Raymond Tallis. Aping Minkind. Neuromania, darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity.pdf

ACUMEN Aping Mankind

“Impassioned and intensely erudite.”

dominic lawson, Sunday Times

“With erudition, wit and rigour, Tallis reveals that much of our current wisdom is as silly as bumps-on-the-head phrenology.” jane o’grady, The Observer “A trenchant, lucid and witty attack on the reductive materialism of many scientific accounts of consciousness – not from a religious point of view, but that of an atheist humanist with a distinguished record in medicine and neuroscience.” david lodge, The Guardian “A really, enjoyably, angry rebuttal of the ‘neurotrash’ of speculative brain science. It does not detract from the work of serious neuroscience to have some of its contemporary pretensions punctured by one of its own practitioners. This is a necessary corrective.” alexander linklater, The Observer “Neuroscience, we are implausibly informed, will help dispense with evil. Who better to debunk its pretensions while instructing us in its uses than wise, literate Raymond Tallis, a neuroscientist himself, in his entertaining Aping Mankind.” george walden, Evening Standard “This kind of personhood – the capacity, in fact the compulsion, to bring things together into some kind of coherent narrative, without which experience is not just senseless, but almost impossible, is what Tallis believes science cannot now explain. Anyone tempted to suppose that science has explained it even in principle – and that means almost all of us – should read him, and realise we’re wrong.” andrew brown, The Guardian “An all-out assault on the exaggerated claims made on behalf of the biological sciences … an important work. Tallis is right to point out that a fundamental shift in our self-perception is under way and frequently going too far.” stephen cave, Financial Times “Witty and filled with aphorisms, Aping Mankind is a powerful and angry response to neurological and evolutionary reductionism as accounts of human nature and human accomplishments. [Tallis’s] defence of human uniqueness and his attack of the grotesquely simplified and degrading accounts of humanity that are ingenuously or disingenuously offered in many scholarly circles these days are welcome and worthy.” andrew scull, Times Literary Supplement

“A pleasure to read … Tallis is fighting for a good cause.” willem b. drees, Times Higher Education Supplement “A terrific book, though readers must be prepared to read it at least twice, not because it is in any sense obscure, but fully to appreciate the richness and subtlety of Tallis’s novel insights, with all their implications for our understanding of humanity’s precious attributes of freedom, intentionality and moral responsibility.” james le fanu, The Tablet “A provocative, fascinating, and deeply paradoxical book … Tallis displays a wit and a turn of phrase which often made me howl with laughter.” allan chapman, Church Times “A welcome corrective to what Tallis calls the ‘bold rush’ of biologism. An important and thought-provoking book.” Philosophy Now “Brilliantly written … renowned polymath Raymond Tallis puts the picture back into much clearer perspective in his scathing exposé of neuroscientific narcissism.” Human Givens “… a relentless assertion of common sense against a delusive but entrenched academic orthodoxy. Few books evince their authors’ complete mastery of his subject like Aping Mankind.” The New English Review “A major and erudite statement of a position that is intellectually, morally and spiritually of the first importance to us living now.” roger scruton “A splendid book. Tallis is right to say that current attempts to explain major elements of human life by brain-talk are fearfully misguided. He is exceptional in having both the philosophical grasp to understand what is wrong here and the scientific knowledge to expose it fully. He documents the gravity of this menace with real fire, venom and humour.” mary midgley “A wonderful book and an important book, one that all neuroscientists should read. Tallis’s fearless criticism of the work of some distinguished contemporary academics and scientists and the rather ludicrous experimental paradigms of fMRI work needs to be made.” simon shorvon, UCL Institute of Neurology “There are few contemporary thinkers who possess either the breadth of Ray Tallis’s knowledge or the depth of his scholarship. There are fewer still who can write so cogently and insightfully about the human condition.” kenan malik

Aping Mankind NEUROMANIA, DARWINITIS AND THE MISREPRESENTATION OF HUMANITY

Raymond Tallis

Acumen

© Raymond Tallis 2011 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. The right of Raymond Tallis to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. First published in 2011 by Acumen First paperback edition 2012 Acumen Publishing Limited 4 Saddler Street Durham DH1 3NP, UK IDS, 70 Enterprise Drive Bristol, CT 06010, USA www.acumenpublishing.com isbn: 978-1-84465-272-3 (hardcover) 978-1-84465-273-0 (paperback) cover: Le singe peintre by Jean Baptiste Deshays (1729–65), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen. © 2011 White Images/Scala, Florence. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the UK by MPG Books Group.

For Ben, Laurence and Terry, with my love

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is man. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

Contents

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: The Strange Case of Professor Gray and Other Provocations

1

1

Science and Scientism

15

2

Consequences

51

3

Neuromania: A Castle Built on Sand

73

4

From Darwinism to Darwinitis

147

5

Bewitched by Language

183

6

The Sighted Watchmaker

209

7

Reaffirming our Humanity

243

8

Defending the Humanities

277

9

Back to the Drawing Board

337

References Index

363 379

ix

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to Steven Gerrard at Acumen, whose enthusiasm for this book and practical encouragement has been even more important to me than he perhaps realizes. I am also deeply grateful to Kate Williams for her excellent editorial work, which has saved me from many blunders and removed numerous infelicities. I have incurred many intellectual debts during the period I have been writing this book but I would single out Roger Scruton for his generous support, as well as for his own trenchant critiques of “neuroculture”, Sally Satel, who sent me a steady flow of priceless examples of Neuromania, and Irving Massey, whose The Neural Imagination proved an invaluable resource. It is a pleasure also to acknowledge the tremendous support from my agent Jonny Pegg. Some of the text that follows draws on material already published in a different form. The critique of the neuroscience of memory in Chapter 3 is based in part on “A Smile at Waterloo Station” in Philosophy Now. “Did Natural Selection Generate Consciousness?” in Chapter 4 is a modified version of “The Unnatural Selection of Consciousness” published in The Philosopher’s Magazine. Chapter 5 draws in places on material in my Why the Mind is Not a Computer. The critique of neuro-determinism is based on “How Can I Possibly be Free?” published in The New Atlantis. “Finding the Self ” in Chapter 7 draws on my Darwin College lecture “Identity and the Mind”, given in 2007 and published in 2010 in a series of lectures edited by Giselle Walker and Elisabeth Leedham-Green. “Neuro-lit-crit” in Chapter 8 incorporates material published in “License my Roving Hands” in the Times Literary Supplement, and “The God-Spot Spotters” is a modified version of “In Search of the G Spot” in The New Humanist. xi

INTRODUCTION

The Strange Case of Professor Gray and Other Provocations

In 2002 a respected publisher issued a volume that made shocking accusations about the then Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Not satisfied with calling him an animal, it described him as “exceptionally rapacious” and “predatory and destructive”: even (in an outrageous pun) as Homo rapiens. He was “not obviously worth preserving”; his life had “no more meaning than that of a slime mould”. The Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, the writer added, was entirely without insight into his degraded nature. He imagined that he was different from, indeed superior to, all other living creatures in virtue of having a distinctive consciousness, selfhood and free will. In reality, the professor’s life was a “fragmentary dream”. It is difficult to imagine a more thorough character assassination and you might expect that the Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics would take the author to court, demanding retraction and a six-figure settlement. The reason he didn’t follow this course of action is rather surprising; the book was Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and the author was none other than John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.1 While the libel laws in the United Kingdom have in recent years proved asinine, they would not, I think, have countenanced a plaintiff suing himself. Anyway, Gray’s legal position was weakened because he had generalized the nasty

1. The quotations in the opening paragraph are from Gray, Straw Dogs, 7, 33, 38, 151 and passim.

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things he said about himself to all humankind. A class action would not have been to his advantage. Besides, it was not clear whether he actually appreciated that what he said about “man” would apply to himself. He may not have been in command of the relevant bit of Aristotelian logic: “All men are horrible. I am a man. Therefore I am horrible”.2 There is nothing particularly original in hosing the image of humanity with liquid manure. With Straw Dogs and subsequent emissions such as Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004) and Gray’s Anatomy (2009),3 Gray, far from blazing a trail, joined a long line of misanthropes. Many of his predecessors had felt it necessary to emphasize the low standing of humanity in order to curry favour with God. Although Gray suffers from a Prometheus complex – the assumption that the hubristic can-do of Homo faber must lead to Nemesis – he is not castigating mankind in order to please a putative maker. His harsh judgement is based on his particular take on history and on science. Human history is “a succession of catastrophes” with “occasional lapses into peace and civilisation”.4 Dreams of moral and material progress have only brought about more cruelty – tyranny, mass murder and the like – and deeper self-deception. We are ultimately powerless to alter our individual or collective destiny. As for science, has it not shown us, courtesy of Darwin, that we are animals and our nature has been fashioned in the bloodbath that is the natural world? What chance of moral progress for a creature raised on a pyramid of slaughter? The technologically enhanced teeth and claws of Homo sapiens are redder than anything else in nature. Anyone who is starry-eyed about humanity and thinks that it is more typically represented by a stroking hand than by a clenched fist, or by a dedicated primary school teacher than by a concentration camp guard, and human possibility by symphonies rather than by poison gas, should think again. Darwin has taught us to expect otherwise and, Gray argues, the record of history supports Darwinian expectations. Aping Mankind owes its origin to many moments of exasperation but reading Straw Dogs was probably decisive. Self-indulgent and lazily

2. Perhaps he did realize this and his book was an expression of a self-loathing that had spilled over to encompass the entire human race. He would not be the first writer to whom this has happened. 3. For a definitive, brief demolition of Gray’s world-picture, do read Grayling, “Through the Looking Glass”. You will have fun. 4. Quoted in Black, “John Gray: The Poster Boy”.

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INTRODUCTION

fragmentary, the book has little merit. The thinkers Gray cites are apparently chosen at random. But his book is less important in itself than in what it represents. It has spared me the need to invent a straw man; in its comparatively small space it illustrates pretty well all the things the present book is written against. One of the most important – and representative – faults of Straw Dogs is that its anti-humanism is self-contradictory, for a reason that is central to the concern of Aping Mankind. Gray attacks what he calls “modern humanism”, and “the humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals”.5 This is “an aberration”, as is the delusion that we can free ourselves “from the limits that frame the lives of other animals”,6 which is based on “the faith that through science humankind can know the truth”. This faith is groundless: “if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true … [t]he human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals”.7 No prizes for the twelveyear-old who can spot the Professor of European Thought re-enacting the ancient Paradox of the Liar and pulling the rug from beneath his own argument.8 This passage also exemplifies a further contradiction, common in much contemporary writing: a tendency to overestimate what natural science, in particular biology, has to say about human nature while at the same time exhibiting extreme scepticism about science as a source of truth and (of course) as an engine of progress. In some writers – although not Gray, who despises all technological fixes and any aspiration to improving the lot of mankind – the contradictions are even more profound: the sense that there is nothing to be done because those who would remedy awfulness are themselves irremediable animals with fixed natures is mysteriously reconciled with a crude, scientistic approach to the law, economics and politics. The assumption, supposedly based on scientific evidence, that we have no free will is combined with all manner of would-be progressive social policies claiming to be rooted in neuroscience. Of this, more presently.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Gray, Straw Dogs, 17. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 26. This is not a momentary lapse from his pretence to disbelieve in objective truth. He makes statements with vast scope that I presume he thinks are objectively true. For example: “In evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language” (ibid., 171). And many of the negative assertions he makes about humanity presuppose knowledge that those of us who do believe in objective truths would hesitate to claim to possess.

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There are other problems with Gray’s thesis that might cause a twelveyear-old to shake her head. If, for example, we humans are no different from all other animals, how did we dream up the idea that we are different? Come to that, how did we ever arrive at an idea of ourselves at all? As far as I know, centipedes do not have the concept “centipede”; nor do they relate that concept to a higher-order concept such as “insect”; they do not compare themselves to other centipedes or calibrate centipedes against other insects. Not even our biological next door neighbours, the chimpanzees, do this. And my illustrative twelve-year-old would, I am sure, be unimpressed by the claim that “The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not”.9 She would point out that our collective, recorded, hotly contested history is one of the many crucial respects in which we are profoundly different from “the beast”, which (as Nietzsche pointed out) “lives unhistorically; for it ‘goes into’ the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder”.10 There is another reason for singling out Straw Dogs. Notwithstanding its many faults, the book was rapturously received, and its successors have fared just as well. It turned Gray into an international celebrity, “the poster boy for misanthropy”,11 and it was endorsed by many other celebrity intellectuals such as Will Self (who described Gray as “the most important living philosopher”,12 a judgement that presupposes acquaintance with all other contemporary thinkers) and A. S. Byatt. Bryan Appleyard asserted that Straw Dogs was “unquestionably one of the great works of our time”.13 This reveals much about the current zeitgeist: in particular the extent to which the notion that we are “just animals” has become an orthodoxy, as the supposed implications of what Daniel Dennett called Darwin’s “dangerous idea” sink in.14 Pessimistic biologism dovetails with other intellectual trends. Contempt for the idea of progress has always been attractive to some because it justifies sparing yourself the effort of trying to leave the world a better place than you found it. Reflection on the century just past, in which proportionately

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ibid., 155. Nietzsche, “The Use and Abuse of History”, 219. Black, “John Gray: The Poster Boy”. Gray, Heresies, back cover. Gray, Straw Dogs, back cover. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

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INTRODUCTION

more people were killed by their fellows than at any other time in history,15 and concerns about the prospects for the next century, with the threat of global warming, wars over resources and the irreversible despoliation of the planet by technologically enhanced mankind, give an apparent warrant for contempt for the idea of progress, a contempt described by Peter Medawar as “the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind”.16 *** Darwinian-inspired pessimism draws on another intellectual trend that has gathered momentum in the past few decades. I am referring to the rise and rise of brain science as a source of the apparent explanation of every aspect of human life. The link between the “Darwinization” of our understanding of humanity (which I have characterized as an inflamed mode of Darwinian thought or “Darwinitis”) and “Neuromania” (the appeal to the brain, as revealed through the latest science, to explain our behaviour) is obvious. If the brain is an evolved organ, as it most certainly is, its purpose must be the same as that of all other organs; namely, to contribute to securing the survival of the organism whose function in turn is to ensure the replication of the genetic material for which it is a vehicle. If we are our brains, then ultimately all that we do, think and feel must be subordinated to this imperative, whether we know it or not. The warm reception accorded Gray’s misanthropic ravings – and their relevance to the present book – indicate that they spoke to an audience already sympathetic to his degraded conception of human nature, to a biologism anchored in a synthesis of Darwinitis and Neuromania. My own quarrel with Neuromania goes back to my time as a medical student in the 1960s, when I argued with my infinitely patient tutor in neurophysiology about the difference between brain activity and our consciousness. I didn’t, however, publish anything until the 1990s, when The Explicit Animal came out. There I endeavoured to make visible the distinctive features of human, as opposed to animal, consciousness. I also argued against neural explanations of consciousness and against the assumption that consciousness in general, and human consciousness in particular, could be explained in evolutionary terms, as an adaptation.

15. Ferguson, The War of the World, 647–54. 16. Medawar, The Hope of Progress, 125.

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Around that time, the notion that the evolved mind–brain was made up of a series of modules, rather like those seen in a computer, designed to help us deal with the challenges served up by the natural world and, subsequently, by our fellow humans, assumed a dominant position in academic psychology. When evolutionary psychology joined forces with “the computational theory of mind”, many of the conceptual errors in identifying conscious humans with their brain activity became clearer to me. I therefore wrote a short book attacking the ideas that the mind was a computer.17 The aim of Why the Mind is Not a Computer was to expose the systemic confusion and terminological legerdemain in evolutionary-based cognitive psychology by examining the language in which it was expressed. Neither book made any difference. Undaunted, I wrote Enemies of Hope, which addressed the bigger picture. In that book I connected the aim to deny human agency, linked to biological accounts of what it is to be a human being, with broader anti-humanist trends, particularly in the humanities as studied and taught in institutions of higher education. These trends had in common a tendency to marginalize the role of consciousness, and conscious intentions, in the conduct of human life. I identified some of the potentially dire consequences that pessimism about mankind might have. The most important was the abandonment of the hope of progress. This might have been good news for the comfortable but not for the destitute. Enemies of Hope drew no response from the enemies of hope. The overwhelming success of Gray’s ecstatically pessimistic Straw Dogs a few years later shows how ineffective my polemic was. My most determined contribution to characterizing our human being was a trilogy on human consciousness.18 These three volumes endeavoured to set out more comprehensively than The Explicit Animal the distinctive nature of human consciousness, and key aspects of it such as selfhood, agency and knowledge. It also offered an explanation of how we humans came to be so different. Finally, I took the opportunity to address some of my preoccupations more accessibly in The Kingdom of Infinite Space, where, in particular, I examined how we humans, through getting our heads together, have transcended our biology and how, running with the biological givens, we have transformed them into something profoundly different.

17. Tallis, Psycho-Electronics, reprinted as Why the Mind is Not a Computer. 18. Tallis, The Hand, I Am and The Knowing Animal.

6

INTRODUCTION

*** The utter failure of my efforts to halt the inexorable advance of Neuromania and Darwinitis may be judged by the fact that, since I published The Explicit Animal twenty years ago, evolutionary psychology, various modes of neuro-determinism (based on the notion that “You are your brain”) and a dozen new disciplines basing themselves on those two offshoots of evolutionary theory and neuroscience have achieved an extraordinary influence on discussions of human nature. It is now almost impossible to pick up a magazine or a newspaper, or listen to the radio, without being reminded of the grip that biologism has on contemporary thought, in every place where our nature is discussed, from professional journals to learned colloquia to pub chat next to a plasma television screen. In view of this you might think that it was about time I learned to recognize a brick wall for what it is, give up and hope that Neuromania and Darwinitis will prove to be fads and, being fads, will pass. Even King Canute would have recognized that the tide could not be turned once the ice cream vans were bobbing in the sea. And I might well have been inclined to take this course and focused on other projects, had it not been for endless provocations. I have mentioned Straw Dogs, but it was but one of many thousands. Another significant prod came from an unexpected, and for me particularly dismaying, quarter: literary criticism. I read a piece in the Times Literary Supplement that made my hackles rise. A. S. Byatt argued that that we are now able to understand the impact of John Donne’s poetry because recent neurology has shown how certain linguistic tropes preferentially stimulate particular neuronal pathways.19 I won’t say much about this here – I shall demolish it in the appropriate place – except to report that I published a reply in which I criticized every single aspect of Byatt’s argument. In the course of researching my response to her article, I discovered to my astonishment that evolutionary and neurological approaches to literary criticism were now the Coming Thing in academic circles. Further research led me to a rapidly expanding, bullish, “neuroaesthetic” discourse purporting to explain the impact of paintings, music and other arts by examining the neural pathways they stimulated. Wherever I looked, I saw the humanities being taken over by neuro-evolutionary pseudoscience: musicology, the law, ethical theory and theology all sought a grounding in biology. Yet another tide of CMTP (colonic material of a taurine

19. Byatt, “Observe the Neurones”.

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provenance) seemed to be engulfing the humanities just when postmodernism and deconstruction were on the wane. There comes a point when you suddenly find yourself behaving like Robert Browning as characterized by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “a man bouncing up from a table, his mouth full of bread and cheese, saying that he meant to stand no more blasted nonsense”.20 I reached that point a short time ago, when I heard an item on the BBC radio programme Today that reported some experiments that apparently showed that our brains are in charge and that we are their helpless playthings. These experiments had been devised by Benjamin Libet. I have questioned their significance in many lectures. (They are discussed at length in this book.) I rang one of the Today journalists on his mobile phone. He was at home, having breakfast with his family. Even so, he was polite and promised the possibility of a reply. I am still waiting, but this was a signal that my frustration was reaching dangerous levels.21 The time had come for more considered action. This book is that considered action. *** You might wonder whether it really matters that an image of humanity based on the twin pillars of Darwinism and brain science is taking such a hold within academe, in the wider Republic of Letters and in the popular mind, or that neuro-evolutionary thought is creating new biology-based disciplines encroaching on the intellectual territory of the humanities. I believe it does, for this reason. The distinctive features of human beings – self-hood, free will, that collective space called the human world, the sense that we lead our lives rather than simply live them as organisms do – are being discarded as illusions by many, even by philosophers, who should think a little bit harder and question the glamour of science rather than succumbing to it. While it is possible that many of those who profess full-on biologism do not really believe it, this is hardly comforting. Insincerely

20. Hopkins, The Correspondence, 74. 21. My fear that pop neuro-evolutionary accounts of our behaviour are inescapable was intensified when, in a debate at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about the curse of Western celebrity culture, Evan Davies of the BBC radio programme Today assured me that we were hard-wired to be fame junkies. A subsequent programme on celebrity, to which I was invited to speak, included two items that explained the cult of celebrity by the fact that we were – wait for it – hard-wired to worship celebrities because conditions of life in the Pleistocene era dictated that we should keep close to the powerful.

8

INTRODUCTION

held, or casually professed, beliefs block the passage to true thought. They also leave the field clear for those who are sincerely committed to developing and propagating the notion that there is no significant gap between man and beast. Such views may have consequences that are not merely intellectually derelict but dangerous. “Dangerous”. Am I being hysterical? Isn’t Aping Mankind just another round in yet another spat in academe dimly mirrored in the casual chatter of journalists and the conversation of people more sincerely interested in sport than in human nature? Aren’t we simply seeing an intellectual fashion that will pass as quickly as the poststructuralism that I and others squandered so many years combating? Well, if ideas make a difference, biologism is not only bad science and bad philosophy – bad enough – but also bad for humanity. And even if we are not worried when various modes of biologistic pseudo-science are ubiquitous in our talk about ourselves, surely we should worry when they are starting to be invoked by policy-makers. I shall discuss “neuro-evolutionary politics” in its place, but, for the moment, let me give you one telling example. Matthew Taylor, once a key advisor to Tony Blair’s Labour government, and now Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts, has launched a “social brain” project, whose aim is to ensure that social policy is informed by the latest findings from the neuro-lab. Scientism and government have always made unhappy bedfellows, as the history of the twentieth century illustrated with horrible clarity. This is chilling, and yet all major political parties in the United Kingdom are fascinated by the possibility of anchoring policies in neuro-evolutionary thought; of moving on, as Taylor has urged, from ideologies of the Right and the Left to the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.22 For this reason, along with a more general irritation at a boringly wrong account of human life, at a low-ceilinged inanity getting in the way when we try to stand up from the minutiae of daily life to think about our own nature, I have felt moved to revisit Neuromania and Darwinitis but to do so in a way that is more accessible and comprehensive than the sometimes densely technical arguments of my earlier books, in which I set out the case against these intellectual aberrations in the kind of detail that some readers may think is best described as “pitiless”. What follows, the reader may be glad to know, is not a treatise. Nor, however, is it a mere digest of

22. See Taylor, “For Left and Right”, for the rationales for this.

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my previous work. And while I hope Aping Mankind is as accessible as The Kingdom of Infinite Space, it does not run over the same territory as that book. It brings together – and in a new way – much that has not been published in book form, although it has been tested out in talks given to professional and lay audiences. This is the book I have been circling around for the past quarter of a century. In some sense it is a book I have been trying to write all my life; or at least since I was fifteen, when I escaped the intellectual, emotional and spiritual prison of religious belief. I have three aims: to set out as clearly as possible the views that I challenge (Chapters 1 and 2); to demonstrate why they are wrong (Chapters 3–8); and, finally, to consider where we might go from here (Chapter 9). I shall present enough of the real science that has been misused in Neuromania and Darwinitis for the reader to make sense of the latter. Because this is an area in which the sloppy thinkers have carried the day, there will be no compromise on rigour. In places the general reader may find the going hard, as some of the key arguments are intrinsically difficult and the intuitions behind them elusive, particularly when the domination of biologism has made them counter-intuitive. And Chapter 8, which subjects the neuro-humanities to critical examination, may seem to some rather long. But this is a huge and complex field and deserves, I believe, a thorough treatment. Which is not to say that my coverage will be entirely up to date. I can say with some confidence that in the six months between completing the manuscript and publishing the book, many new manifestations of Neuromania-inspired nonsense will have emerged. Keeping up is rather like a variant on Hercules’ task: cleaning out the Augean stables while the horses are still emptying their capacious colons. I hope the effort of understanding will be felt to be worthwhile, because, if any ideas are important, then ideas about the kind of creatures we are must be of supreme importance. As an atheist and also a humanist I believe that we should develop an image of humanity that is richer and truer to our distinctive nature than that of an exceptionally gifted chimp. It does not seem to me a very great advance to escape from the prison of false supernatural thought only to land in the prison of a naturalistic understanding. While there are other critiques of aspects of Neuromania and Darwinitis, and I shall refer to them in the pages that follow, the present book, by giving equal weight to biology and philosophy, aims to dig deeper and wider than the many estimable assaults on scientism. Aping Mankind is a one-stop shop for anyone who wishes to question the wild and often ludicrous claims that are made on behalf of biologism. Although I reaffirm 10

INTRODUCTION

our humanity against a beckoning naturalism that would see us as parts of nature in the way that trees, centipedes and chimps are parts of nature, I am not a closet creationist. Nor do I seek to promote a supernatural account of humanity. I do not believe that the organism H. sapiens came into existence by a separate process from that which gave rise to all other living organisms. Nor is my hostility to a materialist account of consciousness, as expressed in the identification of the mind with brain activity, rooted in a belief in Cartesian dualism, or in the notion that we are immaterial ghosts in the material machine of the mind or the body. I thought I ought to get that straight. I do not doubt that Darwinism gives an ever more impressively complete account of how the organism H. sapiens came into being. But that’s not the point: things with us did not stop there. Humans woke up from being organisms to being something quite different: embodied subjects, selfaware and other-aware in a manner and to a degree not approached by other animals. Out of this, a new kind of realm was gradually formed. This, the human world, is materially rooted in the natural world but is quite different from it. It is populated by individuals who are not just organisms, as is evident in that they inhabit an acknowledged, shared public sphere, structured and underpinned by an infinity of abstractions, generalizations, customs, practices, norms, laws, institutions, facts, and artefacts unknown to even the most “social” of animals. It is in this common space that, as selves that actively and knowingly lead lives in conjunction with other selves, our human destinies are played out. Our consciousness, and the engines that shape it, cannot be found solely in the stand-alone brain; or even just in a brain in a body; or even in a brain interacting with other brains in bodies. It participates in, and is part of, a community of minds built up by conscious human beings over hundreds of thousands of years. This cognitive community is an expression of the collectivization of our experiences through a trillion acts of joint and shared attention. Even those who believe that the human mind began as the activity of the brain of H. sapiens, must, I shall argue, have to accept that we have gone far beyond brain activity a long time ago. To seek the fabric of contemporary humanity inside the brain is as mistaken as to try to detect the sound of a gust passing through a billion-leaved wood by applying a stethoscope to isolated seeds. Those who believe they can find our public spaces, lit with explicitness, in the private intracranial darkness of the organism, overlook what it is that makes us human beings. We may have set out on our unique journey equipped with better brains than 11

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other primates – with larger frontal lobes and so on – but that was just the launch pad. Our way of self-conscious being-together is utterly different from the essentially solitary lives of even the most social animals. As the primatologist Jane Goodall wrote, non-human primates are “trapped within themselves”.23 It is a bitter irony that two of our greatest intellectual achievements – the theory of evolution and neuroscience – should be used to prop up a picture of humanity that is not only wrong but degrading. I feel the misuse of bioscience all the more acutely since I have been a biologist of sorts all my life – a doctor and clinical scientist – and my research has been in the field of neuroscience, where I have seen huge advances that have amazed and inspired me. The biologistic image of humans effectively denies the centrality, even the possibility, of precisely those unique capacities that have made humans able to theorize about evolution or to develop neuroscience. If On the Origin of Species really were the last word on humanity, it could not have been written; and if our consciousness were totally explained by brain science, we would have had no brain science to explain it. This book is part of a larger project, pursued through many other volumes, of trying to understand what we are in a way that dispenses with supernatural (non-)explanations without succumbing to the kind of naturalism that I espoused when I was fifteen and had just shaken off my religious beliefs. In order to do this, it is necessary to remove a good deal of rubbish on the path to truth before we can start the great task of getting clear about the kinds of beings we are. Within the secular world picture, Neuromania and Darwinitis are the biggest piles of rubbish. Anyone who doubts the importance of this task should recall that, as is evident from Gray’s calamitously muddled books, those who deny the first pillar of humanism, namely that we are fundamentally different from animals, will also deny the other pillar: that we can work together to improve the conditions of our existence and that it is our duty to strive, as far as we can, to realize that possibility. Instead they will argue that “Faith in progress is a superstition”.24 It is not a superstition. We have in many respects already made extraordinary progress: life expectancy, health expectancy, comfort expectancy and pleasure expectancy have been increased overall in the

23. Goodall, Through a Window, 208. 24. Gray, “The Myth of Progress”.

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INTRODUCTION

world.25 This may not matter to Gray, but it matters to most people. So does the fact that many are still denied long life, good health, security, and pleasure, living short lives of unbearable suffering. To deny hope to such people is to abandon them to tragedy and despair. Let battle commence.

25. Global life expectancy at birth, for example, increased from 28.5 to 68 between 1800 and 2007 (see Riley, Rising Life Expectancy).

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CHAPTER ONE

Science and Scientism

NEUROSCIENCE: THE QUEEN OF THE (NATURAL) SCIENCES

There are two reasons for starting with a brief sketch of some of the central ideas of neuroscience. First, I want to make clear that what I am attacking is not science but scientism: the mistaken belief that the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and their derivatives) can or will give a complete description and even explanation of everything, including human life. The body of knowledge and understanding, and the panoply of techniques, that go under the name “neuroscience” are some of the greatest intellectual achievements of mankind. Every element is a double triumph: over the opacity of nature; and over the presuppositions with which we approach our own bodies and those of the other living creatures whose bodies we use to cast light on our own. Neuroscience is the queen of the natural sciences. As someone who has contributed in a minor way to this discipline, adding my ant’s load to the ant-heap, with some 200 or more scientific papers that have filled in one or two lacunae, but have reported no spectacular breakthroughs, I have a very clear idea of the scale of this achievement. Second, it will be difficult to follow the arguments against neuroscientism without an inkling of the fundamental concepts of neuroscience. What follows, addressed primarily to readers who are not familiar with neuroscience, is the barest outline of a few key notions, and certainly not a history of the subject, which is immensely complex. For a start, there are many neurosciences: neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, neuroendocrinology, neurogenetics, neuroimaging, neuroimmunology, neuropathology, neuropharmacology, neurophysics, neurophysiology, neuropsychiatry, neuro15

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psychology, molecular neuroscience, various clinical neurosciences such as neurology and neurosurgery, and so on. In addition, these sciences pitch their investigations at many levels: examining the molecular architecture of nervous tissue; recording activity in single nerve cells; tracing various structures within the brain that are visible to the naked eye; examining the activity of large populations of neurons; seeing how the brain interacts with other systems in the body; and examining the behavioural neuroscience of whole organisms. What’s more, many other sciences are mobilized in the endeavour to cast light on the amazing organ that occupies the intracranial darkness and is wired to our senses, our muscles, our viscera and our glands. Neuroscientists draw on the expertise of physicists, chemists, biochemists, pharmacologists, immunologists and molecular biologists, to name only a few.1 So what follows does no justice to the queen of the natural sciences: it simply provides enough to make the arguments comprehensible.

The nerve impulse

The obvious place to begin is with the atom of neural activity: the nerve impulse.2 As we shall see below (“Why there can never be a brain science of consciousness” in Chapter 3), nerve impulses are not as conceptually straightforward as Neuromania would have us believe, but they are the key processes in the brain. A nerve impulse is a wave of physical and chemical excitation passing along a neuron, analogous to (although quite different from) an electric current going along a wire. The neurons are the microanatomical elements of the nervous system: their trunks (or “axons”) are often as little as a few thousandths of a millimetre in diameter. At any given point on the axon, the impulse, which usually occurs in response to an external stimulus, consists of a transient alteration in the electrical potential across the membrane of the neuron. When neurons are inactive they are negatively charged on the inside compared with the outside. When they get excited there is a change in that potential difference and that change

1. Zeman, Consciousness, is an ideal introduction to the neuroscience relevant to the discussion of the relation between brain and consciousness. For a truly comprehensive account of the state of the science, Kandel et al., The Principles of Neural Science, is sufficient to satisfy the hungriest mind. 2. Alan Hodgkin’s own account of his work with Andrew Huxley, The Conduction of the Nervous Impulse, is a classic and still worth reading.

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propagates along the axon. Excitation consists of an influx of positively charged sodium ions across the membrane that constitutes the boundary of the axon, separating the fluid within it from the extracellular fluid outside. As a result, there is a reversal of the negative charge inside the neuron. This change is called “depolarization”. It is followed by a restoration of the resting state: “repolarization”. Repolarization is due to an efflux of positively charged potassium ions and resumption of active transport of sodium ions out of the axon. The cycle of depolarization followed by repolarization is called the “action potential”. In a typical neuron in the human brain, the cycle lasts about one millisecond at any given point in the membrane, and when it is displayed on an oscilloscope it looks like a spike. The passage of this spike along the axon – which we may think of as an electrical cable, although unlike a cable it generates the changes that propagate along it – is the nerve impulse. Spikes are kept distinct by a period, called the “refractory period”, in which the nerve membrane is effectively inactivated. Unpacking the action potential depended, among other things, on finding species in which the individual neurons were large enough for recordings of minute changes in electrical charge – a few tens of millivolts – to be made. The squid axon, which is a gigantic half millimetre wide (compared with a few thousandths of a millimetre in most human neurons), proved to be the perfect model. Even so, it was still necessary to develop minute recording electrodes that would not kill the axons when they were inserted into them. For this purpose, fine glass electrodes, like microscopically thin pipettes, were manufactured. By this means it was possible not only to record the changes in electrical charge, but also to track the passage of sodium and other ions across the membrane. Teasing out the ionic movements that caused the spike was only the first step. What was it that prompted the sodium ions to flood in at the beginning of the impulse and potassium ions to flood out at the end? The clue to that was found in the idea of “voltage-dependent gates” in the membrane. The gates – which are smart pores or minute holes in the membrane – are open or closed depending on the voltage difference between the inside and the outside. At rest, as I have already mentioned, there is usually a relative negative potential inside the axon because there the concentration of positively charged sodium ions is lower than in the fluid bathing it. The difference is maintained by the pumping out of sodium ions and the pumping in of potassium ions, in a ratio of 3 to 2. This “active transport” against the grain requires energy, which is provided by the transport of a phosphate group from adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. 17

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Depolarization at any given point in the axon causes a reduction in the potential difference across the neighbouring part of the membrane. This opens the voltage-dependent sodium gates there: sodium floods into the axon, reducing the potential difference further so that the sodium gates are opened even wider. This self-regenerative process, like a controlled explosion, eventually causes the sodium gates to close, so that no more ions enter. It also opens the potassium gates and these (positively charged) ions leave the cell and the status quo is restored. So there we have it: the nerve impulse is a wave or spike of electrochemical disturbance and recovery propagating along the axon. The beauty of the mechanism and the ingenuity of the research that unravelled it is breathtaking. In the 1970s, a couple of decades after Hodgkin and Huxley’s original brilliant work on the nerve impulse, the invention of the patch clamp method,3 which allowed sodium and potassium channels in the axon membrane to be examined individually, was made possible by the availability of ultrasensitive electronic amplifiers. The technique, in which tiny bits of the membrane were attached to ultra-thin pipettes, was used to examine the effect of molecules such as neurotransmitters on the behaviour of the membranes and hence neurons, as well as to peer more closely at the signalling inside the axon itself and to investigate the roles of “second messengers” in conveying and amplifying ionic and other changes that take place when neurotransmitters touch the surface of the axon. This sketch leaves many unfilled gaps. For example, there has been work on the stereochemistry of the proteins involved in the transport of ions across the axon membrane. There has also been intense investigation of the properties of the insulating material around the axons, the myelin sheath, which dips down at intervals at the so-called “nodes of Ranvier”. This interrupted insulation allows nerve impulses to jump from point to point – called “saltatory” conduction – thus speeding up their passage along the axons. And there has been very detailed research into how nerve impulses are initiated at the beginning of the axon: how light, or sound, or touch, or pressure is translated into a “generator potential” that opens the sodium channels in the axon and in turn triggers the action potential. The manner in which the intensity and size of the stimulus is translated into the frequency of the firing of individual axons and the number of axons recruited has also been closely studied, as has the phenomenon

3. Patch clamping is beautifully summarized in the relevant Wikipedia article.

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of adaptation, in accordance with which a constant stimulus will invoke a diminishing response. What I have said, however, should be sufficient to make clear what “neural activity” is: and (to anticipate) enough to understand how, close up, it does not look like the kind of stuff that can explain human consciousness. Nerve impulses as revealed by neuroscience are, essentially, the passage of basic ions through smart membranes and that is about as physical as you can get.

The circuitry

Most of the work in brain science relevant to our present interest has focused on looking at how very large numbers of neurons work together and, centrally for the theme of this book, how different parts of the nervous system support different functions. Equally important is how the locations of these functions may vary over time, during the course of development towards adulthood and in association with the learning of new facts, the acquisition of the skills of movement, of perception and interpretation, and new ways of being. We need, therefore, to move on from the events that occur in the individual wires of the circuitry of the brain to the circuitry itself. Beautifully detailed pictures, using electron microscopy, have been obtained of individual neurons, their cellular powerhouses and the multitudinous “dendrites” into which axons branch. One of the fundamental achievements of neuroscience was the establishment of the neuron doctrine, according to which neurons are discrete cells, not parts of a single fused network. Before the work of pioneers such as Ramón y Cajal, using silver staining techniques that picked out individual neurons, it was thought that the nervous system was a “reticulum”, or connected network. Cajal’s neuron doctrine has been modified in many ways, but it forms the basis of our current understanding of brain activity as being located and shaped in discrete circuits.4

4. There was a robust battle between Cajal and Camillo Golgi, who discovered the technique of silver staining that enabled Cajal to see the way neurons were discrete, functional and anatomical units, although they were connected. They shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and used their acceptance speeches to continue their argument, with Golgi defending his view that there was cytoplasmic continuity. If any topic in neuroscience is worth getting heated over this is the one, for it touches on questions about how the nervous system works as a whole.

