Death… It's A Living

The three major themes of this website—death, the uncanny, and beauty—exist as points on the same dimension, with death and beauty serving as the endpoints. This might be confusing because death and beauty are not opposites, per se. Rather, they are merely the most dramatic examples of the signals that organisms interpret from their senses. Sensation and perception are extremely complicated topics with a considerable amount of nuance, assuming we are asking mechanistic questions (i.e., HOW does sensation work? HOW do we perceive what is sensed?) But if we ask a functional question (i.e., what is the purpose of sensation?), then the answer is pretty straightforward as long as one remembers the purpose of any organism: to stay alive as long as it takes to pass on one’s genes.

Before getting into something as potentially complex as a human being’s perception of what is beautiful and what is not, let’s start with a much simpler organism, the firefly. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any fireflies in my neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest, but there are plenty in the American Midwest where my father’s family is from. On one visit as a child, I watched as a swarm of fireflies flitted across the twilight and wondered aloud why they light up. If my question had been about how they light up, I might have stumped my extended family in an age without smartphones or Wikipedia. But like the bugs, my question was simple.

“They’re bugs. It’s either for food or sex” replied one of my uncles.

Even as a child, I instantly knew I should have been able to come up with that as an answer. Today, I know the answer is even simpler: The needs for food and sex are both examples of the need to survive long enough to pass on one’s genes. Fireflies light up because it enhances their chance of accomplishing that goal. Although there is some nuance here that I’m intentionally leaving out for now, that’s pretty much why any living thing does anything: To enhance the chance that the genes it carries will survive.  

Sensation and Survival

So why do we sense? Because the information the organism receives helps its genes stay alive. Many laypeople (and some scientists) assume this fact necessarily implies that organisms therefore sense an accurate representation of the outside world. If anything, however, it should assure us that no organism is capable of sensing an objective reality. Rather, each species should only be able to sense information that is in some way relevant to its survival. Bees can see ultraviolet light because it helps them find nectar; bats can echolocate in the dark; snakes can see body heat. Humans have none of these abilities because we don’t eat nectar, nor do we need to see or hunt in the dark.

There is an (untrue) internet rumor that human have stripes that cats can see. The first part of the rumor is—kind of—true. Humans have patterns on their skin, a form of mosaicism that UV light does in fact reveal (but cats cannot see this because cats, unlike bees, cannot see the UV spectrum). Now I ask a philosophical question: if humans have stripes that cannot be seen, do they really have stripes at all? A stripe is nothing if not a visual display. If it is not displayed, what is it? If something is invisible, is it real?

Our species’ evolution has an answer to that question, and the answer is, “Who cares?” If the point of life is to survive and reproduce, it does not matter. If the stripe mattered in any way to our survival, then nature would have given us the ability to see them. But nature did not give us the ability to see our own stripes because the stripes do nothing to help us pass on our genes. They have no value. They might be “real”, they might not. That is not the correct question.

I write all of this because it should help us think about what we see when we see something beautiful. It does not matter whether beauty is real or not; but because it can be seen, it does matter what beauty signals. And what beauty signals is the opposite of what death signals. Safety vs. danger. Approach vs. avoid. A greater probability that our genes will survive vs. a reduced probability that our genes will survive.

Because our abilities to sense and perceive are necessarily related to survival, virtually any empirical object can be placed on a spectrum ranging from death (unsafe) to beauty (safe). In fact, that is likely what a large proportion of our unconscious mind is busy with at any given moment. Right now, consciously, I’m thinking about how best to phrase my words so that they are most easily understood. Unconsciously, I’m smelling my cup of chai tea to my right; I’m seeing my fingers move across the keyboard (though not nearly as fluently as I would like to be able to type); I’m feeling the fur of my King Charles spaniel against my right foot. Until I typed those things, I was completely unaware of them. Simultaneously (or more likely, imperceptible milliseconds later), my unconscious mind evaluated all of those stimuli as safe, not safe, or somewhere in-between.

