The Doer Alone Learneth

“The doer alone learneth” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra 1883

 

Do you like to play? That is a pretty easy question to answer. Do you know why you like to play? That is a much harder question to answer and to do so we need to enlist the help of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp. 

Back in the mid 1980’s Panksepp, by studying the neural underpinnings of social play in rats (something he began doing a decade earlier), discovered a sub-cortical circuit in the brain which is responsible for play in mammals. Discovering an entire mammalian circuit of the brain is akin to discovering a contentment — its kind of a big deal.

It turns out that rats play with one another and, more than that, will fight for the chance to do so. We know this because Panksepp attached springs to the tails of well fed and otherwise satiated rats to measure how much force they exerted while running towards an arena in which they’ve been trained to know play will occur So, just in case you ever wanted to know how motivated a rat was to do something, now you know how to test it.

Rats play when a smaller rat gestures to a larger dominant rat that he wants to play — this is invariably the case. Rats play with each other by wrestling with the winner pinning the loser. For rats, a 15% size advantage is enough to guarantee a win every single time. However, if a larger and smaller rat are paired up enough times and the larger rat doesn’t let the smaller rat win at least 30% of the time, the smaller rat will stop inviting the larger rat to play. Using his size advantage to dominate a smaller rat every time will lead to the larger rat no longer being invited to play. The rats don’t talk about this. The rats don’t know about this. But predictably, observed over thousands of times by hundreds of researchers, the big rat will allow the small rat to win 30% of the time in order to maintain the chance for future play. Rats play fair.

It turns out that mammalian fair play is not, as it was assumed until Pankseep proved otherwise, socially conditioned or constructed. There is a dedicated circuit under the cortex just for play and it informs fair play in mammals. To play fair is something which is neither socially nor behaviorally learned, it is hard wired right into the brain of mammals and the importance of this discovery cannot be overestimated. The concept of fair play is so old that mammals all have a separate circuit in the brain just to regulate it. This has been going on for over two hundred million years. Think about that for a year or so.

Fair play is an emergent embodied morality. The moral principle being acted out is “do not play to win in such a way that it negates your chances to continue play over time.” This basic moral principle is embedded bodily in all mammals and we know this thanks to Pankseep. The next time you want to test whether or not your embodied knowledge has an emergent morality built on a biological structure, go watch an NBA player go 100% at a 7 year old in half court basketball, dominate him and then mock him mercilessly afterwards and see how you feel.

When you think of it, there are an infinite number of things that a person can do at any given time. When this emergent moral system is superimposed on that infinite set it shrinks it quite a bit. It is good to play catch. It is not good to play catch on a highway. Why? Because you will die and can’t continue to play in the future. Iterability is part and parcel of the morality which biologically emerges from mammals.  This is also why cheating at a game is wrong. You do not sacrifice the future for the present and you do not win a particular game at the expense of the possibility for participation in the set of all possible games (this is something that the psychopath doesn’t understand which requires him to move constantly from game to game as he will always try to win the game at hand even at the expense of all else). This is built into the mammalian brain so deeply it predates the split from the last common human-chimpanzee ancestor some eight million years ago — by a lot.

What Pankseep figured out with his rats is that a low resolution morality emerges as a result of an underlying biology. Not only is fair play not exclusive to humans, but it is also not socially conditioned and exists in all mammals biologically regardless of their ability to articulate it or lack thereof. For rats it is merely a pattern of behavior (i.e., a custom) which is a result of their play circuit and, in many ways, it is the same for humans. The difference is that humans have the ability to abstract rules and general concepts from he behavior, but it is still biological in origin.^⁠1 

From rats, I want to turn your attention to wolves. Deeply embedded into the mammalian brain, like the embodied knowledge of fair play, is the idea of authority hierarchies. During an authority dispute between wolves, when a winner emerges the looser will roll over and expose his vulnerable side. What he is saying with this action is, in essence, “I am totally useless, here is my neck please feel free to kill me.” The winning wolf will then gesture to the loser that he is not going to kill him, in essence saying “yes, ok, I am the head of the pack and yes I could kill you but tomorrow there may be a moose we need to gang up on so you might be helpful. Just remember from now on, I am in charge.”

