I'm going to try and make this post short. In addition restate my purpose in this blog; I want a place where I can publish my thoughts and ideas. Not to tell anyone what to believe, or what to do with their lives; just share thoughts. Perhaps some things in my posts can have value for the reader, but I'm not in a position to successfully make conclusions on behalf of others. So use your own brain, and use it well.
I had a thought that really caused a sense of profoundness and mystery to me late one night. It was an idea of what humor may be. I was thinking about how intelligence is created when ideas are linked together. This works in computer databases as well as in the mind of all living things that have a recognizable mind, in my opinion.
It's becoming more and more obvious to me that this is how the human mind works. All the understanding we have inside our heads is a vast collection of related data. When there is enough of this data linked together in just the right way, it forms what we call understanding.
If we think of an orange. We can picture a round ball in our mind, with the orange color. We can image the feel of the skin of the fruit. We can think about the indentation where it once grew on a stem. When we think of an orange, it appears to us in our mind as one complete thought. But what is really happening, is that a chain of related concepts, have been grouped together and executed together. The orange is round like a sphere, it has a color to it called orange, it has a outside skin, it has a smell, it has a place where we get oranges, a shop. There are so many attributes of an orange. All these attributes exist separately in our mind, yet when they are put together with links, our mind contains a concept of an orange. If we have a good list of attributes in our mind linked together, our brain has a useful resource of information available. Whenever it needs to know anything related to oranges.
When someone says to us, image an orange in our mind, we access the key reference in out mind to the orange. Every concept I believe must have one key reference of some kind. When this data point is executed, it will then reference all the linked data points. When all the linked information is assembled it doesn't feel like a group of information, it feels like a complete picture.
I have before in previous posts written about what I call the mental model of something. It's when we have created enough links about a subject or thing, to be able to get answers to questions we ask our model. If I ask you what happens when a ping-pong ball is dropped into a pool of water, what would you say? Perhaps "that it floats, and it wont make much of a splash." If I then ask you what happens when a bowling ball is dropped into a pool of water. Your answer would likely be, "it would make a big splash, and definitely would not float." We can make these determinations in our brains, because we have a mental model for water, and the ping-pong ball, and bowling ball, and gravity, and inertia. We can input data into each of these models, or algorithms, get output for each of them, then put all this output together. What we get, is not perfect, flowless, and exact information, but we do get an answer. Perhaps the slash of the bowling ball ended up being bigger then we thought it would be.
Simple attributes, are linked into larger clusters which made up a concept. Concepts can then interact between difference concepts and what we have in the end is an intelligence that can adapt and survive in a complex world. At least it can try too.
On a side note, I refer to models sometimes as algorithms. Likely because I can't make up my mind on which word works best to describe what I'm trying to say. So just a warning.
So where does humor fit into all of this? Well, we are constantly trying to improve out mental models. To do that we have to test them out, compare them to the mental models others have using conversations and books, etc. We can have experiences that give us clues that our mental models need improvement, and we can make new links whenever we find that two things have a relation that we have found.
Some relations are very easy for us, others are more difficult, the point is that linking and unlinking happening a lot, and needs to happen a lot. In order for our mind to help us navigate the world successfully, it must adapt correctly. Which means that every time an important relationship is found between to things, it must create a link. If it doesn't, our brain will miss an opportunity to improve it's capability, which might make an important difference in our survival.
There are other times when the brain will attempt to link two ideas, but then will not. It will attempt to make the link, however it will find by using it's own logic, that the link is invalid. Some things just don't have a valid relation. The brain must only have valid links, invalid links will cause our brains to give us the wrong answer to the questions we give it.
So to link, or not to link, that is the question for our brain. Sometimes we need to make the link to make our mind more accurate, and at times we should not make the link to make our mind more accurate. This is what I thought about late one night months ago. I was thinking about how each emotion control this linking and unlinking process, and when I thought about humor, I thought; what if this link was more unique then the rest? What if a concept needed to be linked, but at the same time should not be linked? What if the brain was caught between to opposing sets of logic that contradicted each other, yet they both were valid arguments to link and unlink.
Consider the major problem this dilemma brings to the human mind. If it makes the link, it will have an invalid algorithm, and then get wrong results from running the algorithm. If it doesn't make the link, then the algorithm is then incomplete and again will get the wrong result when running the algorithm.
So what is to be done? Well, through the process of evolution our brains likely just created a link or didn't create a link, and didn't go further then that, but at some point in the evolutionary process of our intelligence, these contradictory links started to become valuable to us. It became important to treat them differently. What happened, is that humor was created.
The links had to be made, but with an important additional link to them. Connecting them to our humor algorithm.
Have you ever heard, or saw something funny. Laughed about it, then in remembering it later, laughed about it again? I have. Sometimes we laugh at something only once, sometimes we laugh again and again. When we do this, our brain is enjoying a contradiction that is somehow desirable to our mind.
So to review, there are three actions our brain will do, when it finds related information. The first is make the relation if it believes it's valid. The second is reject the relation if it believes it's invalid. The third is related it as an in between valid and invalid. When our algorithm runs, it will run through all the links attached to it, yet when it gets to a humor link, it will not categorize it as truly belonging, yet it may stop and explore it for a quick laugh with a friend.
Understand, I'm not claiming this is all true. It's another one of my interesting and unproven thoughts. It makes a whole lot of sense to me, and I've been thinking about it while hearing jokes, and I have to admit, it does kill the humor a bit when I'm focusing on analyzing humor instead of just enjoying it.
Yet, my mind is very much drawn to some ideas, and for the past while now, this has been on my mind a lot. The part that I find most mysterious about this, is why would humor be so valuable in the first place? Spotting these inconsistencies I think may play a big role in helping us understand what is real, and what just seems like it's real. It may also help us by finding an alternative to finding meaning in things.
I feel like our brain has a strong need to assign meaning to everything that happens. Sometimes humor is the only real meaning to make sense of some things.
One last item I feel I need to discuss, is confusion. Confusion and humor I think are different. In confusion, there is a strong believe in our mind, that a link is either true or untrue. Not that it's in a state between. So we feel confused, because our algorithm doesn't seem to work with the link, or without the link. Add to that, we don't have a third option that we have available for updating our algorithm of links. The end results is confusion.
Humor doesn't have this lingering problem. In humor a solution was found, and making the link in the algorithm but only as a humor link, that will also indicate it's invalid.
If there was more to deliberate on, then confusion would be the result, but humor is not the same as confusion. It can look like confusion, but it's not the same I would argue. We may have a thought that starts as confusion, then as we have time to process it, we discover something to laugh about. In this scenario, we struggled to know if the correction was correct, then found to our surprise, it's humor, and it's time to laugh.
I would encourage anyone reading this to leave a comment in this blog. Let me know what you think of this, and what your ideas are for this odd, and interesting thing called humor.
