May 11th, 2003, 1:07 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: WaaghBakriA quote by E.M. Cioran, Rumanian–born French philosopher, from "The Trouble with Being Born." Plucked off a quotation site....QuoteA zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing <b>monotony</b>, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.<hr>Cioran was actually born in Transylvania, and we know what that means. My favorite quote is: "Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie down and let hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form." (from the same work you cite). I always imagine him with a coffin in the basement of his Paris flat, so he could lie down and make decisions.This theory, that animals seek minimum stimulation, was productive in the early days of cognitive psychology. You can imagine a brain composed of negative stimulus centers: hunger, pain, thirst and so on. A central processor search engine would manipulate outputs to minimize total stimulation. This model does a surprisingly good job of explaining a lot of behavior and experimental results.But it was soon discarded as too simple. You cannot build good models using univariate minimization only. You need to postulate either pleasure centers or multivariate objectives or both.