Like the rats with fair play, the wolf cannot actually explain this to you. They can’t represent what they are doing — even if every wolf in the pack understands implicitly which wolf is the dominant alpha in an unarticulated, bodily manner. This is knowledge that is deeply embedded into their physiology. This is a cross mammalian phenomenon which in no way excludes humans.

Finally, I want to mention chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are something that postmodernists and neomarxists really ought to study more thoroughly. Despite the Marxist nonsense about power being the overarching metanarrative of history, it is not even the case that power is that which controls chimpanzee troops, let alone for more sophisticated mammals like humans and human civilizations.

Frans de Waal, one of the greatest primatologists, showed how powerful chimpanzees can take the alpha chimp spot (leading to the best food, shelter and mating prospects) but the reign of chimps who use power and force to take the lead is always short and always ends in absolute brutality when several chimps gang up on the alpha chimp and tear him to shreds. Chimps instinctively and bodily know that being a bully is wrong.

Stability over time in a chimpanzee group requires an alpha chimp who is not the most powerful, but the most skilled at diplomacy. It is the social saavy, the forming of bonds with key group members, participating in mutual grooming and food sharing that makes for a stable chimpanzee troop over time.

Of course, if you removed a chimpanzee from a troop and asked him how it is that his troop’s leader took on his role as the alpha or how he has maintained that role in relative harmony and peace for so long he would not be able to tell you. He’s a chimp. Unlike humans, he cannot abstract his patterns of behavior and articulate them. The chimp does not have the word. He knows what he is doing on a biological level, not a mental one. Despite not being able to abstract these notions, when returned to the group the chimp will instinctively recognize the authority hierarchy at play.

Humans split from the common chimpanzee ancestor some eight million years ago. Over the course of millions of years we see the emergence of human consciousness as we know it today.  A lot of pain and death went into making each of us. A lot of paying attention.  Our ability to abstract out general principles from our actions and articulate them is, as far as we know, uniquely human. Our ability to express this idea, today, is based largely on scientific techniques which began in the early 17^th Century. Using the scientific method we have the ability to better understand the world in ways which can be demonstrated through testing with reliable reoccurrence. 

However, humans have been watching each other for a very long time — millions of years. That is what we do, we look at each other and we look at the world and we extract out patterns. If you want to see this at work, take a look at the sky. When you see the clouds, come up with a narrative story for what they are doing. You might be shocked how easily you can instantly flesh out a narrative for what a couple of clouds are up to. That is how human beings interact with the world. You could look at those clouds for years and never figure out how rain is made, but it will take all of one minute to have an entire fleshed out story about what they are up to. The oldest question of mankind is something like “just what the hell is everyone up to and what is going on?”

Thousands of years before Jaak Pankseep and his rats and Frans de Waal and his chimps this idea was made manifest in a different way. The scientific method is in no way indicative of the way people think. When people  say, “I think scientifically,” the proper response is “no, you don’t.” Even most scientists do not think scientifically and when they do it is in a very specific subfield under very specific laboratory conditions. The native manner in which humans interact with the world is narrative. We are story telling creatures.

We experience ourselves and the world through narrative. Even now, today, in the 21^st century. There is no need to go further than your own field of vision to experience this. Describe anything you see or have seen in your life. There, you told a story. You did not point out the particles, degree of angles, radius, physical governing laws, etc. We will, in future essays, get more in-depth with this and discuss how you don’t actually perceive a thing outside of its affordant utility, but for now it is enough to say that scientists like de Waal and Pankseep were able to use a non-natural mode of research and articulation to accurately explain phenomena such as authority hierarchies and fair play, but this is not to say that these ideas weren’t understood long ago and just expressed differently. The phenomena of mankind hasn’t changed even though our methods of understanding and articulation, and with them our epistemological frame, have.

One place we see the emergence of articulated knowledge in the ancient world is in the book of Exodus. After the Israelites leave Egypt, Moses sits in judgment of them. For an untold number of years, from morning to night, Moses sits and judges between the squabbles of the people of Israel and adjudicates on their behalf. These people have just been freed after centuries of slavery. Their habits, thoughts and morality are all that of slaves. They cannot understand anything other than the master-slave relation as of yet and as such Moses needs to mediate every aspect of life for them.

This, by the way, is the basis for English Common Law as well as American precedent  law. It is law built from the ground up. People will go to Moses with a complaint and Moses will hear both sides and he will give his judgment and reasons based on principles he sees as valid across multiple instances. This is prior to the delivery of the law proper so what Moses is doing is using his best judgment hundreds and thousands of times which allows for an emergent basic set of principles which can be extracted over a multitude of cases and which can then be used in the future as precedent.

