Notas sobre a 9ª Aula de Computação e Ciências Congnitivas
ON SEX

In an evolutionary point of view sex of course has a dense structure of pathways that stumble and bottleneck in it's domain. An individual without capability of reproduction will not be able to produce new individuals, but nor will an individual who reproduces with infertile opposite sex members, thus there is a need for the ability to distinguish between potentially fertile and infertile opposite sexed individuals (either procedurally or, in the human case, cognitively - mixed with other lower level heuristics of course - pheromones, etc. - many provided to consciousness through emotions).

Of course massive reproduction would provide means for survival through augmenting the number of subjects (in this case new born) of the survival process, but even this way the overall probability of survival would become much smaller as competition for resources would be immense among new born, also rendering resources spent by an individual that was to die latter on without reproducing himself rather useless. Another disabling factor to this method is the 9 month gestation period which limits the number of available mothers in a certain community.
Yet another dimension of the survival problem arises just after birth. If the individual is actually able to reproduce, the problem of conducing descendency to reproduction isn't of course over, his offspring is not fit to carry out survival on it's own, we are mammals and have one of the longest unautonomic parental dependency periods among mammals, there is need for providing a nurturing environment that brings safety to the child and teaches him in order to be fit to survive, reproduce and raise his own offspring (much of which is supported by genetic mechanisms we are mostly unaware of, manly because they are triggered by environment stimulus, specifically of the memetic sort). Notice that this post born phase might be done by any other individuals, as is proven worldwide in a range of different cultures and among occidental cultures in cases of most misfortune when parents die after their descendency is brought to life.
This poses a question that was also raised during the debates (even though posed through a different line of reasoning): why does monogamy (specifically the two progenitors raising their own offspring) flourish among modern societies? I think my previous reasoning has rendered massivity of reproduction impracticable, still there are quite some alternatives to monogamy as we see today open for exploration. First of all there might be a continuous exchange of partners (for example each individual could have 5 or 6 children each from a different partner during his lifetime), with a period long enough to avoid female saturation, but assuming a roughly equal number of males and females this starts to bring us closer to the reasons for monogamy. Adding to the 9 months gestation period each female would not support the raising of a child on her own cumulated with consecutive pregnancy. If the male progenitor was to help with this task then he would have to spend a considerable part of his life committed to it, not enabling him to easily find another female to reproduce with, specially if he was to accumulate the raising of two children from different mothers. So I think this is showing traits of an operational problem, one way to facilitate the process of reproduction with another female was the male gathering his new female acquisition in the same location where he is living with the previous female thus giving origin to the polygamy model. Notice I started using the word acquisition, showing a greater relationship (in the operational sense), due to the sharing of the responsibility of raising the child, sharing of a common living space, prolonged in time by serializing child births in this small community centred on the male in question.
Of course the polygamy model violates the resource availability ratio between males and females, even if the roles of the polygamist (not "polygamer") are to be exchanged from male to female. The only scenario where polygamy would fit is a scenario where some males would be left out without partners, which of course would be a source of fighting back against the model, sort of a natural balancing fleeing away from polygamy.
Up until now I've kept the reproduction and upbringing of child connected but there is no need for it to be that way by principle. Childs could be raised in a community, taking profit from slightly similar aspects as those which render economies of scale so profitable, namely the optimisation of resource usage among the community (applied to both child and grown up members contributing to the children pool present in the community). This model is adaptable to fit the previously posed limitations and has had development along political ideologies as those of communism, still what is most striking in this model is the way it fits part of the modern day responsibilities of bringing up children shared by a community which provides organized instruction facilities through specialized individuals. Not being so extreme to counter the innate behaviour of parental bonding and protection of their own offspring as communist theories pose the model which is nowadays wide spread, based on a monogamous reproductive organization (with some adjustments as permitting separation from marriage to pose solution to the problem of lost effect from chemical mechanisms - namely the PEA amphetamine - that evolution provided to maintain individuals engaging in reproduction bonded during the period of raising of their children).

The long gestation period and the also long growing up when human child are highly dependent upon their parents are not unique to humans and should have evolved in earlier stages thus already be limiting to the latter stages of cognitive evolution of the human species.

