1.2 Where to Find Souls and Spirits

How to Break Art and Bend Gravity, Part 1.2

The ethologist and I moved our discussion to a diner down the street. By the time we were seated, she was musing about ghosts and the odds of an afterlife. Hirst had her thinking about death and dying.

"You think flies have souls?" she asked.

"Probably they do," I said, "because they have to make decisions and exercise judgment in novel environments."

"Roombas have souls too then?" she asked, referring to the consumer-grade vacuum robots. "They make decisions. You'll drop a roomba into your bedroom and watch it try to work out where to go. You could even assign personalities to roombas, couldn't you? Call one bold and reckless if it's programmed to dash forward and knock into things like WALL-E; call another cautious if it moves slowly and never hits the wall on account of its tip top collision detection."

"Roombas aren't alive," I said. "Apples and oranges."

"Brains and circuitboards might be more alike than you think. You've got complex robots that can learn new behaviors. They can improvise. So don't you think it's even plausible that some houseflies run on autopilot like robots?"

"It's funny, I . . . no, my gut tells me living creatures have souls."

"But then where do you draw the line? Do fan corals or bacteria have souls?"

"Maybe," I said, though I didn't believe it.

She knew I was cornered. She asked, "Have you ever heard the saying, 'everything's the way it is because it got that way'?"

Here was a woman who'd spent a chunk of her life of her life obsessing over this topic, and her tangent would divert me from worrying about life after college. Hell yeah I'd geek out with her.

"Everything's the way it is because it got that way," she was saying, "and I mean literally everything you can observe must have an origin story. The shapes of the continents, the tradition of men wearing suits to work, and even my distaste for rotting meat got to be that way. A man of faith would say I'm repulsed by rotting meat because God wants to shield me from poisoning myself. And someone who researches animal behavior would say my ancestors' became repulsed by rotting meat over tens of millions of years. Rotten meat eaters died young and got weeded out of the gene pool while rotten meat avoiders survived and made babies, yada yada yada.”

"Instincts evolve?" I asked. "That's wild."

She said her ninth-grade bio teacher had first pitched this idea that every animal instinct had an origin story, and it hung around her neck ever since. Probably led her to ethology.

In that bio class, she'd watched a nature film, National Geographic's Creatures of the Namib Desert, about the sand dunes’ hidden ecosystem. Amidst all the snakes, lizards and insects on the dunes, the golden wheel spider stood out because it performed the most peculiar behavior imaginable. To escape predators, it tucked its legs and cartwheeled down the duneside. What a clever trick!

The lights came on after the video, and she raised her hand. “Did the spider learn to tuck and roll by imitating its parents?”

Her teacher said no. In fact, this tuck-and-roll protocol was coded into its brain from birth, which meant the spider would express this behavior even if it grew up isolated and without any other spiders to learn from.

Years later, she concluded that spiders never make choices. They never weigh costs and benefits, they never feel emotions, and they never comprehend what they’re doing while doing it. Rather, they run on autopilot, which means they act based on preset algorithms in their brains. So, when faced with Stimulus X, they reflexively initiate Fixed Action Pattern Y. In essence, spiders experience the world the same way roombas do. That's another way of saying they have no consciousness to speak of.

Her biology teacher had handed her that supermassive idea: that in the same way eyes, legs, and lungs evolved, instinctive behaviors evolved too.

If instinctive behaviors evolved, then there would have been a time before golden wheel spiders could cartwheel away from predators. Their ancestors would’ve had other, simpler protocols for fleeing danger, finding food, and wooing mates. But the spiders saw incremental upgrades to their mental hardware, like how a Roomba’s nav system gets upgraded by its manufacturer every few years. One upgrade allowed the spiders to detect predators better than before. Another helped them find food and woo mates better. And she also pointed out that spiders haven't stopped evolving, so future spiders may look and act differently than present spiders.

