Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

stack.

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Perhaps the most extreme version of remembering only the gist was Woody Allen’s five-word summary of War and Peace: “It was about some Russians.”

The problem with trees is much the same as the problem with keeping tracking of our goals. You may recall, from the chapter on memory, the example of what sometimes happens when we plan to stop at the grocery store after work (and instead “autopilot” our way home, sans groceries). In a computer, both types of problems — tracking goals and tracking trees — are typically solved by using a “stack,” in which recent elements temporarily take priority over stored ones; but when it comes to humans, our lack of postal-code memory leads to problems in both cases.

As it happens, there are actually two separate types of recursion, one that requires stacks and one that doesn’t. It is precisely the ones that do require stacks that tie us in knots.

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According to legend, the first machine translation program was given the sentence “The flesh is weak, but the spirit is willing.” The translation (into Russian) was then translated back into English, yielding, “The meat is spoiled, but the vodka is good.”

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Ambiguity comes in two forms, lexical and syntactic. Lexical ambiguity is about the meanings of individual words; I tell you to go have a ball, and you don’t know whether I mean a good time, an elaborate party, or an object for playing tennis. Syntactic (or grammatical) ambiguity, in contrast, is about sentences like Put the block on the box in the table, that have structures which could be interpreted in more than one way. Classic sentences like Time flies like an arrow are ambiguous in both ways; without further context, flies could be a noun or a verb, like a verb or a comparative, and so forth.

In a perfect language, in an organism with properly implemented trees, this sort of inadvertent ambiguity wouldn’t be a problem; instead we’d have the option of using what mathematicians use: parentheses, which are basically symbols that tell us how to group things. (2 ? 3) + 2 = 8, while 2 ? (3 + 2) = 10. We’d be able to easily articulate the difference between (Angela shot the man) with the gun and Angela shot (the man with the gun). As handy as parentheses would be, they, too, are missing in action because the species-wide lack of postal code memory.

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People hear the words animals and ark, and fail to notice that the question is about Moses rather than Noah.

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That said, when it comes to reasons for having sex, pleasure and reproduction are, at least for humans, just two motivations among many. The most comprehensive survey ever conducted, reported recently in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, listed a grand total of 237. Seeking pleasure and making babies were definitely on the list, but so were “it seemed like good exercise,” “I wanted to be popular,” “I was bored,” “I wanted to say thank you,” and “I wanted to feel closer to God.” One way or another, 96 percent of American adults have at least once found some reason for having sex.

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My friend Brad, who hates to see me suffer abstemiously in the service of some abstract long-term good, likes to bring me to a restaurant called Blue Ribbon Sushi, where he invariably orders the green tea creme brulee. Usually, despite my best intentions, we wind up ordering two.

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The trouble is there’s no evidence that all that good uncleing (for relatives that are only one-eighth genetically related) offsets the direct cost of failing to reproduce. Other popular adaptationist accounts of homosexuality include the Sneaky Male theory (favored by Richard Dawkins) and the Spare Uncle theory, by which an uncle who stays home from the hunt can fill in for a dad who doesn’t make it home.

If homosexuality is a sort of evolutionary byproduct, rather than a direct product of natural selection, does that make it wrong to be gay? Not at all; the morality of sexuality should depend on consent, not evolutionary origin. Race is biological, religion is not, but we protect both. By the same token, I see pedophilia as immoral — not because it is not procreative but simply because one party in the equation is not mature enough to genuinely give consent; likewise, of course, for bestiality.

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All this is with respect to humans. The bird world is a different story; there, males do most of the singing, and the connection to courtship is more direct.

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Music that is either purely predictable or completely unpredictable is generally considered unpleasant — tedious when it’s too predictable, discordant when it’s too unpredictable. Composers like John Cage have, of course played, with that balance, but few people derive the same pleasure from Cage’s quasi-random (“aleatoric”) compositions that they do from music with a more traditional balance between the predictable and the surprising — a fact that holds true in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. (The art of improvisation is to invent what in