One way to think of this is if you go to a movie that tells a standard good guy, bad guy story. You watch the good guy and you watch the bad guy. Then you go to another movie like that, and another and maybe 100 more. Soon you abstract out principles of that which is common across all good guys and across all bad guys. You then have the concept of the meta-good guy and the meta-bad guy who will be the archetype for all good and bad guys in the future.

The heart of the dispute between Plato and Aristotle is whether the meta-good guy precedes particular instantiations of good guys (Plato) or if the meta-good guy is merely a made up abstraction which unites all the traits of good guys meaning that individual good guys precede the meta-good guy (Aristotle). This is a question we will spend a lot of time on, but for now it is enough to say that the meta-good guy is not a particular good guy, but the amalgam of all that which good guys have in common that is reflective of their being a good guy.

We see this in what Moses is doing when he judges the squabbles of the Israelite slaves. He is looking at hundreds and thousands of specific instances of justice situationally and abstracting out the meta-justice concept which can then be applied going forward.

After years of doing this for a long time, Moses’ father in law Jethro — we will discuss him in more detail when we get to good versus bad foreigners — tells Moses in Exodus 18:17-23 that he can’t keep this up. Firstly, he will wear himself out trying to adjudicate conflicts of recently freed slaves and their slavish morality. Secondly, by being the sole arbiter for every problem, Moses infantilizes the Hebrews and thus robs from them their ability to grow into a fully formed nation of individuals. Finally, by doing it himself he is merely setting himself up as a new Pharaoh.

Jethro suggests to Moses what is today called in the business world subsidiarity. He suggests that for every 10 people an elder is elected. Then for every 10 elders there is a meta elder. And for every 10 meta elders there is a high elder and so on and so forth up to groups of a thousand.

Jethro suggests to Moses that all problems be dealt with at the most local authority level possible and only move to the next level when necessary. If you recognize the American court system in this you are not mistaken. This is where we took the idea from. The idea is that if the elder cannot issue judgement it is passed upward to a meta elder and so on and so forth with only a rare few cases actually needing to go all the way to Moses.

What Jethro is teaching Moses is what the last 200 years of developmental psychology as well as nursing practices has borne out — never do something for someone which you know they can do for themselves. You let them do as much as they can for themselves, even when it pains you to watch them try and fail (for an excellent dramatic expression of this concept see the movie My Left Foot). Without this they will never become stronger, they just remain children (or in the case of the Exodus story, slaves). The escape from Egypt is only the first part of the escape from slavery. In the wilderness, the Israelites need to learn self governance. Do not think that because it is told in the form of a narrative that it isn’t the same conclusion that de Waal and Pankseep came to. The story is, in fact, a far more natural way of communicating the idea and passing it generation to generation in a preliterate world.

Mircea Eliada who, in my opinion, is the greatest scholar of religion who ever lived, wrote in this classic three volume book History of Religious Ideas (a stunningly brilliant work which everyone should read) that the way preliterate people passed down ideas was by condensation and amalgamation. His example is that of an ancient, pre-literate fishing community. Fishermen in fishing communities knew a lot about fishing. With no way to transmit this knowledge generation to generation it would be impossible to continue on and improve the practice, but without literacy generational memory needed to be used.

So when asked about how we do this, or why we do that, it is not feasible to take a ten thousand year history of who came up with which idea when the way we would in a modern history. The way to pass this knowledge on generationally is to take all of the discoveries and innovations which have occurred after a hundred centuries and attribute them to one person, viz., The Great Fisherman.

You may ask, was the great fisherman real? And the answer is, what do you mean by real? Was the great fisherman a real person like your next door neighbor is a real person? No. No more than Ivan Karamozov is a real person. However, in many ways he is more that merely real. The Great Fisherman is meta real. He is always real for all people at all times like Ivan, like Hamlet. That he didn’t exist at a particular moment in history is absolutely irrelevant. He is eternal.

The same goes with the principle of justice which Moses is abstracting out of the process of mediation of disputes for such a long period of time. The principle isn’t a particular case it is that which is true over all cases abstracted out.

