Level 2
The
“greed for homocumulativity”:
a trick of our phylogenetic wisdom?
Ever since I read the first issue of Evolution and Cognition, I want to express a warning. If evolution is cognition and the genome a phylogenetic accumulation of wisdom necessary for survival, then the results of the “application” of that wisdom must be very different: anatomic structures, physiological mechanisms, etc. One of such results is the behaviour classified as cognitive by the orthodox epistemology. Admittedly, this is a very interesting special case, since it implies a layer of individual ortho-cognition (corresponding to the conventional definition) superimposed by another layer of phylogenetic meta-cognition which gives the former its framework. But in my opinion it is nevertheless unadvisable for the evolutionary epistemology to concentrate too exclusively on that one case, because there may be other, perhaps even more dramatic explanatory achievements in store for this science. One such possibility is that a seemingly non-cognitive behaviour might be identified as a “trick” applied by the phylogenetic wisdom to compel the organism to activities that are very much cognitive in their ultimate effect.
In speaking of this possibility I am referring to a book which I have written originally in German and which is now about to appear in my mother tongue. On the whole, the book is a humanistic piece of work half-way between a literary essay and a proto-scientific exploration. But its theoretical argument is purely biological, and it might be of interest to the readers of this journal. So let me present it here briefly.
Homocumulates and the greed for homocumulativity
There is a school of aesthetic thought called formalism. Its central idea is that things seem beautiful to us because they possess a certain type of qualities connected with their “form” and not with their “content”. The most prominent examples of such a quality (unity-in-diversity, balance, and the like) are evasive holistic intuitions, but in their shadow one often comes across a slightly different kind of characteristics, perhaps better suited for analysis. We all remember the formula “repetition and contrast”, and occasionally the same effect may be ascribed to various other similar properties: intensity, purity, etc.
The latter sort of insight has not aroused much theoretical speculation, though it is ubiquitous in practical aesthetic judgements. But for some unknown reason these “minor” formal qualities caught my attention when I was pondering over the possible motives of man: obviously, they could be interpreted as a group of intrinsic rewards sufficient to elicit consummatory behaviour from that strange animal, and therein I saw a trail worth to be pursued.
The first thing to do was to answer two questions which, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else has bothered to pose. 1. How many such qualities may exist, all in all? After a lot of analytical guesswork I settled on nine “primary” characteristics and an indefinite number of derivatives. The primary characteristics were: quantity, extensity, purity, completeness, exactness of repetition, intensity, density, sharp contour, and contrast. 2. Have these qualities anything in common, apart from the rather vague notion of “form”? And indeed they had! To my own surprise, they could all be easily reduced - easily at least by the standards of mathematical logic - to “large heaps of the same” or homocumulates. (To take a less obvious example, let us consider the case of contour and contrast: the only way to distinguish them from simple otherness is first to imagine a gradual transition patiently piling up small identical units of difference, and then to compress all these units into one point in physical or mental space. A sharp contour is the result in the first case, a contrast in the second.)
The rest of the story is plain: after this discovery, nothing could prevent my “ratiomorphic instinct” (or my “fuzzy logic”, as others may call it) from formulating the conjecture that the motivational effect described above was not really triggered off by intensity or purity, repetition or contrast, but by the homocumulativity itself, regardless of the outward form it assumes.
Strange as the idea may sound, homocumulativity is not the first motive ascribed to man that has to do with the simple and universal dichotomy identity/nonidentity; the same definition applies to the novelty. Moreover, homocumulativity and novelty are exactly opposite extremes, since the former can be reduced to pure identity and the latter to pure nonidentity. These parallels, never suspected by formalistic aesthetics, were bound to be significant, and therefore I decided to give the new motivational mechanism the name Homokumulativitäts-Gier or “greed for homocumulativity", intended to lean heavily on Neu-Gier or “greed for novelty” which is the much more precise German equivalent of “curiosity”.
Towards an ethogramme of the homocumulativity hunter
What could be the use of such a conjecture? I was fascinated by it mainly for two reasons. The first one was the necessity and the chance to examine man’s consummatory behaviour in hitherto unusual detail. We all know that this behaviour shows incredible variety; but when we try to explain it we cannot avoid sweeping generalizations - such as “curiosity and play”, “social imitation”, “habits”, “status symbols”, etc. - which make it pointless to dwell on more than two or three particular cases (for the sake of illustration), and thus all the richness observed gets lost. The greed for homocumulativity, to be sure, is another generalization of the above mentioned kind. But it is an exception in so far as the homocumulativity itself is an extremely variable affair, a thing with a thousand faces or “phenomenal masks”, since each content’s potential of homocumulation consists of a highly specific combination of formal characteristics; and one must know that potential thoroughly in order to be able to draw any further conclusions. Until my book little has been done to meet this need even by the formalistic aesthetics in its proper domain, and nothing in the rest of the field. Therefore I was forced to begin at point zero by compiling an endless list of all the things we may desire plus another list of possible formal properties, and then to pair tentatively each item on the first list with each item on the second. The result was a kind of minute catalogue of man’s consummatory behaviour - something that I had never seen before and that was very much rewarding in itself.
