The Fifth Influence

This book describes how human behavior is determined. It subscribes to the utilitarianism of Bentham, Stuart Mill, and several others since Aristotle. The only difference from my predecessors—in my mind a key one—is that my utilitarian conclusions are not based on intuition, which in turn is based on philosophical introspection. They're based on replicable experimental studies whose evidence is "shareable." This utilitarianism runs counter to three presumptions: — The presumption of the Stoics and their successors, who, in striving for an ideal of human perfection, lose what is best in human nature. To seek virtue is also to seek pleasure. The most rewarding behaviors, the ones that provide the greatest joys, are altruistic behaviors. Reread the Bible: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." (Acts 20: 35). — The presumption of reductionist pseudo-scientists who claim to explain everything by neural circuits and who deny the notion of emergence. As Victor Johnston has pointed out, the properties of a car emerge from the totality of its parts, and these properties cannot be predicted from those of each part. Similarly, thought emerges from the brain, and thought can be neither predicted nor explained through our knowledge of cellular mechanisms. — The presumption of those who say: "What you're doing is obvious." Nothing is harder to study than the obvious. This attitude is humorously summed up by the psychologists Cosmides and Tooby (1995) and likewise by the physicist F. Hoyle (1994). For them, scientists, like all of us, respond to new ideas in three stages. For Cosmides and Tooby: 1. "It's not true." 2. "Well, it may be true, but it's not important." 3. "It's true and it's important, but it's not new. We knew it all along." For Hoyle: 1. "The idea makes no sense." 2. "Someone thought it up before you did." 3. "We've always believed it." This humor belies a serious problem. The new idea is often later taken up and accepted without the original paper ever being cited. As J-F. Revel notes sardonically: "When one wishes to guess today ... which preceding authors have most inspired a new book, one need only read through the bibliography: they are the ones whose names are not listed" (Revel 1997). This behavior is often encountered—and condemned—in the scientific community. It can come about quite innocently for two reasons. First, the volume of scientific literature has expanded, with dramatic growth during the late 20th century. Second, scientific activity itself has become ever more specialized and compartmentalized. The first reason is increasingly suspect. Today, you can easily find relevant material at any university library through a number of online services. Just click a key word and the references will pop up on your screen. Any self-respecting researcher, myself included, can and should do a thorough review of the literature. But the second reason still holds true. Indeed, it is a truism to say that the modern scientific world has become a Tower of Babel. Alexis Carrel concluded Man, the Unknown with the conviction that it was still possible in 1935 to produce a Renaissance man, like Jean Pic de la Mirandole, who could accumulate all the knowledge of his time (Carrel 1935). Those days are long gone. The sciences have fallen victim to their own success. Knowledge has become too abundant to be contained in one brain. As a result, everyone is specializing, a true liberal education has become a seldom if not impossible thing, and the barbarism of Michel Henry (1987) is making headway. People speak only with others of their own science, be it mathematics, physics, biology, or psychology. And each science has become a bundle of mutually ignorant or even mutually antagonistic disciplines. And each discipline has in turn branched out into subdisciplines with often hermetically sealed boundaries. Molecular biologists, for example, know nothing about behavior—the field of ethologists. This book is about behavior and one might think that behavior occupies just one discipline. Alas, there have emerged subdisciplines such as eco-ethology, whose proponents show no interest in speaking with classical ethologists, who likewise cold-shoulder their colleagues in animal psychology. Like many before me, I've encountered this problem when addressing specialists from related fields: once you're labeled as coming from another discipline, you're left to cry in the wilderness and your proposals go unnoticed or are dismissed. I saw my friend, Ted Hammel, a physiologist by background, ran into no end of trouble gaining acceptance for his experimental findings on the physics of aqueous fluids. I myself left physiology for psychology. This research path has taken me across several disciplinary boundaries: Bernardian physiology, cellular electrophysiology, study of behavior and objective psychology, "mentalist" psychology, and now the psychological subdiscipline of decision-making mechanisms (I described this itinerary in La Quête du Plaisir, Montréal: Liber, 1995. La Quête du plaisir was a book about science, The Fifth Influence is a book of science that hopefully will familiarize its readers with my conclusions, which transcend the boundaries of the contemporary Babel of science). I've learned how hard it is to convince those who consider you an uninformed outsider, since they hold the seats of authority in the subdiscipline you've moved into. Nonetheless, a new field of inquiry provides a new perspective. And when you venture into new territory, you see things without the ingrained prejudices of those around you. This phenomenon is described by H.T. Kuhn (1970). Paradoxically, it is by way of the informed layperson that scientists communicate across their disciplinary boundaries. Paralyzed as they are by the rigidities of established science, they address the layperson and, through him or her, reach scientists in related or distant fields. I'm therefore addressing myself not to specialists but to the "honest man or woman" of our time. After accumulating experimental findings on pleasure for thirty years, I now have answers to some problems that specialists no longer see. By training, scientists lack candor except perhaps on political issues, where they very often display the great naïveté of great minds. They're trained to be rational: when one says something to scientists, when one presents new information in their field of expertise, they first ask: "How do you know? What is the evidence for such a proposal or such a conclusion?" In anticipation of such questioning, I've tried to meet scientific standards in preparing this book on the role of pleasure in biology and behavioral decision-making. I present arguments that any reader may verify. Only a few pages are intuitive. They are based on the preceding evidence, but depend more on I believe than on I know. These two statements are separated by a divide that I will clearly announce each time. The body of this work will build on the initial assertion of Chapter I with arguments that may be checked and shared. A basic postulate of ethology—the science of behavior—is that behavior is always optimal. In other words, it tends to satisfy the most urgent need of the subject, usually an animal in the case of ethological studies (Tinbergen 1950; Baerends 1956). This postulate holds true for human behavior. Although ethologists and ecologists have proposed theories of behavior optimization, they avoid one detail: the immediate mechanism that serves to optimize behavior. In other words, they look into how behavior is optimized, but largely ignore the mechanism that drives the optimization. Yes, biologists have the law of natural selection to explain how a useful function is passed on to succeeding generations, i.e., by favoring the survival and reproduction of the preceding g