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Equally important is our understanding of the way nerve impulses pass from one neuron to another via joins that have been called “synapses”, from the Greek word meaning a “clasp”. These are not just blobs of dumb solder gluing neurons together, but complex way stations where activity may be added up, subtracted or modulated before it passes on to the next neuron. The heart of the synapse is typically a minute gap between neurons, which is crossed chemically. The impulses in one axon arrives at the “presynaptic” terminal and chemicals called “neurotransmitters” are released. They spread across the gap and influence the neuron on the far side. Some neurotransmitters are excitatory, facilitating neural activity, and some are inhibitory, damping down neural activity. This enables the synapse to add or subtract inputs from two or more neural pathways that converge on it. Summation and subtraction may be very complex indeed, with several sources of excitation or inhibition acting on either side of the synapse and coming from many different directions. The altered behaviour of synapses in response to the activity passing through them is thought to be the basis of the brain changes associated with learning and memory; and variable levels of neurotransmitters over large parts of the brain – in particular the cerebral cortex – have been linked with mood and behaviour. For those who believe that we are our brains, synapses – being the key to the endless wiring and rewiring that takes place in response to experience – determine what we become in response to experience. That is why there has been so much research into the distribution and effects of neurotransmitters. The synapse, at any rate, is the means by which the discrete activity of neurons is brought together. It is the physical basis of what Charles Sherrington (1857–1952), perhaps the greatest neurophysiologist of all time, termed the “integrative action” of the nervous system,5 in virtue of which inputs from different sources, such as sight and sound and touch, and awareness of one’s own body and feedback from muscles engaged in movements, can all be taken account of in performing complex actions (and all actions, even simple ones, are complex). It is also a means by which an input can sensitize (“up-regulate”) or desensitize (“down-regulate”) the response to a stimulus when another is also being received or in response to the previous history of stimuli received by that particular part of the brain. Regulation of responsiveness has been the subject of much ingen5. Sherrington’s The Integrative Action of the Nervous System is an acknowledged classic that my tutor in Oxford urged me to read in 1965. I am less sure than I was that I will get round to reading it one day.

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ious study, using recordings from individual pre-synaptic and post-synaptic neurons, as well as from groups of neurons or nerve tracts. The way the different parts of the nervous system respond to different kinds of stimuli – so-called “localization” – has generated hundreds of thousands of papers. It is obvious that, for example, nerves wired into the ear are responsive to sound and those into the eyes to light, and so on. This was the “doctrine of specific energies” first advanced by Johannes Peter Müller in the nineteenth century. We have, however, moved on since then. Single-cell recordings over the past half century have shown that groups of neurons are tuned in unexpected ways to particular kinds of stimuli that are of importance to the organism. In the visual cortex, for example, there are neurons that preferentially detect lines placed at a particular angle or that respond to motion, depth and colour: in short to the building blocks of the visual field. This kind of tuning was demonstrated by David Hubel and Torstein Wiesel as part of their Nobel Prize-winning work.6 They inspired a worldwide programme of research into the way individual neurons, or clusters of neurons, have a discriminative response to different kinds of stimuli, enabling them to influence behaviour in a preferential way. There are also much more complex tunings. Responses may be up-regulated or down-regulated according to the context and the salience of the stimulus; and some higher-order cells respond only to a particular combination of inputs from the first-order cells. So while the brain is sensitive to the impingements of the outside world, via the sense organs, it is also a filter regulating its own sensitivity, giving priority to essential and novel stimuli – relevant to survival – over irrelevant and unimportant events. I hope I have conveyed the idea of the brain as an unimaginably complex nexus of neural circuits responding individually or sometimes collectively, or en masse, in highly specific ways to stimuli of various sorts, and to complexes of stimuli. The circuitry can be observed at different levels. Microscopic circuits, bringing together neural activity related to the particular aspects of a stimulus, such as colour, shape and distance of an object, are themselves integrated with other microscopic and higher-level circuits relevant to the visual field or the sensory field as a whole and the sense that is to be made of it. They link this “making sense” with motor neurons mediating outputs such as visible movements and the components

6. The twenty-five-year collaboration between Hubel and Wiesel was one of the great scientific partnerships. It is described in their book Brain and Visual Perception.

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of behaviour. The circuitry active in even relatively simple movements involves millions of neurons connecting quite disparate parts of the brain; for example, the cerebral cortex, where patterns of movement are stored as “motor programmes”, is connected to subcortical structures deep in the hemispheres, such as the basal ganglia where tone and posture (the necessary background for controlled movement) are regulated, to the cerebellum, where balance and the control of movements is ensured, and to the spinal cord, where the final output to muscles is fed to the peripheral nerves. Identifying even a single one of these components represents a huge technical triumph and the success in teasing out brain circuits is a tribute to use of imagination and intuition regulated by the discipline of carefully controlled and checked, and rechecked, observation.

Localization of function

One of the themes dominating brain science is something we have already touched on: the localization of function. It is going to be central to some of the arguments of this book and we shall examine it in the next section, where we shall find that it has been a matter of intense controversy over the centuries, and still is. Let us, however, take a preliminary glance at it now. It had always been obvious that different parts of the brain had different roles: for example, vision, hearing or movement. The actual location of these functions turned out not always to be entirely as expected; for example, the part of the cerebral cortex connected with vision is at the back of the brain, not at the front next to the eyes. Working out which part of the brain is associated with what function has required a range of strategies. Humans are ideal subjects for investigating localization because they can report what they are feeling, but it is hardly necessary to spell out the ethical and methodological limitations of research on our fellow men. The use of people as experimental subjects for invasive research has, thankfully, been unacceptable for most of the history of neuroscience. There are, however, alternative ways of using human subjects. Careful observation of people who have sustained brain damage has turned their personal catastrophes into natural experiments. These observations began in earnest in the nineteenth century. Two cases in particular stand out. The first was a man who suddenly lost his speech owing to a stroke but retained his other functions. The physician 22

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and anatomist Paul Broca followed him with beady-eyed interest for thirty years, making sure that he was present when his patient died, so that he could examine his brain. In one of the most famous neuroscience papers of all time, published in 1861,7 Broca reported that his patient’s brain was intact apart from a small area in the inferior part of the left frontal gyrus, subsequently named “Broca’s area”. (How marvellous to plant one’s name on a part of the brain.)8 He concluded that this quite small area was necessary for the gigantic task of producing language. He also drew the larger, bolder conclusion, absolutely central to the cognitive neuroscience that lay a century ahead, that “the great regions of the mind correspond to the great regions of the brain”.9 Another equally famous nineteenth-century patient was Phineas P. Gage, a railway worker who had an unfortunate encounter with a steel rod, which passed through the frontal lobes of his cerebral cortex. Miraculously, he survived and many of his basic functions – perception, walking and so on – remained intact; but his personality, so his physician John Harlow claimed, was utterly transformed. Gage, who had previously been an entirely reliable, conscientious individual underwent a personality change. After the accident, he: was at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned … a child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations and yet with the animal passions of a strong man.10 This observation11 was foundational for the notion – subsequently refined and elaborated on the basis of careful studies of people with strokes and

7. Broca, “Loss of Speech”. 8. Broca was very lucky to take the credit because he had been anticipated by Marc Dax, who had made similar observations in 1836 that were not published until after Broca, and then posthumously, by his son. 9. Broca, quoted in Zeman, “Neurological Disorders”, §24.2. 10. Harlow, “Recovery From the Passage of an Iron Bar”. 11. The dispute about what happened to Gage’s behaviour after his accident, and the suggestion that it may not have altered as profoundly as Harlow claimed, is summarized in the Wikipedia entry on Gage. The current argument over what the brain damage actually did to Gage should have been a warning to those who have a rather simplistic take on localization of functions: something we shall discuss.

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other causes of brain damage – that the frontal lobes were crucial for judgement, executive function and emotional control. Ingenious tests were developed to examine the effect of damage in other areas of the brain, demonstrating the importance of the temporal lobes for memory (and different parts of the temporal lobes for different aspects of memory); of the parietal lobes for the integration of vision, memory and action; of the back of the occipital lobes for the recognition of faces; and of the fibres going between two hemispheres (the corpus callosum) for bringing together experiences dependent on the activity of those hemispheres. Research into the specialization of functions in different parts of the brain has spawned a mind-boggling body of information published in papers whose numbers run into millions. We shall discuss some of the history of this in the next section but it is relevant to note the observations of the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson that led him to conclude that the brain was crucial in the operation of the will. On the basis of this and other findings, he concluded (to simplify his ideas) that the nervous system was organized hierarchically, with lower functions such as reflex responses to stimuli being at the bottom – in the spinal cord and subcortical parts of the brain – and deliberate activity, carried out in the light of a consciousness that integrated a multitude of perceptions across different senses, memory and learned skills, at the top, in the cerebral cortex.12 Some top-level activities have been teased out in fine detail. Neurolinguistics – one of many neurosciences I have not mentioned in my initial list, as it was already long enough – has shown how different parts of the brain seem to be specifically involved in different aspects of verbal reception (such as breaking up the sounds and translating them into speech components, connecting them with meanings, parsing the grammar of sentences, detecting the different tonal envelopes of questions and statements); in equally numerous aspects of verbal expression (the selection of words, stringing them together in a grammatical form, dealing with different components of articulation); in linking sight and sound and meaning in reading; in connecting sight, sound, action and meaning in writing; and so on.

12. Hughlings Jackson’s contribution to neuroscience, in particular through his observations of the effects of localized damage and his hierarchical vision of the nervous system, is beautifully summarized in John Walton’s revision of the original article by James Taylor, “Hughlings Jackson”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Other research has investigated the effects of deliberate brain damage and brain stimulation on experimental animals. It has demonstrated analogies between maps of brain function in humans and those in beasts. Experiments in which one part of the brain is stimulated and the responses tracked have been useful for tracing the connections between different parts of the brain and the different pathways, the macroscopic circuits, relevant to motor activity and its control, and perception and its interpretation. Inflicting discrete lesions on animals has also been used to tease out the contributions of particular areas of the brain to different aspects of a particular function such as visual perception or controlled movement. The recent development of non-invasive techniques for stimulating the human brain (for example using magnetic stimulation through the skull) and for examining the activity of the brain at rest and in response to a variety of stimuli has enabled research on humans to be as informative as some aspects of research on animals.

From brain localization to brain maps

One of the most impressive consequences of the new, non-invasive methods has been the compilation of detailed brain maps. The first techniques to be used in this way were those of electroencephalography (EEG).13 The spontaneous synchronized rhythmic electrical activity of the brain (“brain waves”) had been described a long time before EEG was developed. The physiologist Richard Caton reported this activity in animals in a paper published in 1875 in The Lancet. It was pretty much forgotten for half a century and then, in the 1930s, the psychiatrist Hans Berger detected brain waves of different frequencies in human subjects, using electrodes placed on the scalp. There was initially much scepticism about this seemingly pointless activity of the brain. It was of very small amplitude and could have been an artefact. Berger, however, was proved right. One of the most exciting observations was the consistent correlation between the kind of brain waves seen and the level of consciousness: alertness, drowsiness, deep sleep and coma are all associated with distinctive patterns of brain activity. Soon EEG was being used to diagnose epilepsy (which is associated with distinctive abnormal patterns of electrical

13. The classic history of these developments is Brazier, A History of the Electrical Activity of the Brain.

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activity), to test the integrity of different pathways in the brain by detecting the responses to visual and other stimuli (so-called evoked potentials) and to examine the effects of drugs, such as sedatives and psychiatric treatments, on the brain. Electoencephalography became increasingly sophisticated, so that it was possible to produce beautiful three-dimensional maps of brain activity in different situations and in response to stimuli. Even so, in recent decades the interest in EEG has been eclipsed by a much more powerful technique for looking at the activity of the waking brain: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), of which more presently.

Plasticity

What has become apparent over the past several decades, as a result of mapping and other techniques, is the extent to which the organization of the brain is very fluid. The connections between different components can be modulated so that certain pathways become facilitated (and nerve impulses are more likely to pass from one part of a circuit to another) or, conversely, inhibited. The brain, to use the commonest term, is not entirely hard-wired: it is “plastic”.14 The immense literature on brain plasticity has examined changes at both the microscopic and the macroscopic level occurring in response to experience. Microscopic studies have shown that repeated activity in a particular neural pathway that includes a synapse may result in increased ease with which the synapse is crossed: less is lost in translation from the pre-synaptic to the post-synaptic neuron. Also, where pathways are active together, they are more likely to make contact and their activity is more likely to be coherent: “nerves that fire together wire together”, to use the famous aphorism attributed to neuropsychologist Donald Hebb. At the macroscopic level, it is possible to see changes in different parts of the brain in the size of the areas dedicated to different parts of the body in response to recurrent stimulation or their involvement in repetitive activities. The quantity of brain active in tasks involving fine touch discrimination, for example, expands and contracts in response to the amount and kind of workload carried by different hands. When an individual learns to play the violin, the representation of the hands in the cerebral cortex – the part of

14. A key text is Hofman et al., Plasticity and the Adult Brain.

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the brain that is most immediately implicated in learned, skilled voluntary movements – is greatly extended.15 What is more, the representation of the hand (usually the left hand) involved in fingering is greater than that involved in bowing. This makes intuitive sense because although both fingering and bowing are immensely skilled and require precise adjustment of pressure, fingering makes even greater demands than the whole-arm and hand movements of bowing. An even more striking example is the dramatic expansion of the cortical area devoted to the fingertips in blind people reading Braille.16 The idea of plasticity is one that has increasingly dominated our understanding of the brain. While plasticity now seems obvious, for a long time the structure of the mature brain was believed to be fixed. After a critical period early in life, so it was thought, there was no possibility of changing the cerebral equipment with which you were endowed. This dogma was based on the belief that new neurons do not grow in the adult brain. This is not entirely true: in humans “neurogenesis” is seen in the olfactory bulb, in the sense of smell, and in the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory.17 But new growth is only modest and losses are not replaced. This is less of a limitation than had been hitherto thought, however, for what is now appreciated is that the way the neurons are wired together can be dramatically changed as a result of experience, and otherwise underemployed neurons can be recruited to take over the functions of neurons in pathways that have been damaged. This reorganization at the microscopic level of individual synapses, and at the macroscopic level of brain maps, is central to our understanding of what is happening in the developing, learning and healing brain.18

15. 16. 17. 18.

Schwenkreis et al., “Assessment of Sensorimotor Cortical Representation Asymmetries”. Pacual-Leone & Torres, “Plasticity of the Sensorimotor Cortex”. Rakic, “Neurogenesis in the Adult Primate Neocortex”. Those involved in the rehabilitation of people with damage to the nervous system have been excited by the increasing evidence of recovery based on reorganization of the brain circuitry, with new connections being formed and dormant areas waking up. I myself have been interested since the early 1980s in the possibility of exploiting plasticity in rehabilitation as the key not only to the acquisition of new skills but also to recovery of neural function (see my “Neurological Rehabilitation”). The most effective driver to reconstruction of normal structures after damage is the neural activity associated with normal function. If you want your brain to work normally, you need to act normally. This presents a real challenge in the case of patients with paralysis due to strokes. They cannot move their arms in the normal way in order to promote the return of normal connectedness. It is for this reason that mirror neurons

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Concluding observations

This brief sketch of some aspects of neuroscience is scarcely more than an invitation to put a toe in the waters of a great ocean of facts, concepts and techniques. I have said nothing, for example, of the research into the exquisitely controlled and controlling activity of sensory organs such as the eye and ear; or of the means by which posture, involuntary movements and voluntary activity are regulated; or of the interactions between the brain and the endocrine system or between the brain and organs such as the gut and heart. And I have skated past the many cul-de-sacs of discarded theories and erroneous data that have littered the history of neuroscience, as with any scientific discipline, and the huge amount that we do not know about the brain. My aim has been the narrow one of equipping the reader who has no prior knowledge of neuroscience to understand the arguments that follow, to which the nature of the nerve impulse, of the circuitry of the brain and its tuning, of localization and plasticity are most directly relevant. When, for example, we want to assess the claim that consciousness boils down to neural activity, we need to have a clear idea about what that activity actually consists of. Likewise, if we are to resist the claim that it is the structure and complexity of the brain that creates consciousness, it is a good idea to know a little of that structure and the nature of its complexity. My other aim, as already mentioned, has been to indicate my admiration for the scope, scale and achievements of neuroscience – something I have felt since I first studied neurophysiology in Oxford in the 1960s – in order to head off the mistaken impression that my attack on Neuromania is intended to diminish the work of neuroscientists. The light we have cast on the workings of our own brains represents one of our greatest achievements, not least because it has drawn on so many other scientific disciplines. We need, however, to distinguish between neuroscience and its shadow, neuroscientism (or neuromythology), which has underpinned Neuromania, and it is to this that we must now turn.

have become of particular interest (see Pomeroy et al., “The Potential for Utilising the ‘Mirror Neurone System’”).

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YOU ARE YOUR BRAIN: NEUROMANIA FROM HIPPOCRATES TO THE BOLD RUSH Locating the soul in the brain

You would have to be remarkably resistant to brainwashing to resist the claim – endlessly repeated – that we are our brains. The notion that our consciousness, the self to which the successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise. Part of the attraction of Neuromania comes from the belief that it is brand new and that it has grown out of the latest discoveries in the laboratory. In fact, the assumption that there is, indeed there must be, an organ in the body where the soul or mind or consciousness is to be found goes back a very long way. It seems to have originated, like other enduring myths, in ancient Greece. Indeed, I might have been tempted to call this section “Hippocrates’ howler”, but this would have been unfair, not least because the cerebral theory was well established before Hippocrates (who lived from c.460 bce to c.377 bce); it was espoused by major Presocratic philosophers such as Pythagoras and Empedocles. So when people tell you that scientists have “recently discovered” that the mind is in the brain or that mental activity boils down to neural activity, just remind them that this theory was put forward several centuries before Jesus Christ was born. It was Hippocrates, however, who gave the theory its most striking expression. In his famous text On the Sacred Disease, a treatise on epilepsy, he declared that: Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arises our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant.19 This was a deeply humane claim, for it was asserted in opposition to the idea that epilepsy was due to divine possession. And it lay at the origin of

19. Quoted in Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves, 8.

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our present understanding of illness in naturalistic rather than supernatural terms. But the phrase “from the brain, and from the brain only” is at the root of the notion, to which this book is opposed, that the brain is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition of conscious experiences: that it is the whole story. And Hippocrates sounds very like Francis Crick, talking 2,500 years later: “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.20 The journey from Hippocrates to Pierre Jean Cabanis, who in the eighteenth century declared that the brain secreted thought as the liver secreted bile, or to Susan Greenfield’s assertion that “our identity is our brain”,21 is, from the philosophical point of view, but a step, and only a small one. The brain theory was contested by champions of other organs. The most famous was Aristotle, for whom the heart, not the brain, was the seat of the intellect. The brain, he said, served only to cool the blood; and perhaps in a sense it does. However, the cerebral theory survived, notwithstanding Aristotle’s great prestige. A few centuries later, Pliny the Elder – a physician who was fried to death when Pompeii was inundated with lava in 79 ce – asserted that the brain is “the citadel of sense-perception, … the crowning pinnacle, the seat of government of the mind”.22 This expressed a view that was dominant among philosophers and physicians in antiquity. The cerebral theory is certainly superficially attractive. Everyday observations seem to give overwhelming support to Hippocrates’ daring conjecture concerning the relation between the brain and conscious experience. For example, the content of my experience is determined by the location of my body: I am experiencing this room in Bramhall, rather than a room in London, because Bramhall is where my body presently is. In other words, my mind is where my body is, my consciousness is more or less of where my body is at. The special role of the brain within the body becomes evident when we add in one or two other observations. In order for me to experience Bramhall, it is necessary for me to bring my brain there. In contrast, my mind is not necessarily where my leg is: I could leave my leg in London and, so long as I had not bled to death, my mind could still come to

20. Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, 3. 21. Greenfield, ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Greenfield elaborates on this assertion and its psychological and sociological consequences. 22. Plin. HN XI, 49.

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Bramhall to experience the delights of that village. So there seems to be an intimate relation between the physical location of my brain and the content of my consciousness. The key role of the brain is supported by other homely observations that seem to suggest that the input of energy into my brain from the outside world determines my experiences. For example, when I cover my ears or close my eyes, that is, block the input into the organs that are connected directly with the brain, I cut off certain experiences. This suggests that experiences are in some intimate way connected with cerebral events. Further support comes from the many ordinary observations, some of which we have already alluded to, that indicate that the condition my brain is in and the condition my mind is in are closely correlated. A bang on the head, with damage to the brain, may remove vision, may impair memory or, as in the case of the unfortunate Mr Gage, may alter personality. All of this suggests that vision, memory, personality – everything from the most primitive buzz of sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self – depend crucially on the functioning of the brain. For neuromaniacs, this means that the mind or soul is housed in the brain. As we shall see, this conclusion does not follow, but let us stick for a while longer with the thesis that every aspect of my consciousness is in my brain and that that organ is the seat of my consciousness. If we accept the thesis, it seems reasonable to wonder whereabouts in the brain my consciousness is to be found,23 a matter that has occupied many philosophers and biologists over the centuries and is still hotly contended. After Hippocrates there was a 2,000-year argument as to whether the soul was in the solid parts of the brain (the parenchyma) or the hollow fluid-filled bits of it (the ventricles). Herophilus – an Alexandrian physician – observed that the fourth ventricle was close to the spinal cord and motor nerves. From this he concluded that the soul resided in the ventricles. This was opposed by his younger colleague Erasistratus, who put forward a rather ingenious argument. He noticed that faster animals such as deer had more numerous and intricate foldings of the solid part of the brain than slower ones. Since Aristotle had connected movement with soul, the latter must reside in the parenchyma. It was not, however, clear whether Erasistratus believed the cerebral cortex or the meninges (the

23. This account of the arguments over localization has been drawn from many sources but is most indebted to Bruyn, “The Seat of the Soul”.

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membranes covering the brain) to be the privileged place. At any rate, there was a bitter, indeed delicious, argument between these two great men. Over the centuries, both ventricular and parenchymal theories underwent considerable elaboration. The ventricular theory was developed to quite a sophisticated degree. According to one very popular version, different ventricles housed different faculties of the soul: the anterior ventricle was the seat of “phantasy” or imagination, the middle ventricle the seat of reason and the posterior ventricle that of memory. If this has a slightly familiar ring to it, it is because it was the beginning of the long history of localization theories that are, as we have already noted, currently in the ascendant and the source of many claims that we shall presently have reason to contest. Eventually, the notion that the solid part of the brain, rather than the liquid in the cerebral ventricles, was the seat of the soul gained the upper hand but it took a long time. As recently as 1796, Samuel von Soemmering, who discovered the substantia nigra, a part of the brain that is affected in conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, argued that the ventricular fluid was the repository of the soul.24 However, the parenchymal theory was by then unassailable and the question for clinicians, scientists and philosophers had moved on again: to consider, for example, exactly where within the parenchyma the soul might be located. There was no shortage of candidates and no shortage of reasons for choosing them. A smorgasbord of possibilities was served up, including: the corpus callosum (the structure linking the two cerebral hemispheres); the corpora striata (deep in the cerebral hemispheres); and the septum pellucidum (a membrane separating the lateral ventricles of the brain). René Descartes famously hedged his bets; while he did not think the mind was entirely in the brain, there was a point – the pineal gland – where mind and brain made contact.25 Thomas Willis, a seventeenth-century physician, was most closely aligned to contemporary thinking: he thought that the cerebral cortex was the seat of the soul.26

24. Soemmering, Über das Organ der Seele. 25. Chris Frith and Geraint Rees have even suggested that his account is “not that different from recent proposals that, for example, neural activity in the fusiform region of the brain somehow leads to conscious experience of the face” (“A Brief History of the Scientific Approach”, 9). 26. Willis, Cerebre anatomi.

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Localizers versus integrators

As speculative neurophilosophy, which drew on sources as disparate as religious doctrine, clinical observation and rampant rationalizing guesswork, gave way to what we would recognize as something remotely related to empirical neuroscience, the question of the location of the soul became more complex, rather as had happened with ventricular theories. Perhaps the soul was distributed between several places rather than being confined to one; or perhaps, on the other hand, it was diffused all over the brain or all over part of the brain such as the cerebral cortex. The decisive intervention in this debate was that of Franz Joseph Gall, the father of phrenology and grandfather and unacknowledged patron saint of one strand in contemporary Neuromania.27 In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Gall promulgated the following principles: • the brain (especially the cortex) is the organ of the mind; • it is a composite of parts, each of which serves a distinctive taskspecific “faculty”; and • the size of the different parts of the brain, as assessed chiefly through the examination of the cranium, is an index of the relative strengths of the different faculties being served. The third principle has dominated and damaged the reputation of phrenology. We all laugh at phrenologists’ technique of feeling the bumps on the head to determine the size of the underlying brain and inferring the relative strength of different faculties, such as a sense of justice or amorous propensity. However, the first two principles – the pre-eminence of the cortex in mental function and the localization of different mental faculties within the cortex – have made an enduring contribution to the framework of neuroscientific research. The second principle is particularly relevant because it was put forward in answer to a serious philosophical problem, one that has led to a second wave of phrenology in the past few decades, which began with Jerry Fodor’s idea of “mental modules” (to be discussed in “Myth-information” in Chapter 5). For this reason, it is worthy of our attention here.

27. See Harrington, Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain.

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The problem that the compartmentalization of mind in the brain, argued for by the phrenologists, was intended to solve arose from the seventeenthcentury philosopher John Locke’s theory of knowledge.28 Locke’s enormously influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding had attacked the notion of innate ideas. All knowledge, he said, came from the senses. The mind at birth was a tabula rasa – a clean slate or blank sheet – and it was effectively constructed out of experiences organized only according to their associations. But if the mind starts off as a blank sheet, and is built up out of experiences, how does it manage to avoid ending up as just “a heap of impressions”: a slop of accumulated experiences and their echoes in memory, not too different from delirium? (This was a point first made by the philosopher Thomas Reid, who proposed the idea of inner faculties.) There must surely be some innate basis for the organization of the material of which the mind was composed. This was what was provided by Gall’s association of twenty-seven separate mental faculties (the sense of language, vanity, the capacity for metaphysics, etc.) with discrete organs in the brain. While a version of phrenology is now flourishing as a key component of contemporary Neuromania, it has always had its opponents, and their objections, as we shall see, remain relevant. Among the anti-phrenologists was Jean Pierre Flourens, one of the great nineteenth-century physiologists, and a pioneer of experimental brain science. He peeled off layers of the cortex in various experimental animals and failed to observe any relation between the particular area of cortex removed and specific loss of higher functions such as memory and cognition. He therefore committed himself to the idea that these amounted to a single faculty and were not localized. This also obviated the need for what was called a sensus communis within the brain: a faculty where everything that is dealt with by separate parts of the brain comes together. Such a faculty had already been broached in response to the earlier ventricular phrenology in ancient times; and the physiologist Albrecht von Haller (1708–77), usually regarded as the father of experimental physiology, had postulated that there was a place where this happened, a “principal part” in the brain “in which resides the origin of all motion, the end of all sensations, and where the soul has its seat”.29 He had opted for the medulla – at the point where the brain joins the spinal cord – as the seat of the mind, where sensations had their final destina-

28. Peacock, “The Relationship Between the Soul and the Brain”. 29. Haller, Primae linea physiologiae, ch. 11.

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tion and motions were initiated. The need for such a place was beautifully expressed by the philosopher Friedrich Albert Lange in 1881; without it, he said, the mind or soul would be “a parliament of little men together, each one of whom, as happens also in a real parliament, possesses but a single idea which he ceaselessly strives to make prevail … Instead of one soul, phrenology gives us forty”.30 Lange, however, was swimming against the tide; for Flourens’ victory over phrenology in the 1840s was short-lived. With the advent of more sophisticated physiological experimentation, the localization doctrine, in which the mind is seen to be composed of discrete faculties to which are assigned distinct areas of the brain, apparently became irresistible. Observations by scientists such as David Ferrier of the discrete effects of stimulating some neural pathways and removing others in apes, complemented precise documentation of both clinical and pathological aspects of neurological damage in humans. These were crucial steps in the rise of the doctrine of localization: in particular the localization of functions within the cortex. The notion that different parts of the brain were responsible for different functions applied not just to obvious functions such as sight, hearing and voluntary movement but also to more elusive things such as aspects of language, mood and personality. This was prompted by some famous observations that I referred to in the previous section: Broca’s paper linking the loss of language with damage to a particular part of the frontal lobes; Hughlings Jackson’s correlations between clinical syndromes and postmortem findings that led him to conclude that the cortex was the site of higher mental functions such as volition; and, most spectacularly, the gruesome meeting of Phineas Gage’s brain and an iron rod, of which the reader may not wish to be reminded, except to recall that he seemed to undergo a profound change in personality as a result. Clinical-pathological

30. Lange, History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance, quoted in James, The Principles of Psychology, 29. The need for such a place where everything that is dealt with by separate parts of the brain comes together is still felt strongly by neuroscientists. Crick who, having made the fundamental discovery with James Watson of the structure of DNA, along with many other contributions to molecular biology, turned to thinking about the neurology of consciousness. In his last, posthumously published, paper, he and Christian Koch argued that integrated consciousness was located in the claustrum, where so many neural pathways come together (Crick & Koch, “What is the Function of the Claustrum?”). Other places have been suggested, such as the subthalamic nucleus, between the cerebral hemispheres and the brain stem. As we shall see in “Brain science and human consciousness, III” in Chapter 3, attempts to find some kind of brain basis for the unity of consciousness are doomed.

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correlations were supplemented by careful microscopic studies of individual cell types in the cortex, which seemed to provide a detailed structural underpinning for localization of functions. The effects of brain stimulation, beginning with the famous experiments of Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon, in waking human subjects undergoing epilepsy surgery were particularly impressive.31 Penfield observed quite complex memories being switched on by electrical stimulation of the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex. (I shall return to these experiments.) Some neurophysiologists had reservations about the doctrine of localization. One was Sherrington, who, as we have seen, emphasized the integrative, as opposed to the differentiated, action of the nervous system underlying higher, especially higher mental, function, focusing on how things came together rather than how they were spatially separated. Another was Karl Lashley, whose experiments led him to revive Flourens’ notion of the “equipotentiality” of all cortical tissue: the parts of the cerebral cortex all participated in all functions. But the trend was irresistible. Early in the twenty-first century, with the advent of modern methods of stimulating and recording from the central nervous system, of delineating its multifarious internal anatomical and physiological connections and of imaging the living brain using a variety of techniques, we are now truly in a neo-phrenological era in which it seems as if every discernible mental function has its own dedicated piece of circuitry. Today’s neo-phrenology is, of course, different from the old phrenology of Gall and his collaborator Johann Spurzheim. There is now increasing emphasis on the plasticity of the brain and soft-wired modules (as we have discussed). And also (or at least until recently, and thereby hangs much of our tale) the functions into which the soul is fractionated tended to be items such as “object localization”, “edge detection”, “differential attention”, various modes of memory and “executive function” rather than “the sense of justice” or “amatory propensity”. The fundamental conceptual framework established by Gall and his later nineteenth-century successors, however, is essentially the same, and in the past few years “neo-phrenology” has taken off, with areas of the brain being assigned to “unconditional love” and “wisdom” and much else besides, as we shall explore. The original conjecture by the Greeks – Hippocrates pre-eminent among them – that the brain is the seat of the soul has, it seems, been

31. See Milner, “Wilder Penfield”.

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triumphantly vindicated by modern science; the multiple functions of the secular mind are located in the cerebral cortex and its connections. All that remains is to work within this secure framework to tease out the details of what happens in different locations and how those locations relate to one another. And this, we are led to believe, is what has been happening – at an ever-increasing pace – over the past 100 years or so.

Seeing the mind

In recent decades, there have been major technical advances enabling ever more precise observation of activity in the living brain, in particular the waking human brain. EEG has been outshone by even more impressive ways of capturing brain function. In a few decades, various modes of “functional neuroimaging” have been developed that enable scientists to see the brain lighting up in various places when its owner is exposed to certain stimuli, engages in certain activities or even thinks about performing them. The most powerful and versatile of these techniques is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It is fMRI, more than anything else, that has taken the analysis of brain function beyond the laboratory into the wider world of popular science, to the point where it is now almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without encountering an image of the brain, showing the location of love, or hatred, or wisdom. The novelty of fMRI explains why the historically incorrect notion that the identity of mind and brain is a recent discovery rooted in neuroscience, rather than a 2,500-year-old assumption about the brain, is so prevalent. For three-quarters of a century after Wilhelm Röntgen’s original work, radiology was based on X-rays, and could reveal only tissues that are radioopaque – such as bones – or hollow structures, such as the stomach, when they are filled with radio-opaque material, usually barium. Computerized tomography was the first technique to be able to demonstrate soft tissues in detail, notably the brain, and to differentiate between normal tissues and structural abnormalities such as a brain tumour or blood clot. To those of us working in clinical neurology in the 1970s its advent was revolutionary. Patients could be diagnosed as having tumours that required neurosurgical treatment or reassured that they did not have such problems without the kind of invasive, and sometime quite ghastly, investigations hitherto in use. MRI, however, has proved to be much more versatile and able to show the structure of the brain in stunning detail. As its name indicates, 37

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the technology exploits a phenomenon called “magnetic resonance”. The physics is immensely complex but the underlying principles can be described quite briefly. The key to MRI is that bodily tissues – including neural tissue – are mainly water, which, having the chemical composition H2O, contains two hydrogen nuclei or protons. When tissues are placed in a powerful magnetic field the hydrogen nuclei are aligned along the lines of force in the field. If a radiofrequency electromagnetic field is then switched on and off the protons release energy, which can be detected by the scanner. Protons in different tissues resonate at different frequencies. As a result, brain grey matter such as the cerebral cortex, white matter such as the nerve tracts that connect the cortex with other structures, and the cerebrospinal fluid, appear in distinctive shades. The contrast between structures can be enhanced by administering agents that influence the resonance of the protons in various tissues – or damaged versus undamaged tissues – in different ways. There are many modes of MRI scanning. One of particular value is “diffusion MRI”, which exploits the fact that water molecules are in a constant state of motion. If unconstrained they diffuse in all directions; but inside a neuron they will be constrained to move roughly in accordance with the long axis of the neuron. This makes it possible to map the connections between fibre tracts (tractography), giving additional information of how the brain is internally wired up. Another application of diffusion MRI is monitoring the distribution and time course of changes following a stroke, when, owing to a clot, the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off. If this is prolonged the cells affected swell, the diffusion of water is restricted and the signal on the scan increases. The application of MRI scanning in increasing our understanding of the anatomy of the intact and the damaged brain is self-evident. As a clinical neuroscientist I was awestruck by the images that became available towards the end of my career. The brain can be visually “sliced” and examined from different angles, and changes in its structure can be tracked over time. For example, the correlation between shrinkage of a part of the temporal lobes called the hippocampus in patients with dementing illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and their degree of memory loss can be investigated. But there has been another important development critical to the rise of Neuromania. Neural activity in a particular region is accompanied by changes in blood flow in that region. These changes are associated with alterations in blood oxygen level. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) MRI is an indirect way of tracking brain activity over time, with an 38

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impressive spatial resolution that enables us to get a general idea of what is going on, and where, in a brain when someone is responding to stimuli or engaging in an activity. By this means we can look not just at brain structure, but also at brain function (hence “functional” MRI). If the brain and the mind were one and the same this would mean that we can see not just the brain but the mind at work. We can read thoughts, intentions, appetites, unconscious responses, the influence of the balance of different kinds of brain activity on character and much else besides. Duncan’s assertion in Macbeth that “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face”32 remains true but we can now, or so it is claimed, read the mind’s construction by looking behind the face. A recent (sceptical) review in Scientific American summarizes the story: Thousands of fMRI studies have explored a wide range of differences in brain activation: adolescents versus adults, schizophrenic and normal minds, the empathetic and the impassive. Researchers have used fMRI to draw bold conclusions about face and word recognition, working memory and false memories, people anticipating pain, mothers recognizing their children, citizens pondering ethical dilemmas – not to mention why many consumers buy Coke even though they really prefer the taste of Pepsi. Psychologists have praised fMRI for finally making their science more quantifiable. And cognitive neuroscientists have cited the scans heavily in the recent, vast expansion in understanding of the brain.33 The attempt over the centuries to prove Hippocrates’ conjecture that “from the brain, and from the brain only, arises our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears” seemed to have reached its triumphant conclusion in “a BOLD rush”.

Support from without

Before concluding this sketch of the development of the Hippocratic notion that the brain and the mind are identical, I want to look briefly at 32. Macbeth, I.iv. 33. Dobbs, “Fact or Phrenology?”

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two trends outside neuroscience that, over the past half century or so, have helped to make it seem unassailable. The first is the computational theory of the mind.34 This is the theory that what the mind–brain does is “information-processing”; or, to put this another way, that the mind is a set of programs or software implemented in the hardware of the brain. The computational theory is particularly associated with cognitive psychology, which arose initially as a reaction against behaviourism. Behaviourism had tried to eliminate the mind, in a bid for psychology to be taken seriously as fully fledged science. Psychology, the behaviourists argued, should confine itself to the objective and the measurable; to quantifiable inputs or stimuli and quantifiable outputs, responses or behaviour. Anything between inputs and outputs was inaccessible to proper scientific study. This methodological decision gradually drifted into the assumption that there was nothing important between inputs and outputs. Cognitive psychology, which reacted against behaviourism, argued that there was something between outputs and inputs. It called them by various names but a favourite was “central processes”. These were best modelled as “information-handling”, of the kind performed by computers, and they were represented by diagrams in which boxes were linked by arrows, supposedly teasing out the representation, transformation and flow of information within the components of the mind–brain. The seemingly unlimited power of computers to do things – “detect” events, “calculate”, “control” outputs – made it superficially attractive to think of the mind–brain as a computer, and an enormously powerful one, which is as one would expect given that its circuitry had an estimated 9,000,000,000 components, each of which made many hundreds, even thousands, of synaptic connections with other neurons. The brain, in short, was the mother of all motherboards. And the mind, the software of the brain, was a respectable object of scientific study because “informationprocessing” seemed a long way away from the flaky stuff that the mind had hitherto seemed to be. The second development came from within philosophy. For a long time, analytic philosophy, the predominant strand in the English-speaking world, treated the notion of locating the mind in an object such as the brain with great suspicion. Looking for thoughts and their like in a particular place

34. The best account of this key trend in psychology remains Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind.

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was a “category error” – like ascribing nutritional value to prime numbers – that arose from thinking of the mind and its components, such as perceptions, memories, thoughts and beliefs, as if they were objects. Following a landmark paper in the 1950s by the psychologist U. T. Place (whose brain we shall visit at the end of this book),35 which argued that there was no logical reason why nerve impulses (which certainly did have locations) should not be identical with thoughts, perceptions and beliefs, this objection seemed to lose its force.36 The philosophers joined with the psychologists and neuroscientists and, eventually, “neurophilosophy” (which came of age with Patricia Churchland’s famous book of that name) was born. The neurophilosophical wing of English-speaking philosophy has flourished ever since, in part because of the glamour of neuroscience, in part because it is consistent with what leading neurophilosopher (and promoter of the computational theory of mind) Daniel Dennett called “the contemporary orthodoxy”, namely that: There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology – and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain … we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.37 Many arguments have been put forward in support of “the contemporary orthodoxy”, but the most direct and widely accepted one goes as follows.38 Our mental states have physical effects. If they did not then our thoughts and our intentions, and even our perceptions, would not be able to bring anything about. We would have no free will, no capacity to alter the course of events; our intentions would not change the disposition of the world around us. In other words, if you really believe that you – your

35. Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” 36. A key collection of essays is Borst (ed.), The Mind–Brain Identity Theory. My own copy has nearly fallen to pieces under the pressure of readings and re-readings, the margins are filled with annotations and scarcely a line is left without underlining. 37. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 33. 38. It is most clearly expressed in Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, esp. ch. 1.

