Provided by Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive
By Istvan Hesslein (Stevan Harnad) Copyright 2005
To appear in: Villaroya, O & Valencia, L. (Eds.)
The Social Brain. Biology of conflicts and cooperation
World Forum of Cultures: From Conflict to Cooperation.
Proposals from the Cognitive Sciences. Barcelona. 17-20 July 2004.
http://www.barcelona2004.org/eng/banco del conocimiento/dialogos/ficha.cfm?idEvento=164
Evan
Evan had always been aloof, cerebral. He was forever creating
theoretical systems -- not practical ones that one could build and use,
but completely abstract ones, usually social and ethical ones, that one
could only contemplate hypothetically. They were "abstract inventions,"
such as a "tit-for-tat society" in which people were forced to behave in
accordance with the golden rule because whatever they did to others was
literally done back to them in return -- not in some remote afterlife,
but almost immediately. Or a communicative system that would teach
everyone to express their every thought clearly, because no one could do
anything for themselves: Every wish -- even to go to the toilet -- had
to be effected through "Chinese whispers," in which the wisher tells it
to someone else, who then goes away and tells it to someone else, and so
on, through chains of a minimum length of 6, before the wisher's wish is
implemented -- IF it has been expressed clearly enough to survive
transmission through this chain.
"Why are you so preoccupied with people in theory, Evan? Real people
are all around you and you hardly seem to notice them as you build
your utopian castles."
And it is true, that although he was not unattractive, either physically
or mentally (people liked to listen to his thought experiments, and he
was not at all overbearing about them: they had to be elicited from him,
and the telling was invariably impassioned but brief) he tended to keep
his own counsel. He had the morphology of a red-haired person -- but
without the red hair or white skin or freckles, only the poor eye-sight.
Yet when he removed his thick lenses, his ash-gray eyes, which always appeared
shrunken behind the lenses, magnified and took on the dreamy and distant
look that was so characteristic of his abstractions. So people -- older
women especially -- wished, sometimes silently, often aloud, that he
were not so aloof and cerebral, that he would forget a little about his
"systems" and look at them, look into their eyes, feel something. They
all felt that they could teach him how to feel, if only...
If only what? What element was missing, actually? Did they think Evan
was deliberately holding himself back from something? That he was