Men, Women, and Lichen

The theme of the weekend is "going back to being friends after breaking up".

It's happened to me recently. It's happened to many of my friends. It's probably happened to most people... you meet somebody as a friend, then you both gradually become more attracted to each other. You start dating, maybe things start getting serious, then you break up for some reason. If it's not a fighting/shouting kind of breakup, chances are you're still on speaking terms. In most cases one person is still in love with the other one, and in many cases you're both still attracted to each other on some level. Mix in a web of interconnected friendships, maybe even coworkers, and you get a wonderful assortment of awkward social situations.

In the midst of all this complexity, you try to go back to being "just friends" and fail miserably. Sometimes you hook up again, even though you both said you wouldn't. Sometimes one person gets unreasonably jealous of the other. Sometimes you find yourselves bickering and arguing over nothing, when you used to get along fine. I'm sure there are many more possible outcomes, many of them ugly.

The age-old question, "can men and women just be friends without sex getting in the way?" has been voiced throughout the ages, and if I were the kind of person who read books I might be able to quote something besides "When Harry Met Sally". We're dealing with fairly complex systems here. It's hard enough to program simple behaviors into a robot and keep all the subsystems running in sync, from position estimation, navigation, and motor control, to computer vision, sound processing, and voice synthesis. This is nothing compared to humans, who are run by enormous networks of biochemical pathways and complex interchanges of often-contradictory information in our intertwined network of nervous, endocrine, and limbic systems.

Although I'm not going to deal with the question of free will here, I think most of us would agree that our behavior is often shaped by our emotions. Instead of doing what is logical, we do something stupid or foolish and often regret it later. This is the fundamental struggle between our intellectual and emotional selves that has forever been a part of the human condition.

To accelerate off onto a far-flung tangent, I think that this is indicative of something that makes us unique as humans, and separates us from most other life forms on this planet (don't ask me if these statements apply to chimpanzees and dolphins - I do robots, not biology). The key, fairly obvious difference between us and other animals is technology. We can record, pass on, discuss, challenge, extend, and be inspired by ideas.

So significant is this difference, I argue, that we have broken free of the laws of natural selection that guide the forces of evolution that created us in the first place. In the animal kingdom, an eagle born with bad eyesight will end up starving and dying because it can't see its food. In our technologically-enhanced world, a person born with bad eyesight can just buy corrective lenses. Natural selection is the shepherd that guides species along the path away from genetic malfunctions, and towards fitness, efficiency, and resistance to disease. We have thumbed our noses at the shepherd and gone off to graze in a new field, where the fitness of an individual is as much a product of the tools and technologies of society as it is of the proteins encoded by DNA sequences.

A philosophical consequence of this, of course, is related to another age-old and likely unanswerable question -- that of nature vs. nurture. How significant a role do our genes play in defining who we are, compared to our education, environment, and upbringing? The answer to this question has all sorts of implications regarding adoption, educational policies, and choices regarding how to rear a child, as well as the justifiability of censorship and information control -- far more implications than I could possibly branch into today. But it raises the question - have we already, or will we ever, develop into a society where the passing on of one's ideas and values is more important than the passing on of one's genes? Perhaps there are those who would argue that we, as intellectual and rational beings, have already reached that point. However, I believe our instincts and emotions would certainly disagree, as they seem to place reproduction pretty high on the priority list.

Which brings us back to the struggle between the mind and body. Our minds, like software, are constantly being updated with new experiences and ideas. Our bodies, however, are running on the same old hardware. Even if we replace a peripheral now and then - an appendectomy here, a filled cavity there, maybe even a prosthetic limb - it's all still plugged into the same old motherboard. Before I dork out too much here by making comparisons like saying that immunizations could be compared to minor BIOS upgrades, why don't I take the analogy out of the computer world and into a realm I have little to no knowledge of: biology.

The other day on our bike trip, my friend Charles and I noticed some lichen growing on an ancient stone lantern at a shrine we visited. We both recalled, I from my 7th grade biology class and he from his TOEIC test, that a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, although neither of us could figure out where the fungus ended and the alga began. The alga performs photosynthesis to generate energy to support the fungus, and the fungus provides the alga with minerals, water, and protection. Is this not, thought I, a beautiful analogy for the mind and body? What better organism to "liken" ourselves to? (ouch...)

It is certainly an interesting thought exercise to consider the purely intellectual part of the self as a separate entity from the primal, emotional, biologically-bound component. These two selfs within each of us are bound together, each necessary to the other but yet always struggling in different directions.

Although our instincts may help to keep us alive when our mind begins to entertain dangerous ideas, our increasingly artificial world often necessitates that the mind veto the body's desires in situations that may not have been an issue for an early homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. The mind may think, "hey, wouldn't it be cool to jump off this cliff", but the body smacks it upside the head with a good dose of vertigo. Likewise, when the body decides that it really is hungry and wants to eat that tasty-looking biohazard sample in the petri dish, the mind picks the body up by the scruff of the neck and shakes it around a bit until that urge is gone.

Getting back to the "just friends after a breakup" issue, there's a clear struggle here between the emotions, who are still totally attached to the other person, and the intellect, which knows that it's a bad idea to keep the relationship going.

So what is the answer, then? In a conflict like this, is our mind always right and are our emotions always wrong? In a society obsessed with keeping emotions in check and allowing only rational arguments as valid in discussions, perhaps the answer is yes. It seems like most people eventually acquiesce and either (a) force the will of the intellect over the emotions, causing great conflict and internal distress, or (b) just avoid the other person completely, to avoid having to do (a).

But why is it so hard to go back to being "just friends" for the emotional side of us? Didn't we have a connection as friends before? Has that connection been broken or changed? I think that simple descriptors like "friends" or "lovers" are not sufficient to capture the entire state of a relationship. In many cases, "friends with potential" seems a better term. For "friends with potential", the emotions may be quite interested in the person, but they are held back not only by intellectual inhibitions, but also by a variety of fears and uncertainties. It's like a hungry rollerblader looking up a hill at a forbidden bowl of spaghetti, held back not only by the societal taboo against forbidden spaghetti, but also by the level of physical effort of skating up the hill. Once you break up and become "friends with history", those fear and uncertainty barriers are gone, and the analogy becomes that of the same hungry rollerblader looking downhill at the spaghetti.

Of course, understanding the dynamic does little for those of us who have already found ourselves stranded uphill our own forbidden spaghetti. The more important question is what to do next, and how to put that spaghetti out of mind, with its delicious meatballs adorned with tantalizing shreds of Parmesan cheese. Perhaps the answer is to skate further up the hill, to where the aroma of the tomato sauce cannot reach us. Perhaps it is better to go find something else for lunch, munching on a peanut butter sandwich instead, or curry rice, or anything besides pasta. Some may even have the self-control to stare down the spaghetti and, through sheer force of will, drive all desire for those firm and supple, yet slightly al dente noodles from their mind.

Regardless of how we choose to deal with the situation, one of the keys to happiness, I think, involves nurturing the lichen within, helping the fungus and alga to learn to live in harmony together. Just like a relationship between individuals, the relationship between the emotional and intellectual self needs to be recognized and managed carefully, with compromises made when necessary. We are no longer feral animals prowling in the jungle, and nor are we disembodied brains in sterilized jars. Each of us needs to come to terms with our position between those two extremes. I think none of us can live a balanced existence without having a true sense of who we are, which means being in touch with both the algae of our mind and the fungus of our soul.