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mental states – can change things in the physical world, you must believe that these mental states are physical states. The most plausible candidates for these physical causes are events in the brain; that is to say, nerve impulses. Hence mental phenomena must be composed of nerve impulses and the mind must be the activity of the brain. Unfortunately, if you believe that these mental states are physical states then, some neurophilosophers have argued, they too must be the product of other physical states. They have a causal ancestry that reaches beyond anything that you would regard yourself as being. You – your brain, your mind, your consciousness – are wired into the universe. And the wiring does not simply connect you to your body, or even to your immediate environment; it goes all the way back to the initial conditions of the universe. In short, you are stitched into a seamless flow of material events subject to the laws of nature. Your actions cannot be in any way exempt from these laws. You are just a little byway in the boundless causal nexus that is the material world. There are many powerful counter-arguments and I shall come to these in due course. For the moment, it looks as if not only everyday experience and sophisticated neuroscience, but also philosophical argument, are in favour of the notion that our minds, our consciousness, our self-consciousness, our very selves, are identical with activity in the brain. Anyone who denies this must be flying in the face of fact and argument. And he or she probably has a hidden agenda. I have lost count of the number of times that I, proudly atheistic, have been accused of promoting religion by the back door.

THE GRAND SYNTHESIS: NEUROMANIA MEETS DARWINITIS

[T]he idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realms of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.39 The next step, and the one that takes us to Darwinitis, is based on the indisputable fact that the human brain is an evolved organ. If the mind is identical with brain activity then the mind, too, must be an evolved

39. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 21.

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organ of sorts. And this is how Steven Pinker, a prominent evolutionary psychologist of mind, put it: “The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors”.40 Because the mind is an evolved organ or system of organs (let us forget about computation for the moment) designed by natural selection it will serve precisely those purposes that other evolved organs serve; namely, to increase the probability of the survival of the genetic material expressed in the organisms that carry it through its part in bringing about adaptive behaviour. As Richard Dawkins put it, “An animal’s behaviour tends to maximise the gene ‘for’ that behaviour whether or not the genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it”.41 If the ultimate aim of your actions, irrespective of whether you are aware of this, is to promote organic survival, this may have disturbing consequences. First, it undermines claims to objective knowledge. You will recall Gray’s confident assertion (presumably exempting himself at least for a moment) that “mind” – the output of a form of human behaviour – “serves evolutionary success, not truth”. Second, in those cases where you seem to be serving the interests of others (as when you lay down your life for a friend), you are really serving the interest of your genetic group. It makes evolutionary sense to lay down your life (and so stop your own genetic material replicating) if you save half a dozen other carriers of the same, or very similar, genetic material. Altruism, and all the norms that govern our behaviour, are not about transcendental ethics but about the “inclusive fitness” of the group: about group, rather than individual, selection. And finally, and most upsettingly, we are not aware – unless we are instructed in biology – of the forces that are motivating and shaping our behaviour. The reasons we give for the things we do are mere rationalizations that conceal from us the real reason, which is not a reason at all but a biologically determined propensity. (As we shall see, the observations of neuroscience highlight the extent of our ignorance; according to eminent neuroscientist Chris Frith,42 our brains are cleverer than we are and frequently deceive us as to what they, and hence we, their dupes, are up to.) You would have to be pretty resistant to the overwhelming body of evidence to deny that the human brain is an evolved organ, fashioned by 40. Pinker, How the Mind Works, x. 41. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 265. 42. Frith, Making up the Mind; this is a book we shall revisit.

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the processes of natural selection acting on spontaneous variation. It does not follow from this that the mind is, unless you believe that the mind is identical with brain activity. Those who do believe that often subscribe to the hugely popular science of “evolutionary psychology”. Evolutionary psychology (or EP as it is known to its aficionados) is one of the most ubiquitous (and, as we shall see, pernicious) expressions of Darwinized Neuromania. Before we talk about Darwin, contemporary evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology it is worth putting contemporary ideas in historical perspective; for, like the notion that the mind, the self and the brain are all one, which goes all the way back to Hippocrates, so the notion that we are animal-like has a venerable ancestry. This has been beautifully discussed by Martin Kemp in his recent book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. We have a strong propensity to humanize animals and to animalize humans: two-way traffic is ubiquitous. Fables, from Aesop to La Fontaine and Orwell, bestiaries, proverbs, metaphors, insults, terms of praise, and our everyday talk about strangers and familiars, household pets and the creatures of the wild, draw on and reinforce habits of anthropomorphization and animalization. In short, as Kemp demonstrates, “the human animal and the animal human” have been, since time immemorial, “deeply embedded in our automatic reactions to characters in the world around us and to images of our characters”.43 It is woven into the Hippocratic notion, elaborated by the second-century ce Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher Galen, of the balance between the four humours – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – as the key to health and illness. We enjoy perfect health when these elements “are duly proportioned to one another”.44 This balance was reflected in the different temperaments that were also associated with different species of animals: the sanguine temperament was exemplified by the horse, the peacock and the monkey; the choleric by the lion, the eagle and the bear; the phlegmatic by the owl, ass, and pig; and the melancholic by the elk and the sheep. Particular animals became ideal representatives of human natures. The mutual mirroring of man and beast was itself mirrored and hence reinforced in the visual arts, as represented by Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci and many of the greatest figures of subsequent centuries. The science of “physiognomics” – ultimately traceable to Theophrastus,

43. Kemp, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science, quoted in my “A Foxed Mirror”, 3103. 44. Hippocrates, On the Nature of Man, 11.

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Aristotle’s successor in the Peripatetic school, but revived in Renaissance Italy by Giambattista della Porta – which provided detailed accounts of facial features for different types of characters in terms of animal analogies, was an important intermediary. The profound reciprocity of the soul and body – in Aristotelian terms, the soul was the form of the body – meant that the soul could be deducible by a suitably qualified individual from a person’s or an animal’s physical appearance. We can read the lion’s character from his majestic face as generous, liberal, magnanimous with a will to win, and as gentle, just and affectionate towards his associates. The soul of a person we dislike or distrust is equally legible in his “piggy” eyes and “foxy” face. There was, therefore, a deep hinterland of preconceptions about the relation between man and animals in the 2,500 years between Hippocrates and Darwin’s decisive intervention in 1859, with On the Origin of Species. His compelling account of how we humans could have been produced by the processes that had given rise to spiders, codfish and chimpanzees established a seemingly inescapable framework within which mankind could be seen only as a form of animalkind. Our claim to being exceptional, hitherto rooted in the assumption that we had uniquely been created by a separate process, and in the image of the creator of the universe, was in question. We are all products of natural processes. “The blind watchmaker” (to use Dawkins’s famous phrase45) that made us was simply the laws of physics that had generated animals and humans alike. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin approvingly wrote that Thomas Huxley had shown that “in every single visible character man differs less from the higher apes, than these do from the lower members of the same order of Primates”.46 Darwin was intensely interested in one particular example of this – facial expressions, surely the most distinctively human motor phenomena – and made his own contribution to physiognomy. Inspired by Duchenne de Boulogne’s photographs of the activation of facial muscles with electrodes, he published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), arguing that: With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of

45. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. 46. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18.

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the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.47 Darwinism prompted a search for “the missing link”, and a succession of finds of increasingly ancient fossils seemed to fill in the gap between humans and other higher primates: or at least indicated a path upstream to a common ancestor between man and monkeys. This was perfectly acceptable as science, leaving aside the occasional hoax and a tendency sometimes to speculation rather beyond the data, and ethically unexceptionable. Unfortunately, evolutionary theory seemed in addition to provide a scientific basis for notions antedating Darwin that now strike us as not only wrong but also ethically repulsive: for example, that of grading human beings according to their proximity to animals, the master idea behind many forms of racism, as we shall discuss in “To hell in a hand cart?” in Chapter 2. The present ubiquitous notion that we are more animal than we generally like to think we are, therefore, has had a long history before Darwin. We have sought our image in this mirror for many centuries. Nevertheless, it is only recently that the argument that we are animals through and through has been so dominant and that “Darwin’s dangerous idea” (to use Dennett’s term) has started on its path to becoming “a universal acid” (Dennett again) that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leave in its wake a revolutionized world-view”,48 in which our most cherished beliefs about God, value, meaning, purpose, culture and morality are shown to be without foundation. One important step towards promoting Darwinism to the status of universal acid has been the development of evolutionary psychology. Hardly a day now passes in which we are not offered explanations of marital infidelity, choice of mate, economic decision-making, altruistic behaviour or the nature and purpose of art in terms of the influence of selfish genes acting on us, either directly or indirectly, through their cultural proxies “memes” (units of cultural transmission). The central tenet of evolutionary psychology is that our behaviour is shaped, indeed determined, by processes of natural selection. Those modes of behaviour that

47. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 13. 48. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 63.

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favour the replication of the genome will preferentially survive. Whether we know it or not (and usually we don’t know it, unless we are evolutionary psychologists) our behaviour is driven by this force. Men who sleep with many women and traders who aim to maximize their returns on their investments are simply responding to the fundamental biological imperative to make the world safe for their genes, and a place where they can optimize their replicative capacity. There are many factions within the field of evolutionary psychology. One of the earliest and the most prominent versions, although by no means uncontroversial in the evolutionary psychology community, is particularly associated with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby,49 and has several fundamental tenets: • The brain is a computer designed by natural selection to extract information from the environment. • Individual brain behaviour is generated by this evolved computer in response to information it extracts from the environment. • The cognitive programs of the human brain are adaptations. They exist because they produce behaviours in our ancestors that enabled them to survive and reproduce. • The cognitive programs of the human brain, which were adaptive in ancestral environments, may not be adaptive now. • Describing the evolved computational architecture of our brains allows a systematic understanding of cultural and social phenomena. This architecture consists of a myriad of modules, such as cheat-detection modules, snake-fear-detection modules, and waist-to-hip-ratio-detection modules. As Brendan Wallace has summed it up, “Evolutionary Psychology is an attempt to reinterpret the basic precepts of [cognitive psychology] within a Darwinian framework”.50 These precepts include the computational theory of mind, to which we shall return in Chapter 5. The important point for the present is that evolutionary psychologists see us as the unwitting playthings of an immensely complex organ (the brain) that stops us even from seeing what time it is, so that we operate in ways that may have been adaptive in ancestral environments – where

49. The canonical text is Barkow et al., The Adapted Mind. 50. Wallace, Getting Darwin Wrong, 6.

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ancestral environments may be as remote as the pre-agricultural habitats of hunting and gathering human beings or of hominids scarcely evolved from chimps – but are often at odds with modern life. We are evolved for the Stone Age savannah in Africa, which is where our species has spent most of its lifetime as a species. We are suited not for our besuited lives, but for life in the wild (although I am not sure how many of us would flourish any better if we were dumped in the savannah supported only by Stone Age technology). At any rate, we are out of place in the places we have created: cities, offices, drawing rooms. This is true of us even, or especially, when we are making what we think are deeply personal, existentially crucial decisions, such as choosing a lifelong partner – which brings me to waist-to-hip ratios. One of the alltime hits of evolutionary psychology was a paper by Devendra Singh, who asked men to rank women according to their sexual attractiveness.51 When shown a series of pictures, men prefer women with waist-to-hip ratios closest to 0.7. This is a good call, because that ratio, as it happens, is associated with optimal fertility, and this is consistent with the fact that the selfish gene, which wants only one thing (more of itself ), will get its way if it programmes the unwitting male to make this choice. If you think this is somewhat tendentious, there is much worse out there. Consider the recent claim that evolutionary psychology can explain why pink is associated with femininity and blue with masculinity.52 Women in prehistory were the principal gatherers of fruit and would have been sensitized to the colours of ripeness: deepening shades of pink. Men, on the other hand, would have looked for good hunting weather and sources of water, both of which are connected with blue. In fact, in Victorian Britain blue was regarded as the appropriate colour for girls (being associated with the Virgin Mary) and pink for boys (being a watered down version of the “fierce” colour red). Colour preferences are therefore scarcely rooted in the properties of a brain shaped in the Pleistocene epoch. They are historically, not biologically, determined; but don’t expect an evolutionary psychologist to spot that. To return to Singh’s findings, do they support the claims of evolutionary psychology to explain our everyday choices? Only if you believe that it is valid to extrapolate from a preference for one picture over another to

51. Singh, “Female Mate Value at a Glance”. 52. Hurlbert & Ling, “Biological Components of Sex Differences”.

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choosing one life companion rather than another. The study ignores innumerable factors other than immediate appearance. The three Fs – fancying, fertility and … sexual behaviour – are not the whole story. Conversation, common interests, shared tastes, deep sympathy for the other person, parental pressure, the expectation of others and a multitude of other things play a part in the choice of long-term partner. Hooking up is not just about mating and it is not a response to a stimulus. The central role of language – conversation, identification of overlapping needs, interests in common, and a future-orientated sense of a life together rooted in remembered past experience – is overlooked by Singh. There is no straight line from waistto-hip ratios (or, come to that, pheromones – another favourite) to the complex ceremonies and commitments and rituals of human partnerships. Our lives are narrated, to ourselves and to each other, never more so than when we are making choices such as whom to share your life with, what job to take on, whether to have children, and so on. The reduction of human life to a chain of programmed responses of modules to stimuli overlooks the complexity of everyday experience and the singularity of the situations we find ourselves in, to say nothing of the role of conscious deliberation. This is something to which we shall return when we look at actual human life in Chapters 6 and 7 and, in Chapter 8, at the neuro-prefixed disciplines that are presuming to displace traditional humanities. The use of seemingly sophisticated notions such as a “mental module” does not alter, but only disguises, this fact. On the other hand, the initial attractiveness of the notion that it is our genes, and not our thoughts, or our conscious agency, that guide our lives is understandable. Hasn’t Darwin demonstrated that human beings were manufactured by the same processes as gave rise to chimpanzees, sea slugs and centipedes? And are we not living now because we have bodies and behaviours that have maximized our individual or collective fitness? What makes us think that human beings engaged in the manifestly biological act of choosing a mate are any different from other creatures engaged in the same activity? These are questions we shall address when we critically examine the case against Darwinitis in particular, and against biologizing humanity in general on the basis of Darwinism. First, however, it is necessary to look at why it is worth pointing this out. In the next chapter, I shall examine the potentially grave consequences of succumbing to Neuromania and Darwinitis.

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CHAPTER TWO

Consequences

A FAREWELL TO FREEDOM

Let us suppose we accept biologism in full: our minds are our brains; and our brains are evolved organs designed, as are all organs, by natural selection to maximize the replicative ability of the genes whose tool the brain is. What follows from this? For many, this means that we are acting out a biological script quite different from the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. We may have to jettison the notion of freedom and, consequently, of personal responsibility. Worse still, to be identified with our brains is to be identified with a piece of matter, and this, like all other pieces of matter, is subject to, and cannot escape from, the laws of material nature. Everything that happens in our brains is the product of material events that impinge on them and the events that result from brain activity – notably our actions – are wired into the endless causal net, extending from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, that is the history of the material universe. Minds and persons are embedded in the physical world. Our destiny, like that of pebbles and waterfalls, is to be predestined. The general argument that free will is an illusion long antedates the rise of neuroscience: it has haunted philosophers since classical times. There are various ways of arguing for determinism: the notion that we do not determine anything but are ourselves determined by things outside of us. The proofs are all pretty straightforward.1 The most obvious is that every

1. The arguments are set out in Kane, The Significance of Free Will.

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one of our actions is a physical event. Every physical event has a cause and that cause will in turn have causes. Eventually we shall arrive at causes that have nothing to do with us: for example, events that happened before we were born. So the actual basis for our actions lies outside us. We’ll return to these arguments, and the false idea that an action is just a physical event like any other, in Chapter 7. What is of particular interest to us now is the claim that neuroscience and Darwinism have added weight to traditional determinism; that they have demonstrated that we are either not as free as we thought or that we are not free at all; that, thanks to brain scientists, we now know to be true what philosophers and others only feared might be true. There is something dodgy, of course, about the claim that an empirical science can address essentially metaphysical questions such as whether or not human freedom is real. At any rate, if the arguments sketched above were sound (which they are not), then we would require no data to support them. Be that as it may, some biologists think that what they have discovered about brain activity further undermines the case for our believing in free will. The eminent neurophysiologist Colin Blakemore expressed this view with admirable lucidity in his Reith Lectures “The Mechanics of the Mind”: The human brain is a machine which alone accounts for all our actions, our most private thoughts, our beliefs … All our actions are products of the activity of our brains. It makes no sense (in scientific terms) to try to distinguish sharply between acts that result from conscious attention and those that result from our reflexes or are caused by disease or damage to the brain.2 If we are identical with our brains, or certain neural discharges in them, we must be just as unfree when we are writing a textbook about the management of seizures as when we ourselves are in the grip of a seizure: it “makes no sense in neuroscientific terms” to distinguish between these things. Other writers are not so radical, or so consistent, as Blakemore. They want only to tone down what they feel to be our exaggerated sense of our own autonomy. Many psychologists have taken especial pleasure in demonstrating how our decisions are often influenced by stimuli of which we are unaware, and that we act for reasons other than those that we

2. Blakemore, The Mind Machine, 270.

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believe drive our actions.3 You might think that you gave money to a beggar because you acknowledged the obligation to assist those less fortunate than yourself. You will be less certain of this when you realize that, according to some studies, you are much more likely to be generous when you are near a bakery sending out the delicious smell of freshly baked bread rather than “a neutral-smelling dry goods store”.4 In general, it seems as if our conscious feelings are less important than we thought they were. As Rita Carter has expressed it, “The conscious appreciation of emotion is looking more and more like one quite small, and sometimes inessential, element of a system of survival mechanisms that mainly operate – even in adults – at an unconscious level”.5 Neuroscientists, of course, are not the only ones who assume a knowing smile in the face of our belief that we are free. Marxists, psychoanalysts, semiologists and behavioural psychologists have questioned the contribution of conscious agency to our actions and argued that our reasons for carrying out certain actions have little to do with why those actions occur.6 But the incursion of neuroscience into our sense of ourselves as conscious agents is more “up close and personal”: so up close that the personal gives way before the impersonal. What is more, neuroscientists have made the most systematic observations, which appear to them to demonstrate that we do not fully will our actions; indeed, the only connection between willing and acting is that both come from the same unconscious source.7 These observations have been given further apparent authority by experiments using fMRI scanning and other methods of directly observing brain activity when people are carrying out supposedly voluntary actions. The pattern of activity seen on the scan often, so it is argued, reveals that more is going on than the actor realizes and that the (unconsciously) “emotional” brain is frequently more engaged than the “rational” brain. We shall return to the status of such statements in “BOLD claims” in Chapter

3. See Frith & Rees, “A Brief History of the Scientific Approach”, for an excellent sketch of the literature demonstrating unconscious processes in every aspect of consciousness, influencing perception, memory and social behaviour. Frith’s own Making Up the Mind is another excellent source. 4. This is one of many examples discussed in Appiah, Experiments in Ethics. For an excellent critical account, see Turner, “Ethics Made Easy”. 5. Carter, Mapping the Mind, 22. 6. See my Enemies of Hope. 7. The most carefully argued and documented case for this is Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will.

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3. For the present, I want to focus on two connected studies, carried out a quarter of a century apart, which have been very widely cited and discussed within neuroscience and philosophy and have attracted the attention of the popular press and the wider public, and seem to challenge the notion that we are in charge of our actions. The first is a famous set of experiments, carried out by the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet in the 1980s and repeated and refined many times since then, which seem to show that our brain makes decisions to act before our conscious mind is aware of them, so they are not really our decisions at all. The neuroscientist Patrick Haggard described the paper in which they were first described as “one of the most philosophically challenging … in modern scientific psychology”.8 So what did Libet do and what did he find? In a typical experiment, Libet’s subjects are instructed to make a simple movement – to bend their right wrist or the fingers of their right hand – in their own time.9 Using EEG, the experimenter records a particular activity in the brain that indicates a readiness to move. This so-called “readiness potential” is seen in the part of the cerebral cortex most closely associated with voluntary movement. The readiness potential occurs about half a second before activity in the relevant muscles of the arm or hand, as recorded by an electromyogram, because it takes time for the neural activity in the cortex to translate into events in the relevant muscles. Nothing worrying there. But Libet made another observation that seemed to raise serious questions. He asked his subjects to recall the position of a spot revolving on a clock face in order to determine the time when they were first aware of their urge or intention to make a movement. To his surprise, he found that the readiness potential occurred a consistent third of a second before the time at which the subjects reported being aware of a decision to move. Libet concluded from this that the brain (not the subject or the person) “decided” to initiate or at least to prepare to initiate the act before there was any reportable subjective awareness of a decision having been made. Put more simply, the cerebral causes of our actions seem to occur before our conscious awareness of deciding to perform them.

8. Haggard et al., “On the Perceived Time of Voluntary Actions”, 291. 9. Libet has published widely on a large series of experiments over many years but the early key reference is Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative”.

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These findings are open to a range of interpretations, as we shall see, but they cannot be dismissed as mere artefacts of the method of recording.10 Nor can the gap between the electrical signal of the initiation of action, the readiness potential, and the awareness of the intention to perform the action be explained away as the interval between forming an intention and being sufficiently reflectively aware of the intention to allocate it to a particular time. This has been demonstrated rather dramatically by more recent work, this time using fMRI. Chung Siong Soon and colleagues carried out studies in which letters were displayed on a screen in succession.11 Subjects were asked to press a left or right button at a moment of their own choosing and to note the letter that was being displayed at the time they felt they were making a decision to press the button. The letter was a time marker. Two regions that lit up in the brain predicted the subject’s choice of left or right button. Remarkably, the regions in question (in the part of the cerebral cortex associated with voluntary movement) lit up a full five seconds before the individual was aware of having made a choice. Moreover, there were other areas in the frontal cortex, traditionally ascribed executive powers, that were active no less than seven seconds before awareness of the decision. If the delay in the response of the scanner detecting the activity was accounted for, the interval increased to ten seconds. Such a delay could not be due to the subject mistiming the intention to move: a possible explanation for Libet’s original findings, as it is somewhat tricky to time one’s own decisions. The authors concluded that there is a network of high-level control areas “that begins to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness”. It looks as if we don’t know what we are doing until we have found that we have done it. This has certainly brought many philosophers up short. Among them is Alfred Mele, who in 2010 was awarded a $4.4 million grant by the Templeton Foundation to look into the whole issue of human free will. Libet’s original interpretation of his own experiments was that they demonstrated that we do not have free will: the brain “decides” to move; the brain “initiates” movement. As Libet put it in a more recent paper, “If the ‘act now’ process is initiated unconsciously, then the conscious free will is not

10. A recent study, however, has suggested that our timing of our own intentions is affected by external factors, notably the sense that you have actually performed the act yourself, that is, voluntarily. See Banks & Isham, “We Infer Rather than Perceive the Moment”. 11. Soon et al., “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions”.

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doing it”.12 We do, however, have “free won’t”: we can inhibit movements that are initiated by the brain. We don’t quite initiate voluntary processes; rather, we “select and control them”, either by permitting the movement that arises out of an unconsciously initiated process or “by vetoing the progression to actual motor activation”.13 This has been expressed as our ability to “rubber-stamp” decisions that have already been made by neural networks. It is, however, not very clear why the decisions should require rubber-stamping. In the person-less world of neuroscience, it makes no more sense for us to rubber-stamp the decisions of our brains than for a falling pebble to endorse the gravitational field. In fact, the conclusion that we do not have any kind of free will (or won’t), or that we have only free won’t, is not supported by either Libet’s or Soon’s experiments. A few moments’ thought will make that clear, and we shall have those few moments in Chapter 7, but the reader may want to spot the (involuntary) mistake before then. For the present, we note that because the justification of the large conclusion drawn from the experiments is so weak there must be a prior intuition that predisposes commentators towards that conclusion. This intuition is one we have referred to already: a presumption in favour of determinism – the notion that our actions, like every other event in the universe, are determined by preceding events in accordance with the laws of nature, as revealed by physical science. “Neuro-determinism”, in other words, is simply a local manifestation of universal physical determinism; and the former is given an easy ride because of the prejudice in favour of the latter. Certainly, if you believe that you are identical with certain physical events in your brain you will find it difficult to see where your freedom could be located: where there could be such a thing as the initiation of an action. Think about it: there is a sensory input, triggering peripheral nerve impulses, which in turn trigger central nerve impulses that trigger motor activity or other outputs. Yes, there are many intermediate layers of activity between the input and the output, but they consist only of other nerve impulses and these are not qualitatively different from those more immediately related to inputs and outputs. The hierarchical vision of the nervous system suggested by Hughlings Jackson, and orthodox ever since, does not help. Consider nerve impulses ascending through various

12. Libet, “Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain”, 62, quoted in Mele, “Free Will”, 5. 13. Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative”, 529.

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tracts to the sensory cortex, being processed at higher and higher levels, and then, via various intermediate stations, activating the motor cortex, prompting outgoing impulses that descend to those fibres whose output causes muscles to contract. This sequence does not have a beginning, a point of origin, a point of departure, that would correspond to the initiation of an action. We have a loop of activity passing through the nervous system, without an obvious point where anything could be started. After all, the circuitry of the brain is causally connected with its immediate surroundings, and these are in turn simply part of a boundless causal nexus extending backwards in time to the beginning of the universe. The inescapable consequence of seeing ourselves identified with a material object – the brain – must be to conclude that we are wired into the material world: subject to the same laws that hold sway over it. So, for a variety of reasons, many neuroscientists argue that, while the experience of free will is very real, the reality is that it is an illusion. This is not the only illusion to which we are prone, apparently. We also mistakenly believe that we are, or have, selves: a coherent, enduring, unified “I”. This is an illusion for which we are “hardwired”.14 Since, as I shall argue, freedom and being an enduring “I” are inseparably linked, it is hardly surprising that those who say “farewell to freedom” also say “bye bye, I’’. Gray, who, as it will be recalled, argued that “our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves”,15 also stated that “The upshot of neuroscientific research is that we cannot be authors of our act”.16 The conscious mind, the self, is only “a spin doctor”,17 and not only puts the best or most comprehensible gloss on things but is also capable of spinning itself with such plausibility as to persuade itself that it exists. As with the denial of free will, there is nothing new about the denial of the self. It is one of the fundamental pillars of many ancient religions, notably Buddhism. And in secular thought it has been a long-standing preoccupation since, in one of the most famous passages in Western philosophy, David Hume argued that the self was a kind of fiction: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other,

14. 15. 16. 17.

Carter, Mapping the Mind, 76. Gray, Straw Dogs, 38. Ibid., 67. Ibid.

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of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception.18 He concluded that humans “are nothing but a bundle … of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”. “The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one”, he finally says.19 So that’s that. Those of you who think of your selves as real are plain wrong. For Dennett, like Hume, the self is a fictional entity: a narrative centre of gravity; the implied heart of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. There is a Head of Mind – which may rotate between different clusters of consciousness – but this no more exists in reality than does the centre of gravity of a hoop.20 Frith also argues that the “I” is an illusion and believes that it is created by the brain. Frith’s brain washes itself into believing in a person called Chris Frith, who somehow – despite being unreal – coheres in various important ways across his biography.21 Notice that it was because he could not find the self by introspection, that Hume concluded that it was not real. An alternative conclusion (as we shall discuss in Chapter 7), is that introspection might not be the right instrument to show us the self. There is an analogy here with the logic of the neuroscientists who conclude that the “self ”, the “I” – like free will – is unreal on the grounds that you can’t find it if you look into the brain; there is nothing in patterns of neural activity corresponding to anything like a self. We could, of course, draw quite a different conclusion: that the self does exist but it is not identical with patterns of neural activity. Only the prior assumption that neuroscience speaks the last word on what we are could force us to deny the existence of the self on the grounds that it cannot be detected by electrodes or scanners. We shall return to, and rescue, free will and the human agent in Chapter 7. For the present, I note simply that the idea of both that is attacked is often a straw man: or a straw homunculus. It is the idea of a little fellow, a spirit, at the heart of one’s consciousness, one’s life, one’s body, one’s brain, that is calling the shots, manipulating the world as if by magic, using the

18. 19. 20. 21.

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I, pt IV, §6. Ibid. Dennett, “The Origins of Selves”. This is argued in detail in Frith, Making up the Mind.

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causal nexus but exempted from its exigencies itself. And this, of course, is not an idea that a non-dualist atheist like myself would wish to defend. Nor would I wish to defend those who think that they can find the self, or a somehow unified consciousness, in the convergent neural activity of large parts of the brain. This, as we shall see in Chapter 3, runs into contradictions. At any rate, we shall discover that those who deny free will and the self, the conscious agent, are either attacking only a straw man or running into contradictions or both.

THE HUMANITIES BECOME ANIMALITIES

The humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.22 If we are our brains, and if human societies are the summed activity of brains interacting with one another and with the material world, it follows that everything we do individually and collectively can be understood in terms of neural activity. The findings of neuroscientists, supplemented – since the brain is an evolved organ designed to help us face the exigencies of life in the jungle or the savannah – by evolutionary thinking, will reveal the true nature of our behaviour and the institutions that regulate it, our customs and practices, norms and laws, arts and sciences. If you want to understand people, look at their brains. The writing is on the wall and the script is pixels on a brain scan. Roll over, social sciences and humanities, allow yourselves to be incorporated into a vastly extended neuroscience and discover your true nature as animalities. That the queen of the natural sciences should also have dominion over territory that once belonged to the human sciences is an assumption that has, as we have seen, spread from academe to the popular press. And so hardly a day passes without yet another breathless account of new light cast on everyday life by findings from the neuro-lab. Newspaper articles and television programmes are usually accompanied by pictures of brain scans in pixel-busting high definition. There are repeated references to new

22. Wilson, Consilience, 12.

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disciplines with the prefix “neuro-” or “evolutionary”: neuro-jurisprudence, evolutionary economics, evolutionary aesthetics, neuro-theology, neuroarchitecture, neuro-archeology and so on. Even philosophers – who should know better, being trained, one hopes, in scepticism – have entered the field with the discipline of “X-phi”, or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages, for example, have invented “neuro-ethics”, in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people’s intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classical dilemmas. Far from being resisted, this takeover has been passionately welcomed by many humanist scholars and social scientists. It is easy to be cynical (although cynicism is not always blind – “malice”, as Settembrini said in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, is “reason’s keenest dart”). From the point of view of a career academic, there are good reasons for seizing the “interdisciplinary” opportunities offered by, say, neuro-prefixed humanities. You can, as John Bayley once said, “rise between two stools”. Most of the time you will be selling your product to an audience that is not in a position to judge the correctness, the validity or even the probability of the claims you are making about the guest discipline you exploit. “A new paradigm” also means lots of lovely conferences and papers, and other income from the regular review of research that determines government grants, that will line the path to professional advancement. It may also help you to overcome a crisis of confidence in the value or validity of what you are doing. Let us, however, give the practitioners of the new disciplines the benefit of assuming their sincerity and glance at some prominent examples. (We shall look at them in more detail in Chapter 8, when we shall be in a better position to see why they are fundamentally misconceived.) Art, that most distinctive of human activities, the most remote, one would have thought, from our organic being, has been a particular focus of attention. The aficionados of “neuroaesthetics” explain the impact of different kinds of art by referring to what is seen on fMRI scans, which show the different areas of the brain that light up when we engage with artworks.23 The creation of art itself is a neurally mediated activity by which the artist, unknown to himself, behaves in such a way as to promote the replication of his genetic material.24 The artist is a show-off. “Neuroarthistory” explains the emergence of different theories of art by the influence

23. The locus classicus is Zeki, Inner Vision. 24. Dutton, The Art Instinct.

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of the environment on the plastic brain of the critic.25 Sponsorship of the arts is a manifestation of the “reputation reflex”, by which, like the peacock whose useless tail advertises the health of his genes, the sponsor advertises the health of his firm. In short, every aspect of the aesthetic business can be explained by the function of the evolved brain.26 According to philosopher and founding editor of Arts and Letters Daily Denis Dutton, our aesthetic preferences were forged in the 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era, rather than the mere 500 generations since the first societies.27 Dutton’s work, Pinker tells us, “marks out the future of the humanities – connecting aesthetics and criticism to an understanding of human nature drawn from the cognitive and biological sciences”.28 While neuroaesthetics seems to be best developed in the case of the traditional visual arts, music has also attracted some attention. According to cognitive psychologist and record producer Daniel Levitin, all tunes fall into six categories (friendship, joy, religion, knowledge, comfort, and love) each of which serves a basic evolutionary function.29 This hypothesis is particularly bold in that it combines biologizing art with a broader reduction of the human characteristics that lie behind it. The most bullish discipline in the neuro-evolutionary humanities is literary criticism. It has attracted some eminent names as well as much media attention. “Literary Critics Scan the Brain to Find Out Why We Love to Read”, says a recent, typical headline in the Observer newspaper. “Neurolit-crit”, we learn, “is the study of how great writing affects the hard wiring inside our heads”.30 Next to the claim that “Lighting up the right neurones is every bit as important as a keen moral insight or a societal context”, there is a quote from Blakey Vermeule, English Professor at Stanford University, to the effect that neuro-lit-crit “is one of the most exciting developments in intellectual life”. The excitement that had prompted the Observer article had been provoked by a study of brain scans in student volunteers looking

25. Onians, Neuroarthistory. I am afraid that I subjected this book – which is dedicated to “the art historians of the future who also have the courage to be neuroarthistorians” – to a rather cruel review in The Lancet: “The Limitations of a Neurological Approach to Art”. The author responded with exemplary courtesy and generosity. 26. Wight, The Peacock’s Tail and the Reputation Reflex. “Science can at last now support what instinct could only proclaim”, he tells us. 27. Dutton, The Art Instinct. 28. Ibid., back cover; quoted in Warburton, “Can Evolution Explain Aesthetics?” 29. Levitin, The World in Six Songs. 30. Harris & Flood, “Literary Critics Scan the Brain”.

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at writing that has varying levels of complexity. This study will apparently help us to understand why we have a different reaction to a newspaper article as opposed to the novels of Proust and Henry James. It has not yet been done, but such is the anticipation that no negative findings would now dare spoil the excitement. There is a bitter irony for me in this swing to biologism. It is now hard to remember that, in the later decades of the twentieth century, academics in the humanities questioned the very truth of science. Under the influence of writers such as the French maître à penser Michel Foucault and the American philosopher Richard Rorty, humanist intellectuals were prone to assert that knowledge was inseparable from power. “Objective” truths, including those turned up by scientists, were simply those interpretations with sufficiently powerful sponsors to back them up. For some critics, the conversion from the idea that scientific accounts of nature are no more objectively true than are politically motivated accounts of history to the opposite notion that natural science (in particular neuroscience) reveals the ultimate truth about us has been Damascene. Norman Bryson, an art critic, was until recently committed to the notion that art, science and the world itself were simply collections of signs. One day he discovered neuroscience and saw “an entirely fresh paradigm for thinking through cultural history and the philosophy of the human subject”.31 The scales fell from his eyes: experiences, worlds, objects were not made of signs at all, but of neural activity. “What makes the apple is not the signified ‘apple’ but rather the simultaneous firing of axons and neurons within cellular and organic life”.32 Bryson, who once would not have been seen dead near a laboratory, is not the only social constructivist to have realized that art criticism is a branch of neuroscience. The very title of the latest book by Alan Richardson (one of the leading figures in neuro-lit-crit), The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts, sounds like a parody. Alas, it is not. Even serious, truly illuminating critics are not immune from the “strong contagion” of the lab coat. This has a particular poignancy for me. Two excellent practitioners, Brian Boyd and Philip Davis, who supported me when I was one of a handful of voices pointing out the invalidity of poststructuralist, postmodern, deconstructive criticism in the 1990s, and whom I count as personal friends, have embraced the new paradigm. Boyd,

31. Bryson, “Foreword”, 11. 32. Ibid.

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the world’s leading authority on Vladimir Nabokov, has recently published a book that aims not only to give an evolutionary account of storytelling, arguing that it is a form of play assisting survival, but also to show “how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works”.33 Among these are the Odyssey and Hamlet. His take on evolutionary criticism is far from simple and does take into account something that I shall emphasize when I assemble a few reminders about the nature of the human world in “The human world” in Chapter 6, but still aims to anchor itself in animal biology.34 And Davis, Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, one of the most sensitive and imaginative of Shakespearean critics, and another opponent of poststructuralism, has taken things further, collaborating with neuroscientists to use fMRI to investigate the basis of the special impact of the Bard’s language.35 In his early oracular masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein pronounced that “ethics and aesthetics are one”.36 And this is certainly true for the neuro-evolutionary humanists. Brain scans, which can X-ray aesthetic experiences, also cast light on moral judgements. This is to be expected, they argue, since our sense of right and wrong is implanted by evolution to ensure that we live together in a nondysfunctional way. In The Science of Morality,37 we learn that the social brain “resides essentially in the orbito-frontal cortex”,38 and that (according to Robin Dunbar, one of the contributors) “only humans achieve moral behaviour” (the right observation) “because of the unique computing power of the social brain” (the wrong kind of reason).39 Even so, apes and orang-utans (as Walker summarizes Dunbar) “have details of acceptable behaviour, who to please and who it is safe to bully, who owes or is owed a favour: a basic moral code in fact”.40 Altruism, by which we subordinate our own interests to those of others, may seem inexplicable in terms of a

33. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, back cover. 34. See, for example, Boyd, “Literature and Evolution”, which does at least acknowledge the existence of a world created out of shared attention, although it still seems to believe that it can be Darwinized. 35. See Davis, “The Shakespeared Brain”. Or, for the full Monty, Thierry et al., “Event-related Potential Characterisation of the Shakespearean Functional Shift”. 36. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.421. 37. Walker, The Science of Morality. 38. Ibid., xvii. 39. Dunbar, “Morality and the Social Brain”, 81. 40. Walker, The Science of Morality, xvi.