Up to now the focus of my writing has been that sex with a reproductive aim has adjacent limits that guide and have come to tailor it into an art that we might nowadays call the art of love or passion. Indeed we are familiar with the complexity of partner choice, the mutual agreement and levelling of potential and interests. This levelling has the influence of a mixture of lower level dynamics acting on it, both processes noticeable through emotions and which we can react upon rapidly and eventually processes which have no emotional mapping but which trigger other responses bodily (and eventually side effects), those last which can then be perceived by our conscious flow and we are rather familiar with (namely a faster heart pace and even sweating). Still the influences to the levelling that in the end will render two persons together for reproduction (and what is further involved) is also coming from the cognitive side and even fruit of "non natural" logical planning and reasoning.
Naturally there is not only the interest of reproduction, nor of rendering descendency safely to social life, there is of course a growing interest in the by-products of a personal relationship needed for the provision of the previous - mutual help, simple company satiating some of the social needs of humans, material needs (notice the multicultural association of marriage with goods trading, still represent today through gifts - which I think is more of a keeping from the past due to it's practical benefits and cultural roots), and, in extremis, the development of a shared consciousness, at least in the utopic minds of many lovers. Naturally narrow band provisions of our communication channels, even those based on heuristics (the way lovers at times talk about mutual understanding without the need to say much words) render this possibility limited as there is no way to exchange even a part of the overwhelming quantity of information that reaches and leaves our individual consciousness, still good communication can provide a very good approach some might say.

In Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett poses love as somewhat a dissected phenomena of human behaviour and derives from this dissection the lost innocence that lies within readers of gothic romances namely, pointing to an eventual parallel with the dissection of consciousness. This loss is truly a problem many mildly elucidated members of modern society have to deal with and has manifestations widespread through cultural icons, namely the standard US sitcoms. It is indeed troublesome to let natural mechanisms act and interact with them if our knowledge of their routines (algorithms) is enough to predict reactions that otherwise would seem magical and astonish us. I personally feel this agony and have developed my own perspective into love and personal relationships, might it differ too much from what is socially accepted that renders me an idealist I don't really care. My personal model is of course changing in face of experience, I don't find it anymore that sharing many common memetic roots (common cultural, aesthetic, ideological and moral experiences liked by both and which have been found separately, sometimes leading into a whole cultural pathway crossed by each separately, providing much building ground for future experiences) is enough to satiate the kind of questioning posed by my sense of well-being, nor is it strong enough to bring someone close enough for other lesser memetic experiences to arise naturally. Still something that troubles me deeper doesn't actually lie within my actions but on those of people who surround me in society.


Slaves of sex?

Lets now turn to somewhat a darker side to the by-products of evolutionary pressure on reproduction. Naturally with a consciousness to deal with information from lower level information processing modules and especially one which bases much of it's processing on heuristics that come to us as emotions it's natural that sex should have an emphasis above most other emotions, not only as an emotion but as collection of such emotions ranging from the stimulus provided by excitation that will make someone interested in another person and engage in future planning so as to make that presence effective to the actual explosion of emotions of the sexual act in itself. Of course that bearing the limitations posed by excess sex and the evolutionary unbearableness of it's consequences, if the sex act converts into gestation of children with a certain frequency then the frequency of the act is in itself limited. Nowadays, with several mechanisms for disabling the reproductive functionality of sex, these limitations are not posed and the pleasure that comes as a by-product of evolution and not as an objective in itself is now an objective in the current social view imposing itself for at least a few decades. Even though the genetic support tailored to those limitations on sexual activities is present and cannot change in such a short little while since the implementation of contraceptive techniques it is being overridden by a global memetic pressuring emphasizing sex that stimulates the genetic support in ways it was never stimulated. And as one of the limitations imposed, monogamy is not put to much risk from this (the 60s group society with free sex experiences degenerated into pairings inside the society naturally) the sexual driven behaviour tends to push social relationships to this new limitation that is the need for sex as an aim itself. Even if sexual partners are not fixed (either by serialization, betrayal or mutual acceptance of parallel activities) the social group relationship suffers from this pairing that drives people who are controlled by such drives further away from each other. This is the reason for my choice of topic before this paragraph. With this I try to focus on a tendency to lower very important things in life, not only the social life but in reality, work practices, motivation, personality strengths (as for example the moral - maybe a UM: Universal Moral), to a slaves of sex and sexual practises as they tend to shape themselves.
From this point of view I also draw conclusions on the importance of memetic influence and social shaping that I had started to minimize since writing for the 3rd class. As I was reading a bit in The Meme Machine (Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins) I came to realize the importance of mimetism, short of uniqueness and it's higher level as a learning mechanism, and of course the consequences it has on the importance of the memetic pool even when viewing the human brain not as a generic learning machine capable of becoming just anything. As mimetism is applied to higher level concepts and behaviours leveraged themselves by genetic mechanisms adapting to new situations the widespreading of social phenomena is almost impossible to sustain, even though the nurturing of a criticism, reasoning and moral may help avoid applying mimetic learning to social disorders that might otherwise spread quite rapidly.