I said. "You say spiders and flies run on autopilot. You say they operate according to instincts that evolved over millions of years." She was nodding. "So then what do instincts look like in the brain? That is, what's physically changing when instincts evolve? I can't picture it.”

“You understand the broad strokes of natural selection, right?” she asked. “Random mutations and selective retention?”

I hadn’t slept through bio. I’d even seen YouTube clips of mudskippers, the Asian land-fish that use their pectoral fins like awkward, stubby arms to drag their bellies across the tidal flats. I could envision their pectoral fins morphing into recognizable front legs and sprouting webbed toes over a hundred-million generations.

Yet I couldn't envisioning a creature’s instincts changing over time. I took a shot.

Naive Explanation 1:

Instincts must sit somewhere in the brain, so what if each instinct was housed in its own brain cell? Each golden wheel spider could have a designated brain cell for tucking-and-rolling, which switches on when conditions are right. Once activated, the cell would command the spider’s leg muscles to clench into cartwheeling posture. This brain cell would have appeared long ago as a mutation in the spider’s brain. . .

The ethologist shook her head. She told me brain cells, aka neurons, didn’t work that way. Nothing so complex as an instinct with input-output conditions could fit into one neuron.

I took another shot.

Naive Explanation 2:

The spider must have a non-physical mind (like a soul). Therefore, we’re misguided if we look for any part of the spider’s physical brain that holds its instincts.

She giggled this time. “Respectfully, you've assumed in both your explanations that a spider has a ghost in its brain. First, you put ghosts inside individual neurons, and then you said, ‘the brain needs a ghost but I can’t decide where to put it.’”

She told me I was a dualist, which meant I pictured myself made from two different kinds of stuff.

1. My body, including my brain, was made of matter.
2. My mind was a cloud of invisible, weightless soulstuff—a ghostly substance defying some or all laws of physics.

She said, “A dualist considers his mind the driver and his body the vehicle, in which case an evil spirit can overpower his mind-spirit-soul and take control of his body, like a carjacker boosting a car at a red light. Or, his mind can separate from his body, circle the room twice, and then repatriate in his brain. Have you ever seen Doctor Strange?”

Doctor Strange was just the latest blockbuster to promote a dualist worldview. Before that, the Harry Potter series showed us ghosts floating through walls. And Freaky Friday showed us Lindsay Lohan’s mind leaping into Jamie Lee Curtis’s body.

I said demonic possession and astral projection were suspect. (Reportedly possessed girls probably had epilepsy and needed meds, not exorcisms.) On the other hand, ghosts might exist in some form.

“And again, please don’t take this condescension. I assure you I'm not standing on top of the mountain waiting for everyone else to catch up. It’s not like that, I just want to expose you to how bio geeks think about the brain differently from normies.”

Of course I wasn’t offended, but I still wanted to visualize what changed in the golden wheel spider’s brain that caused its behavioral change.

“Picture the spider’s instincts as circuit boards, but they're made of neurons instead of silicon. When a spider’s instincts change over a thousand generations—like maybe we see the spider becoming more aggressive towards sexual rivals or more inclined to dart underground at sunrise—its neural circuits are morphing into new configurations.”

“The pattern is what matters.”

“Right. And by the way, you already think about a Roomba’s behavior this way, don't you? You understand that the mechanism steering it left, right, forward, and back is nothing but microscopic transistors on a silicon chip. You'd change the Roomba’s behavior by changing its circuit boards."

"Then flies and spiders don't have souls?" I asked.

"They don't need souls to behave as they do. And I'll take it further: it's not clear to me that any animal has a soul, not even people."

"How does that work?" 

"Suppose your inside jokes with old friends and your memories of chasing fireflies as a kid might just be neural circuitry. Likewise for your table manners and your preference for cheddar instead of Swiss. We don't need souls to explain the way you function or subjectively experience the world. Sufficiently complex Roombas could achieve consciousness . . . probably.”