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simplified “eat-or-be-eaten” Darwinism, but it makes evolutionary sense when we introduce the notion of “inclusive fitness”: genetic material maximizes its chances of surviving by making the group, not the individual, care for itself. It is mediated by empathy. This is supposedly wired into the brains of higher primates courtesy of “mirror neurons”, first described in monkeys, which are activated when we watch someone doing something we intend to do ourselves. We can consequently understand the nature of human morality by looking at chimps or even further afield. It is ethics made easy. It is hardly surprising that economists (and marketing experts) should also have sought their share of the neuro-prefixed action. The credit crunch dealt a severe blow to the notion that, if we were each allowed to pursue our own rational interests, the overall result would be the greatest benefit for all. However, it also seemed to undermine the assumption that consumers really do make rational choices. What about those disastrous sub-prime mortgages, for example? Thanks to neuroscience, neuroeconomists understand the wishful thinking behind them: scans show that purchasing and other financial decisions are driven by parts of the brain that are stronger on emotion (located in rather dubious places such as the amygdala) than on reason (located in the frontal lobes);41 our choices, in other words, are not rational and those toxic debts are in fact neurotoxic. This is precisely what evolutionary theorists might expect: what was a sensible course of action in the prehistoric environments in which the brain evolved – live now because there will be no later – would not be a good thing to do in contemporary life. And ruinous conspicuous consumption is designed, like the peacock’s tail, to exhibit the health of our genes, which matters to a hominid on the pull.42 If ethics and economic behaviour surrender to the advances of neuroevolutionary psychology, it is hardly surprising that the law should be next in line. “Neuro-law” is big business in the US and is starting to make waves on this side of the Atlantic. Both defence and prosecution lawyers have found recent advances in neuroscience relevant to their respective causes. fMRI scans and what they apparently tell us about the working of our brains have been appealed to as the basis for greatly extending the scope of diminished responsibility. They can be used to show an imbalance

41. McClure et al., “Valuing Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards”. 42. This thesis is set out at length in Miller, Spent.

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between the activity in the wild amygdaloid body and that in the prudent frontal lobes. “My brain made me do it”; “the brain takes the rap”: these are phrases that are increasingly heard in legal circles. The ultimate challenge for thinkers who wish to give a purely biological account of humanity is mankind’s beliefs about the supernatural. These, too, have attracted much neuro-evolutionary attention: neuro-theology has even made it to the front cover of Time magazine.43 Biology is the key to religion because belief in God and sharing religious customs apparently has survival value. Certain parts of the brain have been identified as being attuned to the deity; these are the so-called “God spots”. An evolved “God gene” ensures that we are “hard-wired” for religious belief, so that the triumphs of rationalist disbelief will always be only temporary. Atheists are going against the genetic grain.

TO HELL IN A HANDCART?

“Life is horrible,” [Hitler] once mused over dinner. … Humanity, he declared on another occasion, was “a ridiculous cosmic bacterium”.44 Does it matter if people are persuaded that they are animals and that their evolved brains are calling the shots? Would it be of any great moment if the humanities became “animalities”? Might this really result in spiritual impoverishment and change everyday life for the worse? If the answers to these questions are no, then this book is a waste of your time. After all, there are plenty of other ideas that are not only erroneous but also clearly dangerous and effort might be better directed at them. I want in this section, therefore, to discuss why the errors of Neuromania and Darwinitis are important before I try to say what those errors are: to discuss what consequences might follow if sufficient numbers of people – academics, commentators, policy-makers – were seduced by the glamour of biologized humanities.

43. The book that made the splash was Hamer, The God Gene. 44. Ferguson, The War of the World, 555–6.

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One reason for concern will already be evident from Gray’s Straw Dogs: it would justify human self-hatred. If we are animals then we don’t measure up very well against other animals: we are not as pretty as tigers or as innocent as spiders. We are ubiquitous, enormously powerful and rapacious, murderers of each other and despoilers of the planet. We are apes with nuclear weapons. Indeed, we are so awful that climate change may be no bad thing as it “may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its human burden” an outcome to be desired: “It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter”.45 Such malignant ill will towards humanity encourages despair and inactivity. Since we are such nasty creatures and utterly deluded, the less we do to try to change things, even if we make the attempt for the benefit of our fellows, the better. Our behaviour is prescribed by our brains and the bit of the brain that does most of the prescribing is the bit that was developed in the distant past when our main concern was with self-preservation in the bloodbath of the biosphere. Any endeavour to harness and extend human power to change things will increase our abuse of other living creatures, most notably our fellow humans, and will end in a sea of tears and an ocean of blood. A less hysterical and perhaps more typical example of where biologistic thinking may take us is to be found in Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred, his sobering account of the first half of the twentieth century, in which human beings killed more of their fellows – even when corrected for the increased population – than at any other time in recorded history, and one of its many wars – the Second World War – was “the greatest man-made catastrophe of all time”. Ferguson draws this conclusion: No matter how complex the administrative structure we study, we should not lose sight of the basic instincts buried within even the most civilized men. These instincts were to be unleashed time and again after 1900. They were a large part of what made the Second World War so ferocious. 46

45. Gray, Straw Dogs, 17. 46. Ferguson, The War of the World, xlvii.

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And why did we behave so badly? “Man, so some neo-Darwinians argue, is programmed by his genes to protect his kind and fight ‘the Other’.”47 Although the formalization of the Other in the idea of race has little basis for race in biological reality, it is a meme, and powerful one.48 Racism, “in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation” is a meme that “has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify”.49 The fact that it took so much organization to break down civilization and that it was mediated and shaped by highly abstract ideas about the Other is irrelevant: the unparalleled savagery of the twentieth century was simply a regression to biology. There are some writers who draw an opposite, although perhaps even more frightening, conclusion from our animal nature. They believe that the (biologistic) truth will set us free and enable us to develop, for example, a more mature, just and effective approach to crime and punishment. It will guide us to social policies that go with, rather than against, the grain of human nature. Semir Zeki and Oliver Goodenough anticipate a “millennial future, perhaps only decades away” when “a good knowledge of the brain’s system of justice and of how the brain reacts to conflicts may provide critical tools in resolving international political and economic conflicts”.50 The untidy, ill-informed decision-making processes in the law courts will be replaced by a “biological justice” that can connect actions with the neural activity that drove them and the biological bases of that neural activity. This scientistic utopianism actually frightens me more than Gray’s pessimism; at least Gray won’t try to act on his errors. Gray and Ferguson, by the way, are not by any means unusual in their pessimism. As you will recall, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Dennett argued that evolutionary theory would act as a universal acid that would eat into our traditional ways of thinking.51 In the revolutionized worldview left in its wake, most of our cherished beliefs about God, value, meaning, purpose, culture and morality would have been exposed as being without foundation. While Dennett felt that this might have desirable consequences, others are convinced that the revolutionized worldview will not be terribly good 47. Ibid., xliv. 48. Ferguson quotes Richard Lewontin’s calculation that about 85 per cent of the total amount of genetic variation in humans occurs among individuals in an average population; only 6 per cent occurs among races (ibid.: xiii). 49. Ibid., li. 50. Zeki & Goodenough, Law and the Brain, xiv. 51. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 63.

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for our collective health. Alex Rosenberg’s nihilistic Darwinism52 argues that Dennett correctly saw the corrosive effect of Darwin’s theory but then failed to acknowledge that this would lead to metaphysical nihilism (the world, nature and human life are empty of meaning) and ethical nihilism (morality is not about values but about the needs of our genes). Ultimately, everything we do is an expression of the blind laws of physics. Mele, the recipient of the $4.4 million Templeton bounty, has anticipated possible serious social consequences of the discovery that we do not have free will.53 He is worried that disbelief in free will may result in more cheating and aggressive behaviour because people will not feel responsible for their actions. Although this is somewhat naive, there is some evidence from a study by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler that “exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions”.54 Many who do not go this far may nonetheless fear the consequences of a Darwinized understanding of humanity. The supposedly Darwinian defence of unfettered market forces, of the notion that “might is right”, of a dog-eat-dog, greed-is-good, capitalism is too well known to need spelling out here, although a passage from David Brooks’s New York Times column neatly rounds up some of our concerns about the pernicious nonsense Darwinitis may endorse: “From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it is clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest”.55 As medical historian Andrew Scull has put it: biological interpretations of everyday human life lead to “a naturalistic justification for … particular social arrangements”.56 The successful, and for the rest of us destructive, greed of the Wall Street masters of the universe, annexing billions of dollars to themselves by dubious means, is good not just because it is inescapable: it is inescapable

52. His thesis is accessibly summarized in his essay “The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality”. 53. Mele expressed this concern in an interview published by the press office of his university, Florida State University (Elish, “Do We Have Free Will?”) after the $4.4 million grant was announced. 54. Vohs & Schooler, “The Value in Believing in Free Will”. In all fairness, it should be pointed out that others have drawn different conclusions. 55. Brooks, “Human Nature Redux”, quoted in de Waal, “How Bad Biology Killed the Economy”. Unfortunately de Waal, a leading primatologist, believes that we ought to appeal to good biology in order to see the ethical essence of human beings and draws our attention to the nice behaviour of primate ancestors. For a critique, see my “Biological Reasons for Being Cheerful”. 56. Scull, “Mind, Brain, Law and Culture”, 587.

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– written into the genetic script we enact – because it is good (for the genes of the greedy organism). Some writers, such as the primatologist Frans de Waal have suggested that biology brings a more reassuring message; there is evidence that, for example, empathy is an ancient trait present in many other primates and civilized behaviour is not therefore as fragile as we might fear. He is, however, in the minority. The idea that less separates us from animals than we think leads naturally to the sinister notion that there is more of the animal in some people than others. Darwinitic contempt for mankind is often (unnaturally) selective, as Kemp has described so well.57 The theory that badly behaved humans are closer to “animals” formed the basis of nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s massively influential Criminal Man,58 which identified the morphological stigmata of people with criminal tendencies. Degeneration was a regression to those earlier states of existence that were still embedded within humans, and criminals could be identified by means of morphological signs that aligned them with animals. The criminal was an “atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals”,59 distinguished by an enlarged “median occipital fossa” required to house an enlarged vermis that “almost formed a small, intermediate cerebellum like that found in the lower types of apes, rodents and birds”.60 (Here is an interesting anticipation of contemporary neuro-lawyers, who argue that criminals are not ethically accountable for their crimes because they have an imbalance between the “higher” frontal cortex and the lower “amygdala”.) Prostitutes – whom Lombroso fantasized were sexually voracious – were also studied for signs of their unevolved animality, since to surrender to excessive sexual desire was to give way to animal tendencies. He was thrilled when he observed that the morphology of prostitutes was yet more abnormal than that of criminals: they even had prehensile feet like apes. The ghastly consequences of this kind of thinking hardly need spelling out: degenerate human beings, with the unfiltered appetites of beasts, should be treated like beasts and if they are kept in dreadful conditions this is entirely appropriate, since they do not have the sensibilities of their fellow non-degenerate humans. In his essay on Zeki and Goodenough’s Law and

57. 58. 59. 60.

Kemp, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. See Lombroso-Ferrera, Criminal Man. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., 6.

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the Brain, Scull links the biologizing of humanity with nineteenth-century views about the physiological basis for the intellectual inferiority of women and the reasons why they should not be educated, join the professions or assume a greater role in public affairs, and about the case for sterilizing “moral degenerates” such as people with epilepsy.61 There is a contemporary reference here. Singer has argued that a human life is worth only a little more than an animal’s existence because we have only a slightly higher level of sentience. We should therefore treat sentient animals as we would a mentally handicapped human being. From this it would follow that we should treat a mentally handicapped human being as we would an animal.62 Recent, and not-so-recent, history, therefore, has afforded us many reasons for not being at all confident that biological science will encourage us to care for each other better, and that shaping the programmes in the brain rather than deploying reason or reasonableness as the point at which policies should be applied will result in kinder or more effective policies. The return of political scientism, particularly of a biological variety, should strike a chill in the heart. The twentieth century demonstrated how quickly social policies based in pseudo-science, which bypassed the individual as an independent centre of action and judgement but simply saw humanity as a substrate to be shaped by appropriate technologies, led to catastrophe. Unfortunately, historical examples may not be successful in dissuading the bioengineers of the human soul because it will be argued that this time the intentions are better and consequently the results will be less disastrous. Many reject the expectation that the very process of seeing human life in Darwinian terms may make us behave worse to each other. Dawkins dismissed the argument that if you “[t]each children that they are animals … they’ll behave like animals” as an example of shooting the messenger.63 You may not like the truth about humanity but this is how things are: we must not confuse what is true with what is palatable. Yes, the picture of ourselves that comes from the assumption that we are our brains, and our brains are evolved organs, may not be a very pretty one. It may give little grounds for hope, leading us to think that what civilization we have is an unexplained miracle created and sustained in the teeth of our own nature. The idea of progress is laughable and the prospects for the future are bleak. The war of all against all is a more accurate reflection of the nature of 61. Scull, “Mind, Brain, Law and Culture”. 62. See Appleton, “Speciesism”. 63. Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, 402.

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Homo rapiens than is a democracy informed by justice, a concern for the welfare of others and joy in the arts. But that’s life: anyone who is interested in understanding human beings must be prepared to face some nasty truths. So get over it. This principle at least is sound, and I am in agreement with Wallace: As an old philosophy lecturer once told us as fresh-eyed undergraduates in our first years at University: if something has been proven to be true, you just have to accept it, whether you like its implications or not. “It makes me feel bad, therefore it’s false” is not an argument.64 Notwithstanding that the Darwinitic vision of ourselves is deeply unwelcome, as is the underlying notion that we are merely lumps of the material world, this does not count as evidence against it. After all, nothing could be more unpalatable or more certainly true than that we die and many of us do not see this as proof that we are really immortal in some other guise. Fortunately, we don’t have to be either dishonest or muddled or selfdeceived to challenge the biologistic picture of humanity. Our questioning must begin with a critical look at the assumption that consciousness is identical with brain activity so that the observations made by neuroscientists are casting light on the very nature of the human mind. This is the first step in demonstrating that neuro-evolutionary thought is a castle built on sand. I shall begin with a brief examination of empirical claims about what has been achieved so far in the neuroscience of consciousness, and what is likely to be achieved in future. This will be followed by a more detailed critique of the essentially metaphysical assumption that, in looking at neural activity, we are looking at human consciousness. In the first part of my enquiry, I shall focus on fMRI, as this is the technique that has attracted the greatest interest and prompted the most extravagant claims.

64. Wallace, Getting Darwin Wrong, 4.

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CHAPTER THREE

Neuromania: A Castle Built on Sand

BOLD CLAIMS

[Neuro-talk] is often accompanied by a picture of a brain scan, that fast-acting solvent of critical faculties.1 It is surprising that the world has not wearied of stories of findings by neuroscientists that are supposed to cast light on our true nature. Popular articles – which are often heavily dependent on press releases provided by the public relations departments of grant-hungry laboratories – are usually accompanied, as we have noted, by a brain scan. These are seen as visible proof that those clever boffins have discovered the neural basis of love (maternal, romantic, unconditional), altruism, a propensity to incur toxic debts and so on. And that’s just for starters. The sociologist Scott Vrecko has listed neurobiological accounts of (take a deep breath) in alphabetical order: altruism, borderline personality disorder, criminal behaviour, decision-making, empathy, fear, gut feelings, hope, impulsivity, judgement, love (see above for varieties of ), motivation, neuroticism, problem gambling, racial bias, suicide, trust, violence, wisdom and zeal (religious).2 The extent of neuromanic imperialism is astounding. Before we examine the shaky general foundations of these claims, I cannot resist sharing some of my favourite examples with you, which you may wish to examine in

1. Crawford, “The Limits of Neuro-Talk”, 65. 2. Vrecko, “Neuroscience, Power and Culture”.

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more detail by looking at the original papers. They concern love, beauty and wisdom. According to the neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, the truest form of love – truer than the interested love of those who hope to gain from their object, truer than maternal love, or truer even than romantic love – is the love that low-paid care assistants looking after people with learning disability feel for their charges. In a study entitled “The Neural Basis of Unconditional Love”,3 care assistants were invited to look at pictures of people with intellectual disabilities first neutrally and then with a feeling of unconditional love. By subtracting the brain activity seen in the first situation from that seen in the second, the authors pinned down the neural network housing unconditional love. It was distinct from that which had previously been identified for romantic love and maternal love – although there was some overlap – and it included parts of the brain’s “reward” system. This, Beauregard has argued, may be the link between reward and strong emotional links which (guess what?) “may contribute to the survival of the human species”.4 Thus love (unconditional).5 Next, beauty (aesthetic). You and I may feel that the impact on us of a work of art is deeply mysterious. Zeki and Hideaki Kawabata do not agree. A few years ago they reported that they had found the locus of our experience of the beauty of art.6 Their experimental design was marginally more sophisticated than the one that Beauregard used to peer into the souls of low-paid care workers. Subjects were scanned as they looked at pictures they had previously classified as “beautiful”, “neutral” or “ugly”. Their orbito-frontal cortex was more active when they were looking at beautiful pictures. Voilà! The beauty spot. Neuroscientists have also identified neural correlates of trust and of admiration but the big one, surely, must be the neural basis of wisdom and this, too, has revealed itself to the neuroscientific gaze. “Scientists use brain scans to find the secret of what makes us wise”, Jonathan Leake reported in the Sunday Times newspaper. They did this by “pinpointing parts of the

3. Beauregard et al., “The Neural Basis of Unconditional Love”. 4. Ibid., 96. 5. Whether unconditional love is what low-paid care workers feel is not at all clear. Because they do it for less money may not mean that they do it for more love. They may be able to find no better-paid employment. At any rate, I would be surprised if the ideal of unconditional love would survive the removal of the salary as a condition of caring. 6. Zeki & Kawabata, “Neural Correlates of Beauty”.

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brain that guide us when we face difficult moral dilemmas”.7 This was the journalist’s take on an article published by Dilip Jeste and Thomas Meeks.8 The authors seemed a little more circumspect, noting that: the prefrontal cortex figures prominently in several wisdom subcomponents (e.g. emotional regulation, decision making, value relativism) primarily via top-down regulation of the limbic and striatal regions. The lateral prefrontal cortex facilitates calculated, reason-based decision making, whereas the medial prefrontal cortex is implicated in emotional valence and prosocial attitudes/behaviours. Reward neurocircuitry (ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens) also appears important for promoting prosocial attitudes/behaviours.9 This observation enabled them to construct a “speculative model of the neurobiology of wisdom”. It involves a large number of brain pathways but the key is an “optimal balance between functions of phylogenetically more primitive brain regions (limbic system) and newer ones (prefrontal cortex)”.10 Following a familiar pattern, the “speculative” model was translated by journalists, with the help of a press release from the laboratory and rather optimistic interviews with the scientists, to an article headlined: “Found: The Brain’s Centre of Wisdom”. The tentative complex model in the original article was simplified to a matter of balance between “anterior cingulate cortex, linked with emotions” and the “prefrontal cortex”, which “governs conscious thought”. But we should not blame the journalists: they are not the only source of hype and journalism. “Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms in the brain”, Jeste said in an interview “could potentially lead to developing interventions for enhancing wisdom”.11 It is easy to mock such BOLD aims. They seem like brochures from the Grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels. But we need also to specify what is wrong with them and why we should dismiss them as manifestations of what the professor of psychiatry William Uttal has termed “neo-phrenology”: a recurrence of the claims of the eighteenth-century

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Leake, “Found: The Brain’s Centre of Wisdom”. Jeste & Meeks, “Neurobiology of Wisdom”. Ibid., 355. Ibid. Leake, “Found: The Brain’s Centre of Wisdom”.

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phrenologists we described in Chapter 1. They have two kinds of flaws. The first are technical: the limitations of fMRI, the design of the studies that use it and the way data are analysed. I shall discuss them in this section. Much more important, however, are flaws arising from conceptual errors, and I shall address these in the next section. The first thing to remember when you come across headlines such as “Found: The Brain’s Centre of Wisdom” is that fMRI scanning doesn’t directly tap into brain activity. As you may recall from “You are your brain” in Chapter 1, fMRI registers it only indirectly by detecting the increases in blood flow needed to deliver additional oxygen to busy neurons. Given that neuronal activity lasts milliseconds, while detected changes in blood flow lag by 2–10 seconds, it is possible that the blood flow changes may be providing oxygen to more than one set of neuronal discharges. What is more, many millions of neurons have to be activated for a change in blood flow to be detected. Small groups of neurons whose activity elicits little change in blood flow, or a modest network of neurons linking large regions, or neurons acting more efficiently than others, may be of great importance but would be under-represented in the scan or not represented at all. In short, pretty well everything relevant to a given response at a given time might be invisible on an fMRI scan. And then there is the almost laughable crudity of the design of the experiments that are used to support the conclusion that “This bit of the brain houses that bit of us”. They are mind-numbingly simplistic. We have already seen this in the case of studies looking for the “unconditional love spot” or the “beauty spot” or “the wisdom circuits”. In a typical experiment, subjects are exposed to different stimuli, or asked to imagine certain scenarios, and the change in brain activity is recorded. Let me illustrate this with another example: the work of Andreas Bartels and Zeki on love (romantic).12 In these studies, they asked their subjects to look at a photograph of the face of someone with whom they were deeply in love and then at photographs of three friends. By subtracting the activity of the brain recorded when the subjects looked at their friends from that which was seen when they looked at their lovers, they claimed to be able to demonstrate the distinctive brain activity associated with love (romantic). On the basis of these experiments, Bartels and Zeki concluded that love (romantic) was due to activity in a highly restricted area of the brain: “in the medial insula

12. Bartels & Zeki, “The Neural Basis of Romantic Love”.

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and the anterior cingulate cortex and, subcortically, in the caudate nucleus and the putamen, all bilaterally”. This caused them to wonder that “the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through a limited expanse of the cortex”.13 I too feel wonder but for different reasons. How could anyone fail to see the fallacies in the experimental design? What fallacies, you might ask. First, when it is stated that a particular part of the brain lights up in response to a particular stimulus, this is not the whole story. Much more of the brain is already active or lit up; all that can be observed is the additional activity associated with the stimulus. Minor changes noted diffusely are overlooked. Second, the additional activity can be identified only by a process of averaging the results of subtractions after the stimulus has been given repeatedly; variations in the response to successive stimuli are ironed out. The raw data tell a very different story from the cooked. If, to take a much simpler example, you offer a series of subjects the same spatial memory task, you will see enormous differences in the many areas that light up. Even simple actions are associated with highly variable responses. Jian Kong and colleagues found that when subjects were engaged in six sessions of a finger-tapping test, the test–retest correlation ranged between 0.76 and zero for the areas that showed significant activity in all sessions.14 For most of us, finger-tapping is less, rather than more, complex that being in love. Which brings me to the third problem. The experiments looked at the response to very simple stimuli: for example, a picture of the face of a loved one compared with that of the face of one who is not loved. But as anyone knows who has been in love – indeed anyone who is not a Martian – love is not like a response to a simple stimulus such as a picture. It is not even a single enduring state, like being cold. It encompasses many things, including: not feeling in love at that moment; hunger; indifference; delight; wanting to be kind; wanting to impress; worrying over the logistics of meetings; lust; awe; surprise; joy; guilt; anger; jealousy; imagining conversations or events; speculating what the loved one is doing when one is not there; and so on. Likewise – to refer back to Beauregard’s study on what he calls “unconditional love” – no one who has cared for someone with learning disability could see that reduced to a surge of emotion. That would hardly be sufficient even to support a surge of sentimentality at the idea of looking after

13. Ibid., 3833. 14. Kong et al., “Test–Retest Study of fMRI Signal Change”.

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someone who has special needs, never mind the 24/7 grind of actual handson care. (It is reassuring, perhaps, that only three out of the seven areas that Beauregard has reported as lighting up when carers looked at pictures of their potential charges coincided with those seen when romantic lovers looked at a picture of their beloved. If all seven had lit up, one might see recommendations for even more arduous Criminal Record Bureau checks.) The same Martian tendency is evident in studies of the neurology of economic behaviour and, in particular, highly topical studies of the tendency to make unwise financial decisions. As we shall discuss in Chapter 8, neuro-economic researchers have determined that the reason sub-prime mortgages are so seductive, although the financial terms are so disadvantageous, is that they take advantage of our muddled brains. According to Samuel McClure and colleagues15 there are separate “value” systems in the brain. How did they come to this conclusion? By looking at brain activity in individuals who were asked to choose between lesser but more immediate rewards and rewards that were greater but delayed. They demonstrated to their own satisfaction that the limbic system placed special weight on immediate rewards (even if they were smaller than delayed rewards), while the frontal lobes placed more weight on delayed rewards, if they were greater than immediate ones: choosing two jars of jam tomorrow over one today. Sub-prime mortgages typically start with a very low interest rate, fixed for a couple of years, followed by a much higher (above the usual market) rate for the next quarter of a century or so. The first stage of the mortgage – in particular its immediate availability – appeals to the limbic cortex, while the second, much longer, stage should put off the frontal lobes. Unfortunately, in this competition within the brain the limbic circuit wins, because it houses automatic reward-seeking behaviour, which reflects evolutionary adaptations to those remote environments in which the human brain evolved as opposed to “the more recently evolved, uniquely human capacity for abstract … reasoning and future planning”.16 As neuro-economist George Loewenstein (a collaborator on the McClure paper) has argued: Our emotions are like programs that evolved to make important and recurring decisions in our distant past. They are not always well suited to the decisions we make in modern life. It’s

15. McClure et al. “Separate Neural Systems”. 16. Ibid., 506.

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important to know how our emotions lead us astray so that we can design incentives and programs to help compensate for our irrational biases.17 The purchaser of “Chez Nous” is little different from Pleistocene man chasing a mammoth or, perhaps, requisitioning a cave with an en-suite midden. As we shall see in “Neural political economics” in Chapter 8, this is but one of a whole raft of similar studies in neuro-economics. For the present, we note that only a behavioural economist would look to the fixed structures of the brain to explain a relatively new phenomenon such as the ready availability of mortgages to people who can’t afford to pay them back. Its actual origins lie in a change of social attitudes towards debt, alterations in the financial regulatory system and political initiatives that began in the post-Pleistocene Jimmy Carter era. Only a behavioural economist would regard responses to a simple imaginary choice (between two relatively small sums of money – $5 and $40 offered immediately or in six weeks) as an adequate model for the complex business of securing a mortgage. Even the most foolish and “impulsive” mortgage decision requires an enormous amount of future planning, persistence, clerical activity, to-ing and fro-ing, and a clear determination to sustain you through the million little steps it involves. I would love to meet the limbic circuit that could drive all that. The risible simplification of human behaviour seen in the studies of love, beauty, wisdom and (in the case of sub-prime mortgages) stupidity, reflected in their crude experimental design (which treats individuals as passive respondents to stimuli and then discovers that they are passive respondents to stimuli), is not the only empirical reason for treating fMRI with suspicion. A paper published a few years ago reported an extensive overlap between the neural circuits registering physical pain and those implicated in social pain; both pains seemed to “light up” the same areas.18 The authors (as have many others) have taken this as evidence that that the two are essentially the same, and have treated it as a great neuroevolutionary discovery. For social animals like humans, so the story goes, the need for solidarity is served by making social exclusion painful and this requirement is met by employing circuitry that has already developed to

17. Quoted in Lehrer, “The Psychology of Subprime Mortgages”. 18. Eisenberger et al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”

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register ordinary, physical pain. A more plausible interpretation, however, is that the failure to demonstrate fundamental differences between what you feel when you stub your toe and your feelings when you are blackballed by a club from which you are seeking membership is a measure of the limitations of fMRI scanning and, indeed, other modes of brain scanning. I am not alone in questioning the validity of an approach that identifies activity in certain parts of the brain with aspects of the human psyche. In a controversial, but to me compelling, paper published in 2009 (originally provocatively entitled “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience”), the authors found serious problems with the localisations observed in such studies.19 The authors concluded that “in most of the studies that linked brain regions to feelings including social rejection, neuroticism and jealousy, researchers … used a method that inflates the strength of the link between a brain region and the emotion or behaviour”.20 One of the authors, Harold Pashler, is an experimental psychologist of the utmost distinction. He is the editor-in-chief of the major textbook of experimental psychology. The papers examined in the review had been published in top-rank journals, including Science, which is regarded as one of the two leading scientific publications in the world, the other being Nature. The authors observed that “a disturbingly large and quite prominent segment of fMRI scan research on emotion, personality and social cognition is using seriously defective research methods and producing a profusion of numbers that should not be believed”.21 So what problem had Pashler and his colleagues identified? They looked at the statistical methods used to derive correlations between activity in the brain and emotional states and found that the instruments used pretty well guaranteed high correlations between the variables observed. That such an elementary error should be allowed to pass on the nod is a measure of how the glamour of high science can disarm the most acute minds. Pashler and colleagues suggest that “the questionable analysis methods are also used in other fields where fMRI is used to study individual differences, such as cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuroscience and neurogenetics”.22 I first got wind of this article when New Scientist published a mea culpa editorial in 2009 about its own coverage of “breakthroughs” in understanding

19. 20. 21. 22.

Vul et al., “Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies”. Ibid., 285. Ibid. Ibid.

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human beings arising from fMRI studies: “Some of the resulting headlines appeared in New Scientist, so we have to eat a little humble pie and resolve that the next time a sexy-sounding brain scan result appears we will strive to apply a little more scepticism to our coverage”.23 And a more recent, admirably painstaking, review concludes that “the reliability of fMRI scanning is not high compared to other scientific measures”;24 moreover, there is no agreement as to what would count as a measure of reliability; and, finally, reliability is even worse in studies of higher cognitive tasks (experiencing beauty, deploying wisdom, being stupid) than in the case of simple motor or sensory tasks – in short, in the case of those papers that have made the popular press go pop-eyed with excitement. The allocation of human faculties and sentiments to different parts of the brain is also being increasingly undermined by evidence that even the simplest of tasks – never mind negotiating a way through the world, deciding to go for a mortgage or resolving to behave sensibly – require the brain to function as an integrated unit. As David Dobbs has pointed out, fMRI scanning “overlooks the networked or distributed nature of the brain’s workings, emphasising localized activity when it is communication among regions that is most critical to mental function”.25 I shall return to this in a moment. Although the spatial resolution of scanners is improving all the time, increasing the resolution does not solve the problems we have discussed. Normally fMRI scanning looks at cubes of tissue – three-dimensional pixels (called “voxels”) – each of which comprises hundreds of thousands of neurons. It is now possible to examine fine-grained patterns within voxels. Rees has used this technique to examine aspects of visual perception. You might recall from Chapter 1 that Hubel and Wiesel found certain cells in the visual cortex responding preferentially to lines presented at a certain orientation. By studying the fine grain of the fMRI in this area when subjects are looking at lines with different orientations, Rees and colleagues were able to infer the orientation of the presented line with 85 per cent accuracy: in other words, they were able to work out what the subject was looking at.26 This, however, is a far cry from examining the experience of an entire object, of an entire scene, of a changing scene, or of the changing

23. 24. 25. 26.

New Scientist, “What Were the Neuroscientists Thinking?” Bennett & Miller, “How Reliable are the Results?”. Dobbs, “Fact or Phrenology?”, 24. Haynes & Rees, “Predicting the Orientation of Invisible Stimuli”.

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meaning of a scene, never mind complex segments of people’s lives as when, for example, they decide to take on a mortgage or fall in love. The claim that it is possible to look at a single fMRI image and see what the person is seeing, never mind what they are feeling, and how it fits into their day, or their life, is grossly overstating what can be achieved. Ordinary consciousness and ordinary life lie beyond the reach of imaging technologies, except in the imagination of neuromaniacs. The technical limitations of fMRI are compounded by conceptual limitations. Some of these are so fundamental that they are properly the object of philosophical treatment and I shall address them in the next section. Others, however, relate to the neuroscientific framework. The reader will recall the centuries-long debate, discussed in “You are your brain” in Chapter 1, about the modularity of the brain, triggered by the phrenologists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The same debate is hotting up again. You have only to read a few papers on the correlation between this function (e.g. mortgage-buying) and that structure in the brain (e.g. the frontal lobes) to start to notice that certain parts of the cortex appear again and again, serving quite disparate functions. You could be forgiven for thinking of the brain as being managed by a crooked estate agent letting out the same bit of real estate simultaneously to different clients. What is more, not only do certain brain regions serve multiple cognitive functions, but the same cognitive functions may activate the different regions of the brain. Not that this is surprising, given that the brain, ultimately, must work as a whole. Love (romantic), for example, involves a multitude of things: emotions, intentions, the motor activity necessary to buy flowers or to make a pass, and the long narrative with one’s self and real and imaginary conversations with the object of one’s affection. The point is this: the more you think about the idea that human life can be parcelled out into discrete functions that are allocated to their own bits of the brain, the more absurd it seems. And it seems even more absurd in the light of what is accepted about something as seemingly simple as individual memories. According to Antonio Damasio: The brain forms memories in a highly distributed manner. Take, for instance, the memory of a hammer. There is no single place in our brain where you can hold the record for a hammer … there are several records in our brain that correspond to different aspects of our past interaction with hammers … and 82

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all … based on separate neural sites located in separate neural regions.27 Even more telling is the observation made by Marcus Raichle and collaborators. They used another form of imaging called positron emission tomography (PET) scanning and found that learning something as elementary as the association of a word such as “chair” with “sits” involved not only the language centre in the left hemisphere but extensive stretches of the so-called “silent” areas of the frontal lobes and the parietal cortex.28 What hope is there, then, of locating something as global and untidy as my love for someone in a neatly demarcated area of the brain? None, I am pleased to conclude. Observations of this kind have led some scientists, such as Karl Friston (who played a key role in developing neuroimaging techniques), to suggest that “the brain acts more as if the arrival of … inputs provokes a widespread disturbance in some already existing state”, rather as happens when a pebble is dropped in a pond.29 So we need to take the reports about “beauty spots” and “centres for unconditional love” from “leading” scientists with more than a pinch of salt. Neuroscientists who think they have found the circuits in the brain corresponding to wisdom seem to lack that very quality, as a result of which they are oblivious even to what the more critical minds in their own discipline are saying. The current technical limitations of neuroimaging do not, however, support a principled objection to the idea that we can directly observe human consciousness – our experiences, motivations, intentions, emotions and propensities – in the brain. After all, some will argue, most imaging techniques are only a few decades old and they are improving rapidly. Soon we shall be able to track what is happening in the brain of waking, living subjects like ourselves, with a spatial and temporal resolution that will enable us to see precisely which neurons are firing, when and in response to what. Zeki and Goodenough anticipate the coming of “extremely high resolution scanners that can simultaneously track the neural activity and connectivity of every neuron in the human brain, along with computers

27. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, excerpted in Harvey Wood & Byatt, Memory: An Anthology, 282. 28. Raichle et al., “Practice Related Changes in Human Brain Function Anatomy”. 29. Quoted in Le Fanu’s profound Why Us?, 195.

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and software that can analyse and organise these data”.30 Leaving aside the question of how the computers could be programmed to oversee the infinite number of combinations of the activity of a brain with a trillion neurons and more potential connections than there are atoms in the universe, might it not be possible, although it may be difficult to imagine, to pick out the subsets of activity relevant to individual thoughts, or sharply define the boundaries of neural excitement implicated in particular feelings, or identify the particular weighting of different locations in the brain in determining character traits? Let us suppose there were no limit to the precision of imaging. Let us suppose also that the kinds of localizations seen on fMRI scans, which have caused so much excitement, were robust. And let us suppose that the separate psychological states or functions to which the brain activity is supposed to correspond are real entities rather than ad hoc constructions. And let us, finally, suppose that we have explained how that which has been teased apart comes together in the conscious moment: something to which we shall return below, in “Brain science and human consciousness, II”. What, then, would fMRI tell us? If we could obtain a complete record of all neural activity, and we were able to see the firing state of every individual neuron, would this advance our understanding in the slightest? Would the record of neural activity be as useless at telling us what it is like to be conscious as a complete print out of his genome at telling you what it is like to be with your friend? Would (human) consciousness be – to use Dennett’s boastful term – “explained”? Would we be able directly to observe human consciousness and find out what is “really” going on when we experience the world, judge it and act upon it? For this to be the case, one thing at least would be necessary: we would have to be sure that the neural activity we observed was in some strict sense identical with consciousness. Does the new neuroscience allow us to make that assumption and accept Hippocrates’ conjecture as proved beyond reasonable doubt? To answer this question we need to move on from the technical limits and methodological muddles of scan-based cognitive neuroscience to the conceptual, indeed philosophical, problems that Neuromania ignores.