Danger and Speed

One of the things I have learned through my own research is that the speed at which people are able to classify various stimuli tends to be associated with how closely they represent safe and unsafe exemplars. Specifically, people are fastest at identifying extreme examples of safe and unsafe.

For example, let’s say I ask you to sit in front of a computer and tell you that you will be shown a series of animal images. Some of the images will be easy to identify, and some will be manipulated/distorted/scrambled in some way as to be readily unidentifiable. Your task is to press a button on a keyboard as fast as you can when you see an animal and to do nothing when you see a scrambled image.

If you are like most participants, then you will correctly identify pigs from scrambled pigs—for example—over 98% of the time (you weren’t confused about that remaining 2%, just a little trigger happy). But I’ve been a little sneaky here and I’ve not told you the full details of what I’m interested. Because you are fully functioning adult, I already know you can tell pictures of pigs from scrambled images of pigs. What I really want to know is, How fast can you identify dangerous animals and safe animals? Because I’ve already established you as like most other participants, I know that you will tend to move your fingers toward that button faster when you see a dangerous animal (think an image of a poisonous spider or a striking snake) than when you see a barnyard animal. You’ll also react faster to a snarling wolf than to a sleeping puppy. But why?

If it’s not clear yet, recall that sensation and perception provide cues that enhance genetic survival. Furthermore, over millions of years of cognitive evolution, nature has designed a neural system that not only abstracts survival-relevant information, it connects that information to speed of behavioral reaction. The snapping wolf and sleeping puppy should prompt two different reactions: the first, to avoid (that wolf might bite, maim, even kill me); and the second, to approach (that puppy-wuppy needs cuddle-wuddles). Although both are emotional reactions, they differ not only in valence (negative vs. positive) but also in terms of arousal. As much as we might love puppies and want to approach, we need to avoid the wolf.

This cognitive and emotional reaction are part of what is often called the negativity bias in behavioral science. That is, humans react more quickly and with more negative emotion (in most cases, fear) to negative stimuli than they do with positive emotions to positive stimuli. In most cases, we always fear the wolf, we only sometimes pet the puppy. Again, this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective if we contrast this scenario with its reverse. If we always avoid the wolf and sometimes approach the puppy, we will occasionally miss out on the joy that Charles Schulz taught humanity decades ago: Happiness is a warm puppy; but we will survive to meet pet other puppies. If, on the other hand, we always pet the puppy, we will know true happiness but perhaps moments before we die to the teeth of the wolf. Thus, we have evolved to react quickly to dangerous stimuli because that matters to our survival.

Cognitive Processing Level

The other distinction between the behaviors to avoid the wolf and approach the puppy is the level of cognitive processing at which they occur. The recognition of the wolf likely triggered your evolved fight/flight/freeze response. What you actually do when you see that wolf isn’t really up to you and your choices, it’s up to your midbrain’s emotional response center. If I were to see a hungry wolf eyeing me in the woods, I imagine that I would instantly freeze. While frozen, I might begin to assess my next options and whatever I do after that would be up to me (or at least it would feel like my choice). But I did not decide to freeze in the first place. That was automatic.  That was unconscious.

A decision to pet a puppy on the other hand occurs at a higher level of processing. When I see a new puppy at the local park, I don’t have a (strong) autonomic response, but I do think, “Ohhhhh, there’s a puppy! I wonder if I can come say hi?” Then, I decide whether the owner looks like they want another person to come dote on their dog (they always do).

Thus, an aspect of the negativity bias is its primacy and its unconsciousness. Once an object, in this case a puppy, has been evaluated as a non-threat, the unconscious mind’s job is done; the puppy can be approached or avoided based on wholly distinct conscious processes. Interestingly, however, reaction time and processing speed are still correlated with conscious evaluation. Only this time, the objects that are the safest are responded to with more speed. To unpack what might at first feel like a paradox, it will be necessary to define beauty as a cue denoting safety. That can wait for another post.

-The Plague Doctor