After years (decades?) of Moses sitting as judge and then setting up a system of judicial subsidiarity, he goes to the top of Mt. Sinai, from the peak of the hierarchy of the subsidiary judiciary he constructed with Jethro to the peak of Sinai whereupon the principle which stands even above the person who occupies the hierarchical peak lingers, and BANG….the law. This is what revelation is. Embodied knowledge emerging in the form

of custom for a long period of time when some genius who is watching closely extracts out of the patterned behavior and rules and is able to articulate it. This is what happens when the structuring logos is spoken into the chaotic void producing habitable order.

How else could it be? The rules do not come first and understanding them after. The deeply patterned action comes first, the obeying of the law comes first. We obey the law and then we understand the law. And of course it is this way. If the law wasn’t already understandable it would be immediately seen as unnatural tyrannical authority artificially imposed (this is at the heart of the failure of Socialism). We obey the law first, then we articulate it.

It isn’t like the commandments weren’t something everyone didn’t already know. You shall not kill. You shall not steal. They already knew these laws. Even obeying the Sabbath was something the Israelites were doing prior to the giving of the comandments. They were acting them out already. Then the revelation in articulated form — behold, I give you the law. The biblical narrative represents this revelation as a cataclysmic and world changing event (a pattern replicated in the creation, the giving of the law and the passion of Christ). Patterns being replicated is, as you will learn in the essays to come, the whole ball of wax.

What we are doing is abstracting out of our actions the modes of being in the world which resonate with the patterns which are threaded throughout. We see revelation in the etching below (Fig.2).

A man stares up at the figure of ultimate authority and has the revelation that the ultimate mode of being which is good across all possible hierarchies and which can be replicated through time is of the person who sees and accepts their mortality and the suffering implicit in life and, despite that, acts in a generous, grateful and forthright manner which enables him, those around him and the community at large to be better, not just today but always. This is the mode of being which the biblical text represent as walking with God, being great in ones generations or walking before god.

It has to be repeatable across time no different, other than in its articulation, from the emergent morality in play in rats which says we do not sacrifice play across the whole set of games for victory in one particular game. That is the principle which mammals act out. 

You may ask if that is correct and the answer is simple. Which do you admire, the courageous or the cowardly? It is built into the very nature of our being that the acceptance of life’s vicissitudes and finitude coupled with voluntarily acting in a noble and courageous manner in the face of that knowledge is something to be admired. And people may think this is socially constructed, but they are dead wrong and show a lack of understanding of primate neurobiology and human psychology. Do not take the pattern of natural admiration which is universal lightly. That we universally admire this pattern is a key to understanding ourselves and our world.

Think back to Jaak Pankseep’s rats and fair play. Larger rats are already playing fair (just as the Hebrews are already obeying the sabbath) in that they allow smaller rats to win a small percentage of the time in order to assure the game continues. It is not about winning the game at hand it is about participating in a mode of being which allows for success in every possible game across time for you and the group. 

If there was a rat Moses, after years of playing fair, he would have received the articulated law of fair play. He would have a tablet that says “thou shalt not sacrifice the future for the present.” Where would he receive this law? On the top of a mountain, of course. Revelation comes from on high, above the one who has reached the pinnacle of the hierarchy. It is in this way, the king and the abstract concept of sovereignty are never joined as that is the biblical Egypt which is the tyranny to be avoided.

This is the concept enshrined on the back of the American dollar bill. The Eye of Providence is a pyramid. At the peak of the pyramid, the pinnacle of the dominance hierarchy, there is an attentive (it is an eye — since the Babylonians humans have understood that the absolute top principle was some form of paying attention) abstract principle to which the hierarchy itself is subordinate and to which all hierarchies are subordinate…hence the capstone not being a part of the pyramid itself. This shows that even at the top, the leader is still subordinate to the abstract principle above him. When the peak of the hierarchy is conflated with the abstract principle to which it ought to be subordinate the result is a return to the slavery of the biblical egypt. We see this in the books of the prophets as well with the constant growth, hubristic ambitions and collapse into tyranny of the Hebrew kingdoms.

So with rat Moses, his aim is upward. He is at the peak of the hierarchy but recognizes the principle to which he is subordinate This is what is going on here. This is a very ancient way of explaining how it is that embodied knowledge, knowledge of fair play which stems from sub-cortical circuitry and is known bodily, comes to be articulated. In an explosion that shatters the epoch and eclipses it ushering in a new epistemic cognitive framework. With Sinai a new epoch is born, the epoch of the book.

