Fred wants to do this so that he can prove that he understands humans.
Thing is, Fred will never understand humans because he tries to understand them by standing off to the side and ping-ponging between studying with detached curiosity, making snide, sarcastic comments, and performing the occasional (disastrous and destructive) social engineering experiment on their lives.
But I don’t think this is going to work for him. See, he IS a human. You wouldn’t know it to listen to him or interact with him. In fact, you would swear, if you didn’t know better, that he was an alien anthropologist from the planet Mysanthropia doomed to conduct research on some back-water planet because he committed an unforgivable social gaff at his supervisor’s Christmas party…or whatever the Mysanthropia equivalent is.
But he’s a flesh and blood human. What gives him away is that anthropologists are really good at blending in to the population they are studying. You hardly know they’re there, and they really experience what it is like to live as one of their objects of study.
Fred, not so much. Oh, Fred is alright with the concept of human brains. He likes those. Yep, brains are the shining light of Fred’s dismal little world. Hearts are OK…to him they are just the muddy parts of the brain which we can’t seem to get rid of but maybe someday, when we figure out how the brain works, we can iron out that whole heart thing…you know, fix it up so it works according to sensible rules and without hurting so damn much.
But the body part of the human is a huge bug-aboo to Fred. Bodies are bad. Bodies do bad, scary things that make your brain not work right. Especially when members of the opposite sex are around. They have to go. Especially women’s bodies, because jeeze, the human race would be so much better off without them.
Bodies are impulsive, and have instincts and urges and do yucky things like poop and have sex. Bodies make otherwise pleasant people sleep around on their spouses, and otherwise peaceful people panic and hit other people if they feel they are in danger. Nope, the bodies can hang around in the capacity of car driving and pizza eating…but they have to be taken out of the decision-making process, because they are chaotic. Or they must be quantified and explained so that they are no longer chaotic, and we can manage them.
I realized that this was the case when Fred said that every man should be allowed to have three wives. He described wife number one as an intellectual equal and social partner. Someone you could work with, live with, talk to. Wife number two would be a woman you could love. You know, pure love…have feelings for. And the third wife was the one you could have sex with. He said something like “the one over there in the cage.” Pretty clear that Fred doesn’t get that human beings should be all three at once (except no cages. That’s just disturbed). But it seems that he believes that the mind can only be ordered and orderly when separated (operationally, not physically) from emotions and the physical body.
I would argue differently, of course. I do think that the input of the physical has an order to it. It’s a longer-lived, more far-reaching order, but an order nonetheless.
The other day, I was sparring with SiFu. He dropped one of his hands slightly to throw a kick. I thought “Hey! He’s open! I should kick him there!” And then I realized that my foot was just returning to the ground, and I had already done it.
That happens to me a lot when I am fighting SiFu. If he is really pressing me to the utmost, and I feel just on the edge of overwhelmed…I end up moving before I think (the technique doesn’t always score, but it is fast). Oddly, when I get around to thinking, what I think is exactly what I did.
When I’m sparring a beginner, I am not so pressured. I think stuff like: “If I come in from this side with a backfist, they will move away from it and right into my reverse hook”. And they do. My brain gives the orders, and the body obeys. That works great, when I am sparring someone who is inexperienced enough to give me the leisure of conscious thought.
But when I am sparring SiFu or some other person who is significantly better than me, I often find my body taking over, and making short-cuts. And yet, they are often short-cuts that I would have chosen to take, had the action been slow enough to allow my brain to work. I don’t know what process is used in determining the course of unconscious thought, but it is clear that it is faster than conscious thought and just as appropriate and accurate (as in, not always appropriate and accurate, but often enough that it seems a valid means of response).
I think that Fred is missing the fact that instinct is a kind of learning. It’s learning on the evolutionary level. It’s learning on the species level…the generational level.
In qigong there is a meditation where you call on your ancestral energy. Not being someone who thinks she knows what a soul is, if a soul is, or how one would work if it existed…I have to say there is something wise in honoring and invoking that particular aspect of your being. It seems right to acknowledge all those who came before you, who survived by reacting to a certain stimuli a certain way, and passed that information on to you, so you wouldn’t have to figure out that if it behaves in a threatening way, and it’s bigger than you, you should breath harder, pump blood faster, oxygenate your tissues, and get ready to fight or run. There is wisdom in the need to protect babies even at the risk of your own life, and there is wisdom in the body assessing the mate potential in every member of the opposite sex. Everyone has those traits to a different degree, ranging from dominant to almost non-existent.
There is a lot of power there. Power for destruction, sure…but power for survival as well. The body knows things that the mind has had to forget in order for us to live, work, grow and flourish together as the dominant social life-form on the planet. In the qigong meditation, the ancestral energy is only called upon once. After that, the mind focuses that energy, and guides it through the body. It is always in contact with the mind. Always moved by the mind…but it comes from the past.
Disconnecting from it seems like a misfortune. Denying it seems like a mistake. Holding it in contempt, revulsion and fear seems like a tragedy.
Of course, Fred’s problem is that he’s been on the downside of it. He’s seen what that force can drive people to do to others. He knows how destructive and terrible it can be. He knows the urge to fight danger can lead to people abusing and dominating others out of a need to control their circumstances and every aspect of their surroundings to calm anxiety and unease. He knows that the urge to protect the young can result in parents being able to convince themselves that the most repressive and controlling and damaging behaviors are “for the kid’s own good”. In short, he knows that every primal urge has its darkside.
So he wants to believe he’s above it. That it’s not in him. He wants to believe that it has no place in the people he respects, or the people he loves. Sure, it has its place, and that’s in a cage.
Fred recently made a comment about how much contempt he has for the Star Trek series. One of the things he doesn’t like about it is how Spock; the logical, dispassionate alien, is constantly waxing rhapsodic on how admirable human traits like emotions and illogic are.
But it’s true. Fred may not like it, but sometimes you have to fight like an animal to live like a human being…and it’s not just other humans that make it so. The elements, other animals we share this world with, freak accidents sometimes still arise where the genetic gifts of our ancestors are the only experience we have that will carry us through.
Rejecting it and denigrating it just seems inhuman and maladjusted. And unfortunately for Fred, it probably means that he’ll never create the perfect computer model for human behavior. Worse, it’s likely he’ll never really understand how people work.