This essay is about viewing Buddha’s diagnosis of human predicament in the scope of evolutionary psychology. When I started writing this essay, there are several scenes from the movie The Matrix (1999) wandering in my mind. If you haven’t seen the movie, that’s all right, for the scenes and lines I am to mention are not hard to understand.
Scene 1: The leader of the rebels, Morpheus, led our protagonist, Neo who discovered he had been in a dream world filled with hallucination, into a dim room and facing with each other, they sat on sofas. Morpheus said to Neo: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison (refers to the Matrix) that you cannot taste or see or touch—a prison for your mind.”
Scene 2: The villain in the movie, Smith, aka the Agent (in fact, “he” is a sophisticating perceptual program) trapped Morpheus in his office, and told Morpheus: “The first Matrix was built to be perfect, without suffering, but you (refers to human) wouldn’t accept it—many corps(human) died…”
I don’t want to overdramatize this essay. Nonetheless, those two scenes above are quite in line with Buddha’s diagnosis of the human predicament: our mind is blindfolded from the truth—we fail to see everything is impermanent; without craving, we cannot even live.
Why We Are Naturally Deluded?
When it comes to describing the working state of our mind, Buddhism often uses the word “delusion”, or “ignorance”(痴,moha, avidyā/avijjā). From Buddhist perspective, there is something like a bias, fundamentally wrong preventing us from seeing the truth: what we see in the material world is just illusions and delusions and the process by which mind responds to things causing either duhkha or a sense of nirvana is called “Dependent Arising” (pratītya-samutpāda/paticca-samuppāda). In Tang Dynasty the great Buddhist Monk Fazang(法藏) who was once a co-translator of early sūtras with the well-known Monk Xuanzang(玄奘), poetically translated this term into “缘起”. Was Buddhism true, why we are naturally deluded? Evolutionary psychology seems to answer why.
Gone are the days when we consider our mind as spiritual, something immune to natural laws. Today, most of us believe the compelling story told by Darwin that both mind and body are products of evolution in which natural selection plays a key role. Natural selection “bequeaths” us a solitary ultimate mission—surviving well to propagate our gene as much as possible, and this mission has nothing to do with truth, or put it in another way, truth doesn’t matter. Let us see two examples.
First, false positives. False positives mean that there is actually nothing, whereas you have good reasons to think there is something. Suppose you are walking in a dark night, suddenly you hear something rustling. In this tiny fraction of time, the first thought automatically popping out in your mind will be: oh my god, there might be someone or something could hurt me and I should get prepared. However, it turns out to be a stray dog or cat searching something to eat. In the scope of natural selection, false positives make a great deal of sense, because we cannot afford to pay the heavy price of thinking vice versa: we automatically think there is nothing but a stray cat, but there comes a fierce beast or someone from another tribe we are in war with. It is always better “false” than “sorry”.
Second, the preference for high-calorie foods. I have been on a diet these days and I understand this built-in preference better than before. My fitness coach told me to maintain current muscles and lose another 4.5kg (10lb). Well, I don’t want your metabolism going down, she said, you can have a binge day once a week. Look at the food I choose on binge day—they are murderously tasty, but I know for certain that these food will kill me one day and do me no good in the long run. In the hunter-gatherer society we humans used to live in, that would be a different story: it is tantamount to suicide that you went on a diet steering clear of foods rich in sugar and fat.
Three “Design” Principles by Natural Selection
Buddha’s diagnosis points out: everything is impermanent; people fail to see the impermanence, which causes them duhkha; Natural selection, however, “favours” and “rewards” this fundamental bias.
Natural selection is random per se, but all the species coming along through evolution are so ingenious that we are tempting to conceive of natural selection as a “conscious designer”. Instead of examining how human as a specie adapt to the surrounding environment, Professor Wright using the “designer” metaphor, offers us an entirely new and valuable dimension of thinking: Were we natural selection, what algorithm-like principles would we design in order to make human automatically adapt, survive and thrive? There are three “design” principles:
(1)Pleasure must be delivered soon after reaching goals that are related to survive and reproduction. Humans must derive pleasure from things like food, sex, or a rise of social status. This principle is quite self-evident;
(2)Pleasure must be evaporated shortly thereafter. Suppose the pleasure lasts for a decent time, say, several months, in this period of time humans would do nothing but constantly reflecting on the pleasure: what a tasty food; how wonderful the sex I just had, refusing food intake and missing a great deal of chances of producing more offspring. As a “designer”, you definitely do not want to see this in the fiercely competitive context of evolution. This principle makes humans become restless self-motivated machines: humans attain their goals, then pleasure comes and fades away leaving them unsatisfied, which in turn motivates them going another round and round after round.
(3)Humans must focus much more on the pleasure itself than its evaporation, not vice versa. What would happen if someone focused more on the latter than the former? Well, he would be overwhelmed by ennui, mock at others, and might read some existential philosophy as well. A total disaster, right?
In later writings, I am going to introduce you the second two Noble Truths which address issues of duhkha and craving. What Buddha had taught, I have to confess, is anti-Darwinian—Buddhism seems to counter-program natural selection. Hope you enjoy!