30. Zeki & Goodenough, Law and the Brain, 218.

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THE LEAP FROM NEUROSCIENCE TO METAPHYSICS

I am now going to argue that neuroscience does not address, even less answer, the fundamental question of the relation(s) between matter and mind, body and mind, or brain and mind. If it seems to do so this is only the result of a confusion between, indeed a conflation of, three quite different relations: correlation, causation and identity. Consider the research we have been discussing, based on fMRI. Typically, brain scanning reveals (rather wobbly and definitely loose, as we have seen) correlations between (say) the experience of seeing some item such as a loved one’s face and activity in some part or other of the nervous system. Does this mean that what we see on the brain scan is either the cause of the experience or even identical with it? No, because a correlation is not a cause: even less is it an identity. Seeing correlations between event A (neural activity) and event B (say, reported experience) is not the same as seeing event B when you are seeing event A. Neuromaniacs, however, argue, or rather assume, that the close correlation between events A and B means that they are essentially the same thing. The most obvious trouble with the view that neural activity on the one hand, and experiences on the other, are the same thing is that they should appear like one another. But nothing could be further from the truth. The colour yellow, or more precisely the experience of the colour yellow, and neural activity in the relevant part of the visual cortex, however it is presented, look not in the slightest bit similar. There is nothing yellow about the nerve impulses and nothing nerve-impulse-like about yellow. If, however, they were the same thing, the least one might expect is that they would appear as if they were the same thing. Surely, it is not too much to expect that something should look like itself. As it is, nerve impulses seem required to have two sets of appearances at the same time that are profoundly different from one another: an appearance as electrochemical activity (of which more below in “Why there can never be a brain science of consciousness”) and an appearance as an experience – of something other than themselves, such as the colour yellow belonging to an object. The more philosophically astute neuromaniacs are not, of course, unaware of this difficulty and have found different ways of getting round it. The most popular tactic, and prima facie the most plausible, is to assert that experiences (such as the colour yellow) and the neural activity seen in the visual cortex in association with that experience are two aspects of the same item. This is the so-called “double-aspect” theory. While there is only 85

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one set of events – what we see in the brain – these events have two sides: a neural side and an experiential side. There are many objections to this ploy. The first becomes apparent when we ask what is meant by “aspects” or “sides”. We know what it is like for an object, such as a house, to have one aspect when it is looked at from behind and another aspect when it is looked at from the front. But we cannot imagine any kind of entity that has an experiential (or mental) front end and a neural (or material) back end. The same objection applies if, instead of “front” and “back”, we speak of “top” and “bottom” or “inside” and “outside”. We could summarize the failure of the double-aspect theory by saying that the difference between different aspects of a house – between the front and the back – is nothing like the difference between a material event such as a discharge of nerve impulses and a conscious event such as having the experience of yellow. What is more, the notion of two aspects of a house presupposes observers who see the house from different angles. The house does not, in or of itself, have two aspects or indeed any aspects. This touches on the most profound problem with the assumption of identity between neural activity and consciousness, and we shall return to this below in “Why there can never be a brain science of consciousness”. For the present, it is necessary only to note that we cannot invoke (implicitly conscious) observers to generate the two aspects of the events detected by neuroimaging – the neural activity and the experience – in order to explain how (material) neural activity is also (conscious) experience. To invoke doubled aspects is to cheat: it smuggles consciousness in to explain how it is that neural activity, which does not look like experience, actually is such experience. This is a point that is overlooked even by the most thoughtful and sensible philosophers, for example John Searle, the scourge of much sloppy thinking in this area. Searle has his own version of the dual-aspect theory.31 Water, he says, is identical with H2O molecules and yet they appear quite different. H2O molecules are not shiny and slippery like water. And this is how it is, he says, with neural activity and consciousness: consciousness is made up of experiences, such as that of yellow, which are nothing like nerve impulses but are nonetheless the same as nerve impulses. Stripped to its bare bones, Searle offers us an analogy:

31. Searle, Intentionality.

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Water is to H2O molecules as conscious experience is to neural activity. Or

Water : H2O :: conscious experience : neural activity

In both cases, he argues, the large-scale phenomena (consciousness, drops of water) are identical with the small-scale phenomena (nerve impulses, molecules of H2O.) This analogy is false. The reason it does not hold up is the reason we gave just now for the failure of all double-aspect theories: both shiny water and H2O molecules require observation in order to be revealed as one or the other. They correspond to two different modes of observation: one by our ordinary unenhanced senses (introspecting experience, sensing water); the other by means of complex equipment and representations and interpretations that render H2O molecules “visible” and brain activity recordable. The two aspects of water are two appearances, two modes of experiencing it, and this hardly applies to neural activity as electrochemical activity and as experience. Searle’s error is interesting, not just because it is perpetrated by a philosopher who thinks hard, writes lucidly and does not lose sight of common sense (something, by the way, for which he has been criticized), but because he compounds it in a particularly revealing way. He argues that molecules of H2O, as revealed through science, and water as we directly experience it are not only the same thing but that they stand in a causal relation to one another, and this is how it is with nerve impulses, which have the same kind of causal relation to conscious experiences. The molecules of H2O, he says, cause the appearances that we associate with water as we encounter it in our everyday lives; and, likewise, nerve impulses cause conscious experiences. This is, of course, incompatible with the notion that they are the same thing. We cannot say that A is the same as B and that A causes B, because cause and effect are, by definition, different items; and so, too, are the molecular and macroscopic appearances of water, respectively. (The only item I can think of as being the cause of itself is the God of monotheistic religions.) Nor can we see one aspect of an object causing another aspect: they are present, simultaneously, side by side, so one cannot be the product of another. The inside of a house cannot be caused by the outside any more than the latter can be caused by the former. Both, of course, require another cause: observers who see the house from different angles. When a philosopher as gifted as Searle makes such an elementary mistake, it must be because he is in the grip of an intuition that is hidden from him, although it is directing his thought. The intuition is worth exploring because 87

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doing so should help to pre-empt its casting its spell on us. Searle thinks that H2O molecules cause the experience of dampness and shininess because he thinks of the dampness and so on as the macroscopic appearance of large aggregations of molecules. This is wrong for the reason we have already pointed out; namely that H2O molecules – as an array of triplets of atoms – are already themselves a kind of appearance, although one that is mediated by scientific instruments and measurements and theories in the way that the shininess of a pool of water is not. If we deny that the individual molecules have an appearance at all – arguing that they are simply inferred from measurements, for example – then we arrive at an interesting result. Water, as we see it in everyday life outside the laboratory, is the appearance of large quantities of something – molecules of H2O – that do not have an appearance in everyday life. Their representations in physics are a borrowed appearance. If this is accepted then we have to ask this question: what it is that gives the molecules an appearance at all? The answer to this will be the same as the answer to the question as to what it is that brings microscopic molecules together into a macroscopic patch or stretch of water of the kind that we see is shiny or feel as damp. And it is, of course, a conscious observer, or conscious “experiencer”. The water looks as it does – indeed has a look – because someone is conscious of it. What Searle has done is to move the relation between the water and a creature such as a human being aware of it into a causal relation between (a) what water is reduced to in the eyes of physical science – molecules of H2O – and (b) an appearance that it supposedly has in itself. This enables him, without being fully aware of it, to smuggle in the consciousness he needs in order to get from nerve impulses to experiences and hence to make nerve impulses plausible as the basis for experience. While molecules of H2O are of course necessary for the experience of the shiny stuff that is water, they do not of themselves create that experience. They are necessary but not sufficient. The shiny appearance, the damp or liquid feel, requires in addition a conscious observer. And so, also, does the appearance of water as an array of H2O molecules. What we are referring to when we talk about macroscopic pools of water that are shiny, and molecules that are not, are different ways of experiencing water: the direct, everyday experience and the molecular experience mediated through instruments. The relation between these two ways of appearing cannot be a model of the relation between nerve impulses and appearances, and even less an explanation of how nerve impulses can be both propagated waves of electrochemical activity and, say, the experience of yellow. 88

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Searle, therefore, is not different from many other thinkers of a neurophilosophical persuasion, in taking the correlation between neural activity and reported experience to mean that there is an intimate causal relation between them: nerve impulses cause consciousness. And, like many others, he also believes that nerve impulses (or some of them at any rate) are (identical with) consciousness. What makes his position particularly illuminating is that he holds both of these incorrect, and also incompatible, views at once. It is, however, possible to be a little more choosy and many writers opt for the idea that nerve impulses cause consciousness, period: experiences are distinct from nerve impulses but are the effects of them. Although this view runs at once into insuperable difficulties, to which I shall return, it is worth reminding ourselves why it seems so attractive. I flash a light into your eye while I record activity in the visual cortex using my latest scanner. Following the flash I see a burst of impulses passing up the optic nerve and into the cortex. At some point, as this burst is spreading across your cortex, you report an experience of a flash of light. I note also a close association between the intensity of the light to which you are exposed, the amount of activity in the relevant neurons and the reported intensity of your experience. This seems to demonstrate beyond doubt that the light causes the nerve impulses and the nerve impulses cause the experience of light; in short that the nerve impulses are the means by which light energy is changed into experience of light energy. Two other kinds of observation, to which I have already referred, seem to place this conclusion beyond doubt. First, it is possible to prevent the experience by various means. If I interpose a screen between your eyes and the source of the light, blindfold your eyes or damage the pathways taken by the nerve impulses into the brain and within it then you do not experience the light. This is indirect evidence of the causal chain; if the putative causal chain is broken, then the experience is not had. And for some, this is conclusive proof that mind and brain are one. The neuropsychologist Bruce Hood is speaking for most cognitive neuroscientists when he says: “We know that damage to certain parts of the brain produces characteristic changes in the mind. It’s one of the reasons most psychologists are not dualists: they are very familiar with the idea that the mind is a product of the brain.”32 The slither in the logic is plain. We shall return in the last chapter to the (incorrect) notion that the only alternative to accepting that the mind is identical with, or caused by, brain activity is

32. Hood, Supersense, 231.

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dualism. But let us look a bit more closely at the claim that brain-damage studies should oblige us to conclude that “the mind is a product of the brain”. The correct conclusion from the evidence provided by brain damage, or indeed from less dramatic events such as closing your eyes, or covering your ears, or turning your head away, or indeed moving to another place, is that the brain is a necessary condition of experience and a brain in the right place is a necessary condition of experiencing that place. For example, it seems that provoking neural activity in the right place is a necessary condition of experiencing the light. A necessary condition is not, however, a sufficient condition. Now the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions and, indeed, between conditions and causes is very difficult to capture precisely, although it has stimulated a large philosophical literature.33 Let me, however, illustrate the difference with a simple example. In order for me to be knocked down by a bus in London, it is necessary for me to be in London. It is, however, not sufficient; otherwise I would avoid the place more than I do. If, however, nerve impulses in a particular part of the brain were identical with certain experiences then they would not only be a necessary condition but also a sufficient condition. You could not have the experience without the nerve impulses and, more importantly, you could not have the nerve impulses without having the experience. It should not matter how those nerve impulses arise. Now some observations do indeed seem to support the notion that the nerve impulses are a sufficient condition for the experience, and this would be consistent with the impulses being identical with the experiences. Here is an example from my own work as a clinician. For many years, I was responsible for running an electromyography clinic. One of my tasks was to diagnose patients with damage to the peripheral nerves: the ones that go down the limbs to the toes and fingertips. The method consisted of electrically stimulating the nerves near the end of the limb and recording the response higher up, to see how big it was and how fast it travelled. When the nerves were stimulated the patient felt a tingling. This might suggest that nerve activity alone could produce conscious experience. Even more impressive were the testimonies of some of my patients with epilepsy. Epilepsy, you may recall from Chapter 1, is a condition in which there are, from time to time, bursts of highly synchronized

33. This is accessibly summarized in the admirable and admirably generous internet Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: Brennan, “Necessary and Sufficient Conditions”.

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abnormal electrical activity occurring spontaneously in the brain. These cut right across the activity associated with normal function, and their usual effect is to disrupt consciousness (which may be lost or in some other way impaired) or replace voluntary activity with involuntary activity (so that the person falls to the ground, sometimes twitching, or engages in automatic behaviour). Some of my patients, however, had forms of epilepsy affecting the temporal and parietal association areas of the cerebral cortex. These resulted in very complex, formed images or indeed entire scenarios. Sometimes they are prolonged – so-called status epilepticus – and they may be mistaken for dreams. Removing the particular part of the brain affected by the abnormal neural activity gets rid of the hallucinations. Does this not suggest that the stand-alone brain has the wherewithal to generate at least fragments of consciousness on its own: that, in other words, its activity is a sufficient, as well as a necessary, condition of perceptual experiences; that experiences are neural activity? Even more challenging are some observations made by the Canadian neurosurgeon Penfield that I mentioned in “You are your brain” in Chapter 1. Penfield, it will be recalled, pioneered neurosurgical techniques for treating intractable epilepsy by removing foci of irritable tissue in the parts of the brain where the seizures originate. Since it was vital not to cut out structures essential for speech and for other key functions, the operations were carried out in waking patients (the brain itself does not experience pain). Prior to the excision, Penfield mapped the location of different functions in the brain using stimulating electrodes. When he stimulated the temporal lobe and the hippocampus some patients re-experienced fragments of their past. A patient might feel himself eavesdropping on a familiar scene, for example, the voice of someone calling her child, or the arrival of a travelling circus in town.34 This, again, might seem to support the belief that the stand-alone brain could be the basis for complex consciousness. Such observations – and others, for example the hallucinations experienced when the brain is affected by psychoactive drugs – underpin a famous thought experiment, which in turn inspired an even more famous film. The thought experiment was that of “The Brain in the Vat”, proposed by Hilary Putnam and the film was The Matrix, of which I have heard enough to know 34. His findings and the excitement of being present in the operating theatre when he was doing his work are beautifully described in a commemorative article by his very distinguished protégé Brenda Milner: “Wilder Penfield”.

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that I do not want to see it. Putnam’s thought experiment – which was designed in part to refute the idea that “meanings are in the head (or brain)”, something that need not concern us here – went as follows. Since neural activity seems to be sufficient for experience, and it does not seem to matter how the neural activity is triggered, is it not possible that we are deceived as to our true nature? If we were brains suspended in a vat of nutrient liquid, so that they could function adequately, and these brains were stimulated electrically under the guidance of supercomputers, would it not be possible to have the entire range of experiences that we have now? How could we tell that these experiences were not of a real world? Might not a computer regulate the activity of the brain such that I, the brain-owner, might have the impression of being surrounded by a world very like the one in which you and I are currently located? If this were possible, then all sorts of sceptical concerns about the world we are currently experiencing would be justified. Is this world, after all, a mere construct out of nerve impulses?35 This thought experiment is valuable not just for the reason that Putnam introduced it. He wanted to argue that one could not have the thought “I might be a brain in a vat” unless there were external objects such as brains, vats, laboratories and scientists, and so, in short, a real world rather than one that was hallucinated by the brain. Well, I don’t think many of us needed persuading that words would not have meaning if no real referent corresponded to them and there was no world in which we were together with others. In other words, a brain in a vat would require a community of minds in a real outside world for the experiment to be imagined, never mind to be set up. No, it is valuable because it demonstrates the absurdity of moving from the observation that neural activity is correlated with experiences to the conclusion that neural activity is not only a necessary condition of experiences but that it is a sufficient condition of them and may indeed be identical with them. This way lies the madness of concluding that a stand-alone brain could sustain a sense of a world.36 (The tendency to think of the brain as something stand-alone is reinforced by cognitive science, which imagines that what goes on in the brain are “representations” that are uncoupled from the world and are manipulated by the model-making brain.)

35. See Putnam, Reason, Truth and History. 36. Again the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is an excellent guide. See Brueckner, “Brains in a Vat”.

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Be that as it may, neither the experiences of people with epilepsy nor Penfield’s observations justify entertaining the possibility that we might be a brain in a vat or, more to the point, that the stand-alone brain can create a world and that neural activity would be not only a necessary but actually a sufficient condition of consciousness. Take the “memories” reported by Penfield’s patients when they are stimulated (seen, by the way, in only 5 per cent of his subjects and not readily replicated by contemporary surgeons): they are essentially second-hand or recycled memories. No one who had not already had any experiences by the usual route, and had remembered them in the conventional way, would interpret what was happening as a memory, even less as a memory with a particular significance, meaning or reference to something other than themselves. The Penfield phenomena, like the pseudo-experiences of epilepsy, are simply re-activations of real memories of experiences had in the real world: had, by the way, not by an isolated brain but by a person. The electrical activity in the isolated brain appears to have the “aboutness” or intentionality of normal experiences (of which more presently) only because under all other circumstances (when the patient is not having a seizure or undergoing electrical stimulation) the experiences are genuinely of something that is really “out there”, really happening, to a real person. As Sven Pfeiffer has pointed out to me, Penfield’s patients are “awake, conscious and living before and while they are being stimulated”.37 This existential and cognitive background is taken for granted but it undermines the claim that the neural activity in a standalone brain is, or could be, sufficient for consciousness: that brain stimulation is producing genuine stand-alone experience. To look ahead somewhat, it is necessary to appreciate that our ordinary memories, and our ordinary current experiences, make sense because they are part of a world. Yes, we are located in this world in virtue of being embodied and we access it through our brains; but it makes sense to us, as a world, not solely on account of its physical properties but as a network of significances upheld by the community of minds of which we individually are only a part. The brain in the vat thought experiment helps itself free of charge to this world: a world, incidentally, in which, in addition to electrode-induced experiences, there really are material brains, electrodes, vats, scientists and the institutions, practices and know-how that support them. The hallucinations induced in the stand-alone brain by electrical

37. Pfeiffer, pers. comm.

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stimulation or epilepsy also seem to make brain electricity a sufficient condition, or cause, of experience only because they, too, parasitize a real world experienced in the usual way.38 The fact that neural activity is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition of consciousness is consistent with the observation that a person’s behaviour becomes more completely explicable in neurological terms the more damaged they are. A seizure sits more comfortably within the neural model of mind than does living with epilepsy, which requires something to bring it all together. And of the necessity for cerebral activity I have no doubt. My entire career as a doctor with a special interest in neurological diseases such as stroke and epilepsy has been a reminder of the extent to which our functioning as persons is vulnerable to the failures of our body. The distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions is a way of highlighting the fact that, even if the neuroscientific picture were complete, along the lines I have indicated just now, we would not have achieved an explanation of consciousness. Nor should we expect to do so, since neuroscience is itself a late manifestation of consciousness. What is more, as we shall see below in “Why there can never be a brain science of consciousness”, physical science, to which neural impulses ultimately belong, does not have any place for consciously experienced appearances. A neural account of consciousness is a contradiction in terms. We have some way to travel before we arrive at this conclusion. I want first of all to focus on different aspects or layers of human consciousness. I shall begin with sentience – the ground floor of consciousness, and something we may share with beasts – and then I shall examine higherlevel or more organized aspects of consciousness, many of which we most certainly do not share with beasts. The sharpest division between the levels is signalled by the emergence of what I characterize as “full-blown” intentionality, or the “aboutness” of consciousness: something that is at once so simple and yet of such profound importance that it underpins the unique complexity of human life and our distance from all other living creatures.

38. It is a healthy sign that the doctrine of “disjunctivism”, originally proposed by my friend Howard Robinson, is now catching on. According to this doctrine, hallucinations have nothing in common with genuine perceptions apart from the fact that they seem the same to the person experiencing them. Too right.

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BRAIN SCIENCE AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, I: PROBLEMS WITH SENSATIONS

The errors of muddling correlation with causation, necessary condition with sufficient causation, and sufficient causation with identity lie at the heart of the neuromaniac’s basic assumption that consciousness and nerve impulses are one and the same, and that (to echo a commonly used formulation) “the mind is a creation of the brain”. There are, however, many other reasons for rejecting this belief and they apply to several distinct problems relating to physical explanations of consciousness: how matter became or relates to basic sentience; and how it is that certain material objects (such as you and I) are self-aware, how they are a subject of concern for ourselves. I shall begin, as I said, with the ground floor of consciousness: with qualia. Qualia are the very fabric of consciousness: the material of experience, of the “what-it-is-like” feel of mental states. Although experience is gathered up into various kinds of wholes – objects, fields, situations, worlds – it is possible to pick out individual qualia to exemplify the notion. And so, somewhat at random, I pluck out from my rich sensory field the sound of a violin playing, the blackness of the letters growing across the screen, the feeling of pressure on my buttocks, the redness of a hat next to my computer, the sensations associated with a present anxiety. If these components cannot be identified with nerve impulses then no aspect of human consciousness can. So let me set out some of the problems that arise when one tries to identify qualia with nerve impulses. The most fundamental and obvious problem is one that we have touched on already; namely, that nerve impulses are not at all like qualia. Those impulses in the visual cortex do not look like, say, the colour or shape or size of my red hat. We have seen how some philosophers have tried to deal with this by suggesting that what we see on a brain scan or an EEG is only one aspect of the neural activity and that consciousness is another aspect. This does not make the identity between neural activity and conscious experiences any more plausible because the very notion of “aspects” presupposes consciousness: an observer looking at something from a particular angle or in a particular way (as when it is examined through the lens of instruments, concepts and theories). But let us imagine it makes sense to think of a nerve impulse having an appearance in the absence of someone to whom it can appear. How would the intrinsic appearance of the nerve impulse relate to the experiences that it is supposed to embody? Not very well, it would seem. If we think of the nerve impulse as it appears 95

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to the observing neuroscientist, then we are really stumped. You will recall from Chapter 1 that it consists of sodium and other ions fluxing in and out of semi-permeable membranes. These do not seem like anything that is revealed in our ordinary experience of the world. And yet, if Neuromania is correct, they have to be the intermediary through which the world – for example my red hat – is revealed to me. More generally, those sodium and other ionic fluxes have to be the appearance of the world to me. This brings me to another problem. The trigger for the nerve impulses in virtue of which I am supposed to be aware of my red hat is not the hat itself: or not directly anyway. It is light, whose spectral frequency and patterns of distribution have been altered by running into my red hat. The neural activity is a response to this interfered-with light, and from this neural activity I can infer what it was that was interfered with by the light. This reaching back from the light to an object that interfered with it is something I shall come to in the next section when I talk about “intentionality”. For the present, however, let me focus on the light itself. Physics tells us that light is electromagnetic radiation and this does not in itself have a colour or, necessarily, visibility. Yellow-in-itself is not actually yellow; and electromagnetic radiation outside a very narrow bandwidth is actually invisible. Only an appropriately tuned perceiver can confer brightness, colour and beauty on light. Neurophilosophers have to believe that it is in nerve impulses, which have no appearance in themselves, that light energy acquires an appearance. Let us consider something else very elementary: heat. An increase in the rate of jigging of atoms (heat as seen by physicists) is not itself a hotting up: the transformation of jigging into an experience of heat requires something else – again, a conscious subject. A dispassionate examination of nerve impulses would not lead one to the conclusion that they could carry out this miraculous transformation: that they are capable of conferring the appearance of warmth on faster jigging; that electrochemical waves in nerve fibres, despite being items in the material world, are nonetheless able to confer appearance on the environing material world. One way of getting a handle on the difference between nerve impulses and experiences is to try out the following well-known thought experiment. Imagine there was a device called an autocerebroscope that enabled us to see our own neural activity online as it occurs. Supposing I were able to look at the part of the brain where the neural activity corresponding to my seeing my neural activity through the autocerebroscope was happening. I would be seeing the neural activity and at the same time having the 96

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experience of seeing the neural activity. My experience would be that of someone seeing the activity from the outside and yet the activity would simply be itself, not itself seen from the outside. Or the activity would have to be both the experience and the experience of seeing itself from the outside: it would have to be at once subjective experience and an objective experience of the basis of the subjective experience. This would of course be impossible: it has to be one or the other but not both. What’s more, the activity I can see through the autocerebroscope could be seen by someone else, whereas my experiences could be experienced only by me. Clearly an item cannot at the same time be something that can be visible to others as well as myself and something that cannot be experienced by others. At the risk of making you dizzy, let me pursue this a bit further. Someone might object by saying that the nerve impulses I am looking at are not the same as the nerve impulses associated with my seeing the nerve impulses, which is something else that someone might share. Perhaps not: other nerve impulses are involved in my experience of seeing the nerve impulses. This, however, only moves the problem on, because those other impulses are also in principle visible to other people, while the experience they are supposed to be identical with is not. What this illustrates is that there is a gap, which cannot be closed, between experience and that which neuroscience observes; between experiences and nerve impulses. Touché. All right, someone might say, mysterious and even paradoxical though the idea of the neural theory of consciousness might be, this is how things are. Get over it, accept it, believe it. Well, there are other problems that make me disinclined to just “get over it”, most strikingly this one: there is a monotonous similarity about neural activity throughout the cerebral cortex and yet it is supposed to underpin the infinite richness of phenomenal consciousness. How is this possible? There have been two kinds of explanation of how the nervous system creates or reconstructs the variety of the experienced world in the monotonous language of nerve impulses. The first appeals to differences of location in the brain; and the second to patterns of activity. Let’s deal with location first. Neural activity associated with the experience of different colours, or sounds versus colours, or with sense experiences versus memories, is located in different places in the nervous system. Although nerve impulses look the same, they are not the same when they are located in different places. Now, I don’t know how it strikes you, but different locations don’t seem to me to deliver what is needed. Why should the fact that a shower of nerve impulses is located two centimetres from another shower be 97

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sufficient to explain how one is the basis of a sense of disgust when faced with a bad smell and the other the feeling of pleasure given by contemplating that one’s child has got into university. Why does this look even remotely plausible? Is it because we already know that there are certain functions partitioned in the brain: there are sense organs, nerve pathways, and sections of the brain devoted to particular aspects of the experienced world – say sight as opposed to hearing? This makes us inclined to say that the reason that neurons in the ventral visual pathways (interacting with the pre-frontal and parietal cortex) give rise to visual awareness (as opposed to sounds or smells) is because these fibres are ultimately connected to the eyes. This is Müller’s “doctrine of specific energies” that we referred to in “Neuroscience” in Chapter 1. Any stimulus to the eyes results in visual experiences; so I have sensations of light even when I stimulate my retina mechanically by pressing my eyeball, a stimulus unrelated to light. This seemingly common-sense response is actually circular. Or it restates, rather than explains, the problem. The nerve impulses originating from the eyes give rise to visual consciousness because they are linked to central structures associated with visual consciousness and these centres experience visual consciousness because they are linked to the eyes. The fact that neither the light, nor the nerve impulses that are triggered by it, has an intrinsic appearance (of any sort, including that of visible light) shows how empty this circular explanation is. The eyes may respond primarily to light energy but this does not explain how it is that electromagnetic energy is translated into experienced light, into colour and brightness and so on. Different wirings – to the eyes or the ears or the nose – do not explain different experiences, particularly since, whatever energies land on sense endings, they are all translated into the same kind of energy: the electrochemical energy of nerve impulses. While each sense organ may be tuned to a different kind of energy – the eye to electromagnetic radiation and the ear to vibrations in the air – each translates those “specific energies” into the same language of propagated electrochemical disturbances. So much for the appeal to location. Others have suggested that the differences that underpin the difference in experiences are to be found not in individual nerve impulses simply added up but in the hugely varied patterns of neural activity. There is potentially an infinite variety of patterns of nerve impulses: their numbers are not restricted, like the numbers of locations in the nervous system. It is in different patterns that we must find the difference between the experience of the red of a red hat, the experience of the hat as an object, the sense 98

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that to wear it would be a good idea, the emotional investment in the hat, and so on. But this “explanation” fails for the same reason as the supposed explanation by location: why should particular patterns correspond to experiences of material events – such as the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with material objects – that do not themselves have anything in them corresponding to those experiences? And there is another problem with explaining the variety of subjective experiences on the basis of the variety of patterns; this is the assumption that patterns somehow pick out themselves, add themselves up, know themselves. However, patterns of material objects or events, like aspects, have to be picked out by something else: by a conscious observer. Let me illustrate this point with a simple example. Take a square consisting of nine letters: T

T

T

T

T

T

T

T

T

This could be seen as three vertical rows each of three letters, three horizontal rows each of three letters, a group of six letters plus a group of three letters or a single group of nine letters. There are many other possibilities. What this variety tells us is not that the array left to itself contains all of these patterns inherently but that it contains only the possibility of these patterns, and not, for example, other possibilities such as a pattern consisting of two groups of six letters. The possibilities will be actualized, however, only by a conscious observer. In the case of patterns in the brain, such a conscious observer is not available, unless you imagine a little Cartesian ghost observing the activity in the brain and picking out the patterns. There is another problem encountered at the most basic level of consciousness: awareness itself. Just as we cannot find any kind of basis in the uniform electrochemical gray (and actually “gray” is a bit flattering) of neural activity for the multicoloured world of sense experience, we cannot find any basis for the fact that we are aware of our sense experiences. We cannot, to use the jargon, find “the neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC): more precisely, identify an adequate basis for the difference between neural activity that is, and neural activity that isn’t, associated 99

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with consciousness.39 Anyone who believes in the identity of consciousness and brain activity has to deal with the fact that most brain activity is not associated with consciousness and the small amount that is associated does not look all that much different from the large amount that is not. There is not sufficient, or the right kind of, difference. The NCCs have been sought most carefully in the visual system. The NCC-seekers agree that the primary visual area (V1), where the neural activity in the visual pathways first reaches the cerebral cortex, is not itself the seat of consciousness of sight, although it is necessary for there to be visual awareness. Visual consciousness, it is claimed, requires supplementary activity in the extra-striate visual cortex and the frontal and parietal cortex. The question then arises how all these disparate areas, in play at once, come together: how, that is to say, they sum their scattered activity to something that amounts to awareness, to a whole that is unified in itself. It is easy to see how an external observer could bring them together as a whole, just as I, looking at the brain, can see it as a whole as well as a collection of connected parts. But we don’t have an observer within the brain to bind the different parts into the kind of whole that seems to be required for consciousness: such an observer has to be constructed in the brain out of nerve impulses according to the neural theory and so the problem returns. (We shall come back to the binding problem in due course.) At this point, it is important to keep asking questions that tend to get overlooked or discarded because they seem naive or even childish. One such question is this: if consciousness is identical with neural activity, which consists of travelling waves, is this activity to be considered as consisting in the travelling or the arrival? Only in certain areas of the brain, distant from where most nerve impulses originate, is neural activity associated with consciousness. This suggests that travelling is necessary, but only to ensure arrival. But what does arrival consist of? Well, as we know, when nerve impulses reach the end of a neuron, they may trigger activity in a connected neuron via synapses. So “arrival” seems to correspond to more activity in certain central areas, presumably. But this, in turn, consists of travelling: nothing stands still; propagated impulses trigger other propagated impulses. If travelling remains essential and there is no real arrival in the sense of standing still, then the difference between what is happening in

39. For an excellent discussion of this concept and the scientific hunt for such correlates, see Rees & Frith, “Methodologies for Identifying Neural Correlates”.

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those places where consciousness is located and what is happening where consciousness is not located isn’t at all clear. Nor is it clear what localization actually consists of, given that nothing keeps to a particular place. Perhaps consciousness resides not in a place of putative arrival of impulses and in the moment of arrival but in the history of the journey they have undergone. Unfortunately, this would require the nervous system to step out of its present moment in order to reach into an (admittedly recent) past and an (admittedly short-term) future and integrate over time. This reaching out of the present tense, which means reaching out of the present (that is to say actual) state, is not possible for a material object; the physical world does not have tensed time, in which present, past and future exist side by side. It is, as we shall discuss below in “Brain science and human consciousness, III”, unique to conscious creatures for whom time is explicit and whose lives have temporal depth. We therefore have great difficulty with making sense of the notion of NCCs: that is to say, of neural activity, in a certain place, or a set of places, that is extraordinarily privileged, being (supposedly) the basis of consciousness in a brain that is overwhelmingly the site of unconscious processes. There is not enough difference between the kind of activity that is associated, and the kind of activity that is not associated, with consciousness plausibly to account for this absolutely fundamental difference. What’s more, it seems very odd that nerve impulses should have to travel in order to qualify to become consciousness or that a particular journey to a particular place would deliver the metaphysical transformation from electrochemical activity to subjective experience. For a start, the place they are coming from and the place they are going to does not seem different enough to carry the difference between events that are and events that are not associated with consciousness; or between events that are and events that are not consciousness itself. Given that nerve impulses never stand still, and have no clear point of arrival, the very notion of travelling to a location is problematic. And the idea that summed activity at several places is required for consciousness raises the question of how, or in what, it is summed. It does not exist in itself as its sum: to do so would require that it should somehow demarcate itself and then add up everything inside the boundary of demarcation. Of course, no neuroscientist would suggest that location alone is sufficient to ensure that neural activity should be conscious. The other requirement is that the activity should be intense enough to break a notional threshold of awareness. The assumption that the more quantitatively 101

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impressive the activity, the more likely it is to do this – that more neural activity means more consciousness of something other than the neural activity – is not at all self-evident. The fact that it seems indisputable is due to transference of observations within the field of consciousness to the relation between consciousness and neural events. The fact that I am more likely to see a bright light than a dim one is translated into the assumption that I am more likely to have an experience when there is a lot of neural activity than when there is a small amount of neural activity; or that a lot of neural activity is more likely to amount to an experience than a smaller quantity. This is based on a false analogy illegitimately identifying the contrast between dim and bright lights with the contrast between less and more activity in the visual pathways. The difference between a bright and a dim light, what is more, is not the same as the difference between a light of which one is conscious and a light of which one is not conscious.40 Only the assumption that the difference is the same or analogous could make the assumption that more electrochemical activity means consciousness, or more intense consciousness, seem self-evident. Otherwise it would seem very odd that more nerve impulses would not only add up to the greater total but also, having done so, be more likely to make objects other than themselves have appearance. In summary, the pursuit of plausible NCCs simply highlights the distance between neural activity and consciousness. These are the problems that we encounter trying to make sense of a neural account of seemingly simple components of consciousness such as qualia. I say seemingly simple because qualia are never isolated atoms of consciousness; they are always experienced as parts of an object, of a field of items surrounding the individual; as being of a certain kind and carrying a certain meaning; and so on. The notion of raw atomic experiences uprooted from any other experiences, from systems of classification and from the nexus of meaning that is the world is not one that is upheld by psychological fact; and, indeed, if consciousness were made of qualia that exist separately, it would be difficult to see how they all came together in the unfolding world in which we live. As the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked: “Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others in

40. Under certain circumstances, a very large amount of neural activity can be associated with loss of consciousness, as seen in an epileptic fit, where giant waves of synchronized activity across the cortex blot out awareness.

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a darker shade, or less light …?”41 In fact, every element of consciousness is impregnated not only with the present world to which it relates but also with an explicit or implicit future and past. Even so, if we can’t make sense of simple qualia in neural terms there is not much hope of making sense of the rest. This is why dedicated neuromaniacs, most notably Dennett, have taken the desperate measure of denying the existence of qualia altogether, suggesting that they are spurious items left over from a “folk psychology” still haunted by Cartesian dualism. He argues this most thoroughly in Consciousness Explained:42 a book title that should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act, for what this, his most famous, book offers is not Consciousness Explained, but Consciousness Evaded.

BRAIN SCIENCE AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, II: PROBLEMS WITH INTENTIONALITY

Nothing I have said so far will cause neuromaniacs to change their minds. They will simply reiterate that this is how things are: the brain is mysterious but then so is matter. If you dismiss the neural theory of consciousness because it is baffling then, to be consistent, you ought to reject quantum mechanics, which demands that you set aside many more of your common-sense intuitions, even such fundamental ones as that things have a definite location. In response, it is necessary only to point out that if you believe that the brain, or some small part of it, is the seat of consciousness then you are going to have to grant this bit of matter properties that no other material object – including most of the human nervous system, and perhaps all of the nervous system of some lower animals – possesses. You cannot be a materialist and ascribe to the brain the capability of making the material world present to itself. More specifically, you cannot deal with two features of consciousness that are connected, although I shall address them separately: intentionality (which I shall discuss in this section); and the ability

41. Coleridge, Notebook 21, Coleridge Notebooks ii, 2370. 42. For those who are tempted to entertain the idea that qualia are not real, Searle’s savage review of Dennett’s book (reprinted in The Mystery of Consciousness) will convince them that they are real, and give them a lot of pleasure en route.

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to make other items appear (which I shall leave to the final section of this chapter because it is the most fundamental objection to the neural theory of consciousness). So what is “intentionality”? This is a philosophical term that has a long history (a “sordid history”, according to Searle43), but its use in modern philosophy is traceable to Franz Brentano and a landmark book that he published in 1874, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. In this book he reminded his readers what it was that distinguished mental items from physical items. Mental items had the property of “aboutness”: they were directed on, or about, other things. This was most obvious in the case of what Bertrand Russell later called “propositional attitudes”: items such as hopes, desires, fears and, more broadly, beliefs, which are directed on objects or parts of the world or real or virtual entities or clusters of possibilities that are felt to be other than the subject. But they are also present in all knowledge and, indeed, all perception. It is perception that I want to focus on here because it illustrates most clearly what Brentano meant. Consider a very simple example: my perception of the red hat next to my computer. The standard story is that I see the red hat because the hat interferes with the light in a certain way and some of the light bouncing off the hat enters my eyes. Changes in the retina result and these changes trigger impulses in the optic nerve and, eventually, in those parts of the visual cortex that have been identified by neuroscientists as the seat of visual awareness. This chain of events is very similar to causal sequences seen elsewhere in the material world. Physicists, physical chemists, biophysicists and so on would be entirely at home with the processes I have just described. But that, of course, is not the end of the story. I am aware of the red hat; and I am aware of it as being separate from me, at some distance from me, as having properties and a reality all of its own, some of which I cannot currently see. My awareness, that is to say, is of or about an entity that is located causally upstream from those events in virtue of which I am aware of the hat. The causal chain points in one direction, from the hat to my cerebral cortex, with the light being translated into electrochemical events as the key step; but the aboutness of my experience points in another direction, from my cerebral cortex back to the hat. Actually, it’s much more complicated than that. For, although I see a hat, I see it in virtue of events that involve it: the interaction between the hat

43. Searle, “Biological Naturalism”, 327.

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and the light incident on it. That is primarily what I see, although I interpret it as the-hat-in-a-certain-light. For it is events, not objects, that count as causes of events. Nevertheless, it is an object that I see and (an added twist) I see it in a certain light, or that it is in a certain light, part of which is the light in virtue of which it is seen. The key point, however, is that intentionality – my awareness of the hat – points in the opposite direction to the arrow of causation. It points from effects (nerve impulses in the higher levels of the visual pathways) backwards to their causes (the interference between the object and the light). And then it points further backwards to the partners producing the effects: the red hat and the light it is bathed in. How the object and the light are unpacked, or inferred, from the events has been the subject of a huge research effort in the philosophy, psychology and physiology of perception. Some of this has focused on what is called “object constancy”: that in virtue of which an object looks the same size and shape irrespective of the distance and angle we see it from. Object constancy is puzzling because the image cast on the retina will diminish as the object recedes. Other research has investigated depth perception: my ability to infer, from a two-dimensional image on the retina, that the object has three dimensions. There are other and even more intractable problems but our main concern here is with this fundamental property of perception: intentionality – namely, that perception is about something other than itself. The irony is that it is the neural accounts of consciousness that highlight just how mysterious this aboutness is. Giving perceptions a definite location in the brain (say neural activity in the visual cortex), makes the separation between the perception and that which it is about a literal, that is to say spatial, distance. The relevant neural activity is, say, a yard away from the hat that it reveals or is about. This is shown in Figure 1. There is nothing elsewhere in nature comparable to intentionality. It will prove, as we shall see, to be the key to our human differences: our subjectivity; our sustained self-consciousness; our sense of others as selves like us; first- and second-person being; our ability to form intentions; our freedom; and our collective creation of a human world offset from nature. For the present, I want to focus on the phenomenon itself. In Figure 1, the two arrows correspond, respectively, to the light getting into the brain (upper arrow) and the gaze looking out (the lower arrow). Physicalist neuroscience has no problem with the light getting into the brain through the eyes and triggering nerve impulses. The gaze looking out is another matter entirely. It is different from causation and it is in the opposite direction. 105

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Identity theory: the mystery of intentionality Neural activity

Red Hat Direction of causal relation

Identity

“Red Hat”

Direction of intentionality Perception

Figure 1 Causation and intentionality in perception.

