Instinctively Lisa

Discussion

• Introduction to the ontological problem: when did Lisa start to exist? 
  
  Was it the moment she was born? If yes, then when exactly did she transition from nonexistence into unquestionable being? Was it the entrance into the birth canal, midway through it or at the very end, the obstetric equivalent of the “plump” sound when opening a champagne bottle? was it when the umbilical cord was cut? Or perhaps only when she took her first breath?
  
  Maybe it was even before she was born — perhaps the first heartbeat granted her the status of existence. But if that’s true, then does a skipped beat mean Lisa momentarily ceases to be? Does she flicker between 100% Lisa and 0% Lisa every time her heart stutters?
  
  Or maybe Lisa existed even before the first heartbeat — as a bundle of cells. She was 1 billion-cell Lisa, and before that, 1 million-cell Lisa, and before that one-cell Lisa. But no one knew about one-cell Lisa. If she had undergone spontaneous abortion at the two-cell stage, would she still have been Lisa — for a few hours, silently, in anonymity?
  
  And if so, then when precisely in the abortion process did Lisa lapse out of existence? Was it a single moment, like the severance of a tungsten cord in a light bulb? Or a gradual erratic process, like a candle fighting and eventually submitting to harsh breeze?
  
  These questions seem to resist a stable answer, and it is precisely for this reason they are discussed in the philosophical field of ontology – the study of existence. 
  
  Ontology doesn’t just ask what exists, but also in what way it does. Do things exist independently of us humans, or are names we use mere mental containers we impose upon the chaotic world of sensation? 
  
  One view, to which I subscribe, views language as a tool for survival, not a mirror of truth. Reality is a means to our own ends. We name things not to reveal what they are, but to make sense of them, to control them, to charge them with meaning — but a name is never the thing itself.
  
  When we say “Lisa,” we’re not pointing to some universal, metaphysical Lisa-ness. We’re pointing to an endlessly shifting and changing chaos of cells and organs, shapes and sounds, memories, moods, and fleeting dreams.
  
  We gather this chaos under a fragile sound in order to tame it — to impose structure, to serve a purpose. We want to feed it, raise it, enroll it in school, gossip about it, and eventually marry it off to produce another bundle of chaos.
  
  And though the contents of this bundle change, decay, and eventually vanish, the name remains — preserving the illusion of continuity, and keeping our world comfortably orderly.
  
• The history of instinct: Infant Lisa with infantile instincts. 
  
  Although this newly created chaos – Lisa – hasn’t gained the cognitive ability to categorize and tame her world, to give it meaning, she is still a motivated chaos, animated by something both within and beyond her, both precedes and guides her – we can call this motivating force instinct.
  
  The word ”instinct” comes from the Latin instinctus, meaning “impulse, inspiration, or prompting.” Just like the word “Lisa”, ”instinct” is also something we invented to make sense of our world and impose order upon it. Instinct isn’t a set concept, but one with a long history and evolution. It underwent philosophical manipulation and dissection by the hands and quills of great men and women over the past three centuries. Each pulled and stretched the word in one direction, trimmed it in another, for it to end up a thin and wide, ragged sound that instead of solidifying our understanding of the world in the concrete and measurable, dilutes it in vague abstraction. It has become a word that instead of imposing order, creates confusion and chaos.
  
  It all started with early modern science and rationalism, in the 17th and 18th century, with thinkers such as Spinoza and Kant, who uprooted the word from its original, almost poetic use, and planted it firmly in biology. They used the word to imply all that is common between humans and animals. Essentially, instinct to them was the animal within every human. If humans were body and soul, instinct was the body, a reflex system, the machinery within that is separated from, and does not respond to, reason. 
  
  With the emergence of evolutionary biology, propelled by Darwin, the separation of reason and instinct began to collapse, and both belonged to the same biological substance, and shaped by nature’s evolutionary forces. Just like bones and muscles, to Darwin, instinct is shaped by time; adaptive instincts give the organism a survival advantage, thus passing on to the next generation, while the maladaptive instincts fade away. Instinct became “inheritable patterns of behavior that appear in animals without prior experience of learning.” This solidified the biological anchoring of the word, but the dichotomy it declared between learning and instinct created the problem of defining which behaviors belong to which.
  
