Grasshopper Spirituality

 

The other day I came upon a remark by a neuroscientist at the University of Lund who studies insects: ‘One of the main functions of all brains,' he writes, 'is to take sensory information, use it to generate an estimate of the current state of the world, and then to compare it to the desired state of the world. If the two do not match, compensatory action is initiated, which is what we call behavior.’

This is true not only of insects, of course, but of all life-forms, including humans. We all have desires, ambitions, fears, grievances. The world—perhaps it would be more fitting to say "our personal world"—is never quite right.

I would quibble, however, with this eminent neuroscientist's way of describing the significance of this unending disparity. Dropping into the passive mode heavily favored in the scientific community, he suggests that whenever this mismatch between reality and need occurs (which is often) "compensatory action is initiated." That's an ugly phrase, and it also happens to be untrue. It suggests that life is a process of replacing things that are missing in an effort to maintain homeostasis.  

If something is lacking in our life (or a dung-beetle's life, for that matter)  we might be inclined to "compensate" by seeking out an inferior but perhaps more readily available substitute, but more often, we seek out the thing we're lacking itself. And it often happens that the lack we feel, the thirst we seek to quench, is a lofty one that has nothing to do with basic bodily functions. Often we don't know quite what we're missing, but it seems to be something big. 

Where do such lofty aspirations come from? Who knows? But they're endemic to life, and they go a long ways toward explaining why life-forms have developed rather than merely "hanging in there" over the course of the eons.

The better part of Plato's philosophy is devoted to exploring the significance of the fact that we can, and often do, envision, desire, and seek out things that are better than anything we've actually experienced. How could that be? For Plato (in a nutshell) the source of those impulses is divine eros, and the result is the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. 

Our no-nonsense Norwegian entomologist, in his own pithy way, focuses our attention on the same disparity between reality and desire, but for him, the result can be described in a single glamourless value-neutral word: "behavior." Such a expression is clearly inadequate to describe what's going on. That disparity can produce any number of emotions--desire, frustration, anger, aspiration--and such emotion sometimes (though not always) lead to the activities directed toward summoning the values Plato has explored so carefully. But bland though it may be, the word "behavior" has at least the merit of acknowledging a fact overlooked by many philosophers--namely, that life is a matter, not only of thinking, but also of emoting, and of doing things in response.   

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Just now five or six heavy construction vehicles rolled past outside the window. The city is in the process of scraping off an inch or two of the street and resurfacing it. One of the workers told me they can do the entire neighborhood in two days. We'll see.