How could she suggest humans are just animals? I’d heard PETA activists argue the same point when they wanted to convince me that cockroaches and bedbugs had as much claim to this earth as people do (I’m hardly exaggerating--see their website!) But I didn't think that idea held water with scientists. Surely we're exceptional.

“I owe you an apology," she said. "Listen, I usually avoid discussing this stuff with non-scientists because I remember what a bitter pill it was for me to swallow.”

“No, it’s an interesting way of looking at how the mind works,” I said, because I didn't want to look dogmatic or closed-minded. “But I still can't figure how anyone can prove we don’t have souls.”

She let her shoulders slump and she gave me a sad smile, like I was making her tell me things that would damage me down the road.

“I don't know what evidence would convince change your mind. And then, what's the point of changing your mind anyway? I was happier before I knew what I know." 

"What do you know?" I pressed.

She shook her head and looked away as she said, "I know I can change your personality by fiddling with your neural circuits. I can cut out your amygdala and you won’t feel fear anymore. Cut out your dlPFC and you’ll become hyperaggressive and hypersexual. Stimulate your visual cortex with tiny electrodes and you’ll see flashes of light. Stimulate your thalamus and, if you had chronic pain before, it’s gone. Spray oxytocin, a hormone, into your synapses and you’d trust your friends and family more. Should I keep going? I can get norepinephrine into your brain by spraying it up your nose, and it will cause you to overreact to social cues, so you’ll be more likely to pick a fight with a guy who crosses you, but also more likely to befriend a stranger who’s kind.”

I shrugged and said, “If you want to change my personality, you don’t need a scalpel. Caffeine or alcohol will do it. But that's got no bearing on my soul. I mean, if I'm driving a car and the accelerator and brakes malfunction, the car will drive differently even though nothing’s wrong with the driver. Likewise, brain damage will change how my personality comes across to you and everyone else, even though my soul remains unscathed.”

She nodded and smiled, but I pressed her again.

“Alright, here's a thought experiment. Pretend you and I undergo brain surgery. We lay down on adjacent operating tables, and in comes the surgeon. She saws open your skull and swaps half your brain with half of mine. Now your brain's equally divided between two bodies, so where’s your soul?”

I didn’t know.

“Nor do I. Because there’s no mission control center in your head. There’s no cockpit where your soul can exercise its free will and decide how you should behave. I’d rather not go down the free-will rabbit hole, but--”

“You don’t believe in free will?”

“Can we put a pin in that? Look, the brain swapping operation is science fiction, but it’s not that far-fetched. We’ve been performing another kind of split-brain operation for decades called a corpus callosotomy. A surgeon cuts the tissue between a patient’s right and left hemispheres so the two halves can’t talk. The procedure is supposed to make seizures less severe, but it also causes seriously bizarre side effects. If your brain hemispheres can’t talk, then each half of your brain experiences its own emotions and desires, which the other side doesn’t know about. It’s like you have two independent selves, or two free wills.”

“Sounds like Being John Malkovich.” I said.

“But this isn’t a movie. In a typical split-brain case, a boy will notice his left hand reaching for random objects, like it’s controlled by a mysterious outside force. He’ll get spooked by his left hand’s behavior, and he’ll wrestle it into submission with his right hand. I mean this is freaky stuff.”

“What's controlling his left hand?”

“His right-brain-self controls one hand and his left-brain-self controls the other. Both selves are conscious, but neither knows what the other's up to. Then, into the room come the researchers and they interrogate the boy’s two selves--”What do you want to be when you grow up? What motivated you to do that thing you just did?”--and the two selves give different answers. So, when I heard these stories as a young dualist, I was hard-pressed to explain how surgeons could divide someone’s free will with a knife."

I couldn’t explain it either.

“I don't know why you'd want to know any of this,” she said.

I said I enjoyed her perspective. She raised her eyebrows. Just a few years ago, she’d sat where I was sitting now, and she’d endured the same pitch for a just-neurons-and-atoms picture of the mind. She heard the same thought experiments. And when it all was laid before her, she still clung to dualism for a couple more years. No argument at that time could have convinced her she didn't have a soul. But after years of studying how non-human animals behave, she opened her heart to these uncomfortable ideas.

