conscious beings who inhabit
it, could be one of those patterns.
Or maybe not. The argument only works if you believe that
mathematics is eternal and precedes the universe. One could equally well argue
that mathematics arises from counting and measuring and so can't exist until
after there is a universe of things to count and measure. I should also
say that while I love the idea that the universe is nothing but a mathematical
model of itself, I've never met anyone else who found the idea of "software
without hardware" even remotely plausible.
But there might be a good economic reason why we're
stymied. Steven Pinker points out that understanding the origin of the universe
is not a terribly useful skill. It confers no reproductive advantage, so
there's no reason we should have evolved brains capable of thinking about such
a question. Nature is too good an economist to invest in such frivolities. On
the other hand, the ability to understand human behavior has clear payoffs for
a social animal like Homo sapiens . So it's not too much to hope that we
could work out a detailed and convincing theory of refrigerator locks.
