On Happiness

From this geneticist point of view, all human’s minds (and all living beings) have three layers, from bottom to top: Primal, Social and Learned; and each one is based on the one before.

The Primal layer is encoded in the genes (and thus, each one of us is different from all the others, Primal is stronger is some individuals and weaker in others when it comes to behaviour), and it represents the most basic instincts inherent to a species, like the survival instinct, the search for nourishment and the urge to mate and reproduce to inherit your genes. Primal has been selected over millions of years across millions of species, these instincts started to evolve from the LUCA, and are inherent to all living beings to a great extent and very difficult or almost impossible to override.

The Social layer is encoded through epigenetics, and is specific to species and even groups within the species when these are widely spread (like humans). These changes evolve much faster than hardcoded genetic mutations, and they are the basis for the adaptation to rapidly changing environments. Fear, love, hate, predominant aesthetic, and a wide range of what are considered mental disorders fall in this layer. These are more easily overridden than the Primal layer, which can be achieved in several ways, the most obvious, when they enter in conflict with a Primal, the Primal usually wins; but also they can be overridden by drugs or force of will for example.

The Learned layer is not encoded in the genome, neither in the genetics or the epigenetics of the individuals. What’s contained in this layer is passed from generation to generation through a combination of memes together with personal experience. Knowledge, science, religion, art, morals, fashion and many other human constructs fall in this layer. As you can imagine this layer is easily overridden and/or influenced by the Primal and Social layers.

These three layers are very abstract concepts, and, thus, very difficult to measure directly, hence, enter proxies. Proxies are widely used as easy measures of a thing that can tell us something about the measure of another thing which is much more difficult to measure. For example, when a human presents mongoloid factions, that is considered to be a proxy for a trisomy of chromosome 21, and, thus, Down syndrome. Not every human with mongoloid factions has a trisomy of chromosome 21, and more in general, no proxy correlates perfectly with its target trait, whether it is Primal, Social or Learned; but they work very nicely to predict things which would be very hard or impossible to predict otherwise if you find the right proxy.

It is also important to consider that this is not about how many things are contained in each layer (and that is also important, but a different discussion), but about how much of each layer is in each decision that we make in our life. There are very few things in the Primal layer, and tons and tons of them in the Learned layer (in humans, or some of them anyway), but in you, the Primal layer can be the one making the decisions over the others. If the hardcoded genetics variants you carry make you more Primal, and since Primal is most difficult layer to override by our conscious self, your decision making will be mostly Primal, and in which sense specifically will also be hardcoded in your genes. If the hardcoded genetic variants you carry makes you less Primal, but your epigenetics directs you to some aspects of Social more strongly, then the Social layer will be predominant on your decision making. If both your genetics and your epigenetics are not particularly strong towards one thing or another, then your decision making will be mostly influenced by your Learned layer, i.e. by the memes inherited from your parents, family and friends and by your personal experience; or the pool of all the knowledge your mind has acquired during your life up until the point you make that decision.

The brain is an architectural construct product of millions of years of evolution over the genetics and epigenetics of the species. The circuits of neurons within our brains encode all the information that is us, our mind; and these circuits belong into one or more areas of the brain that are in charge of different aspects of the mind, e.g. spacial perception, abstract thinking, self-awareness, memory, etc. How these circuits are and can be made and connected are first determined by our genetics, and most of it occurs during pregnancy (the foundation part if you will). What is not determined by genetics during pregnancy is determined by epigenetics (and this part can get really complicated, since we do not express our epigenetic alleles, but our parent’s). Then we are born, and the most basic things have been already set by our genetic variants (things can change during puberty, for although our genetic sequence does not change over life, the gene expression levels can, and some of these changes are genetically encoded, and puberty is a messy thing from a genetic and hormonal point of view), but epigenetics keep changing through our life depending on the environment, and also, we start learning things, and thus, building the Learned layer, which, usually, gets bigger and bigger as you live.