It was getting late and we called for the check. If I planned to head back to campus on the bus tonight, I'd have to claim a seat soon. I was already packed and checked out of my hotel.

“Before we go,” she said, “I want to connect the dots. Most people I talk to, including a few scientists, have this strange idea that human creativity can never be surpassed by intelligent machines. They think making art is outside the jurisdiction of AI.”

“But," I said, "if you already think of the human brain as an impressive computer, then granting creative agency to machines isn’t such a stretch, right?”

“Right,” she said. “So I want to stay in touch, and I mean that. My employer has me working on a project for the next two months that’s right up your alley. I could use the insights of a rising artist who didn’t sleep through biology class.”

1.3 What the Spiders Call Beautiful

How to Break Art and Bend Gravity, Part 1.3


Side A: The Unfashionable Majority

While waiting in line at the bus station, I paid more attention than usual to the other passengers. I was trying to guess who’d align with Sargent or Hirst. Team Sargent would attract the high-conscientiousness and mid- to low-openness commuters. That meant violinists, actuaries, chemists, and other guys who dressed like Jon Arbuckle. Meanwhile, Team Hirst would attract the competitively eccentric creatives, plus a few highbrow socialites whose parents and peers had systematically desensitized them to blood-and-maggot art.  

A young latina lady in line ahead of me wore combat boots and a dozen bracelets on each wrist. I thought she'd be a fine candidate for Team Hirst if the guys from the art show ever came out recruiting. But the fifteen others in line belonged to Team Sargent. And here was another important insight: Team Hirst was a tiny tribe. They were the early adopters, the first movers. Maybe they'd even sway the majority to join them someday. 

Or maybe not. I could see Team Hirst remaining on the fringes the same way kids with tarantulas would forever stay an insignificant subset of pet owners. (How many lifetimes would we have to wait for the hordes of irish setters owners to abandon their dogs in favor of pet spiders?) Team Sargent might not attract the trendy innovators, not in the fine art domain, but they were the middlebrow majority.

Still, the problem with Team Sargent was that they built a 600-year backlog of more phenomenal art than they could ever sift through, so they could ignore future generations of art makers. I'd need to outpaint Rembrandt and Turner to make a splash.

By contrast, Marc wouldn't have to be a one-in-fifty-million virtuoso to win attention as a blood-and-maggot artist. All he had to do was to show his fans the next clever idea. That was no cakewalk either, but it was an order of magnitude easier than besting Rembrandt or Turner. 

That's all to say I decided it wise to look for opportunities outside the "fine artist" profession. And soon the ethologist would give me my first lead.

Side B: The Spider’s Tale

My bus pulled out at 10:15 PM. Soon, the city lights were behind me, and I was barreling down a long, straight corridor of highway. It sank between a grassy embankment on either side, upon which grew thick trees that loomed over me.

My mind wandered.

I stared out the window and imagined the embankments shedding their grass and then climbing a hundred feet higher. The cars were gone, and even the highway disappeared beneath hard-packed sand. That's when the bus rolled to a stop. The passengers weren't there any more.

I was sitting alone when the sand began to invade the bus’s aisle. It came in waves, rolling past me and swallowing the floor. Layer after layer of sand kept piling on until it was up to my knees. I had to lean forward use the seat in front of me like a fulcrum to yank my feet free. Then I climbed out the bus's ceiling exit and started up the nearest dune. It was still a silhouette against the night sky.

The sun broke the horizon as I reached the summit. It shone on the sand ahead of me, revealing a little glass dome—the kind a baker uses to cover cakes. I approached and saw that underneath the dome was the same golden wheel spider the ethologist had described. He stood motionless, as small as my palm and beige to match the sand.