Think back to de Waal’s chimps. They follow the rules and defer to the alpha. It seems they act as if the alpha is the alpha because he creates a stable troop across long periods of time with reciprocal generosity and affection — but they know it in an embodied, not explicit, way. They act it instead of knowing it. Knowing it is reserved for humans. The alpha embodies being an alpha in a way that the other chimps recognize is good for them as individual chimps as well as good for the entire troop over time. They know it. They don’t know they know it, but they know it.

The relevant literature on the evolutionary origins of consciousness (Jean Piaget, Merlin Donald, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung) all agree with primatologists and epigeneticists on this — the embodied knowledge comes first. Getting from two chimpanzees staring at each other to human beings being able to describe a common faculty in all humans called ‘consciousness’ took hundreds of millions of years and a lot of paying attention (hence the eye at the top of the pyramid).

Anthropologists and primatologists may look at a chimp group and say “they are acting as if” they are following rules of hierarchical organization, but that is very far from the case. They are not acting as if they are following a rule, rather a rule is an abstracted conscious articulation of the behavioral patterns being acted out. While it may be hard to see at first, the difference is both massive and important.

Humans are different in that we know that we know and the story of Moses in the wilderness is pointing to just that. You have a nation that is being judged in such a way that customs emerge for long enough that eventually it goes from being embodied custom to articulated knowledge. The biblical authors were not idiots. They were absolute geniuses who were working with a distillation of tens of thousands of years of inherited wisdom from individuals, families, tribes and then eventually nations and empires and they were trying to figure out just what the hell is up with us.

It is not a coincidence that the knowledge imparted in the ancient stories of the biblical library corresponds to the leading scientific research today. The only real difference is in the manner in which it is articulated. In the biblical library the methodology is that of the native human interaction with the world — narrative — while in the scientific methodology it is articulated from an artificially imposed distance to the object and studied as natural phenomenon from the point of view of an observer not participating in nature.

One of the great geniuses of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, understood this idea of bodily knowledge undergrirding articulated abstract knowledge. Nietzsche argued that the idea of disembodied metaphysical transcendent truths such as Plato’s forms, Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s categories or knowledge in the manner of science with the human merely as observer of inanimate world was horrifically anti-human. Instead Nietzsche argues for a perspectival understanding of knowledge, truths which are contingent on and shaped by the body’s interaction with the world. The scientific world would catch up to him with special and general relativity when Einstein proved that understanding the world as separate from the human perspective is, at best, incomplete. Seeing a century into the future was a hallmark of many of Nietzsche’s works.

Nietzsche believed that this was the point of art. Through art, the body’s instincts and creative drives manifest in inarticulate ways that affirm life and resist the sterile abstractions of the philosophy of his time. We see the same with the relation between the right and left hemisphere of the brain. The artist, like the right hemisphere, like Pankseep’s rats and de Waal’s chimps, like Moses judging Israel before the law is revealed,  is expressing deeply embedded yet still unarticulated truths which are then interpreted, articulated and understood by reason and rationality, the left hemisphere, the cataclysm on the peak of Sinai — written in stone if you will.

To this effect, Nietzsche says “behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage — whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra).

Rejecting the disembodied, rationalist interpretations of knowledge found in Plato, Descartes and Kant and the enlightenment thinkers in general as well the the emerging science and engineering of the enlightenment, Nietzsche aligns with a Heraclitean view of knowledge as a dynamic, life-affirming principle rooted in the flux of existence. For Nietzsche, knowledge is not a detached pursuit of universal truths but a bodily, perspectival engagement with the world, where the instincts, sense and creative drives shape understanding. By grounding knowledge in the body, Nietzsche reclaims it as a vital immanent force that rejects metaphysical abstractions.

Nietzsche, a student of Heraclitus, sees and understands the principle force of nature be it human, material or cosmic, not as a static abstract truth, but a dynamic embodied ongoing eternal process underpinning the entire cosmos that Heraclitus calls the logos (Gr. λόγος). 

¹ Developmental Psychologist Jean Piaget studied emergent rules in children’s play and found that like rats, children at six years old can cooperatively play a game in a group but, removed from the group, cannot abstract a set of rules which they can fully articulate. Humans act the rules and then we know them, not the other way around.