If one wants, however, to transform such a catalogue into an ethogramme of the homocumulativity hunter, one has to subject all material collected in this manner to a rather tricky test. In many instances we seek intensity, extensity, purity, etc., on other, extrinsic grounds, and in order to identify a single case of greed for homocumulativity without doubt, that possibility must be at least for the moment excluded.
In arts and philosophy, it is an old tradition to account for the idiosyncrasies of man by notions like “lack of measure” or “insatiability"; and as a humanist I was inevitably inclined to interpret the greed for homocumulativity as a new elaboration of the same theme. Therefore I was probably rather quick to decide that a certain behaviour was guided wholly or in part by this motive, and its ethogramme turned out very large indeed. But in fact, the only methods of identification I could propose were introspection and observation of others. By the standards of the modern natural scientist, that is surely a very crude and primitive sort of science, if it is science at all. So let me skip the special problems of my ethogramme and turn to the second reason I had for venturing the conjecture in question. The idea of homocumulativity, i.e. of large heaps of the same, can hardly mean anything to the traditional philosopher; but it suits almost perfectly the requirements of biological functionalism, and it establishes a surprising correspondence between the basic structure of our universe and some of the most esoteric results, aesthetic and other, of the so-called self-realization of man.
General repertory strategies and their filters
In terms of the systems theory, the organism must always have in stock an adequate repertory of behavioural outputs. Where does it get them? For the “adaptationist”, of course, this is a silly question, since he believes that they are mere re-actions, i.e. secondary phenomena totally determined and somehow extorted by the inputs. But perhaps the “interactionist” will understand what I mean.
At least some outputs must be found by the organism itself, and this can in principle be accomplished by two types of strategies. The first one produces well-defined single reactions ready for use by memorizing that something the organism has done by chance has had the desired kind of effect, or by anticipating intelligently that the same will be the consequence of a more or less similar output. However, this is not the only way to tackle the problem, since one can easily think of another course of action which would start from the premise that everything the organism can perceive, in connexion with its own activity or otherwise, is a potential reaction and should be treated with the corresponding respect. The result is what I call a general repertory strategy.
The first thing to be said about it is that it makes us sharply aware of the real nature of the organism’s behavioural output. Some outputs may be reactions from the very moment of their birth, but the immediate products of a general repertory strategy are definitely not among them. It is possible - though it is by no means certain - that they will become reactions in due time, but they begin their life as something quite different: as unprovoked provocations forcing the environment to react.
The advantages of such a strategy are not difficult to discover. One problem, however, remains. Under normal conditions, so much can be perceived by the organism that even a general repertory strategy implies a severe selection, and there is reason to believe that this selection cannot be left entirely to chance, since in that case the gains would not be substantial enough; the mechanism must include a “filter” which will pick out the most promising outputs. But at the same time the process of selection should not affect the generality of the strategy, i.e. the filter cannot simply prefer some contents to others. Its operating principle must be a really universal distinction, and such a distinction can only be based on the criterion of identity and nonidentity.
Is it possible to combine these two in a way that will satisfy the above demands? Yes - if we are prepared to accept utterly trivial “structures” (a condition which makes it very difficult for the structuralists to approve of my argument). The first possibility is pure nonidentity, commonly known as novelty. In other words, the greed for novelty can be interpreted as a typical example of a general repertory strategy, and the novelty as a filter, a clever device that prevents waste in the form of mere repetition of well-known patterns. But perhaps this greed is not the only specimen in its class, since I can predict theoretically - and make at least to some degree probable in practice - that there exists another filter with similar merits: pure identity, or as I call it, homocumulate.
Why is homocumulativity a useful principle of selection of prospective reactions? As long as additional units of a certain output have identical effects, their heaping up in the form of intensification, extensification, purification, etc., leads to extreme efficiency - admittedly of a sort which may seem elementary or even primitive, but the results can be easily incorporated into more complex outputs at a later stage if necessary. Generally speaking, homocumulation is a process that tends to fathom and exhaust the complete potential of all the existing possibilities, expanding into the “depth” of the world and not into its “width” like the search for novelty. (The reader may object that the process is obviously of such a nature that it cannot have only linear consequences. As a matter of fact, ruthless homocumulation of a single component is probably the best way to destroy an equilibrium and provoke surprising restructurations. But this might be a further gain - some of man’s basic inventions strongly suggest a similar genetic pattern. In any case, it is evident that the strategy pushes the idea of provocation to extremes, compelling the world to “put all its cards on the table”.)