Nothing in physical science can even seem to provide an adequate explanation of why, or how, some (although not most) neural activity would reach causally upstream to events that led up to themselves; why or how a burst of impulses in my visual cortex should refer itself back to the interaction of the light with the hat and, out of this, construct a hat-in-the-light “out there”. It is not merely a case of “registering” those events, as a photoelectric cell might register light from any source. For we not only register events, but also register them as belonging to something other than our self: we are aware of them and aware of them as “over there”. It is a revelation: of an object to a subject in which object and subject are kept separate and distinct, with the subject (me) being here and the object (the hat I am looking at) being over there. This difference between physical registration (if one can truly speak of something being “registered” by an entity, such as a photometer, that is not conscious of that which is registered) and perception is absolutely fundamental but quite elusive. It is easy to lose sight of it, particularly if one is a neuromaniac and has a vested interest in concealing it. It is even easier to conceal it if one treats the brain both as material object and as a quasiperson. Normally one would be inclined to say that the light impacts on the brain while it is the person who looks out and this would highlight the inadequacy of accounting for the gaze in neural terms. The habit of describing brains in terms that properly apply only to people (something we shall examine in detail in Chapter 5) makes it easy to think of the brain doing the looking and (more importantly) to imagine that the looking consists only of brain activity. Most importantly – and this is the pillar of unwisdom on which Neuromania rests – this makes it possible to conceal the outward 106

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arrow of intentionality or (more usually) to bury it in the inward arrow of causation. This act of assimilation is most clearly expressed in the causal theory of perception.44 According to this seemingly common-sense theory, perceptions are caused by the things or events that we perceive; indeed, if they are not so caused, they are not true perceptions but hallucinations. We can now see how causation does not on its own deliver perception: that perceptions are more than effects of that in virtue of which perception is possible. Something has to be done with the effects for them to reach upstream to their causes and become perceptions of the objects or states of affairs that are implicated in their causation. This is overlooked, so much so that the causal theory has been extended to encompass more complex modes of awareness: propositional attitudes such as beliefs, expectations and so on; and verbal and non-verbal meanings and linguistic reference. My beliefs are, so the story goes, effects of the material world on my brain. The meaning of a word or a sentence is the effect it has on me. A word has reference in virtue of its creating an effect in my brain that stands proxy for the object that would have a similar effect in my brain. And so on. You can see where this might lead: the brain (and hence the mind) becomes a mere causal way station, linking inputs into and outputs from the body. Perceptions, beliefs, meanings and reference are simply the intermediate neural steps between experiential inputs and behavioural (in the broadest sense) outputs. The assimilation of consciousness to the causal net in which the organism is located has been the central pillar of materialist theories of mind, in particular of a highly popular theory called “functionalism”. Functionalists argue that mind is not importantly about the phenomenal aspects of consciousness: actual awareness. No, its job – and consciousness, according to them simply is its job – is to refine the connection between inputs and outputs in such a way as to optimize the survival of the organism or the group to which the organism belongs. Any particular element of consciousness is constituted entirely by its functional role: its causal relations to sensory inputs, to other mental states, and to behavioural outputs.

44. For a detailed account and critique of this theory, see my “The Causal Theory of Perception”, in The Explicit Animal.

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This is as close to missing the point that one can get. At the most basic level, it ignores the lower arrow in Figure 1: that in virtue of which experiences, memories, beliefs and other propositional attitudes are about something other than themselves. And so it is easy to understand why those who wish to defend a materialistic account of consciousness have either dismissed or marginalized intentionality. The lengths to which they are prepared to go to achieve this are illustrated by the writings of Dennett. Dennett argues that intentionality is not an intrinsic property of mental phenomena; rather, it is a product of “the intentional stance”, an attitude that ascribes intentionality from without. Intentionality is not something in itself but a level of abstraction at which we view or describe the behaviour of a thing in terms of mental properties. This, Dennett says, gives us greater computational power when we are concerned to anticipate or understand their behaviour and hence is of adaptive value.45 Trying to make sense of my behaviour by seeing me as a collection of atoms – the physical stance – and predicting the future behaviour of that collection of atoms would place an impossible burden on my cognitive capacity. Even adopting a design stance, which would see me as an artefact or organism designed to achieve certain goals, would make working out what I might do next very difficult; I am, after all, more complex than an artefact such as a thermostat. The intentional stance alone has sufficient power. This stance assumes that you are a self who acts according to beliefs, thoughts and intentions and on the basis of that I can make a pretty good guess at what you are, or are likely to be, up to. It does not, however, mean that you truly are such an item or that beliefs and other propositional attitudes are anything other than artefacts postulated by “folk psychology”. The inner life we ascribe to others is merely an interpretative device and nothing in reality corresponds to it. And the assumption that we are related to the world by perceptions, beliefs, reasons is just such an interpretative device. It is difficult to know why this argument has been taken seriously. While we might need to use a very sophisticated intentional stance to make sense of, and predict, the behaviour of a robot primed to behave just like me under all circumstances, there is an irreducible difference between myself and such a zombie. And, what is more, the intentionality ascribed to the zombie is real but mislocated; it lies within the team that designed it and

45. Dennett has expressed this view over many years but his most comprehensive statement of it is in The Intentional Stance.

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had its functions in mind and within anyone, such as myself, who tries to anticipate the zombie’s “behaviour”. But it is not out of mere interpretative convenience that we ascribe all sorts of intentional phenomena – perceptions, feelings, thoughts – to people; it is because these intentional phenomena are real, as we know from our own case. Overlooking the aboutness of perception and other conscious experiences means that we shall overlook many other things – which is very convenient for neuromaniacs but disastrous for anyone who is serious about capturing human consciousness. The intentional relation lies at the root of the distinction between the subject and the object, as a result of which human beings are not simply organisms but rather are embodied subjects. (We shall discuss this in Chapter 6.) While the material light gets into the brain by physical means, the gaze that looks out is not a continuation of that chain of physical events. It is a person that looks out, not a brain. The person is aware of herself as other than, as confronting, the object. While perception connects us with the material world it also asserts our distance from it and, more broadly, our difference. This uncoupling is most evident in vision among the modalities of perception but it is elaborated in the infinitely complex mediations of experience that are afforded by the signs – signals, gestures, codes, languages, words – that fill our lives. For humans, perception is not simply a means by which, as organisms, we are wired into the world; it is also the basis of the distance that is opened up between ourselves as conscious agents and the world we can operate on as if from an outside: a virtual outside that is built up, as we shall see in Chapter 6, into a real, but non-physical outside that is the human world. Our perception yields objects that transcend our awareness; we are explicitly aware that the object is more than our perceptions – it is not exhausted by our perceptions – and that it is other than our self. This transcendent object, which is seen as something only partly revealed, is related to a transcendent self that is other than it. There is no room for this kind of thing in a causally hard-wired universe of material objects, which would include material organisms and material organs in those organisms, such as the brain. That is why Dennett, in common with many other mind–brain identity theorists are intentionality-deniers (or intentionality reducers); it enables them to see the mind entirely in terms of the function of a material brain evolved through material processes. Hence his claim that intentionality is just the product of an intentional stance that enables us to make a quicker assessment of the likely behaviour of a predator than, say, using an atomic or design-based approach. To ascribe intentionality to 109

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others is simply to deploy a conceptual tool to promote survival. Against Dennett, we would argue that intentionality is not simply something that is ascribed; it is a fundamental feature of human consciousness and it begins with perception. How, anyway, should we ascribe it to anything else unless it was something we had experienced in the first place in our selves? By a nice irony, those who try to be hard line about consciousness and see it as simply an effect of the material world on a material brain end up in a position that is far from hard line. The claim that my experience of the red hat is a set of nerve impulses in parts of my cerebral cortex raises awkward questions. The first is, given that those impulses really are about the hat, why does their aboutness stop at the hat? Once there is a reaching causally upstream, then there is no reason why it should not continue right back to the Big Bang. This may seem to be a silly suggestion but let us stick with it for a moment and examine the actual things that are thought to trigger the nerve impulses that are in turn supposed to reveal the object. It is not the object that causes the perception of itself but its interaction with the light that results in my seeing it. This is a bit messy: the interaction is a fizz of events, not just a few neat straight lines of light connecting the object with the eye. The object has to be constructed from the interference with the light: a challenging task, to put it mildly. Indeed, it is so challenging that many neuropsychologists argue that the object that we experience is not really an object that is out there at all: it is a construct put together by the brain. This leads to the idea that the world we inhabit is a mental model that has only a tangential relation to what is “out there”, an idea that has dominated cognitive psychology for many decades. Frith has gone further and argued that the contents of the mind are not real.46 If the objects we experience are actually constructed out of data that may mislead us, although they may be corrected by subsequent experience (otherwise we would not survive to be further deceived), then we have an interesting case of the pulled rug. The brain, which is supposed to be the passive recipient of energy from an outside world, now suddenly becomes something that actually constructs that outside world rather actively. Such activity seems to be at odds with the notion of the brain as a material object helplessly wired into the material world that surrounds it via causal interactions guided by the laws of physical nature. One would like to know

46. Frith, Making up the Mind. The reader might be interested in my critique: “Not All in the Brain”.

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where, out of the electrochemical activity of the cortex and other bits of the nervous system, the ability to construct an illusory or approximate world arises. The brain, it seems, has the power to fight back and shape the world by which it is shaped. This, of course, relies on counter-causally directed intentionality. Those of us who are not brainwashed into thinking that they are brains washed by the laws of physics might be tempted to hazard a daring suggestion: that it is a person, or something like a person, that looks out at, peers into, interprets and shapes the world. And that person is prefigured in the counter-causal direction of intentionality: the very “bounce back” that some neural theorists of consciousness find so awkward they wish to deny it. Indeed, neuro-talk often dismisses reference to persons and their beliefs and conjectures and volitions as belonging to a pre-scientific “folk psychology” that it has itself grown out of. But we shall find, again and again, that we cannot make sense of what the brain is supposed to do – in particular postulating an intelligible world in which it is located – without appealing to talk about people who are not identical with their brains or with material processes in those brains. The neurophysiology of the visual system falls short of explaining the mystery of the gaze for many reasons but, most fundamentally, because it cannot deal with intentionality. Intentionality highlights the mystery of what brains are, ultimately, supposed to do; namely, to make other items, indeed worlds, appear to someone. This presents an insuperable, groundfloor problem for neural accounts of consciousness, and we shall return to it in the final section of this chapter. In the meantime, let us look at other aspects of consciousness that elude neural explanation.47

47. Even those who are sympathetic to the argument I have presented here may be uncomfortable with my dealing with perception as if it were independent of action, and argue that this separation is artificial. It is of course true that, biologically, perception is the servant of action and that even when we have loosened the bonds of biology what we perceive is a world that requires us to act or gives us an opportunity to act or shapes our ongoing actions. Nevertheless, the fact that we can perceive without acting, that we have the capacity to postpone and plan action, that we are able to contemplate the world without any intention of acting, is what ultimately leads to knowledge, to the know-that that uniquely informs human know-how, that sets us off from the world and enables us to act on it so effectively. That perception is not an irresistible trigger to action is in part the basis of the sense that our actions are ours and that it is we who are acting. This in turn underlines the sense of self and our sense of leading our lives rather than merely living or suffering them.

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BRAIN SCIENCE AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, III: PROBLEMS WITH PRETTY WELL EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

The problem with neural theories of consciousness becomes clearly evident when we consider full-blown perceptions; but it is already there, if less prominent, in the case of smaller fry, such as isolated sensations. Consider an itch or a tingle. The neural theory would have to explain why, if the tingle or itch is actually in the brain, it seems to be located, it is felt, in the arm: where the cause of the neural activity arises rather than where the neural activity is located. There seems to be no way of explaining, if the experience and the nerve impulses are the same, how something can be in two places at once: in the brain and in the arm. The fact is that the brain is not aware of itself; even less are collections of nerve impulses in parts of the brain aware of themselves. They always refer any awareness elsewhere. When I cut myself I feel the pain in my finger, although the neural activity that is supposed to be the pain is in my brain. Identifying brain activity and experiences, far from explaining the latter, seems to make them more difficult to understand. One way of trying to get round this is to argue that the brain “represents” what is in the arm, so that the itch is, at it were, the object, and the neural activity is the representation of it. Unfortunately, this way of recasting the relation between the itch in the brain and the itch in the arm is not acceptable for a very simple reason: representation presupposes prior presentation. For example, my face in a mirror counts as a representation of the visual appearance of my face only because my face, courtesy of consciousness, already has an appearance. In short, as with Searle’s example of water and molecules of H2O, we require consciousness to be already in place in order to make the concept of sensation as “representation” or “re-presentation” work – or seem to. So even lowly sensations cause problems for the neural theory of consciousness, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Other aspects of human consciousness are much further out of reach. Spoiled for choice, I am going to focus on features that are relevant to my larger aim of highlighting those ways in which humans are distant from the natural world. The features in question are all connected with first-person being: (a) the sense of (being an) “I” at a given time; (b) the unity of the self at a time and over time that also accommodates a sense of multiplicity; and (c) the sense of explicit time – of a timetabled future and an explicit past revealed in memory. 112

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The sense of being an “I”

It is tempting to say that the material world is third-person, while human consciousness is first-person. This does grasp half the truth. But the world in which we live is also in some respects first-person: it is set out, in the first instance at least, in what Russell called “egocentric space”, where near and far, here and there, are defined with respect to one’s own location, as defined by one’s body, and, in a more complex sense, by one’s interests.48 There are no inherent centres or nears and fars in physical space. The material world is without viewpoints that arrange items along a gradient of proximity and distance. This viewpoint-less world is strictly no-person, rather than third-person. What is third-person is the objective, scientific view arrived at by suppressing individual viewpoints and favouring an imaginary viewpoint that gathers up all possible points of view. It remains a view, however, and is not inherent in matter that is no-person rather than third-person. The no-person view, a “view from nowhere” (to use the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s poignant phrase) in which all appearances are summarized in the abstract, quantitative account of possible experiences, had by no one in particular and consequently by no one at all, is the ultimate goal, or at least the regulative idea of natural science. In order for this view from nowhere to be achieved, the third-person view must give way to a paradoxical viewless no-person view, which is the material world seeing itself but from no particular point of view. (It would not be a world, however, since that is a gathering together of many items in a centred whole infused with significance.) It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a viewpoint, and the basis of first-person being, is bundled into the starter pack of any organism, and, since the organism is a material entity, to imagine that viewpoint could be present in the material world.49 After all, all organisms have inputs and outputs, an organic being and an environment around them: they seem objectively to lie at the centre of a world. However, in the case of organisms that are not conscious or self-conscious, these contrasts are borrowed, imputed, honorary. Yes, there is a sense in which it is correct to invoke the opposition between “the organism” and “the environment” in the case of an insentient creature such as a bacterium. The organism does not, however, 48. “Egocentric space” is discussed in my The Kingdom of Infinite Space. 49. For a profound exploration of the implications of conceiving of a world without viewpoints, see Shand, “Limits, Perspectives and Thought”.

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itself lie at the centre of its environment, creating an organism-centred space. The centre–surround distinction belongs only to the observer, just as that which counts as the surroundings of a pebble belong to the observer rather than to the pebble. It is the observer who posits the organism as being related to an environment centred on it. “Surroundedness” does not come free along with, say, a membrane marking the boundary between the organism and the rest of the material world any more than it comes free with an entity such as a pebble that has a continuous surface marking its limits. The boundaries visible to us do not transform the organism’s objective location into a point of view that stipulates that which is physically around it as its surroundings. The brain, seen through the eyes of neuroscience, is a material organ within a material organism. It will be evident from what we have just said that there is nothing in the material transactions it has with the material world that would form the basis of the sense of a centred world, of “me”, or of the ownership that makes a brain my brain, a body my body, a portion of matter my world. There is nothing, in short, to underpin the sense of self: the feeling that I am and that certain things are addressed to me. Many neuromaniacs, as we have seen, would happily accept this and argue that the absence of a neural basis for the self is evidence that this is an illusion. I shall return to this in due course, but for the present I would argue that there are some fundamental elements of selfhood that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. It is not possible to deny viewpoint, the sense that one is (the feeling of “am”), and the feeling that one is in a setting that is centred on one’s self. There are two other more prominent aspects of selfhood that cannot be denied: the feeling of being a unity at a given time; and the feeling of having some kind of unity or coherence over time. Let’s take a look at these.50

The unity of consciousness: here and now

Consider, first, unity at a given time: the unity of my conscious moment. As I sit here I am aware of many things: my action of typing and all the movements, sights and sounds associated with this; the pressure of the seat

50. Materialist neuroscience is equally impotent when it comes to dealing with second-person being.

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that is supporting me, and other sensations arising from my body; several conversations in the background; thoughts coming into my head; memories; and so on. These are all distinct – otherwise I could not specify what they were – and yet they are also together. They belong to the present moment of my life. This capacity to keep things separate and at the same time experience them as together is evident at every level of our experience. To see the problem it is not necessary to look to complex experiences, such as entire visual fields, or scenes impregnated with meaning and memory, or a sense of rejection, or a hope for the future, which must involve many layers of integration without loss of the separate identity of the components. Unity, and the problems it poses for Neuromania, begin at a very basic level, as when we see a material object as the unitary bearer of many distinctive properties: as a subject with many predicates. Think of an experience as simple as my seeing my red hat. According to standard visual physiology, this involves the stimulation of neurons that are responsible for detecting edges and synthesizing them into a perceived shape; for sensing colour; for determining location in space (the “where” of my hat); and for seeing the kind of thing something is (the “what” of my hat). I experience all this at once; my awareness of colour, shape, location and meaning of the hat are not presented separately. I see a recognizable red hat at a particular place, which, in addition, I might note, is likely to be damaged by someone who has just entered the room and wants to borrow it. There must be some place, according to the neurophysiological story, where the inputs into the various specialized groups of cells converge, the basis of that sensus communis which has haunted the project of developing a neurophysiology of mind discussed in “You are your brain” in Chapter 1. For the organism to be successful in its “million-sided environment”, it must in its reactions be many-sided. There will therefore have to be a mechanism that summates the signals from the senses, and from other sources, in a pathway to a common destination. The usual putative mechanism, as we have seen, involves joining up neurons at synapses into networks and connecting those networks into other networks that ultimately summate the entire activity of the nervous system. At the microscopic level, this was described (in the wake of research using single-cell recording) as being carried out by “higher-order” cells. But this solution creates more problems than it solves. If the inputs do converge, one would expect them to lose their individual identity, just as the mixing of colours results in a composite in which individual colours are lost. The higher-order cell would be a point where, 115

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instead of a red-hat-at-a-particular-place, one would have some unholy mixture of redness, hat-shapeness, location and meaning. It is as if the higher-order cell – or the region of convergence – has to deliver the hat simultaneously as its constituent features and as an integrated whole. This is, of course, impossible if one thinks of what happens at synapses: a kind of adding up and subtraction, so that what comes out of the higher-order cell is the sum of its inputs. It is as if in the equation 2 + 2 = 4 the right-hand side had somehow to hang on to, or be, the left-hand side; that the 4 had to keep the two 2’s separate within itself while being 4. The neurophysiological explanation of the unity of things that are also experienced separately is so evidently flawed that there must be some undeclared intuition that is making it seem right. The undeclared intuition is that the lower-order cells and the higher-order cells add up themselves to a different kind of whole that has two parts: the lower part where the component features of the hat are kept apart and the upper part where they are together. This is cheating, of course, because the higher-order cells are required to integrate the features of the hat as a whole and there cannot be implicit a prior integration of what the higher-order and the lower-order cells report, unless one imagines there is yet another viewpoint – higher still – from which both ways of experiencing the hat, as separate features and as a whole, can be seen. The undeclared intuition, although invalid, gains apparent support from the anatomical fact that the lower cells and the higher cells coexist physically, side by side in the nervous system, so that what goes on in the latter does not obliterate what goes on in the former. This coexistence would not, of course, translate into the explicit co-presence of the activity in both, or the side-by-side presence that the summed activity is supposed to stand for: or not, at least, without a third viewpoint to gather up the lower and higher cells together. And, given that unification takes places at many, many levels – single object, single visual field, single sensory field, the unfolding of events in a sensory field, the unfolding of events in life – one would require an endless multiplication of higher viewpoints to retain the unity and separateness of the viewpoints sustained by cells lower down the hierarchy. This rather tortuous argument can be summarized very simply; there is no model of merging of activity in the nervous system that would not lead to mushing of the merged components and a loss of their individual identity. The fact that the neural pathways supposedly dealing with the different aspects of an object, of a scene, of a life, are anatomically distinct does not solve the problem because it is the anatomical distinctness that 116

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creates the need for integration in the first place. Consequently, there is no neural explanation of how I see a visual field as an integrated whole and yet can still appreciate its component objects, and the relations between the component objects, and the constituent features of the component objects. And this insuperable problem is replicated at many levels all the way up to my feeling of being in a world that makes sense to me on the basis of past experience. Our experience of being located in a sensory field that is at once unified – it hangs together as a field, so that the things in it are all related to one another – and at the same time populated with a myriad of distinct items has another feature that resists explanation in terms of neural integration. Just consider for a moment your awareness of the visual field that is surrounding you now. The light arising from that field has two fundamentally distinct components: one is what we may call “the background lighting”; and the other is the array of illuminated objects we see in the light. We see the objects, so the story goes, because of the way they interfere with the light. Their presence, that is to say, is derived from an analysis of this interfered-with light. Now consider this. All that interference of objects with the light enters together through the narrow portal of the pupil; even so, you are able to fasten back on to the individual objects their own share of interfered-with light. In other words, the arrow of intentionality is very precise. At the same time, however, it can also be global, seeing the light in itself as a background illumination that is making the objects visible.51 The theories of integration that are on offer – which appeal simultaneously to anatomical separation (localization of function within the nervous system) and functional convergence – would have even greater difficulty explaining how this is possible. And we have already seen how the models of integration that are on offer would, if taken literally, generate objects, sensory fields, indeed lives, that would be an unholy purée of colours, feels, distances, meanings, memories and so on. This, then, is the heart of the problem: consciousness at any given time is manifestly unified but also explicitly multiple. Models of integration, even 51. This problem of perceiving the light that is the condition of our seeing, that is, of seeing background illumination separate from that which is illuminated, is analogous to another profound problem, to which neuroscience offers no solution: the difference between the level and content of consciousness; between that which we are conscious of and the state of wakefulness that allows us to be conscious of it. The various solutions on offer – mass activity in certain pathways (the thalamo-cortical pathways) – do not address the problems of the unity of consciousness.

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if they did explain how it is that my experience of a million leaves amounts to an experience of a tree, or my experience of a red and round and distant object becomes the experience of “a rubber ball over there”, could not at the same time explain how it is that I am still, nonetheless, aware of the tree as being composed of millions of leaves or of the ball as being red and round and distant. Our sensory/perceptual/cognitive fields are simultaneously unified and divided. This mystery – greater to me than that of the Trinity, of the three-in-one, that exercises theologians – is insufficiently appreciated, even by those aware of the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. The appeals by Kantians to the notion of “synthesis”52 and by neuroscientists to “integration” do not explain how we get merging without mushing. We have the same unanswered questions that dominated the debate in the nineteenth century – which we discussed in “You are your brain” in Chapter 1 – between the unifiers and the localizers over “the parliament of little men”. Just how desperate things are is illustrated by the mechanisms that have been invoked to explain the physical basis for the unity of consciousness. One favourite ploy is to appeal to quantum physics.53 Sometimes this is mere hand-waving but some serious work has been done. Steven Hameroff and Roger Penrose54 have suggested that the unity of consciousness may be underpinned by a phenomenon called “quantum coherence”, which they believe could be generated by the special properties of the folded membranes in axons. This doesn’t persuade me for many reasons. The most obvious objection is this: the kind of structures that are supposed to house quantum coherence are widely distributed throughout the nervous system, and are not confined to those areas that are associated with consciousness. It might be argued (somewhat tendentiously) that quantum coherence does not make you conscious but unifies your consciousness if you have it already. We should, however, be suspicious of thinking of consciousness as a kind of stuff that is potentially dissipated but can be called to order by what, after all, are microscopic physical forces. Besides, there is no reason why the unification that quantum coherence supposedly imposes should translate into subjective or experienced unity, even less into a unity

52. Alhough (very) hard going, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is worth struggling with because it addresses the problem at the right depth. 53. I discussed and criticized this in my first foray into the field (The Explicit Animal), but to no avail. 54. Hameroff & Penrose, “Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence”.

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in which multiplicity is retained. The brain itself, after all, is at one level a single, unified material item, and so should provide all the coherence that is needed – if the physics of the system were going to provide it – and, what is more, has the added advantage of being the right kind of size. The appeal to quantum physics is deeply flawed for another reason; according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the ultimate constituents of the material world have definite properties (as waves or particles and possessing a definite location or velocity) only in the presence of measurement – that is to say an observer. In other words, quantum phenomena require consciousness and so cannot generate it. Those who look to classical, as opposed to quantum, physics for an explanation are even more obviously on a hiding to nothing. It has been suggested that electromagnetic phenomena may bind neural activity into a coherent whole.55 This falls foul of all the objections we made to using quantum theory. The truth is, no theory of matter will explain why material entities (e.g. human beings) are conscious and others are not. The phenomena described in physics are present equally in conscious and unconscious beings; indeed, they are universally distributed through the material world. So they provide no account of the difference between, say, a thought and a pebble, which is the kind of difference that any theory of consciousness worthy of the name must be able to capture. Crick and Christof Koch thought they had solved the problem of the unity of consciousness by invoking the synchronous rhythmic activity of large number of neurons which act as a reference that binds all the activity together.56 One reason this is wrong touches on something that is central

55. This is a view put forward by McFadden, “The Conscious Electromagnetic Field (Cemi) Field Theory”. 56. The key paper is Crick & Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness”. This notion comes back again and again. In a recent paper that purported to explain memories by “brain entanglement”, the authors note that the voltage of the electrical signal in groups of neurons separated by up to 10 mm sometimes rose and fell with exactly the same rhythm and adopted the same amplitude: a phenomenon variously called “coherence potentials” or “phase-locking” (Tharagarjan et al., “Coherence Potentials”). The precision with which these new sites pick up the activity of the initiating group is extraordinary; they were perfect clones. Since the coherence potentials seemed unique, they argue that each could represent a different memory, as if that distributed signature could be gathered up into a unified memory. Even if this claim were not riddled with conceptual problems, an empirical observation reported in the same paper does it in completely. The coherence potentials were not unique to those cells associated with memory as we understand the term: they were also seen in dish-grown neural cultures – hardly the site for nostalgia.

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to consciousness: that it (unlike the material world) has tensed time, so we shall look at it in more detail later. However, it is also daft for another more obvious reason: it assumes that the rhythmic activity will bind itself in a unity; or that an objectively observed synchrony will automatically translate into subjective unity. It also fails to explain the property we have just been talking about: how that which binds the contents of consciousness together also keeps them apart. Anyway, a few years later they ditched this theory, which (for reasons that must have had more to do with Crick’s justifiable reputation as a molecular biologist than with its merits) had attracted a huge amount of largely sympathetic attention. They looked instead to structures in the brain where things come together. As we have already noted, they focused on a little entity called “the claustrum” as the leader’s office where “the parliament of little men” would be called to order. In a paper that Crick was correcting on the last day of his life, they wrote  of: The notion of the dynamical core – a shifting assembly of active neurons throughout the forebrain that is stabilized using massive re-entrant feedback connections. Its representational content, highly differentiated and yet integrated, corresponds to the unitary and yet amazingly particular content of phenomenal consciousness.57 This structure, whose representational contents are both “highly differentiated and yet integrated”, apparently would answer to “the need to rapidly integrate and bind information in neurons that are situated across distinct cortical and thalamic regions”.58 The claustrum, in virtue of its enormous reciprocal connectedness, is in “an ideal position to integrate the most diverse kinds of information that underlie conscious perception, cognition and action”.59 The discussion in the past few pages should be sufficient to expose phrases such as “integration of information” as a smokescreen hiding the real nature of the problem. The idea that unification could occur at some point of physical convergence in the nervous system is empty because, to repeat, it gives no model of merging without mushing. 57. Crick & Koch, “What is the Function of the Claustrum?” 58. Ibid., 1272. 59. Ibid.

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The unity of consciousness: being one over time

So much for the unities of our consciousness at a particular time. However, we are also unified over time. In order to pre-empt the objection, of which we have heard much, that we are not unified over time, or at least that our sense of being enduring selves is an illusion that neuroscience should disabuse us of, let us just think of any everyday activity and see how it is dependent on our being intricately internally connected from one day to the next, or indeed one week, month or year to the next. Consider an ordinary commitment: say a plan to meet for an important dinner in a couple of weeks’ time. The commitment knits together a multidimensional lace of moments. These include: those in which we discussed the dinner, the where, when and why; the time we spent clearing a space for it, making sure that we got there punctually; and those moments in which we deployed all sorts of implicit knowledge in order to find our way via car and foot to the right restaurant at the right time, while in the grip of a thousand other preoccupations, and floating in a sea of sense data. This is just for starters. There are also those moments in which we remind ourselves of the dinner, in which we check our other commitments, in which we think about its purpose or purposes or lack of explicit purpose, in which we consider what we are going to say, itself rooted in a complex sense of who we are, and so on. The fact that this ordinary arrangement comes off at all is a striking manifestation of the inexpressibly complex inner organization of our lives and its extendedness across time. And it also shows how the favoured solution to the problem of the complexity of our lives – the appeal to localization in the brain – would just make things worse. For keeping things tidily apart would obstruct the process of bringing them together in a way that is infinitely more complicated than is required to bring together the aspects of an object such as my red hat. The troubles that the dinner date presents to the neural theory of consciousness go deeper than this. If you think of all the things that would have to be going on in my brain in order to ensure that I turned up at the right place at the right time, you could be forgiven for entertaining the image – based on conventional neuroscience – of a vast number of overlapping electronic microcircuits supporting a huge ensemble of different functions, and it is difficult to see how they could be kept apart so as not to interfere with one another. You will recall the suggestion by Friston that “the brain acts more as if the arrival of … inputs provokes a wide121

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spread disturbance in some already existing state”,60 rather as happens when a pebble is dropped in a pond. Well, let’s build on that notion and think of everyday consciousness as a million set of ripples in a pond created by the impact of a dense shower of hail, compounded by all sorts of internal sources of ripples. How are we to explain how each ripple or set of ripples – such as those supposedly corresponding to my complex plan to have dinner with you – could retain its separate identity? It hardly seems possible. It seems even less possible if we remember that, ultimately, the nervous system has to allow everything to merge in the moment of present consciousness, steeped in meaning, but retaining its relation to a highly structured near and distant past and reaching into an equally structured future of expectation, responsibility, time table, ambition and life plan. This moment (unlike the present moment of a computer, even a Cray supercomputer with 1012 operations per second) has to bring everything together, so that I know where (in the widest sense) and who (in the deepest sense) I am. So again we have the nineteenth-century problem highlighted by Flourens, who lost the battle against modularity and Lange’s “parliament of little men” in the late nineteenth century. What makes the problem insoluble in neural terms is that if there were a neural mechanism for bringing everything relevant together, it would simply exacerbate the problem of keeping everything apart. For, while the events in the brain are required to be bound into some kind of unity, something must at the very same time keep distinct vast numbers of projects, actions, micro-projects, micro-actions. Moreover, to make things even more difficult, those distinct projects must connect with a thousand others as each provides the others’ frameworks of possibility. My keeping this important engagement explains my refusing other invitations; rearranging the day so that I arrive on time; being more than usually concerned to keep my distance from someone who had a cold a couple of days ago because I know that you can’t afford to catch a cold as you have a crucial lecture to give the following week. The distinctiveness of the patterns of ripples has to be retained, although the patterns have to be open to one another. And worse, moment-to-moment consciousness has to retain a global openness in order that I can fulfil the multitude of activities adding up to attending the dinner date in a sea of unplanned events, so that, for example, I avoided the cyclist who might have killed me as I crossed the road to the venue, or

60. Quoted in Le Fanu’s profound Why Us?, 195.

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took account of the fourth step outside the restaurant on my way to accomplishing this timetabled complex task. The unifying organization necessary to complete even the simplest task – such as keeping an appointment – reaches down to the smallest details. I look at my watch and am shocked to see what time it is. If I do not hurry I will be late for the dinner. I therefore lock the door rather hastily and speed up the conversation I have with a neighbour who has hailed me from across the road, thinking of courteous ways of escape. The pressure of time, which requires the modification of both these actions and many others, means that I have to re-set the motor programmes of which they are composed, without the harmony between the subroutines being disturbed. The amazing feat of unification that is exemplified in every voluntary activity is all the more amazing for being accomplished while all the components of the unified action retain their distinctness and are accessible to observation and individual modification: and even more because they are deeply interrelated in the hours, days, weeks and years of a connected self. And this connectedness is a personal, long-term, inner connectedness that cannot be downloaded to the impersonal connectedness of synapses. When we see the unity of consciousness for what it is, we should be able to resist the temptation to reach for easy analogies, as for example with a computer: a model we shall dissect in “The computational theory of mind” in Chapter 5. Yes, a computer has numerous modules in which various inputs are kept separate and, yes, it has a central processor where they all in some sense come together so that an output can be fashioned that has been influenced by them all. There is, however, no place or time at which that which is separate is also unified; whereas, by contrast, every moment of our consciousness has precisely this characteristic of being unified and multiple. Now you will note that I haven’t talked about my sense of continuing personal identity, which some neuroscientists dismiss as an illusion. No, I have made my case for such a unity over time on the basis of aspects of behaviour that even neuromaniacs cannot deny.

Memory in a dish?

The kind of integration over time that I have just talked about often, although not always, makes time explicit. There is one mode of integration over time where the dimension itself – its passage, its length, the distance 123

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of things from the present – most definitely is clearly made explicit. I am referring to memory. Contrary to the claims of many neuroscientists, fullblown memories, such as you and I experience all the time, and more broadly the explicit temporal depth of our lives, cannot be captured by a neural account of the mind. To appreciate this and, more generally, to grasp how memory cannot be found in matter, however configured it is, we need to remind ourselves what memory is and, after this, what matter is. When I remember something I have experienced, the memory is not merely a recurrence of the experience. Nor is it, as the philosopher David Hume suggested, a “pale” or less vivid copy of the experience.61 No, when I recall something that is past I am aware that it is past; remembered red is not just like a present experience of faded red. I have a sense of a place in time, outside the present, in which what was experienced, what the memory is about, took place. Supposing I remember that yesterday you asked me to do something. Although my memory is necessarily a present event it is aware that it is about something that is not present. The memory is not only the presence of something that is absent but also the presence of something that is explicitly absent. When I remember your request, however clear my memory, however precise the mental image I might have of you making the request, I am not deceived into thinking that you are now making the request. Your request is firmly located in the past. As for the past, it is an extraordinarily elaborated and structured realm. It is layered; it is both personal (memory) and collective (history); it is randomly visited and timetabled; it is accessed through facts, through vague impressions, through images steeped in nostalgia. This realm has no place in the physical world. The physical world is what it is. It is not haunted by what it has been (or, indeed, by what it might become): by what was and will be. There are, in short, no tenses in the material world. This is beautifully expressed by Albert Einstein in a letter, written in the last year of his life, to the widow of his oldest friend Michael Besso: “People like me”, he said “who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future, is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.62 Tenses are not, of course, illusions, unless the only reality that is accepted is the world as revealed to physics. But they have no place in the physical world. And they therefore have no

61. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I, pt I, §1. 62. Quoted in Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, 540.

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place in a piece of the physical world: a material object such as the brain. The only presence that the past has in the material present is in virtue of the contents of the present being the effects of the past. As we shall see, being an effect of past events does not of itself amount to being the presence of the past. Just how completely memories elude translation into neural activity is illustrated by comparing them with perceptions, which, as we have seen, are not, in virtue of their intentionality, explicable in terms of the causal relations seen in the material world. Memories, too, have intentionality or aboutness, but they have a double dose of this. They reach through time to the experience on which they are based. That is the first dose of intentionality. But those experiences were in turn about the events that they were experiences of. This is the second dose of intentionality. This double dose reflects how memories are both in the present (they are presently experienced) and in the past (they are of something that was once experienced). They are the presence of the past. Needless to say, neuromaniacs imagine they can deal with this. Indeed, there have been recent claims that the neural mechanisms of memory are close to being cracked. One researcher – Eric Kandel – received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for research that led him to claim that he could capture “memory in a dish”.63 It is worth looking at his studies in some detail because they demonstrate very clearly how it is possible to deceive oneself into thinking that memory can be explained in neural terms.64 Kandel’s studies were carried out using the giant (almost 30 cm long) sea snail Aplysia. Aplysia has two features that make it attractive to neuroscientists. First, it has relatively few neurons (a mere 20,000 compared with the hundred billion in your cerebral cortex alone and its hundred trillion synaptic connections); second, the neurons are strapping cables of a millimetre or more in diameter, and uniquely identifiable, so it is easy to see what is happening inside them and, more importantly, what is happening inside their connections, the synapses. The snail has the additional advantages of being (a) ugly and (b) dim and so it is unlikely (a) to attract the protection of the Animal Liberation Front or (b) to seek legal advice. This is relevant because of the unkind nature of the experiment that Kandel used 63. Quoted in Rose, “Memories are Made of This”, 61. 64. Kandel’s work and his philosophy are accessibly summarized in his Nobel Laureate lecture, “The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage”.