  The mission of defining the unlearned and instinctual behaviors was then adopted by ethologists. Essentially, ethologists study organisms in their natural habitat, where behavior, including the instinctual one, will not be obscured or distorted by synthetic laboratory conditions, where the act of observing will not modify or taint the observed. From the array of behaviors ethologists witnessed in animals, they identified those that are universally shared, reliably replicated with surgical precision among all the members of the species – these were cherry-picked, collected, and called Fixed Action Patterns (FAE). FAEs were the fruit of the ethologists’ endeavor. 
  
  The rigidity of ethologists created a problem for modern psychology, who wanted the scientific and biological legitimacy of instinct, but had the challenging task of explaining the behavior of an organism with notorious unreliability. Humans, unlike other animals rarely perform “fixed” behavior, and even when they do, behavior tends to evolve with time. A newborn’s motor reflexes, such suckling or grasping objects, are refined and improved with time and learning, yet still reflect the same reflex. Humans also display extremely variable sexual behviour, both influenced by, and adapted to, the specific culture one inhabits and the partner’s whims of passion. It can hardly be said that with every fetish or sex position a new instinct is discovered.
  
  To deal with the variability of behavior but maintain the biological grounding of instinct, various schools of psychology resorted to different strategies. The behaviorists went with the ostrich’s approach – to plant one’s head in the dirt to avoid confusion. They completely eliminated the idea of instinct from psychology and posited that all behavior can be explained by learning. To them, the organism is born as a clear slate, a tabula rasa, on which all behavioral patterns are drawn by learning; behavior is the outcome of environmental stimuli, the organism’s response to it, and the outcome of this response. Today, this view has been largely refuted, and no serious psychologist would go this far.            
  
  Psychoanalysis, pioneered by Freud, grounded behavior in biology by putting instincts at the center. It was only natural for Freud, being a practicing physician, to reject superstitious explanations of behavior and resort to biology. Ironically, his explanations turned instincts into a speculative art, a prestigious bedtime story, rather than a measurable scientific entity. In short, he posited the existence of an Eros – life instinct – and a Thanatos – death instinct. He used the former to explain sexual desire, creativity and all behavior that promotes life, while the latter to explain aggression, self destruction, etc. While his model largely shaped the clinical practice of psychoanalytical psychologists, it remains isolated from empirical psychology, thus contributing to the ongoing identity crisis of psychology – half scientific, half literary. Freud’s instincts remain too abstract for scientific exploration. Trying to prove or refute an ill defined phenomenon like an “instinct for life” would be like trying to shoot a target made of lavender scent – it can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.     
  
  Evolutionary psychologists make a U-turn to the Darwinian definition, that instincts are evolutionary adaptations of behavior to the challenges of the environment, but are more open to the cultural modification of these behaviors. Behaviors that are common to all cultures, even if expressed variably, and have given humans a survival advantage, earn the label of instinct. Fear of snakes, disgust towards bodily fluids, sexual jealousy, and altruism towards family members are considered instinctual behaviors because they are helpful for survival – obviously. Yet “obviously” is where the problem arises; As long as one can concoct a story about how a certain common behavior increased the chance of survival they can stick the label of instinct on it. Thus, instinctual behavior became the product of imagination coupled with good literary abilities. 
  
• A modern ontology of instinct: Lisa is hungry for reason.
  
  Yet Instincts aren’t a story, they don‘t belong to literature, they belong to Lisa. Instincts are Lisa‘s way to make more Lisa. This is why instinct belongs to psychology. And if you think about it, Lisa belongs to instincts as well, as Lisa is an instinct’s way to make more instinct. This is why instincts must belong to biology. 
  
  Both Lisa as an organism, and instinct as a word, have responsibilities. For Lisa to be an exemplary human she must bear the responsibilities of living – eating, drinking, pooping, and perhaps eventually procreating etc (though the latter “responsibility” can be debated). For instincts to be a useful word, it must serve both biology and psychology; it must be well-defined and measurable enough to serve science, as opposed to lavender, and dynamic enough to allow and account for the variability in observable behavior, as opposed to FAEs. It must be concrete enough to allow integration with current knowledge in biology, and manifest abstractly to allow integration with psychology. It must serve as an interface between the two fields, a linking bridge between the two disciples. This is the purpose of the word, the end to which it is means. This is its teleology. 
  
