There is a great flaw in the design of our brains. They evolved as prediction machines, because in a chaotic world it is highly advantageous to our survival to have as good an understanding of what is going to happen next as possible. As humans, our brains are exceptionally good at that. We use all the continuous streams of multimodal information from our senses to construct a model of reality that is as accurate as we can manage. For this to work, we need to constantly filter all incoming pieces of information to find those that disagree with our predictions and require an update to our model. Depending on how this unexpected data is interpreted, this can cause any of the various emotions humans can feel.
If we find information that contradicts our assumptions about another person's values we might get angry at them. If we learn something that is unexpectedly bad according to our own values we might get sad. If we notice artifacts of a potential danger we did not previously anticipate, we feel fear. These are just a few examples of negative emotions that might be caused by a mismatch between our expectation and reality. But they all describe exceptional situations. The foundational experience underlying it all is that learning is enjoyable. It has to be because otherwise there would be no incentive to improve our model. You probably know this from situations where those other emotions don’t blot out that subtle satisfaction that you learned something. When you’re watching an interesting documentary, have an enticing conversation or find something you didn’t know existed in a shop, you might describe it as “fun”. But opposed to the fun you have when you dance or are being tickled, this fun is caused by learning something new.
Our brains are designed to seek out this kind of fun. After all, it’s what makes us so good at constructing an accurate model of reality. Seeking out these adverse experiences can cause severe addictions if a process manages to continuously produce experiences that people perceive as “new”. Addictions to gambling, social media and gaming are only the most popular examples of this. But it might surprise you that this is not the flaw in our brain I want to talk about. These addictions can easily be circumvented with a model of reality that properly encodes uncertainty.
No, the flaw I’m after is even more fundamental and it has to do with the fact that the frequency of adverse experiences is negatively correlated with the quality of our predictions by nature. After all, if your predictions are accurate they are not surprising. That is what it means for your predictions to be accurate after all. So if you’re good at what you’re supposed to do, you get less and less of that reward. You might think that nature could have easily addressed this by introducing a different reward for accurate predictions, but it’s not that easy. Remember what I said earlier about filtering the incoming streams of information? The brain cannot waste energy processing all that data which already fits with our model, it’s already the most power hungry organ in our body. No, nearly all of these things you were right about are filtered out and you never knew they happened.
Some readers will now call this nonsense, since there are clearly situations where you were right about something and that felt amazing. I’m not claiming that never happens, but those are once again exceptions. In addition, most of the time they don’t actually feel great because you were right but because someone else was wrong. If other people don’t believe in your predictions, that makes you doubt them yourself. So when it turns out you were right and they were wrong, the doubt vanishes which is relieving and you get to tell your ego that you’re a better predictor than those people. That’s what makes these experiences feel rewarding and memorable, not the fact that you were right.
I’d even go as far as saying that being right can be quite disappointing. A story where you can guess how it will end is just a boring story. A joke where you can guess the punchline is just a boring joke. So an experience where you can accurately imagine what it will be like before experiencing it is just a boring experience. But what if you’re exceptionally good at predicting experiences? You might say this isn’t possible because there’s always things you cannot know, but you don’t need to know all the details to account for them in your model. For most people, riding a bus is a mundane, boring, experience. But there’s so many people there you do not know doing all kinds of things you cannot predict. But it still feels boring because if there’s a girl with headphones, a guy playing with his phone and an old lady with shopping bags you don’t need to know the exact cast to find them in the set of plausible characters. That’s what I meant earlier with accounting for uncertainty. You don’t know what exactly will happen but you have a model for the space of possibilities. It helps you to predict anything that will be relevant to you, like arriving at your destination safely. If there was suddenly a grizzly bear on the bus, your model would be wrong and you’d be very surprised. And dead.
Now what if your model of reality was so good that you couldn’t find anything new anymore? You watch a movie and cannot predict the end, but the end doesn’t really surprise you because it’s just another movie that ends in a way that movies tend to end sometimes. You’re playing a game and don’t know if you’ll win or lose but both options are plausible so the game just ends. You’re going to the zoo and don’t know what the animals will do but you’ve seen all these animals before and none of them do anything that you didn’t see coming. Don’t get me wrong, you might still enjoy yourself. Watching movies, playing games and going to the zoo can be fun for other reasons than novelty. But wouldn’t you still be disappointed? Wouldn’t it make you feel empty inside? What do you dream about after a day where nothing new has happened? Is there even any point in sleeping?
Sure, the examples I just gave are a bit boring themselves. You need to get out of your comfort zone sometimes to make new experiences. But then what. After you’ve been bungee jumping, travelled to Japan, attempted a world record and learned glass blowing you might realize that all these things are not so different as it’s still the same old human experience. You don’t know what emotions you’ll feel but they’re the same joy, anger, frustration, sadness, envy and hatred you’ve felt so many times before. You don’t know what colors you’ll see but they’re going to be the same colors you’ve been seeing since you learned their names in primary school. You don’t know what sounds you’ll hear but you know that they’ll be in the same 20 to 20k Hz range perceptible to humans (and that range gets even smaller as you age). What if you get tired of being a human?
There you go, there’s a brand new thing for you to be worried about, at least that’s a bit of novelty. Or maybe it’s just another idea about a philosophical concept that you didn’t necessarily see coming but that caused you a bit of wonder, as ideas about philosophical concepts ordinarily do.
