capybara ni naritai

Créme Bruleé Brownies

Prep Time: 40 minutes Cook Time: 30 minutes Total Time: 1 hour, 10 minutes Yield: 15 servings

Ingredients

Brownies:

1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter, melted

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 cups granulated sugar

4 large eggs

1 TBS vanilla extract

1 1/3 cups flour

12 oz (ish) jar hot fudge sauce

Créme Bruleé Topping:

¼ cup cornstarch

1 cup white sugar

6 Tablespoons butter, melted

3 ¼ cups half and half cream

2 teaspoons vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste

¼ cup granulated sugar

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350. Line a 9x13 pan with foil and spray thoroughly with nonstick spray; set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the cocoa and melted butter. Stir in sugar until combined. Stir in eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each. Stir in vanilla. Fold in flour JUST until you no longer see flour streaks in the batter. Gently fold in hot fudge sauce.

Spread batter in prepared pan and bake for about 20 minutes, until raw batter no longer appears when a toothpick is inserted in the center. Remove from oven and place pan on a cooling rack.

Prepare topping: In a medium-sized heavy saucepan, whisk together cornstarch and sugar. Whisk in the melted butter and half and half. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is the consistency of a thick pudding. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Pour custard over the brownies, spreading to cover. Sprinkle surface with granulated sugar, then place under the broiler for several minutes until top is golden (may be dark brown is some spots). Alternately, a kitchen torch can be used.

Let brownies cool to room temperature, then refrigerate until chilled. Remove foil, cut into bars and serve.

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?