I knelt beside him and started to lift the glass off him. He spoke, or rather I heard a voice I imagined to be his, though he never moved. The voice said: “Leave the cover where it is, please.”

Suppose you could converse with a golden wheel spider. What would you ask him? What would he ask you?

Earlier tonight, the ethologist had told me a bit about this spider’s habits. I knew, for instance, that he didn’t build webs because they were useless on the dunes. I knew he dug a burrow and tucked himself underground from sunrise to sunset. And I knew that at night, he crawled out to hunt for bugs.

“I’m not one to lounge in the open like this,” the voice said, “not when the sun’s up. So forgive me if I seem edgy.”

The sand would be searing hot to the touch in a couple hours, but it was cool now. We had a spectacular view across the sandy expanse, which were turning the color of rust in the sunlight. I told him I was privileged to enjoy such a beautiful vista.







“That’s interesting,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m puzzled by what you call beautiful. Sunsets and expansive views with big skies? I assure you that if we auctioned off apartments to my relatives, the windowless basement units would fetch the highest prices. You can keep your penthouses with big windows and balconies looking out over the beach.”

Really?”

“We’re burrowers,” he said. “We avoid sunlight and open spaces the best we can.”

I thought living in a cramped burrow and barely able to move would take its toll on anyone. Maybe some sunlight and fresh air would be good for him if he’d only let me remove the glass cover.

“And then I want you to help me understand a couple strange habits for which humans are known . . .”

I tried to guess which habits baffled him. Maybe he couldn’t wrap his head around how men bring themselves to torture each other, or why we consume books, songs, and films that make us sad. These quirks must seem queer to a non-human.

“It seems strange,” he said, “that you plant gardens of inedible crops, like roses. And that you wear impractical clothes, like white silk shirts that can’t sustain the slightest bit of wear or soiling. And you squander so many hours and calories building 60,000-word vocabularies, when an 850-word vocabulary would let you express yourself precisely and effectively. Oh, I’ve even heard that you build massive fountains that you never drink from. Help me out.”

He was pushy, and I didn’t know how to field his questions. So I deferred to the ethologist’s guiding principle: that everything we observe in nature has a backstory. I said, “You must understand that humankind climbed to the pinnacle of animal intelligence. Big vocabularies came bundled with our big brains, like a byproduct. If spiders had big brains, they’d plant rose gardens and wear ornate costumes too.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. No, see, if you were smart, you’d dress in the most durable materials available. You’d probably wear navy to hide stains. Or better yet, you wouldn’t fuss about stains, since a stained shirt and a clean shirt keep you warm all the same. And you’d plant edible crops, but never flowers, which have no use.”

Again with the flowers. I told him rose gardens look and smell lovely.

“Why?”

I stared at him.

“You don’t know. That’s alright, but remember that some of the animals with the most powerful noses are indifferent to the smell of flowers, which means flowers aren’t objectively nice-smelling or pretty-looking—they’re only so in your brain.”







I thought of how few young people filled their homes with floral patterns. The trend had fallen out of favor since my grandparents’ time. I decided I’d have to ask the ethologist next time I saw her how we came to like the look and smell of flowers. My question for the spider was: “What looks beautiful to you?”

“Actually, nothing,” he said, and I thought I now understood why he spoke so abrasively. “I mean nothing looks beautiful to me. I only read beauty in what I can feel or smell. So then beauty to me is feeling the footsteps of a she-spider vibrating through the sand, especially when I can tell she has strong legs for digging burrows. I’ll trek 100 meters just to feel her lovely steps, and I’m smitten by the feeling. On top of that, her scent puts me in a trance.”

I said he was romantic.

“How could anyone feel the steps of a she-spider and not recognize her exhilarating beauty?”

It was my turn to challenge him. I said that even if I had specially calibrated instruments to detect spider footsteps, I wouldn’t call them beautiful.

“No, I supposed you wouldn’t. And by the same logic, if I had ears and could listen to Beyoncé, her voice wouldn’t please me any more than radio static or fingernails across a chalkboard. Human music is for humans alone. ”

“Your use of the term ‘human music’ casts a pretty wide net.”