Or, to express it more formally: the homocumulate is an aggregation which can be realized only in one out of a billion of ways, a heap which contains no disorder or randomness and whose entropy is therefore equal to zero, i.e. whose energy can be completely converted into work. Actually, the term denotes the only well-defined structure of which we can say that in general and without limitations. So it is precisely this class of phenomena of the physical and mental universe one has to look for if one wants to find the most powerful reactions, and the greed for homocumulativity is a general repertory strategy that makes as much sense as the greed for novelty.
At this point it becomes clear why I had to coin the somewhat clumsy word “homocumulate”: it brings to light things which were hidden from us as long as we knew only some scattered facets of that structure. “Repetition” or “contrast” are qualities confined to the aesthetics, while my slogan conforms at least to the spirit of the natural sciences: the curious fact that we like homocumulates is simply a kind of biological adaptation.
But how do we know all that?
In the eyes of the evolutionary epistemology, the organism does certain things because it somehow knows they are the right things to do. But who has told us that the greed for homocumulativity is one of them?
First of all, let me stress that according to my observations this greed is truly general. Often a homocumulate it pursues is undeniably silly or detrimental, and yet we cannot leave it alone. In fact, many serious defects of man - not only his urge for exclusive possession of beautiful things, but also such behaviours as destruction, superstition, drugs abuse, or suicide - become more understandable if we view them as a quest for intensity, extensity, purity, etc., for its own sake; the price that must be paid for the advantages of such a quest is obviously high enough. These circumstances seem to exclude the possibility that the greed for homocumulativity might be an achievement of our conscious or unconscious intelligence and thus of individual ortho-cognition. Of course, one of the functions of intelligence is generalization, but this function is so tightly interwoven with differentiation that it cannot really be isolated, which would be the only way to block the preference for the evidently useful. The intelligence is simply a tool perfectly adapted to the needs of single-case repertory strategies and for that very reason unfit for their opposite.
As for the greed for novelty, nobody actually believes that this strategy is a product of intelligence; we all speak of an innate disposition based on phylogenetic meta-cognition. And my guess is that the same applies to the greed for homocumulativity, which would make the supposed parallel perfect.
Such a state of affairs puts the individual in a very interesting position. There is something inside him (his genome) that knows very well why he should be greedy for homocumulates; but he “himself” has no idea of that knowledge - in fact, I seem to be the first one to make him aware of it. The term “greed for novelty” or “curiosity” is full of cognitive connotations, whereas the aesthetic formalism makes a point of the assertion that formal beauty has no extrinsic purpose, cognitive or other. Most people just feel the joy and exhilaration connected with the perception of a homocumulate and strive to experience them again and again; and if a philosopher stops to reflect upon a negative side-effect of this greed, he does it to complain about the strange force that rides his soul and makes him do things he has never intended. The last description is fair enough, since the wisdom of our genome does not leave it to the individual to decide whether he will be intrigued by homocumulativity or not - instead, it offers him a consummatory reward that acts as a bait and entraps him in a quasi-instinctive automatism difficult or impossible to control.
The arrangement obviously implies a kind of distrust, and the distrust appears to be justified, as the greed for homocumulativity must be protected from interferences of intelligent reasoning in order to fulfil its purpose; in a way, it presupposes extreme simplicity of mind. The astonishing thing is that such a mechanism should be one of the biological innovations specific of man - that it should have evolved at the same time as his overwhelming intelligence. The picture I am adding some strokes to is certainly not that of Homo sapiens but that of a homo insipiens only too familiar to the critics of rationalistic optimism. And why are other animals not greedy for homocumulates? Perhaps the rich network of rather detailed instructions they are endowed with makes unnecessary or even excludes a life-style of radical provocation, so appropriate if the organism has to find almost all its behavioural outputs alone.
Conclusion
I know it is a queer enterprise to contribute a new name to the long and doubtful list of possible incentives of man - twice as queer since the motive I am postulating is so unusual, so abstract or downright mathematical. What are the chances that such a motive should really exist? At the moment, the conjecture yields an interesting theoretical argument and an equally interesting analytical portrait of man and his goals; but it does not contain the slightest hint whatsoever as to the physiological equivalent of the mechanism described. In principle, to be sure, the question I put to the neurobiologists can be answered by a clear “yes” or “no”. The problem is that it will probably take them a lot of time to get so far, and until then my hypothesis will continue to include a strong element of speculation.