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for his investigations, which involved a defensive withdrawal reflex. When the animal received an electric shock to its tail, it demonstrated a gill withdrawal reflex. They had been weakened by habituation to repeated stimuli. After the shock, it would withdraw even after an innocuous stimulus. This was a form of learned behaviour, which lasted longer the more shocks it received. Kandel saw this as a model for memory. Because of those giant neurons, he was able to identify the changes that occurred in the electrical and biochemical properties of their synapses as the snail learned to be jittery. It was this that he described as “memory in a dish”. His own, and subsequent research by others, on a variety of species, such as young chicks, showed that when an organism is trained on a novel task there are increases in the size and strength of certain synaptic connections in particular regions of the brain. The synapses enlarge and the effectiveness of the neurotransmitters within them is increased. But why should we think this has anything to do with memory as we humans know and value it? Kandel thinks it has because, he argues, there are no fundamental functional or biochemical differences between the nerve cells and synapses of humans and those of a snail, a worm or a fly. From this he concludes that similar changes not only underpin your memories and mine but are what memories amount to. Human memory, like that of Aplysia, is stored in, is identical with, the modifications of the connections between nerve cells. Experience leaves a biochemical imprint on the neurons and this alters their excitability. This altered excitability is the trace of experienced events: the presence of the past. Memory is, of course, a little more complicated with you and me than with Aplysia but, many neuroscientists would argue, the principles are the same. My memory of the smile on your face when we last met at London Waterloo railway station is more sophisticated than the learned flinch of the unlucky sea snail. Even so, my memory is stored in the form of the altered connectivity of the neurons associated with the smile. Those neurons are primed to fire off in response to present cues, prompting me to recall the smile. The experiments on Aplysia and other animals supposedly show how this rewiring takes place and hence how memory works. Memory, so we are told, is “encoded” in changes in the minute structure, and consequently the responsiveness, of neurons. Irrespective of whether it is a matter of learning to behave in a certain way or acquiring factual knowledge, there is the same underlying mechanism: facilitation of the transmission of nerve impulses across synapses due to long-term enhancement of their reactivity. 126

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You might be resistant, as I am, to this idea. Aplysia, for all its altruistic commitment to advancing the science of memory, does not, as far as I know, have any of the following: memory of facts, such as that there is a London Waterloo station (this is what psychologists call semantic memory); explicit memories of events, such as the meeting at the station, that it locates in the past (so-called “episodic memory”); or autobiographical memories it ascribes to its own past (corresponding to my sense that it was I who saw your smile – an “I” that lay at the centre of the circumstances, of the self-world, in which the experience was had). Nor does it have an explicit sense of time, of the past, even less of a collective past where a history shared with one other person – two, ten, a thousand, a million, a billion other people – is located. Nor can one imagine it actively trying to remember past events, racking its meagre allocation of 20,000 neurons to recall the shocks that now make it twitchy, any more than one can think of it feeling nostalgic for the time when it had confidence in a benign world free of electric shocks. In short, the altered behaviour of Aplysia has little, perhaps nothing, in common with memory as I understand it. Neuromaniacs will not be impressed by my objection. The difference between the shock-chastened sea slug and my feeling sad over a meeting that passed over so quickly is simply the difference between 20,000 and 100 billion neurons or, more importantly, between the modest number of connections within the sea snail’s nervous system and the unimaginably large number of connections (said to be of the order of a 100 trillion) in your brain. Should we accept that the difference between Kandel’s “memory in a dish” and actual memory is just a matter of the size of the relevant nervous system or the number and/or complexity of the connections in it? I don’t think so. What we noted earlier about tensed time should be enough to show that numbers of neurons and the mind-boggling complexity of their connections will not deliver the difference between Kandel’s “memory in a dish” and the kind of thing we think of when we talk about our memories.65 Let us return to that smile. It is supposed to be “stored” or “encoded” in the form of a changed state of excitability in part of my neural circuitry resulting from my being exposed to the smile. A present experience

65. We may recall that memory has been found in another dish by Tharagarjan et al., “Coherence Potentials”.

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reminding me of the smile is one that stimulates the part of my nervous system whose activity corresponds to the experience of the smile. The present event are cues or triggers. The memory, that is to say, is a present state of a part of my nervous system: a physical state of a physical entity, namely my brain. Somehow, this has to be about, or refer to, the smile by referring to an experience that was itself about or “of ” the smile. This is the “double intentionality” that we noted above. One arrow of this double intentionality explicitly refers backwards in time to something that is no longer present: indeed, no longer exists.66 A remembered smile is located in the past: indeed in a past world, which is, as John McCrone has put it, “a living network of understanding rather than a dormant warehouse of facts”.67 Thus we see intentionality elaborated: it opens us up to a present world that exceeds our experience; and it opens up the present world to the absent, the actual to the possible. As a result, as we shall discuss in Chapter 6, we have our being in a world that is an infinitely extended space of possibilities; we are not simply “wired in” to what is. And this, as we shall see in Chapter 7, is the basis of our freedom. And the failure to see this is the reason why Kandel’s claim of seeing memory in a dish is not only wrong but importantly so. Scientifically, Kandel’s work has been hugely influential, as recent work bears witness to. For example, the observation of the emergence of new proteins in the synapses of Aplysia in response to stimuli has been described as “watching memories being made”.68 A paper by Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv and colleagues, published in Science in 2008, claiming to solve the problem of memory, inadvertently underlines why this claim is without foundation.69 The authors found that the same neurons were activated, and in the same way, when individuals remembered a scene (from The Simpsons) as when they actually saw it. But seeing and remembering seeing are (as you don’t

66. The intentionality of autobiographical memories is arguably more than double: perhaps five-way! After all, the relevant brain activity would have to be “about” a current memory; the latter “about” a past event. It would also be “about” the time elapsed from the remembered event to the present; “about” a past world that the memory belongs to; and “about” the “I” to whose world it was. And there are, of course, memories belonging to more than one individual and each may support the other in recalling what happened. The French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, writing in the first half of the twentieth century, referred to the “social frameworks of memory” (On Collective Memory, pt 1). 67. McCrone, “Not So Total Recall”. 68. Wang et al., “Synapse- and Stimulus-Specific Local Translation”. 69. Gelbard-Sagiv et al., “Internally Generated Reactivation of Single Neurons”.

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need me to point out) different. The neuroscience that can’t capture this absolutely fundamental difference, in which lies the very essence of memory, cannot claim to have an account of memory. And this difference eludes it because it is unable to separate that which is activated now from that which happened then, as both are present as consequences of past events. And this is why it is not possible to get even a conceptually clear account of the difference between the memory and the act of remembering: that which is presently stored as the memory and the processes by which memories are actively remembered or spontaneously recalled. We have already seen that making present something that is past as something past, that is to say absent, hardly looks like a job that a piece of matter, even a complex electrochemical process in a piece of matter such as a brain, could perform. There are, to repeat, no tenses in the physical world; no realms of “what was” (or “what will be”) outside “what is”. Material objects are what they are, not what they have been, any more than they are what they will be. A changed synaptic connection is its present state; this changed state does not hold on to the causes of its present state. Nor is it “about” those causes or its increased propensity to fire off in response to cues. Even less is it about those causes explicitly located at a temporal distance from its present state. For a real memory not only reaches back to its cause, but also maintains the temporal distance between itself, the effect and its cause. If it didn’t, it would be confused with a perception. Reference to the experience-based behavioural changes that are not associated with any sense of the past, such as those seen in Aplysia, as “implicit memory” is simply a fudge. So how did anyone ever come to believe that memory could be a “cerebral deposit” (to use Henri Bergson’s sardonic phrase in his classic Matter and Memory)?70 In a sense, Kandel’s account of memory is the latest version of Socrates’ suggestion (as reported in Plato’s Theaetetus) that memories are analogous to the marks left in a wax tablet by the impress of events. This is the intuition that leads us to imagine that an altered state of something is, or even could be, about that which caused its altered state. How do we allow that obviously dodgy idea to pass? I think it is because we smuggle consciousness into our thoughts about the relation between the altered synapse and that which caused it to be altered, so that we imagine that the one can be “about” the other: that the altered synapse or the alteration in the synapse can be about that which caused the alteration. It is easier to see

70. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 176.

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what is wrong with this if we look at a more homely example of alteration: a broken cup. A broken cup can signify to me the unfortunate event that resulted in its unhappy state. But this requires my consciousness. If you allow that the present state of the cup can signify its past state, or the events that took it from its past to its present state, without importing consciousness, then you should be prepared to accept that the present state of anything can be a sign of all the past events that brought about its present state and that the sum total of the past can be present at every moment. From this it would follow that all matter could claim to be blessed with memory in virtue of having being changed; and the present state of the universe would be a delirium of all its previous states, present side by side. Fortunately, such a claim is without foundation. Yes, a pebble is in a sense a record of its past, just as a battered suitcase is a record of all the vicissitudes it has undergone and, indirectly, of the journeys in which it has accompanied me. But the pasts are not housed in the pebble or the suitcase. It is I who make the present state of the pebble or the suitcase a sign of its past states and of elapsed time. The footprint is not the memory of a foot, except to an observer. This point was made indirectly by William James when he remarked that “a succession of feelings is not a feeling of succession. And since to our succession of feelings, a feeling of their own succession is added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation”.71 This remark applies with even greater force to the succession of the states of a synapse – or a pebble. None of those states carries the sense of succession, or of the one being past and the other present: not unless, of course, we smuggle in consciousness by thinking of an observer who sees both states of the synapse or the pebble. Smuggling in consciousness like this is, of course, inadmissible because the synapses are supposed to supply the very consciousness that reaches back in time to the causes of their present states. But, as we have seen, they don’t. So they cannot be memories or the basis of them. This is connected with the fact that in the physical world no event is intrinsically past, present or future. It becomes so only with reference to a conscious, indeed selfconscious, being who provides the reference point, the “now”, that makes some events past, others future and yet others present. The temporal depth created by memories, which hold open the distance between that which

71. James The Principles of Psychology, 628–9.

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is here and now and that which is no longer, is not to be found in the material world. We must assume that neurophysiologists and others who think of memory as a material state of a material object – as “a cerebral deposit” – also believe what physicists have to say about matter. In this case, they ought not to believe that tensed time could be manufactured in a material object such as the brain or, more specifically, in a particular state of synapses, irrespective of whether they are located in the spinal cord (which has little to do with memory) or the hippocampus, which is supposed to be a key memory structure. Only homeopaths believe that material substances remember their past states. A synapse no more contains its previous state than does a broken cup. Nor does it retain, as something explicitly present, its previous state, the event(s) that caused it to be changed, the fact that it has changed or the time elapsed between its present and one or more of its past states, so that the latter would be present in all its “pastness”. All this would be necessary, however, if synaptic alteration were truly to be the stuff of memory. Another reason we might be persuaded into thinking that the present state of a piece of matter such as a synapse could be a memory of the past events that have impinged on it is linguistic. The word “memory” is used very loosely and covers a multitude of phenomena, ranging from an acquired habit (which may not even be conscious) to an explicit recall of a unique event. Neurophysiologists of memory trade on this profound ambiguity. They slither from memory as you and I understand it (as when I recall your smile last week at London Waterloo) to learning (as when I get to acquire expertise or knowledge); from learning to altered behaviour (as when a sea slug acquires a conditioned reflex); from altered behaviour to altered properties of the organism (as happens in the synapses of a sea slug conditioned to withdraw into its shell when water is disturbed); and (Bingo!, there we have it) the materialization of memory. But with Einstein’s help we can see that sincere materialists – those who believe in neural accounts of consciousness – must acknowledge that they have no explanation of memory. Instead of thinking that it can be located in the brain, even less captured “in a dish”, they ought to hold, along with Bergson, that “memory [cannot] settle within matter” even though (alas) “materiality begets oblivion”.72 (This is an illustration of the difference between

72. Bergson Matter and Memory, 177.

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necessary and sufficient conditions.) In short, they should take off their dull materialist blinkers and acknowledge the mystery of memory: the presence of the past, and the temporal depth this implies, which does not exist in the material  world. The inadequacy of the neurophysiological account of memory should be obvious from the fact that it can be applied equally well to a Aplysia, whose behaviour is changed by an electric shock, as to a human being reminiscing about past days. The lowest common denominator between us and sea slugs is low indeed. And yet the changes in the properties of synapses have been invoked not only as the basis of memory but also (where the self is reduced to neuronal states rather than denied to exist outright) as the basis of the self: that feeling that I am, that I am such-and-such, and that I am the same such-and-such over time, so that I am responsible for actions that I carried out many years ago. Indeed, renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has even published a book that argues that the synaptic connections between our neurons, modified by our past experience, are what make us who we are.73

Tensed time, change, endurance and the nervous system

Our discussion of memory has led us to think about the nature of time: more particularly about physics of time. It is important to appreciate that, in the absence of an observer, time has no tenses; not only does the physical world not have past and future in which events are located but (and this may seem less obvious) it doesn’t have the present. For an event to count as being present, there has to be someone for whom it is present, for whom it is “now” as opposed to “then” or “not yet”. The mere fact that something is does not generate a present tense: matter does not turn back on itself and become “That it is (now)”. The complex consciousness of self-aware human beings brings tenses into the world and makes the happenings of the material world the contents of the present tense. Only by overlooking this human basis of tensed time can memory as we experience it be assimilated to learning, learning assimilated to behavioural changes and behavioural changes reduced to altered properties of a piece of matter such as a brain. We could put this another way by saying that matter cannot entertain

73. LeDoux, Synaptic Self.

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possibility: that which may exist or turns out not to exist; the contents of the remembered past or anticipated future.74 We may take an even more radical stance. The great philosopher of time Adolf Grünbaum does. He has argued that there is no such thing as becoming in the physical world: in the absence of an observer. Unfortunately he concluded from this that “becoming” was unreal. This is clearly the kind of absurd position you get into when you assert that the sum total of reality is physical reality. But the challenge he presents to those who would reduce consciousness to physical events is valid: “How can temporal becoming be intrinsic to mental events but not to physical events (such as events in the brain) with which these mental events are correlated and upon which they are, for a naturalist, causally dependent?”75 There is one way to deal with this: to conclude that mental events are not physical events in the brain. At any rate, it is arguable that both explicit change and endurance (persistence) require more than matter as conceived by the physicist. Change requires someone who will connect state A of an item with state B of the same item by making them both present at the same time. Endurance requires linking an earlier phase of state A with a later phase of state A. In neither case can the things that are related in the perception of change or of endurance physically exist at the same time; even less can they exist at the same time as separate and be connected. The lack of tensed time in the material world is relevant not only to memory but also, less obviously, to the issue we dealt with above: the unity of consciousness at a particular time. We found that it was difficult to account for even a small component of this unity; namely, my experience of the different features of an object as the features of a single object. How do I get the redness, the shape, the location and the meaning of my red hat together and yet still keep them apart, so they can be noted separately? The appeal to different locations of the brain, such that the component characteristics of the hat were experienced in one place and its unity as an object in another, was found to be unhelpful. It required the same collection of nerve impulses to work twice: as part of a smaller crowd – say neural events taking place in a particular area – and also as part of a larger crowd, of neural events taking place in several locations that are linked.

74. A similar view was first suggested by Parmenides, who argued that being could not change and time was unreal (see my The Enduring Significance of Parmenides). 75. As summarized by Richard Gale, Introduction to “Section IV: Human Time”, in The Philosophy of Time, 300.

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We are now in a better position to see how the explanation offered to deal with this “binding” problem – as it applies to the visual field as a whole, the sensory field as a whole, and indeed the unity of the self – by Crick and Koch doesn’t work.76 It will be recalled that they proposed a background rhythm of about thirty-five cycles per second – “a common neural oscillation” – which engages large quantities of the brain, and that it is this synchronous activity that “binds” together all that is happening in the present moment into a unity. Although Crick and Koch no longer subscribe to this,77 it remains relevant to us, however, for overlooking the oversight that gives it what little plausibility it has. Namely, it assumes that synchrony is something inherent in physical events. But the material world does not bind separate events together and label them as parts of “now”. What’s more, according to physics – more specifically the special theory of relativity – synchrony depends on the perception of events. Two events are synchronous if and only if they are observed to be synchronous. This requires picking them out and seeing the temporal relation between them, something that is not possible without an observer. So the unifying effect of the synchronous activity Crick and Koch talk about depends on an observer to synthesize them into a unity. But if an “I” or something like it is needed to confer unity on the very elements that are supposed to bind the moment and the “I” together, we may as well cut out those elements. So, the present tense – which gathers together all those things that are “now” – does not exist in an observer-free material world, and hence must be absent from the brain understood as a material object. Nor does the past or, indeed, the future. The future, after all, does not yet exist. It is the notional location of possibilities, which we humans have mapped in a multitude of complex ways into boxes populated with events anticipated or planned. Matter can house only actualities. While there are indeed sequences of events in the material world, the relation in virtue of which one event is “past” compared to another, or “future” compared to another, has to be established by an observer.78 76. Crick & Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness”. 77. Crick & Koch, “A Neurobiological Framework for Consciousness”. 78. Consider a succession of events E1 to E100,000. Event E3, although it occurs early on, is not in itself intrinsically in the past nor is E85,000 intrinsically in the future, although it occurs late on. We require a viewpoint to locate an event in the present, the past or the future. The viewpoint establishes the relation between present events and past events. From a viewpoint simultaneous with event E3, E3 is in the present, E1 is in the past and E85,000 is in the

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It will be obvious that if neuroscience cannot capture the unity of the present moment, nor the sense of the past or future, it will not be able to deal with the unity of an enduring self. The closest science can come to an enduring self is a succession of events that are bound together only in virtue of the objective facts (not available to it as facts) that they are housed in the same brain and have cumulative effects on the structure or functioning of that brain. The neurophysiological self is at best the locus of “one damn thing after another”, which hardly comes near to the self of a human being who leads her life, who is a person reaching into a structured future with anticipations, aims and ambitions, that are themselves rooted in an almost infinitely complex accessible past that makes sense of them. While tensed time does not correspond to anything in the physical world, it is indubitably real and a ubiquitous presence in human life. This is why biologists, who are determined (as we shall discuss in the next chapter) to find human characteristics in non-human animals, try to find a sense of tensed time in beasts. We need, therefore, to be on our guard when animal models are used to explain the basis of human memory. We should likewise treat talk about animals having a sense of the future with similar scepticism. One example is particularly relevant here: a study by Nicola Clayton and her colleagues published in the prestigious journal Nature.79 Clayton and colleagues claim that western scrub-jays, a member of the crow family, have an explicit sense of the future as evidenced by their apparent ability to plan for it. Like many other animals, these jays store

future. From a viewpoint simultaneous with E1, E3 is in the future, as is E85,000. From a viewpoint simultaneous with E100,000, E1, E3 and E85,000 are in the past and E100,000 is in the present. The relationship of the many hundreds of thousands of discrete events in the nervous system as past, present or future therefore requires a viewpoint that experiences or observes them as occurring simultaneously or in succession. According to Crick and Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness”, however, that viewpoint is precisely what the synchronous activity is supposed to construct. It will now be obvious that supposed binding activity will not bind multi-itemed consciousness into the moments of a unified conscious self unless it has itself already been bound into a unity by a unified conscious self. The factual simultaneity of the neural activity does not translate into a unity, in part because it would still have to be observed for the translation to be made and in part because they are not, for reasons already given, intrinsically simultaneous. What is more, because the elements are spatially separate, even though the separation is a matter of centimetres, the limits of the synchronous activity would have to be observed at different times by an observer. The belief that they are intrinsically simultaneous is the result of inserting into a material world the idea of an observer. 79. Raby et al., “Planning for the Future”.

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and recover food caches. There is nothing unusual about that. But what has excited attention are Clayton’s studies of “caching” of food under different experimental conditions. Jays (apparently) make provision for a future need, both by preferentially hiding food in places in which they have learned they will be hungry the following morning and by differentially storing a particular type of food in a place in which that type of food will not be available the following morning. Clayton and colleagues believe this pattern of caching cannot be attributed to conditioning or cue-driven behaviour. In fact, there is no need to ascribe a sense of the future to an animal whose present behaviour optimizes the servicing of future needs. Even if the jays did have a sense of the future, would this be evidence that this sense of the future, or even of explicit time, was similar to that which rules our lives? Not at all. Our human sense of the future is that of a densely populated open space of possibility that is structured according to anticipated seasons or (in recent history) numbered days. This is hardly mirrored in the behaviour of crows choosing between caching more of one type of food rather than another, even if this does seem to indicate a sense of future need. We could imagine the jays’ behaviour, which would ensure the optimal allocation of food between serving present hunger and meeting future needs, being “hard-wired”. We cannot imagine this of an explicit, fully developed sense of future such as we humans have. Behaviour addressed to singular future possibilities that we anticipate is not something that seems to correspond to fixed neural wiring, for, being material substances, neural wires do not deal in explicitly entertained possibilities. At best, they can be tuned to objective probabilities. If scrub-jays truly had a fully developed sense of the future, this sense would be addressed to a field of possibility and it would not refer only to food caches. While our human sense of the future is not entirely gathered up in timetables, or some kind of formatting of the not-yet, timetabling is the only sure evidence of a extended, spacious sense of future. What is more, it would be astonishing if the scrub-jay’s future were personalized: in other words, permeated by a sense that it is its own future, a future that it can influence, for which it will be in part responsible. If, as seems likely, it were no such thing, it would not count as a true future in the sense that we humans have a future to which we orientate ourselves both individually and collectively.

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WHY THERE CAN NEVER BE A BRAIN SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF APPEARANCE

It is [Bishop] Berkeley’s merit to have realised that the Cartesian/Newtonian philosophers, seeking to account for a seeable world, succeeded only in substituting a world that could in no sense be seen. He realised that they had substituted a theory of optics for a theory of visual perception.80 There are many other aspects of consciousness that elude any kind of conceptually coherent explanation. For example, it is not clear how, within the population of nerve impulses, we could find the basis for the absolutely fundamental difference between the level of consciousness (alert, drowsy, comatose) and its content: between background lighting and that which is lit. And what about the active directing of attention or racking one’s brains to remember something? But I won’t pursue these problems because I think I have already given enough reasons for maintaining that not only are current neural explanations of consciousness inadequate but also neurally based stories are wrong in principle and their inadequacy won’t be amended by technological advances enabling ever more complete accounts of what is going on in the brain. For even quite profound inadequacies are themselves only symptoms of a yet more fundamental problem: a contradiction at the heart of neural theories of consciousness that I want to discuss now. This contradiction rules out the very idea that certain material events in the brain could make a world around the person appear to that person. The materialist account of mind requires us to confer on brain events properties that actually run contrary to the physicist’s notion of the matter of which they are formed. I want to dwell on this because it addresses the following objection to my critique of the neural theory of consciousness: that neural theory does not aspire to be an explanation; it simply reflects empirical truth, and the fact that it is mysterious does not make it untrue. It is this seemingly perfectly reasonable response that requires us to dig a bit deeper and to ask some more fundamental questions about the kind of activity that is supposed to be identical with consciousness. Let us go back to what Dennett (accurately, I believe) calls “the contemporary orthodoxy” in a passage quoted in “You are your brain” in Chapter 1:

80. Stebbing, “Furniture of the Earth”, 78.

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There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology – and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain … we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.81 It is when we examine this, the clearest possible statement of the metaphysical framework of Neuromania, that we shall see why it is a castle built on sand. Neuromania has to look for consciousness in material events (neural activity), located in a material object (the brain), while holding that the final truth of material events and material objects is captured in the laws of physics. The trouble with physical science, however, is that it is committed to seeing the world in the absence of consciousness (at least prior to quantum mechanics); indeed, at its heart is the disappearance of appearance. This presents not one but three insuperable problems for Neuromania. They are inextricably connected but it is helpful to address them separately: the first concerns the nature of nerve impulses; the second is about the things nerve impulses are supposed to make appear; and the third relates to the supposed capability of nerve impulses to make those things appear.

Nerve impulses don’t have an intrinsic nature

Let us get back to basics. If I claimed that consciousness was identical with neural activity then you might reasonably assume that I had a clear idea what I meant by “neural activity”. We have already seen that there are serious ambiguities in this concept, which leaves it unclear how we should think of what goes on in those parts of the brain that are supposedly associated with subjective experience. Is “neural activity” something that is delivered to a certain place in the brain? Or is it the sum total of what is happening in several places of the brain? If so, where is the summing and the totalling taking place? Does consciousness reside in the travelling of nerve impulses along neurons or its arrival at a synapse? These questions invite us to look more closely at what we think a nerve impulse is in itself.

81. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 33.

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You may think this had been spelled out in (fairly pitiless) detail in Chapter 1. It will be noticed, however, that the nerve impulse could be described in different ways. Here are some: • a cycle of events taking place at a particular point on the membrane that occurs over a time (of the order of milliseconds) represented by a wave or a spike traced on an oscilloscope screen; in other words, the sum total of the changes in the potential difference across a particular point in the membrane; • the overall journey of the wave along the length of the nerve axon; a propagated displacement of the alterations in the potential difference along the length of the axon; a displacement of a displacement; • part of a summed total of many millions of nerve impulses as seen on an EEG or inferred from an fMRI scan. Since the nerve impulse may be represented with equal validity as being any of these things, it is intrinsically none of them. Which properties are ascribed to it are observer-dependent. To put it slightly differently, there are different “takes” on a nerve impulse. It could be seen as an influx of sodium ions at a particular point in the neuron followed by an efflux of positive ions; or as a change of the potential difference between the inside and the outside of the membrane at a particular place; or as a succession of events, lasting about a millisecond, at a particular point in the neuron; or as a wave of activity at that point; or as a wave moving along the neuron; or as a wave arriving rather than travelling; or as one of a crowd of waves, several thousand, several million or several billion strong, occurring in a particular place in the brain. There are many other candidates, for example patches of coloured pixels in brain scans or brain maps. But I hope the point will have been made: the nerve impulse is not in itself a local passage of sodium ions or in itself part of a billion-strong crowd of waves; otherwise it would have to be both of these at the same time. And it is not just a matter of how the impulse appears. What a nerve impulse is depends on how it is viewed. A micro-pipette recording from a single neuron will deliver a different account of a nerve impulse compared with an EEG recording large-scale activity through the skull. Or, to draw the conclusion that should be obvious to anyone who is not ideologically wedded to Neuromania, the nerve impulse does not have any intrinsic determinate character. It depends how it is looked at, on how it is teased apart or put together. We are deceived if we think that scientific instruments 139

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reveal what it is “in itself ”. It is easy to overlook this when we confuse the representation(s) of the nerve impulse with the thing in itself. We are less likely to do so if we remind ourselves that there are many competing ways of representing a nerve impulse. The nerve impulse requires a viewpoint (provided by a highly mediated consciousness involving sophisticated scientific instrumentation) to be either an instantaneous displacement in potential difference at a particular point in space and time; or a spike extended over a short time at a particular place; or a spike moving over space and time; or a member of a crowd of spikes moving over space and time and spreading over space and building up over time. Anyone who still thinks that neural activity has an intrinsic appearance that is independent of observers might want to reflect on the following final twist. Some of the ways we may represent nerve impulses to ourselves can be analysed into two or more takes that correspond to incompatible viewpoints. For example, seeing the impulse as a travelling spike requires an observation over time at a particular place (this generates the image of the spike) and observation at successive places. But temporal depth, as we discussed in the previous section, is not to be found in matter – or in material events such as nerve impulses.

Material objects do not have (phenomenal) appearances when viewed through the eyes of physics

Nerve impulses are not uniquely impoverished in having no intrinsic appearances. This lack characterizes the entire material world as seen through the eyes of physical science. This was noted early in the history of modern science. Galileo – and subsequently philosophers such as Descartes and Locke – marginalized most of the things that make up the appearance of material objects as being (mere) “secondary qualities”. Colours, tastes, smells, sounds and so on exist only where there are observers and they do not correspond to what, according to physical science, is objectively there. As Galileo said, “If the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated”.82 The material world has only primary qualities such as solidity, extension, motion, number and shape. These by themselves would not, however, amount to a full-blown appearance. You couldn’t imagine an

82. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 274.

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object without a colour (and “colour” here includes black and white). Primary qualities by themselves don’t really amount to much. An object such as a cup reduced to its primary qualities would not only lack colour, but also features such as being near or far, looking small or large, and being related to this object rather than that. Indeed, it would boil down to naked numbers that capture (abstracted) shape, motion, size and so on. This is what lies behind Galileo’s famous assertion that the book of nature is written in mathematical language. One manifestation of this view is connected with the centrality of measurement in all sciences, the reduction in physical sciences of the phenomenal world to numerical quantities and the unfolding of events to the relations between quantities, ultimately expressed in equations. The output of measurement is a number: of abstract units, or patterns of numbers of abstract units or general laws connecting numbers of abstract units. Let’s illustrate with a simple example of what happens when we progress from immediate (subjective) experience to (objective) measurement. Imagine you and I are looking at a table. Because we are looking at it from different angles it seems square to you and oblong to me. What’s more, I think it is bigger than another table and you think it is smaller. We decide to settle our disagreement by taking a measurement, and discover that it measures 100 cm × 75 cm. End of argument; but also end of the appearance of the table. It is no longer “square”-looking or “oblong”-looking, nor “bigger” or “smaller”. It loses these qualities and, in addition, it lacks position and relation to us. We have replaced its appearance by two numbers. You might want to argue that there is a residue of appearance: the appearances that are necessary to make the measurement; for example the appearance of the ruler next to the table. But of course, these appearances are set aside once we have the result: “100 cm × 75 cm” gives no hint of the appearance of the devices (the tape measure or ruler) by which the measurement was made or of the processes that led up to the measurement. They are as irrelevant as a quarrel over which side of the tape measure to use. And the actual appearance of the measurement as written down – “100 cm × 75 cm” – is equally irrelevant. It would not matter whether the result was recorded in blue ink or black, was written as “1 m × 0.75 m” or “1000 mm × 750 mm” or “one hundred centimetres by seventy-five centimetres”, or whether it was spoken or presented on a screen.83

83. The idea that we get closer to the essence of something as we progressively abstract from it towards mathematics most certainly does not apply to consciousness. This does not stop neuromaniacs such as Paul Churchland suggesting that sensations really boil down to spiking frequencies in different vector spaces of the brain. See Churchland, Matter and Consciousness.

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We seem, therefore, to have a disappearance of appearance as we move from subjective experience towards the scientific, quantitative and ultimately mathematical account of the world as matter. This loss of appearance is strikingly illustrated by those great equations that encompass the sum total of appearances, such as “e = mc2”. But it is also present at a more homely level when we try to envisage material objects as they are in themselves. Think of a rock. I can look at the rock from the front or from the back, from above or below, from near or far, in bright light or dim. In each of an (innumerable) range of possible circumstances, it will have a slightly or radically different appearance. In itself, it has no definite appearance; it simply offers the possibility of an appearance to a potential observer (although those possibilities are constrained – the rock cannot look like a sonnet). So we can see that, as we get closer to the material world “in-itself ”, as a piece of matter, so we lose appearances: colour, nearness or farness, perspective. (The history of science, which is that of progress towards greater generalization is a gradual shedding of perspective – a journey towards Nagel’s “view from nowhere”.84) You might want to say that it still has primary qualities. Weight, size and shape may exist independently of any consciousness, as is evident from the fact that the rock may have an impact irrespective of any perceiver. It may provide shelter to grass, stop the dampness in the soil underneath it from drying out so quickly, arrest the path of another rock rolling down the hill, cast shadows and so on. Primary qualities, however, do not add up to an appearance. A rock does not have the wherewithal to generate the way it would appear in consciousness, even less “from a long way off ” or “from close to”. It is, of course, potentially, all these things, but the potential will not be realized unless it is observed. If those appearances were intrinsic rather than merely potential, if they were in the rock itself, then the item would be in conflict with itself: trying, for example, to look as it does from far off and from nearby at the same time. Like the nerve impulse, the rock – or indeed any other material object considered, in the absence of an observer, as matter – does not have an appearance. To summarize, such appearances as material objects do have are the “takes” that external observers – or an entire community of scientific observers coming to a conclusion about the appropriate way(s) to represent them – have on them. While the object provides certain constraints on

84. Nagel, The View from Nowhere.

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takes, it does not of itself deliver takes; takes require consciousness; indeed, consciousness is made up of takes. Matter has to have an angle, a viewpoint, a perspective, to support awareness of a world. It has none of these things intrinsically. Material objects as viewed by physics “in themselves”, as matter, have no appearances. The very notion of a complete account of the world in physical terms is of a world without appearance and hence a world without consciousness.

Nothing in appearance-less nerve impulses suggests that they have the ability to make appearance-less material things acquire (phenomenal) appearances

So far we have arrived at two conclusions: first, nerve impulses do not have definite appearances or phenomenal character in themselves; and, second, they share this lack with all material items when the latter are considered independently of an observer, most obviously when they are seen through the eyeless mathematical eyes of physics. We are now in a position to see the inherent contradiction of trying to find consciousness in nerve impulses or, more broadly, to see consciousness as a property arising out of certain events in the material world, where matter is as defined by physics. Consciousness is, at the basic level, appearances or appearings-to, but neither nerve impulses nor the material world have appearances. So there is absolutely no basis for the assumption, central to Neuromania, that the intrinsically appearance-less material world will flower into appearance to a bit of that world (the brain) as a result of the particular material properties of that bit of the world: for example, its ability to control the passage of sodium ions through semi-permeable membranes. We cannot expect to find anything in a material object, however fashioned, that can explain the difference between a thought and a pebble, or between a supposedly thoughtful brain and a definitely thoughtless kidney. And there is even more obviously nothing in the difference between a spinal cord and a cerebral cortex to explain why the former should be unaware and thoughtless and the latter (in parts) aware and thoughtful. This makes more obviously barmy the idea that nerve impulses can journey towards a place where they become consciousness: that, by moving from one material place to another they are mysteriously able to be the appearance of things other than themselves. If this is physics, it is not the physics to be found in textbooks. 143

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The difficulty of seeing how nerve impulses could confer appearance on the material world has led some to suggest that we do not experience the material world as such, only nerve impulses. Iain McGilchrist, whose extraordinary The Master and His Emissary represents Neuromania at its most extreme, asserts that “one could call ‘the mind’ the brain’s experience of itself ”,85 and many others have suggested that consciousness is our perception of some physical processes in the brain: in short, that consciousness and appearance are made of the appearance of nerve impulses to themselves! Leaving aside what we have already established, that nerve impulses do not have a definite appearance apart from a viewpoint that has a certain take on them, there is no reason why they should be riddled with a selfawareness that is, mysteriously, awareness of the material world that is their immediate or remote cause: that their unique self-awareness should be awareness of a world that is other than them. It is no help moving away from matter and appealing to the energy of mass-energy. Just as matter itself, by definition, ex officio, as it were, does not have an appearance corresponding to the kind of things we experience in consciousness, no more does energy. There is nothing in either corresponding to my seeing a rock. The light-mediated rubbing together of an appearance-less object (my brain) with appearance-less light arising from an appearance-less object (the rock) is hardly going to explain the appearance of the rock to me, the owner of the brain, even less my sense that the rock is independent of me (a foundational intuition of physics and the folk metaphysics of everyday life) or that it has the potential to yield an infinity of other different appearances to ourselves and other people (the foundational intuition of the public world we humans live in). So, the neural theory of consciousness is at odds with the very notion of matter that lies at the heart of the “orthodoxy” – to use Dennett’s word – that underpins it. The objects that surround us analysed as elementary particles are remote from the phenomenal world experienced and lived in by conscious beings. As the scientific gaze goes beyond ordinary objects,

85. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 19. Indeed, this “solution” makes things worse for the neural theory of consciousness. Consider my consciousness of this rock in front of me. There is no such thing (within the rock) as “what it is like to be” that rock. And there is no such thing as what it is like to be my body qua organism. And there is no such thing as what it is like to be my brain understood as a material object. The McGilchrist version of the neural theory requires all three things, if I am to be aware of a rock. Most mysteriously, it requires that “what it is like to be a brain” should be the revelation of what it is like to be a body and what a rock is like.

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perceived in the ordinary way, to their underlying material reality, so it progresses from things that have qualities to things that are characterized by numbers. It is not by accident that atoms are colourless, odourless and so on, and are defined by numbers that capture their size, speed and quantities; that experiences and experienced phenomena are replaced by numbers, patterns, and laws; that the progress of physical science is characterized by a progressive disappearance of appearance. Further empirical research, therefore, within the current way of understanding the problem will not take us any closer to a neural explanation of consciousness. What is needed is a revolution in the way in which we approach the problem. This may require us to see that it is more than a problem, or even to see that it is more than “a hard problem”. It is a mystery.