“Yes and no” he said, “Listen, if you play for me jazz, electronica, traditional Mayan music, and Javanese gamelan, I can distinguish between these genres probably 80% of the time—I mean, just by feeling the speed of the vibrations, the tempos and beat structures, I can pick up clear differences. But then, if you play me jazz, whale songs, frog songs, and cicada songs, the difference is an order of magnitude greater. Even bird songs could never be mistaken for human music because they’re missing the core melodic and rhythmic structure you’d find in your musical genres. That underlying structure is what attracts you.”

“I guess so,” I said, while trying to think of evidence that would dispute his claim. Here was something: I bet he’d never heard of atonal compositions like those written by the experimental composer Arnold Schoenberg. They had neither rhythms nor melodies, and they sounded like someone had randomly patched them together measures from other symphonies to create a messy jumble of notes. What structural similarity could be found between Mozart and Schoenberg?

“Human tastes are phenomenally pliable,” the spider said, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t have innate pleasure buttons. Let’s say you gathered 10 representatives from every human culture on the planet, from Amazon tribespeople to New Guineans. And you asked all the participants whether they liked Mozart or Schoenberg. What would happen?”

“A few would vote for Schoenberg,” I said.

“Right, and yet the vast majority would vote for Mozart. Now if beauty were in the eye of the beholder, you’d expect preferences to be half and half. That’s not what we’d see, though. The dramatic skew to Mozart, which we see even among those who never heard Western radio, suggests that humans are probably wired to like a melody with a beat. Someone could probably define pan-cultural music tastes in more detail, but I won’t try.”

“How do you explain the outliers that like Schoenberg better than Mozart?” I asked.

“Your environment can override your genes in fringe cases. That’s why almost every human is grossed out by rotting meat, save for a few Icelanders and Swedes who eat spoiled shark and fish. And almost every human is terrified of spiders, save for a few outliers who adopt them as pets. So in all these cases, environmental pressures can coax people away from their instinctive aversion to atonal music, bad meat, or spiders. ”

I was scared of spiders. Not that I wanted to feel afraid, but that response grabbed hold of me despite my best efforts. I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if he noticed me stiffen up when I’d first approached him.

The spider was saying, “We spiders aren’t objectively scary, but you evolved to fear us. Do you know why?”

I guessed that a long time ago, spider bites were a frequent cause of death. Arachnophobes took steps to protect themselves, like flicking spiders off their calves. Thus, arachnophobes out-survived people indifferent to spiders, which is why I'm descended from arachnophobes.

“You get that each of your pleasure buttons—your attraction to flowers, fountains, expansive views, and rhythmic music—also somehow helped your ancestors survive and make babies.”

I asked whether our pleasure buttons might be accidental byproducts of our big brains.

“Probably not,” he said. “You like things that were good for your ancestors. Listen, I've got instinctive likes and dislikes same as you, and they all make sense in terms of evolution. Like when I lie underground in a dark, cramped burrow, and when I feel the sand pressing against my belly, I feel nirvana.”

You tell him a dark, cramped burrow would make you feel panicked like you’re about to suffocate.

“Why do you think my brain links pleasure to burrowing?” he asked.

“Because,” I said, “your ancestors needed to protect themselves from the scorching sun to retain water.”

“That’s part of it, and they also had to stay hidden from predatory wasps. So a spider that walked in the daylight wouldn’t make it. The burrowers were the ones who kept out of trouble long enough to continue the golden wheel spider bloodline.”

I stood up. The morning was getting hot and I didn’t want the spider to dehydrate, so I thanked him for his wisdom. I also told him the sunrise over the dunes was gorgeous. What a treat!

“Would you lift the cover before you go?” he said. “I set up our conversation so you’d feel comfortable next to a spider.”

As soon as I did, he shot out of sight. Then I was back on the bus and moving again.