Taking all this together, each individual will be the mix of its three layers. One particularly impulsive individual in all matters maybe will be 60% Primal, 30% Social and 10% Learned for example (he or she could have tons of knowledge, but not used in decision making), while a person considered as very tempered could be 10% Primal, 30% Social and 60% Learned. How could we determine this? As we spoke before, proxies. So, which are good proxies for the strength of each layer? In my opinion there can be many, and a mean of plenty for each layer would be more adequate, but to keep things simple, and again, in my (educated) experience:

• Number of wisdom teeth for the Primal layer. Most common number in humans is four, and in my opinion this is fairly primal (yes, most humans are reasonably primal, hence, the irrationality in the world). If you have six like me, you are totally screwed, but the good side of it is that people around you usually know how you feel, since you are very obvious and a fucking bad liar. One day, probably some 5,000 years from now, if we haven’t killed ourselves, hopefully the most common number of wisdom teeth in humans will be two, and the world will be a better place.
• Number of people you consider your friends (they also need to consider you their friend) for the Social layer. No, Facebook friends do not count. Tweeter followers do not count. Only people that you would put your life in their hands.
• Number of full (cover to cover) books you have read in your life for the Learned layer. In here there can be a lot of debate, as this is the most complex layer, but in my humble opinion things like twilight and fifty shades of grey do not count.

So now sum your wisdom teeth, your friends and the number of books divided by 12 (universal constant to normalize books that I just made up) and that’s your total (let’s call it N). Your Primal percentage is wisdom teeth/N, your Social percentage is your number of friends/N and your learned percentage is (number of books/12)/N. How are you? Do you agree? In my case it looks like….

Logically, you are born completely primal (no books, no friends, all teeth). According to this proposition, if you want to be less Primal, start reading more books and making more friends, motherfucker. On the other hand, if you want to be more primal, stop reading books and by all means tell everyone around you to go fuck themselves.

So, finally, happiness. What is happiness?. That elusive thing that all of us seek, none understand and few attain for more than some hours in a whole life. In my opinion, happiness is agreement, the agreement of the Primal, the Social and the Learned layer. Achieving this agreement in some banal decision like whether to cut your hair or leave it long will give you some 0.00000000000000000000000001 miliseconds of happiness (keep summing, champion!). Achieving this agreement when making the most important decision in your life could give you a whole year of happiness, but I don’t think that any human yet has been able to do this. Plus, if all the parts of your mind work at unison you become invincible, everyone knows that, while if they disagree, you, as a conscious being, is full of doubt, and doubt only leads to failure.

But then again, all is determined by the universe and written already in the universal equation, so why bother? Just do whatever it is you’re going to do.

If I could save only ten movies

The other day a committee of aliens came to me (crazy, I know), and they explained to me that they have stellar nurseries in which they hatch their own, but for it to work they need tons of biomass. They explained how places like earth are just some wild farm from where to gather this biomass, and that we are about to be harvested. Even then, they feel bad about all the countless species to have extincted so far, so they have a tradition (just to make them feel better about the xenocides). When they are about to harvest a planet they ask their inhabitants for some token of their culture to be stored in their quantum crystal digital stores, so they will be preserved forever and seen in a billion worlds for a billion years. In our case they want movies, ten of them. As they understand society, any chain is as week as the weakest link, so all individuals have to be equally prepared for everything at all times in their species; hence, for anything they just choose someone at random, and that's what they apply to others also (rings a bell?). They have explained to me that I have been chosen at random from seven billion, and that I have to choose these ten movies as the only thing that will remain from us once we are harvested. This is just a farm, none will survive, it's the end of all days. We humans don't work like that, we specialize, but that's how it has to go down, so even I am no one to say, in my most humble opinion these would be my top ten, in no particular order, and the reasons why.

Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)

IMDB 8.2, Rotten Tomatoes 89%

Where Science-Fiction, Philosophy and Noir meet at their best (AKA cyberpunk), if I could only pick one movie for the alien's repository of gems from every planet they've wiped out, chances are it would be Blade Runner. Only the question asked here... what happens when we have the tech to build synthetic humans, that feel and think as you or me do, that come with "best before" date for cheap and disposable work force? Based on the equally genius novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.

Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino)

IMDB 8.9, Rotten Tomatoes 94%

The best portrayal in movies of how random, cruel, vicious, stupid and greedy humans can be. Not sure a good idea that the aliens see this one, but only the conversation about feet massage with Vincent and Jules backs on camera makes it worth it. A master piece of apparently absurd dialogue that hides profound knowledge and wisdom about human nature.

Ezekiel 25:17. The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.

Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)

IMDB 8.7, Rotten Tomatoes 86%

Christopher Nolan is one of the best directors of all time, and sure the best from his generation, and this is probably his best movie. A dream within a dream. A spinning top spinning on a table as the final scene presents you with at least seven possible endings. And the cast of the movie delivers some of the best acting ever seen in a movie.