Pornography comes to play an odd role on mechanisms designed for reproduction and enables dwelling in the cognitive realms of sex that might prove very interesting. First of all pornography picks up mainly on high level, conscious, mechanisms, there are no pheromones sprayed over Playboy magazines, only pictorial representations which even a child can distinguish from a real person. Thus easily higher level mechanisms can set the pornographic experience apart from a sexual experience, but even though should the experience and it's pleasuring be triggered from only a cognitive perspective or are there lower levels of processing involved with the image that might be similar to viewing an attractive female in the distance (good for reproduction and eventual raising children, if imagery can pass that kind of information). If the vision of a female is distant enough not to provide pheromone and other information exchanges other than the visual (and eventually audible) one there might be a similarity for the lower levels of human information processing, not involving cognitive processes through which the individual could distinguish between the two experiences, but triggering the same set of processes which would ready the individual for a good approach to the female and prepare for an eventual intercourse latter on. Still at this point there is no such thing as pleasure (unless we consider precoce ejaculation which usually happens with a much closer contact with a female). So what makes an individual feel pleasure from a pornography stimulus? The mechanisms may only be the by-product of evolution as there is no advantage from this kind of behaviour and no such stimulus present in the environment surrounding human evolution (any male individual tunnelling his sexual potential towards masturbation when excited by a female presence would not reproduce more easily, even though he might satiate some mechanisms of his sexual need and become more stable). Still there might be a pathway to explain some gain in effect from masturbation. This way was pointed out on one of the documentaries showed to us in class, masturbation will make for sperm renewal and augment the number of sperm cells contained therein thus providing a better chance for insemination of a female being penetrated after the sperm has been renewed (thus obviously not right after masturbation). So eventually an individual without making use of masturbation would have less chance of inseminating the same female as an identical individual who did, rendering masturbation an evolutionary advantage and not just a by-product.
Returning to the cognitive implications of pornography now that I think I have made a point of an evolutionary advantage in masturbation, thus connecting pornography (which is a good trigger for masturbation) to a feature that has been evolutionarily selected thus has a genetic support. Pornography might work either towards these same goals that have derived from evolution or might just be used to pose positive feedback to those mechanisms without accomplishing their aims, somewhat similarly as what happens with sex only for pleasure.
Even though the cognitive mechanism faces pornography not as a reproductive pathway the images an individual is posed to will undoubtedly be memorised similarly as the images of several potential sexual partners being selected and entering the levelling mechanisms of though and emotion that will move passion and bonding forces in future situations. This points to the problem of maladjustment of beauty and levelling aims, not only posed by pornography but by the massive amount of faces and bodies continuously exposed to an individual through the media, city life, etc. Still this problem doesn't seem to pose a great problem due to our cognitive distinguishing of each context (it would be very difficult for most individuals to bond with a super-model who they have only seen on the media) and so should only give rise to a certain degree of discontent with what otherwise could be considered a good partner. But this is not a new problem but a higher scale of an ever present problem that the mechanisms of levelling (that make it possible for a not so attractive person to fall in love with someone who is not so attractive too) seem to have been solving up to now.