2019-10-05
(Related to some previous thoughts on consciousness being a process of synchrony-seeking, and maybe language-as-organism. This article on laughter is probably also good context for these thoughts.)
Gratitude: I want to express attribution to SG, a new acquaintance who I met at a loud dinner. Last night, he indulged me with his attention and helped me speak aloud some related thoughts, which directly re-energized me to write a bit more about this stuff swimming around my head lately.
I recall from my undergrad that laughter is a bit of an interesting phenomenon. It’s not really about “funny” things, than it is about communicating “hey, there’s some novelty happening here!”. You could almost imagine it as a little burst of noise we send out, like crows cawing, when we’ve found a new or interesting puzzle and contradiction, and a safe space to explore it.
How this theory came about is interesting, and essentially rooted in discovering two forms of muscles controlling our facial expressions of laughter, signifying a two-step emergence of different forms of laughter.
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Duchenne laughter. Came first. Triggered by something funny. Breathy panting. Likely appeared before the emergence of language. From the above article, it was a “signal that things at the moment were OK, that danger was low and basic needs were met, and now was as good a time as any to explore, to play, to socialize.” It said, “this is an opportunity for learning”.
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Non-Duchenne laughter. Came second with language. “As people developed cognitively and behaviorally, they learned to mimic the spontaneous behavior of laughter to take advantage of its effects.” But there are subtle “tells” where the eye muscle movements don’t always come with this version.
So through this particular lens (which may not be the full story, mind you), laughter is maybe more like a very primitive, pre-linguistic form of communication that we evolved and repeatedly repurposed to our evolving and increasingly social context. It’s been repurposed into other things. But it’s really like an animal sound. It’s like our “moo”.
But importantly our “moo” has been put partially under our cognitive control. And over the course of human social development, we learned to “deploy” our “moo” in a calculated way to better shape our desired social situations, to manipulate our social context based on our desires (e.g., our cultural software), and not just our hardware instincts.
So maybe it’s more like we evolved to wire our animal sound of laughter to our software level, rather than only our hardware level (the latter of which is like “moos” and “caws”).
But further, I’m curious whether there’s also another layer that’s interesting. If you were to take for granted that “seeking and generating synchrony” in the minds of others is something we’re maybe programmed to do as conscious creatures. I imagine it a bit like our subconscious drives are seeking others who will join us in building a meme-based force of united will. Which kinda makes sense if you start to think of the essence of humanity being the langauge and concepts living in our brains — living within the vessel or spaceship of our biology.
And viewed that way, primitive Duchenne laughter represents a hardcoded way for us to broadcast a physical space (1) where novelty or a new or interesting contradictory idea has been discovered, and (2) that is a safe physical space to explore that idea, to remix it not just within a single mind, but in the shared capacity of a group of minds. It’s a safe space to form a megazord1 of minds to work together to share some ideas in a space that has been flagged as full of ideas.
This feels like it explains a lot of our experience of laughter — our draw to be near it, to move toward it, to participate in it. That would satisfy all the needs of a purported language organism that lives within our minds.
Oh god, this langauge-as-organism thing is a deep rabbit-hole, and it strikes me as either 100% real and informative of the world, or totally insane :)
h/t CoTech co-op community for inspiring the Megazord analogy.