What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.

Fight Club (1999, David Fincher)

IMDB 8.8, Rotten Tomatoes 79%

Every generation has their own big adversity, you name it: the black plague, the crusades, the inquisition, world wars, cold wars, great economic depressions; but not us, we are the sons of apathy with nothing to fight for but our hedonistic desires, and no greater enemy than ourselves. And this movie is the perfect reflection of that reality, plus the brilliant script and the stellar performance by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Based on the book of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. 

Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

IMDB 8.0,  Rotten Tomatoes 96%

Humans have replaced so many parts of them for machines that they are hardly human, and machines are so evolved that they have feelings more humane than humans. The story of a hybrid between human and machine discovering what she is and of an AI born in the vast information sea of what we know today as the internet. Based on the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow published in 1989, when the internet as we know it today was but a dream.

If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it's wired into the core of our being.

The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)

IMDB 9.0, Rotten Tomatoes 97%

[This one is interchangeable with the first one, for me, part II is better since I am more a Robert de Niro person than a Marlon Brando person, but both are sublime].

The Godfather. shit. If this one (or the first one) is not on your top ten list you need to have an MRI done on your head to look for brain damage. I am not even going to argue why this movie is here.

My father taught me many things here - he taught me in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

The Matrix (1999,  Lana and Lilly Wachowski)
IMDB 8.7, Rotten Tomatoes 87%

The Wachowskis took East and West philosophy, computer programming, martial arts, Ghost in the Shell, Rene Descartes and Isaac Asimov to ensemble one of the most influential, imitated, mind blowing and aesthetically perfect movies ever made. And I love the sequels too, contrary to popular opinion. I know this is usually a trope, but in my case, I actually only say this of two movies (this one, and its sequels, and Inception): If you don't like them, it's because you don't understand them really. And the worst thing is believing you understand them when you don't, for you cannot learn a thing you think you know.
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Contact (1997, Robert Zemeckis)

IMDB 7.4, Rotten Tomatoes 62%

The best of the very few movies that takes a serious and believable approach to the first contact with an alien civilization (hello Arrival). A beautiful story of hope for mankind amidst an age of technological and scientific advance and ideological and political stupidity. Based on the book of the same name by Carl Sagan, one of the best human beings ever born. We miss you Dr. Sagan.

You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.

The Martian (2015, Ridley Scott)

IMDB 8.0, Rotten Tomatoes 92%

Ridley Scott has in this list Blade Runner, which is one the most dystopic, dark and depressing movies you can imagine, while he also directed The Martian, a movie about optimism, about never surrendering, about using our most powerful weapon to overcome any obstacle: our intellect and knowledge. Plus the power of science. And I never liked Matt Damon, that is, until I saw this movie, in which he proved to me what he can do. Based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir.

In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this.

Dracula (1992, Francis Ford Coppola)

IMDB 7.5, Rotten Tomatoes 78%

Many books have been adapted to movies, and almost always the book is better than the movie (especially in the case of the Lord of the Rings). Not this once, this Coppola adaptation of one of the most (in)famous books in human history beats the novel by Bram Stoker, and that's a lot to say from me, since the book is also one of my favorite ones. Contrary to the appearances, a story about what happens when we find ourselves out of our place and out of our time. We would all be monsters if suddenly we are placed in a different country 500 years from now. And it also happens to be one of the most beautiful love stories ever made.

I have crossed oceans of time to find you.

On a side note(s)

there are several things that appear more than once in this ten movies: both Ridley Scott and Francis Ford Coppola directed two of them. Coincidentally, Keanu Reeves is in two of them (The Matrix and Dracula) although he only has a lead role in one of them. Two of them were made the same year, 1999 (The Matrix and Fight Club). Six of the ten are Science-Fiction. Eight of them are based on books (where most good stories come from). And all but one (Ghost in the Shell) are from the States, which makes me think, we can say tons of shit about the people from the stars and stripes country, but they do know their shit when making movies (to be fair the have probably also done 9 of the 10 worst movies ever done, but who cares?).

I feel sad there is no more space in the alien's quantum crystal digital stores for some James Cameron and Martin Scorsese movies, which are obviously the honorable mentions for this list.

And finally, no, Citizen Kane could not be here. That is one of the shitiest movies I have ever suffered. I would prefer to take out my nails using my teeth rather than to have to watch it again. Fuck Citizen Kane.