Aphorism #6: Love in the Age of Transhumanism
An introduction to Couplepsyche
Distributed cognition, n. a psychological theory that knowledge lies not only within the individual but also in the individual's social and physical environment.
There are so many wonderful qualities I could panegyrise in my aunt. Frugality, alas, has never been on that list. Before my uncle passed away, she was known to sneak into Limerick and get some drippy clothes or jewellery (fashion taste being one of the aforementioned panegyrisable qualities). She never thought about the money; she thought only of how to hide it from my uncle (quite often, stashing it at our house was the solution).
After he passed away, my aunt was out shopping one day. She was eyeing up a nice jacket when, quite uncalled for, a thought intruded into consciousness: “is it worth it?” It came as a surprise. She told me she’d never worried about the money before — only about hiding it from my uncle. Their Couplepsyche had collapsed.
In 2015 Pais-Viera et al. crudely wired four rat brains together to form a “brainnet”. This quartet outperformed individual rats on tasks becoming a rat hive mind.
Bees communicate what they’ve learned using trails of pheromone chemicals.
Our brains do the same (but with the enhancement of electrical myelin sheath).
And then there’s love.
When we love we fuse our minds together. My uncle took the Couplepsyche’s caution with money; my aunt the compensatory. Examples are ubiquitous: the battleaxe wife and the saintly husband; the domineering boyfriend and the pathologically indecisive girlfriend; the overweight husband and the anorexic wife; the pure optimist and the sardonic cynic; the map-reader and the “hopeless with directions”.
When you cut the bridge between your brain’s hemispheres we get "two separate minds, all in one head". Peter Watts contrasts this before and after as the difference between dial-up and broadband. Over time the sense of unity emerges even if the minds aren’t as synchronised as they once were.
Do we speak of this as one psyche or two?
The difference between lover and friend is the difference between dial-up and broadband. Communication is quicker, more regular, deep and exclusive. Conflict is more common as the psyche adjusts to its new, expanded size. Relationship conflict is the teething phase of the emerging Couplepsyche — when its scope and burdens are being negotiated.
We say that opposites attract but it is more accurate to speak of couples fusing into a greater psyche. The romantic relationship is the vessel that lends itself most to these expansions of psyche (in our society at least; the Ancient Greeks, with their beardless boys and brothers in arms, would see it differently). The commitment to one person creates a feedback loop of enmeshment at a psychological (and usually material) level such that we can speak of marriage in every sense of the word. No longer individual but Couplepsyche.