  Where do we find this interface? Where is the animator inside the animal? Where does the objective produce the subjective? Where does physics fuse with phenomenology? 
  
  The answer is physiology. 
  
  Physiology is the study of the normal functioning of the body. We’ve become acquainted with physiology in ”The Story of Johnny,” where a cancer blocking the bile ducts produced jaundice – yellow skin. Where cancer – an objective fact – produced yellow – a subjective experience. Cancer can be put under a microscope, while yellow can be sensed, appreciated, loved or hated. But cancer cannot be an instinct, as it isn’t determined genetically, hasn’t helped our ancestors adapt to their environment, and isn’t present in all members of the human species.
  
  Hunger is. 
  
  Hunger is not passed from one generation to the next in books that constantly struggle to define it. It isn’t the product of great minds with literary abilities, nor does it require any [literary abilities] to be measured and assessed. It is passed by heredity, written in the language of genes that gave their possessors an edge towards life. It is the function of specific, traceable, and objectively studied interplay of measurable hormones, scannable neurons, and mappable receptors. It is a biologically rooted, evolutionary mechanism. Hunger, as an instinct, serves biology par excellence.
  
  Hunger is dynamic, yet in a predictable and universal way. The hormone levels and the body’s response to them change, influenced by food intake, obesity levels, drugs, stress and other factors. Yet they change similarly among all humans. When hunger is affected by the social or cognitive context, by belief or intention, meaning or interpretation, it is only affected through these well defined factors.  
  
  And while hunger is the product of a fixed physiology, it manifests as a subjective sensation, one that can be loved or hated, regarded as holy or vile, related in a metaphor or painting, resolved by eating – with all the cultural richness and situational variability of the practice, – relegated to the next break from work, or harvested for pride and a sense of self-control. The same interplay of hormones, neurons and receptors, producing the same sensation of hunger, can generate suffering and anxiety, or alternatively extinguish them through divine connectedness or pride, as we’ve seen in Lisa. Hunger serves psychology par excellence as well.
  
  Biology holds the hormones, neurons and receptors in one hand, and the hunger sensation in the other. Psychology holds the hunger sensation in one hand and the emotional and behavioral response to it in the other. Therefore hunger is where the two fields meet; where the concrete hand of biology touches the abstract hand of psychology, leading to a continuity, a stable ground we can build on to understand the human struggle and strife. Hunger is the meeting of the giants.   
  
  Drawing on the logic of hunger as an instinct, we can finally land on a useful definition of instinct: a biologically-based reflex mechanism that maintains a fixed relationship between stimuli and neurophysiological events, across all the members of the species. 
  
  Biological means evolutionary and adaptive, but also traceable to a definite set of neurons. This prevents the over-inflation of instinct in favour of indulging a zealous psychologist’s covert ideology or world view. If psychologists wish to add a “justice instinct,” as have been proposed, then immediately the responsibility arises to locate the ”justice neurons” or the “justice brain centre,” and not merely to concoct a just-so story about how justice helped our ancestors survive. This is no doubt a heavy scientific burden to bear, yet is it heavier than that which aeronautics engineers carry while designing an airplane? And while airplanes may carry hundreds of thousands across the Atlantic, the product of psychologists’ labour, the self-knowledge they produce, can carry the entirety of humanity into the future, or drive it to the ground – literally.  
  
  Stimuli are anything that can be picked up by the sensing neurons, from within or without the body. Whether it is the blood nutrient levels or a hot surface, both are stimuli that are transformed, predictably, universally, physiologically, into a neurophysiological event by our instincts – to hunger, satiety, or pain. 
  
  Neurophysiological events are any internal change induced by neurons as a response to the sensing. This broadens the repertoire of instinct, as it can manifest in a sensation such as hunger, a change in energy metabolism, or the contraction of a muscle – removing a hand from a hot stove. Yet just as importantly, it shifts the focus from observable behavior which is almost always interpreted subjectively, to internal states which are unambiguous – hormone levels, brain metabolic activity, etc.  
  
  This is the point I’d like to close on; Assessing the biological basis of psychology – instincts, – through labour that is governed solely by psychology – observing behavior, – is the single most cataclysmic paradigm that we must change.