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CHAPTER FOUR

From Darwinism to Darwinitis

DENYING WHAT IS IN FRONT OF OUR NOSES

One of the most cherished assumptions of contemporary psychology … [is] that ape minds and human minds are in fact basically of the same type and shape, that there is no great qualitative gulf between human ways of construing the world and apes’ ways, that apes are in effect just like us, only less so.1 People say that we are our brains; our brains are evolved organs designed like other organs in all other living creatures to promote survival; the theory of evolution should therefore have the last word on human nature. And if you want to understand human beings, look to biology: thus the grand synthesis of Neuromania and Darwinitis. We have seen that Neuromania is without foundation, but Darwinitis is equally vulnerable. This time, you will be glad to know, knotty philosophical arguments are not required to expose this. We have only to do what Darwinitics failed to do. If they only looked at what was in front if their noses they would not have to be told that there are differences between organisms and people: that a great gulf separates us from even our nearest animal kin. There are, however, many thinkers who do see these differences but insist that they are not real or, if real, not fundamental. Under the surface differences, they tell us, there is a deep similarity or even identity. The life of a person in

1. Humphrey, “Foreword”.

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the office is essentially shaped by, and driven by, the programmes, instincts, tropism, motivations, imperatives and so on that guide the life of an ape in the jungle. The chief executive and the alpha-male gorilla are in thrall to the same imperative: to replicate their genetic material through individual survival or through their contribution to group survival. It is this that has shaped their brains, the consciousness supported by their brains and the behaviour that flows from that consciousness. It is not always clear how sincerely this belief is held. What is clear is that many people feel that they ought to hold it. In part, this may be an over-correction to the discredited view that man was different from all the other animals in virtue of having a special relationship to the author of the universe: that a separate day was set aside by God for the creation of man and that he, uniquely, was made in the image of God and was God’s particular concern. Over-correction may explain the fallacious assumption that the only alternative to a supernatural account of human beings is a naturalistic one. (This is not to deny that naturalism can, under certain circumstances, be liberating. We saw in Chapter 1 how Hippocrates’ naturalistic critique of supernatural explanations of epilepsy was deeply humane.) Biologism may also be a response to the uneasy feeling that man is still rather too prone to see himself as morally superior to other living creatures, notwithstanding the (seemingly) negative impact humans have had on the planet. Hence the Gray view of ourselves as Homo rapiens, a creature that exceeds all others not in virtue but in the power to wreak havoc. If we still cling to the assumption that the earth is there primarily for our benefit, and that we can suborn everything on it to our purposes, we may end up by destroying the very conditions of our own existence. At any rate, so the argument goes, if we give up the idea that we are superior to beasts then we might treat them better. We might be less “speciesist”. Josie Appleton has described speciesism as “a beastly concept”:2 upgrading beasts may lead to downgrading humans and even the importance of their suffering. There is evidence in support of her concern. For example, Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles suggested that hunting dolphins or capturing them for aquariums is “roughly the same thing whites were doing to blacks 200 years ago in the slave trade”.3 This is, of course, disgusting as well as nonsense. As for how we treat

2. Appleton, “Speciesism”. 3. Quoted in Leake & Warren, “Smarter Than You Think”.

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animals, we have only to acknowledge that they can experience suffering to feel morally obliged to minimize the suffering we inflict on them. More defensible is a feeling for which, as a doctor for thirty-five years – dealing with the way “our flesh surrounds us with its own decisions”4 and seeing how illness narrows the gap between our being as people and our being as organisms – I have some sympathy. It is this: since we are like animals in so many respects, unsentimental honesty perhaps requires us to acknowledge that we are just like animals in all respects. Like animals we are ejected from our mother’s bodies at birth and like animals we die of physiological failure; like animals, we eat, defecate, copulate, fight, fall over and so on. Every time I open my bowels I am reminded that I am an organism as well as a professor; and when I fall down the stairs I am informed that I am a piece of matter subject to the laws of gravity, as well as a living creature. It does not, however, follow from this that I am “just an animal” any more than I am “just a piece of matter”. Our lives are filled with many activities that are remote from eating, defecating, copulating, fighting and falling over, and, what is more, even these activities are utterly transformed in us. We don’t even defecate like animals, or not by choice anyway. Not only do we insist on a certain amount of privacy – and in recent times in rooms with light switches that are connected to fans based in the mighty science of electromagnetism to take away the pong – but we are the only beasts who manufacture toilet paper and argue over the respective merits of different brands of it. (These may have been recent developments but they are symptoms of our fundamental difference as a species from all others.) Human dying is profoundly different from animal dying, except at the very end, when we become more like other stricken beasts. To say that we have a different attitude to death would miss the real difference: we are the sole creatures who have any attitude towards death and it pervades our life. And when it comes to mating we are the only beasts who make love, the only ones for whom sexual intercourse is the meeting of two selves. Every seemingly animal need or appetite – for food, water, warmth – is profoundly changed in humans. We appropriate the biological givens and subordinate them to distinctively, uniquely human ends.5 Take something as simple as dealing with our saliva. We use our capacity to spit it out as well as to swallow it as the basis for a nexus of profoundly

4. Larkin, “Ignorance”. 5. See my The Kingdom of Infinite Space.

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symbolic acts. These acts may be very complex indeed. We usually find others’ saliva rather repulsive. Hence saliva is ripe to be used in fabricating potent symbols of contempt and spitting at someone is a profound violation of their person. The asymmetry of the one who spits and the one who is spat on is profound; it cuts through the power relations between humans to its existential bedrock. This makes the line in Handel’s Messiah “He hid not His face from shame and spitting” arresting as well as poignant. What is more, as I pointed out in The Kingdom of Infinite Space,6 the act of spitting at Jesus was, according to the Bible, foretold in the book of the prophet Isaiah seven hundred or more years before Christ is supposed to have been born. There could be no more arresting a transformation of a biological given than that of spitting prepared seven hundred years – greater than the interval between the battle of Agincourt and the Somme – before the head went back and hurled the prophesied saliva at its target, Jesus Christ, an individual who is supposed to be the earthly representative of the sum total of everything. Consider something as commonplace and seemingly simple as buying a can of beans in a supermarket. Getting to the shelves involves a journey that requires a sustained intention to see me from my home through many twists and turns, many gear changes, many constituent actions, to get to the shop. While the can of beans may sometimes be an impulse purchase prompted by the wiles of the advertising industry (itself another marker of the complexity of human beings), in most cases, contrary to the theorists of neuromarketing (of whom more in Chapter 8), beans will be what I set out to buy. And even the “impulse” buy has an extensive back story. It requires my getting into position to make any kind of purchase. It would take an entire book to unpack the act of buying: the exchange of (earned or stolen) money; the nature of the thing bought (its being picked, processed, canned, labelled, the label itself drawing on a mass of knowledge and shaped by a myriad of regulations); the idea of the meal that it will contribute to. The implicit frames of reference that make sense of this seemingly simple act are endless and none have any counterpart in the life of any beasts. I have focused on homely things such as defecating and buying beans7 because I think it’s a mistake to pick out more elevated or spiritual modes

6. I have devoted a section of The Kingdom of Infinite Space to sputum (pp. 24–32), where those with strong stomachs may contemplate the human transformation of this biological given in a little more detail. 7. In Michelangelo’s Finger I have focused on the gesture of referential pointing.

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of behaviour, such as writing sonnets or composing symphonies or investigating the laws of nature or believing in God. This is to play into the hands of the Darwinitics because it suggests that our differences are only marginal: evident in the top 2 per cent of our behaviours. After all, few of us spend much time writing sonnets and most none at all. If my difference from beasts depended on my ability to write symphonies or to worship a god then I would not make the grade. Besides, the appeal to premier cru human activities would not impress the determined animalizers: as we saw in “The humanities become animalities” in Chapter 2, and will discuss in Chapter 8, even these can be neuralized and Darwinized and assimilated to animal behaviour. The point is that our difference from beasts is wall to wall, permeating every moment of our day. We are as remote from animals when we queue for tickets for a pop concert as when we write a sublime symphony. It is, of course, salutary to point out that some of our differences from beasts are rather elevated. Many of our strongest appetites – for example, for abstract knowledge and understanding – are unique to us. Only humans read and write books on the distinctive features of being the particular species they are; or, more generally, seek a collective and individual self-image and meaning, trying to make sense of who and what they are. At the heart of our exceptional nature, the difference that makes us different from all animals in a way that is itself quite different from all the respects other animals are different from each other is that we are explicit creatures who do things deliberately (something to which I shall return, especially in “The human world” in Chapter 6). This transforms every aspect of our lives. It lies at the root of so many things: that we guide, justify, and excuse our behaviour according to general and abstract principles; create cities, laws, institutions; frame our individual lives within a shared history; and systematically enquire into the order of things and the patterns of causation and physical laws that seem to underpin that order. It is this that lies behind the uses to which we put fire, our invention of the wheel, the manipulation of the world through a multitude of different kinds of levers, our unique sense of hidden forces and causes,8 and all the artefacts that have resulted from our ingenuity. In the several million years since we separated from the pongids, we have created a material world that

8. Even those who disagree with the primatologist Daniel Povinelli about certain differences between humans and non-human primates agree that we are unique in having a sense of causation that goes beyond mere association: we have an intuition of causes as handles on the world. See e.g. Reboul, “Similarities and Differences”.

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is an artefactscape, invented countless tools from the pebble chopper via the needle to the power station and the supercomputer, and established a multitude of ways of regulating how we live together. Chimpanzees are living roughly as they lived when we and they took different paths from our joint ancestors five million years ago. The acme of their (apparent) tool use remains the ability to crack a nut with a stone or highly programmed termite fishing. I don’t want to sound “chimpist”, but I cannot resist observing that chimps are chumps. The desire to minimize human uniqueness has prompted exaggerated claims about animal tool use, about their range and mode of communication and their sense of each other, about their putative beliefs and other modes of thought. However, the monuments of collective endeavour seen in the animal kingdom – for example the heaps created by termites – are the result not of conscious deliberation but of dovetailing automaticities. Beavers and humans make dams but the beaver’s dam is a standardized species-wide imperative; human dams are the product of argument, effort, imagination, domination, evolving technology, ingenuity and so on. The Hoover Dam was legislated into place; beaver dams require no such instruments to bring them about. Not that this would impress Gray, for whom “the humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration” so that “Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is as natural as a spider’s web”.9 One wonders why the World Wide Web was not spun until the 1990s. For some, an overwhelming case for feeling obliged to “see through” our differences from higher primates to an underlying identity comes from the fact that we share more than 98 per cent of our genes with the chimpanzee. This is not as relevant to predicting the expected distance between ourselves and our nearest primate kin as is often claimed. First, genetic determinism is looking very ropy. Ironically, it was the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago that showed how little the genetic code told us about living organisms (and even less about complex ones such as us). The increasing emphasis on post-genomics, epigenetics, integrative biology and the influence of the environment is an indirect criticism of the hype surrounding the decoding of DNA. The expression of genes is hugely influenced by the environment in which the organism finds itself. In the case of the genes relevant to behaviour, the overwhelmingly influential

9. Gray, Straw Dogs, 116.

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human environment – woven out of artefacts, institutions, mores, laws, norms, expectations, narratives, education, training, self-education and self-training – is utterly different from any conceivable animal environment. Second, the figure of more than a 98 per cent overlap needs to be examined carefully. One common riposte is to point out that we share 50 per cent of our genes with a banana. More importantly, we need to ask what the “sharing” means, and here an unlikely ally comes to our aid. Dawkins points out that “an estimate like ‘98 per cent in common’ doesn’t mean anything unless we specify the size of the unit we are comparing … If you are comparing whole chromosomes, the percentage shared is zero”.10 I could go on, but anyone who still believes that our supposed close genetic overlap with chimps means that chimps are humanoids and humans are chimpish should read Jeremy Taylor’s book on this theme.11 It sometimes takes more than one set of opaque lenses, of preconceived ideas, to prevent us from seeing what is in front of our noses. And there is no shortage of such ideas to make some people believe that a chimp reaching for a banana and a shopper reaching for a can of beans are doing the same kinds of things. Robinson has identified a fallacy that he has called “persistence of original motivation”.12 Here’s how it goes. If the behaviour of a later species S2 (say H. sapiens) has evolved from the behaviour of the earlier species S1 (say a common primate ancestor), then the explanation of the behaviour of S2 remains essentially the same as the behaviour of S1. Behind this is another assumption that if two sets of behaviour – say eating – have a common ultimate origin, then they are the same now. This, finally, expresses the bedrock (fallacious) assumption that if two evolving processes have a common origin they cannot end up any different from one another, from which it follows that the shopper reaching for a can of beans is doing the same thing and is moved by the same forces as the chimp reaching out for a banana. Denying the reality of change – so that biological roots are regarded as the complete explanation of cultural leaves – underpins the mistaken belief that Darwinism (which explains how the organism H. sapiens came into being) requires us also to accept Darwinitis (which purports to explain everything about people in terms of biological evolution). The change is easier to deny because it was gradual: there was no point at which the 10. Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, 318. 11. Taylor, Not a Chimp. 12. Robinson, pers. comm.

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human organism suddenly turned into an embodied subject, into a person; no leap from one essence (a primate essence) to human being. Instead, there was (as we shall discuss in Chapter 6) a gradual widening of the gap between human subjects and animal organisms over many hundreds of thousands of years, resulting from a multitude of processes contributing to a collective self-fashioning reinforced by a collective sense of who we are, itself in turn reinforced by an infinitely complex human environment built out of artefacts that are signs and mirrors of our difference from the natural world out of which we originated. Those who want to say that we are “essentially animals”, and that the distance between our cultural leaves and our biological roots is irrelevant, have to forget, or at least minimize, all that has happened in the millions of years since we and chimps journeyed in different directions: the slow-moving journey of gene-based evolution in the chimps’ case; and a much faster-moving hominid journey, in which initial biological promoters of difference – the upright position, hands, a special kind of gaze – were increasingly overshadowed by cultural promoters such as tools, language and the creation of public spaces and a shared consciousness. Those who overlook this journey are fixing their gaze on the launch pad in the expectation of seeing the rocket that has long since gone into space. Darwin himself reached the edge of Darwinitis. In The Descent of Man, he approvingly cited Thomas Huxley’s assertion that “in every visible character man differs less from the higher apes, than these do from the lower members of the same order of Primates”.13 And he added that “in his bodily frame”, man bears “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”.14 So much for visible features; no one is going to deny that humans are anatomically closer to chimps than the latter are to, say, a dwarf lemur or a centipede. This does not diminish the potential importance of the anatomical differences between the great apes and humans. Nor, on the other hand, should we doubt the shared origins of some of our modes of expression, as readers will recall from his discussion of facial expressions (see p. 43). He concluded from them that “man once existed in a much lower and animallike condition”.15 Note that Darwin writes “once existed”. Emotionally and intellectually modern man is a relative newcomer. What is most important is that we 13. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18. 14. Ibid., 691. 15. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 13.

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have now come to be utterly different. As Darwin himself said in his discussion of the expression of human emotions, while “every true or inherited movement of expression seems to have had some natural and independent origin”, once acquired “such movements may be voluntarily and consciously employed as a means of communication”.16 We take the biological givens and subordinate them to distinctively human ends. It is this that underlies the difference between the biological opinion and the cultural destination; between the organism H. sapiens and the human person. We can be good Darwinians and acknowledge this difference: in short, allow ourselves to see what is in front of our noses and admit that life in the office and life in the jungle share little or nothing, beyond the kind of surface analogies captured in jokes. So how could anyone be persuaded otherwise?

THE PINCER MOVEMENT

If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.17 I have suggested why some thinkers feel that we ought to think of ourselves as animals; they imagine Darwinism requires this of them. But we still need to explain how they manage actually to mislead themselves. The explanation lies in our propensity to think by analogy. One example of this is to see in other creatures a mirror of ourselves. This tendency to see ourselves in “a foxed mirror” has a venerable ancestry, as we noted earlier. We see foxy faces, piggy eyes in those we meet; we describe their behaviour as being like a shark or a viper; and even talk of the streets of inner cities as being “like a jungle”. Recent biologistic arguments are drawing not only on science but also on ancient intuitions, which have a rich and complex history. Darwinism – and subsequent genetic science and molecular

16. Ibid., 356. 17. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 21.

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biology – has simply given an apparent systematic, scientific warrant for an existing propensity to believe that we are not fundamentally different from other animals. The Darwinitic case, however, has been reinforced by a language-based “pincer movement” closing on the gap between the way we describe, and hence think of, animals and the way we describe, and hence think of, ourselves. It involves characterizing humans in beastly terms and beasts in human terms. Darwinitics have become so used to re-describing what goes on in ordinary human life in such a way as to make it sound like what goes on in ordinary animal life that they no longer notice themselves doing it. And this way of talking has invaded, indeed pervaded, our everyday way of speaking and thinking about ourselves and the activities that fill our lives.

Animalizing humans

Here are a couple of examples: feeding and learning: first, feeding. Supposing you invite me out for a meal. Having learnt that you have just taken on a big loan for a house, which has unexpectedly turned into a mound of negative equity, I choose the cheapest items on the menu and, patting my stomach and blowing out my cheeks, demonstrating the standard signs of satiety, falsely declare that I am full after the main course so as to spare you the expense of a pudding. A chimpanzee reaches out for or begs for a banana and consumes it. Darwinitics would like to say that both the chimp and I are doing similar things: exhibiting “feeding behaviour”. This identity of description, however, obscures huge differences between the chimp’s behaviour and mine. Let’s stick with food for a moment. Anyone who is acquainted with the most ordinary dinner table – the products of a vast number of deliberate actions on the part of those sitting round it – will be on their guard when they hear the phrase “feeding behaviour” applied to both humans and beasts. An ordinary meal is the endpoint of a long journey away from biology. Cooking, eating regulated by the clock and the calendar, the complex structure of meals and the grammar of what goes with what, the ritualistic and celebratory aspects of eating, the multitude of items of tableware that have come from near and far, the journeys taken by the food to the table, the journeys undertaken by those who gather round the table, and the use of money as the all-purpose commodity to purchase food – these are but a few of the ways in which human dining is distanced from animal eating. 156

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These are all increasingly sophisticated aspects of man the animal who does things explicitly and whose natural medium is a community of minds extending geographically across the globe and historically into the accumulated consciousness of the human race. The laid and laden table draws on four quarters of the earth and great tracts of past and present human consciousness.18 Here’s another example. I decide to improve my career prospects by signing up for a degree course that begins next year. I have a small child. I therefore do more babysitting this year in order to stockpile some tokens that I can cash when I will need them to attend my classes. Daisy the cow bumps into an electric wire and henceforth avoids the location of the wire. It could be said that both Daisy and I have been exhibiting “learning behaviour”. This manages to cover up huge differences that hardly need spelling out, although it is worth drawing attention to something that is distinctive about human learning: it is deliberate, explicit, mediated through innumerable intermediate steps that require us to know what we are doing and why. What is more, our learning often depends on others to teach us. We are the only animals who deliberately instruct each other. Chimps don’t even teach their young such elementary skills as breaking a nut with a stone.19

Humanizing animals

The second arm of the pincer narrowing the gap between humans and beasts describes animal behaviour anthropomorphically, making it seem to be human-like; talking down humans is complemented by talking up animals. This is even more productive of distortions. We are all familiar with Disney-like descriptions of animals that impute to them all manner of abstract or factual knowledge and institutional sentiments for which there is evidence only in human beings. This exemplifies a wider error that I have christened the fallacy of misplaced explicitness, which enables us to speak of foxes formulating cunning plans to outwit their predators. Such everyday anthropomorphism – the obverse of the fallacy of non-explicitness, which

18. The argument that our true animal nature is revealed in our need for food, and that feeding is just feeding behaviour, is dealt with in my book Hunger. 19. After decades of observation, the leading primatologists David Premack and Ann Premack concluded that chimpanzee mothers do not teach their children to crack nuts (see Premack & Premack, Original Intelligence).

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tries to automate human behaviour and deny that agents are aware of the nature, the purpose and the drivers of their actions – should have no place in science. but it does and it is very much alive and kicking in the most sophisticated zoological circles. Recall Kandel’s claim that sea slugs have memory and Clayton’s attempt to demonstrate that Western scrub-jays have a sense of future. But once the standards are lowered for granting faculties to animals, all creatures great and small are able to qualify when seen through the sympathetic eyes of a champion. A recent paper has suggested that insects can recognize human faces, categorize the contents of the world and even count!20 The counting claim is particularly arresting because, if anything separates humans from the animal kingdom, it is the quantitative approach to conceptualizing the world around us. “Measurement began our might”, as the poet W. B. Yeats said.21 So it’s worth examining this claim a bit more closely.22 In the vast majority of cases, the evidence for animal numeracy has been based on the observation that the beast under study behaves differently towards something that is (say) composed of four items rather than three. This is then interpreted to mean that it can tell the difference between “three” and “four”, and hence can count. The conclusion is, however, unwarranted. All that the beast detects is a difference in qualitative magnitude – “bigger” rather than “smaller” – and this has little to do with counting. What counts as counting? For a start, it requires a grip on numbers, on quantities separate from objects, on abstract quantities: or, as philosophers would say, the idea (if only implicit) of a number as “a class of equinumerous classes”. And it requires a sense of the limitlessness of numbers. An animal that can count only up to 2, or 7, or 15, is not counting, just as it is not calculating if it is not able to manipulate those abstract quantities. It is the human observer who turns the insects’ sense of different magnitudes into counting. In reality, they no more count than they read. Other over-interpreted examples relate to so-called tool use. A recent instance is a report of a newly observed behaviour in the veined octopus. This enterprising creature collects half coconut shells and, using its arms as rigid stilts, transports the shells and assembles them as shelters when

20. Chittka & Niven, “Are Bigger Brains Better?” 21. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben”. 22. For a more detailed critique of claims about animal numeracy see my The Hand, ch. 8, “Abstract Digits”.

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they are needed. Is this tool use in the way that is seen in humans? If octopuses really had the concepts of “shelter” and of “tool”, they would not be one-trick ponies that had only this single tool system.23 Their failure to build on this does not make the new variation in behaviour quantitatively different from other pre-programmed activity such as nest building, which is anyway much more complex. By their (lack of ) subsequent fruit, ye shall know what these technologically infertile variations truly are. Another recent, to some even more compelling, example of humanlike tool use was observed in chimps by the biologist Paco Bertolani in the hot, dry savannah of Fongoli in Senegal.24 They use sharpened sticks as spears to poke into holes in trees and stab bushbabies to death prior to eating them. What is wrong with this as an example of human-like tool use, leaving aside the view of the bushbaby? It is the one-trick pony problem again. The chimp does not use the tool for any other purpose – for example to throw at a prey at a distance – and it does not make other tools on the basis of the principles seemingly expressed in this one. The animal does not grasp any underlying principles. The sharpened stick is not a case of primitive technology, for the latter is rooted in explicitness. What is more, the technological breakthrough does not seem to have been appreciated by the males: females and the young are overwhelmingly the main users. The missing element is what lies at the heart of genuine technology or tool use: a true sense of causality, connected with that of bodily agency, as we shall discuss in Chapter 6. This is illustrated in the absence of self-training or indeed training others in the use of tools. Animals do not practise or teach skills. In no case is the use of the tool a local expression of a global sense of personal possibility. I have already referred to the fallacy of misplaced explicitness. One consequence of the power of this fallacy is that there is no point at which we can say that some abstract, higher-level faculty is not present. It can lead to assertions such as that animals, which can be trained to exhibit different responses to types of stimuli, are engaging in classificatory behaviour. Why should we not then conclude that a spider weaves a web in the belief/expectation/hope that it will catch a fly, satisfy its needs or guarantee the replication of the genetic material for which it is the vehicle? Even talk of “selfish genes”, although it is not meant literally – Dawkins does not believe that

23. Finn et al., “Defensive Tool Use in a Coconut-Carrying Octopus”. 24. Pruetz, “Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus”.

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molecules can be selfish, any more than they can be selfless, because they have no self to which these ethical categories can be attached – contributes nonetheless to blurring the boundaries between material events that simply happen, animal behaviour, and human activity that is driven, shaped and guided by explicit intentions and conscious motivation. The reality of that blurring process is shown by the claim by some that artefacts such as thermostats “judge” that the temperature is too high or too low, and send out signals or instructions accordingly.25 One of the key steps in Disneyfication of animal consciousness is the ascription of beliefs to animals. Why is this wrong? Consider a dog chasing a cat. The cat scampers up a lime tree. The dog misses this clever dodge but carries on to the next tree, an elm, and, seeing that the cat has disappeared, barks up it. We are inclined to say that the reason the dog is barking at nothing is that it believes (in this case erroneously) that the cat is up the elm tree. As has often been pointed out, we are not justified in describing the dog as having “the belief that the cat is up the elm tree” because he does not have the concepts “cat”, “elm tree” and so on. This is not a narrow point about the dog lacking language but a broader point about the fact that any particular belief is part of a network of beliefs, which have logical entailments. As Donald Davidson wrote, “To have a single propositional attitude [such as a belief ] is to have a largely correct logic, in the sense of having a pattern of beliefs that largely cohere”.26 The cause of a belief is another belief: a different kind of connectedness than that which is seen in the causal sequences of the material world. It might be counter-argued that this is a requirement only for explicit beliefs. If, however, one cannot ascribe explicit beliefs to animals then one is left with ascribing only implicit beliefs to them. But the criteria for determining that an animal has an implicit belief are then so lax that it would allow us to say of a spider that it believed that its web would catch flies, that this would satisfy its needs and that this would ensure the replication of its genome. Primatologists whose favourite species are given the benefit of the doubt by the deployment of the fallacy of misplaced explicitness may be a little miffed to find that an anthropomorphizing gaze can be cast with equal fondness on creepy-crawlies. And there is no reason why one should stop

25. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind; see esp. “What is it like to be a thermostat?” (p. 293) and “Whither panpsychism?” (p. 297). 26. Davidson, “Rational Animals”, 321.

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there.27 Consider the claim by Dennett that a “thermostat” not only judges situations (as David Chalmers suggested) but that “it is one of the simplest … systems that should be included in the class of believers”.28 There could be no clearer demonstration that, once modes of consciousness such as beliefs are separated from explicit awareness, we can find them everywhere (even, as we shall find in “Myth-information” in Chapter 5, “information processing” in an electron on Mars). Much Disneyfication in zoology comes from what Povinelli has called “the argument from analogy”: “the logical weakness in assuming that the similarity in the natural behaviour of humans and chimpanzees implies a comparable similarity in the mental states that attend and generate that behaviour”.29 This humanizes the way chimpanzees understand their world: how it is put together, what it is made of and why it works the way it does. Povinelli dismantles the seductive assumption that similarity of behaviour implies similarity of mental processes by means of a series of ingenious studies that demonstrate just how remote the chimpanzee mind is from the human mind. For example, while one chimp may follow another chimp’s gaze, thereby seeing what his fellow is seeing, this hard-wired response, superficially similar to gaze-following in humans, does not require the first chimp to have the idea that the other chimp has a mental state of seeing. How does Povinelli back up his scepticism about chimpanzees’ having the notion of others having mental states? Through experiments that demonstrate that chimpanzees do not have the notion of another individual – say a human observer – being unable to see something because their eyes are covered. By contrast human infants are able to appreciate pointing – and the notion of seeing as a state in another person – before they achieve their first birthday. Primatologists have failed to see this deficiency in chimps, Povinelli argues, because man has “a unique mental system that cannot help distorting the chimpanzee’s mind, obligatorily recreating it in his own image”.30 We shall return to Povinelli in Chapter 6, when we consider the fundamental differences between human and animal consciousness.

27. Dennett, “Do Animals Have Beliefs?”, 114. 28. Ibid. 29. This is engagingly described in Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes, 9. Some of the key points are covered in Povinelli & Vonk, “Chimpanzee Minds”. 30. For a critique of Povinelli’s views see Tomasello et al., “Chimpanzees Understand Psychological States”. I was not persuaded by this, but the reader might be.

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The lexical shuttle

In my attempt to explain how so many people have demonstrated to their own and others’ satisfaction that we are not fundamentally different from animals, I have separated the two strategies (not always consciously deployed): (a) animalizing human behaviour and (b) humanizing animal behaviour. In fact, they are not truly separate and, indeed, are successive phases in a cyclical process, in which each reinforces the other. Those who ascribe beliefs to animals, and even to artefacts such as thermostats, are also highly sceptical of the way we think of beliefs in humans as distinct mental contents, arguing, as Dennett does, that they belong to “folk psychology”. And the semantic obliteration of the gap between human and animal behaviour has been the result of a shuttling back and forth of descriptive terms between the former and the latter. Anthropomorphism and animalomorphism are like two sides of an arch, supporting one another. This is particularly striking in the case of sexual bonding and child rearing. A word such as “courtship”, for example, is transferred from the complex setting of the interactions between self-conscious human beings in a community of minds to the hard-wired behaviour of animals: the standardized pre-mating feeding rituals of herring gulls, for example. This act of lexical anthropomorphism is then complemented by a reverse movement in which the notion of “courtship”, reduced to hard-wired rituals, is reapplied to the human behaviour from which the term was originally derived. The anthropomorphization of sexual behaviour can extend to some unlikely species. I promise you I did not invent a paper entitled “Homosexual Rape and Sexual Selection in Acanthocephalan Worms”. It was published in Science.31 Other terms, such as “pair bonding” used to refer both to human marriage and the long-term cohabitation of ravens or “nest-building” to encompass the programmed behaviour of birds and the decisions to engage in DIY before a baby is born, likewise belong to a lexical shuttle. This is how we reinforce the habit of locating the idea of the human in the same conceptual space as the idea of the animal. One example that particularly amuses me is the use of the word “grooming” to encompass what I do when I brush my teeth and what the

31. Abele & Gilchrist, “Homosexual Rape and Sexual Selection”. The authors do not consider whether the rape in question might have been date rape or due to a ghastly misunderstanding.

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cat does when it licks its bottom with its tongue. The fact that my grooming involves toothpaste, which I have remembered to buy and pack, and which has been sold to me on the basis of its superior ability to prevent tooth decay itself validated by knowledge about dental biology, puts it at some distance from the cat’s stomach-turning auto-attentions. That toothpaste is a commodity, bought for money, should remind us of a ubiquitous feature of human life: the transformation of the objects of needs into commodities that are obtained through complex systems of exchange. In summary, those who are committed to closing the gap between humans and animals have many instruments at their disposal, and a long history of conceptual border-crossing. They also play on our fear of seeming sentimental about humans since Darwin demonstrated that the organism H. sapiens came into being by the same processes as generated monkeys, squids and bacteria. No wonder it is possible for some people to ignore what is in front of their noses, particularly since they may feel obliged to doubt their own senses. Nevertheless, even Darwinitics can’t help noticing that there is a gap between themselves and chimps and a greater gap between themselves and dwarf lemurs and rats and centipedes. Something is needed to fill that gap: or to elide it. Enter the meme: to “save appearances”; to reconcile the facts with a theory that cannot accommodate them.

FILLING THE GREAT DITCH: MEMES

The land-fill devised to obliterate the great ditch between animals who merely live and humans who lead their lives actively and self-consciously and whose entire way of being is subject to unlimited elaboration and transformation, was invented by Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene, the book that justly propelled him to international fame.32 Many readers found Dawkins’s conception of the meme persuasive as a bridge between evolutionary theory – which gives an account of the agonisingly slow emergence of organisms including H. sapiens – and the rapidly changing nature of human life that is clearly independent of any genetic changes. Meme theory is central to one school of ideas at the heart of evolutionary psychology.

32. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 11, “Memes: The New Replicators”. There have been two further editions since its first publication.

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We have already discussed another version of evolutionary psychology that emphasizes the extent to which our thoughts and motives and actions are constrained by universals that evolved during our time as hunter-gatherers, mediated by modules of our mind–brain computer that evolved in the distant past. We shall return to this as it also assumes that we are ignorant of the source, motive and indeed the very nature of actions. However, meme theory is more concerned with change than with constancy: it aims to explain not only the speed of cultural development but also the diversity and the unique richness of human life. It has imported into the understanding of history, society, social psychology and the customs and practices of everyday life the concepts on which Darwinian theory was founded. In the decades since Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, the theory of the meme has grown increasingly popular, not least because it has had some very distinguished champions, notably Susan Blackmore33 and Dennett, for whom the meme was central to his biologistic account of consciousness in Consciousness Explained.34 There was a time when Dawkins himself seemed a little uneasy about his brainchild but this is no longer the case. His critique of religion The God Delusion, for example, draws heavily on the notion of religion as a meme or meme complex. Indeed, the “meme” as a term, a concept, an explain-all, has itself behaved precisely as memes are supposed to behave; it has spread like a highly infectious virus through the brains of many who think about our nature and the population at large, who are invited to think in a certain way about their own nature. Let us step back in time and remind ourselves of the change of the perspective that Dawkins – building on the work of theorists such as J. B. S. Haldane, R. S. Fisher and Bill Hamilton – effected in his extraordinarily brilliant The Selfish Gene. He placed genetic material, the DNA that is replicated each time an organism reproduces, at the heart of evolutionary theory, rather than the organism itself. He called this the replicator and downgraded the organism to a mere vehicle to carry the replicator. According to this “gene-eyed” view, everything in the organism is subordinated to ensuring the replication of the replicator. A butterfly, for example, is merely a flying device for ensuring the spread of the butterfly genome. 33. Blackmore, The Meme Machine. 34. Dennett devotes a full ten pages to memes in Consciousness Explained and, as we shall see, develops a theory in which memes are the very fabric of our minds.

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This seemingly topsy-turvy view of evolution was a way of cutting to the heart of the notion of natural selection: of the way life evolves by differential selection of replicators. It is not the individual organism that is at issue when we are talking about selective survival but the population of organisms sharing the same genetic material. The organism is merely the means to securing the continuation of the genetic material. This is what survives when the fittest survive. The population-based approach – and the idea of inclusive, as opposed to individual, fitness – deals among other things with an apparent paradox; namely, that the lives of some organisms seem to be subordinated to the needs of their conspecifics. Inclusive fitness is the sum of an organism’s classical fitness (how many of its own offspring it produces and supports) and the number of equivalents of its own offspring it can add to the population by supporting others. Worker ants and altruistic chimps, while they are apparently acting against their own best interest, are in tune with the central evolutionary drive: they are slaves to the replicative demands of their genetic material. You will recall Dawkins’s pithy observation quoted in Chapter 1 that “An animal’s behaviour tends to maximise the gene ‘for’ that behaviour whether or not the genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it”.35 The genome, therefore, carries instructions not only for making the structure of the organism but also for shaping its behaviour. The phenotype expressing the gene extends, beyond “function” physiologically construed, to individual and collective behaviour. And this is where memes enter the picture. It is obvious that human life evolves independently of genes and, indeed, the pace of change leaves genes panting far behind. Darwinitis demands that we invoke something analogous to genes to account for this faster rate of evolution. That is why the biosphere has to be complemented with the memosphere: to take account of cultural evolution. Memes, like genes, are transmissible units: fertile elements that replicate themselves with reliability. Gene products, such as a brain adapted to react in a certain way to natural stimuli, are supplemented by mental phenomena that are shared between brains. As Blackmore has put it, our minds are fashioned by memes, just as our bodies are fashioned by genes: “We are meme machines by and for the selfish replicators”.36

35. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 265. 36. Blackmore, “The Evolution of Meme Machines”.

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When Dawkins introduced the concept he gave as examples of memes items such as “tunes, ideas, catch phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”. The memophilic Dennett lists “returnable bottles, Moby Dick, the SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] agreement, faith and tolerance for free speech”.37 The important point is that memes are just as selfish as genes. If they are advantageous to those who carry them, all well and good. They are, however, of advantage primarily to themselves: they exist in order to replicate; and they persist because they replicate. And how do they replicate? By occupying human minds. “Minds”, according to Dawkins, “are friendly environments to parasitic, self-replicating ideas or information, and [they] are typically massively infected”; “if an idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain”.38 As Dennett writes, “The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind”;39 indeed (for Dennett), human minds are not merely massively infected with memes – they “are themselves to a very great degree the creation of memes”. “Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly meme-effects in brains).”40 We will give the idea – reminiscent of the wilder shores of scholasticism (how many memes can dance on the head of an evolutionary psychologist?) – the courtesy of critique. Let’s first address the notion that a meme is supposed to be a unit, analogous to a gene, transmitted whole or not at all. In what sense is “faith” or “tolerance of free speech” or even the SALT agreement a unit? These quasi-entities are gathered up in nouns (“faith”) or noun-phrases (“tolerance of free speech”) but it is the grossest literalism to imagine that for every noun – not excluding abstract nouns – there corresponds a bounded object, or an entity that comes with its own boundaries, which can jump, whole cloth, from mind to mind. The claim that memes are units because they “replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity”41 manages to be circular, empty and daft all at once: quite an achievement. The extremity of daftness is achieved when Dennett identifies memes “for normative concepts – for ought and good and truth and beauty”.42 I will

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 203. Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, 162. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 207. Ibid., 210. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 344. Dennett, “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination”, 134.

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not insult the readers’ intelligence by spelling out why these cannot be described as units. The supposed unitary nature of memes raises the question of how many there are (after all, we can count genes), or how many are in play at a particular time. How many memes were acting through me on a train journey I recently took to London? If I were to construct a complete transcript of my train journey – which I shall spare you – the gospel according to the memophiles would require me to invoke not merely many thousands of these items but actually an indefinite number. The process of boarding the train, the decisions that got me on to the train, the way I comported myself to my fellow passengers, the work that I did while travelling and all that it meant, and so on and so forth, cannot be boiled down to the expression of a definite number of memes. Undertaking such a journey expresses, as we noted when we discussed the unity of consciousness, a long-range internal connectedness, knitting together a multidimensional network of world-moments infused by my explicit consciousness. And all these moments are held together in the face of those hundreds of other preoccupations that engage any busy person, all maintained in the teeth of a continuous rain of interruptions, distractions and sense data. None of this would be possible without a sustained sense of purpose – or indeed of the multiplicity of purposes, relating to our tasks, duties and immediate and distant goals – trans-illuminating the whole journey. “Units of cultural transmission”, of which our minds are passive recipients, hardly reflect the densely interwoven fabric of everyday understanding. Indeed, it is difficult to see how meme-possession could offer anything other than the image of the mind as a lumber room or junkyard full of cognitive or cultural bric-a-brac. This would hardly correspond either to the reality of experience or, more importantly, to the reality of the way we navigate through, and interact with, the world of daily life, never mind how we project ourselves into a complex, timetabled future, on the basis of a complex past composed of singularities. Memes, passively acquired and stitching themselves together in clusters or “meme-plexes”, hardly answer to this. There are other objections to the notion of the human mind and our shared cultures as being woven out of memes and evolving as the result of an essentially unconscious process leading to differential survival of these imaginary items. First, meme theory puts a question mark against its own claims to truth. If it is true it must, like other memes, simply be a mind infestation that has only its own welfare at heart. This objection has been anticipated by Dawkins: 167

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Scientific ideas, like all memes are subject to a kind of natural selection and this might look superficially virus-like, but the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favour pointless self-serving behaviour.43 And he goes on to set out the methodological virtues that the memes he approves of have. Merging the notion of scientific methodology and “natural selection” is barmy. I would suggest that the clinical trial that leads to the choice of one drug against another – typically taking five to ten years to set up, implement and analyse, doesn’t look anything like natural selection. And this is linked with a second objection. Ideas and ideacomplexes do not invade our passive minds; we have to think, comprehend them and acquire them, often with a great deal of conscious work. And the ideas themselves are, as in the case of those in science, developed as the result of huge mental effort by individuals thinking in concert with, in opposition to, other individuals. We may assent to, or dissent from, ideas; we may even resist a tune in our head. Try doing that with one of your genes or a virus infesting your brain! An encounter with a putative meme does not guarantee the consent necessary to its becoming incorporated in my mind. Indeed, meme theory betrays how the very term “cultural evolution” can be a fudge, importing into cultural change the passivity of a process driven by the operation of natural selection on spontaneous variation. It pushes to one side the huge efforts, and ingenuity, that go into driving the various revolutions – technological, agricultural, scientific, industrial, judicial – that mark the history of humanity. By glossing over this, the ambiguity of the concept of “evolution”, which refers both to any gradual change over time and to a process of change driven by natural selection, can be exploited to keep the Darwinian flame alive in places where it should not be able to find any oxygen. So Darwinitics talk about “social evolution” or “institutional evolution” as if they were the same as organic evolution; in other words as if they were unconscious processes, requiring no effort on anyone’s part or sense of direction even at a micro-scale. In reality, evolution as it applies to technologies or social institutions, while it is indeed a

43. Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, 171.

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gradual process that has no final goal in view, involves much deliberation and has many explicit intermediate goals.44 Finally, the analogy with genes is flawed; it does not have anything corresponding to the distinction between the genotype and the phenotype, or between gene and gene product. Indeed, Dawkins describes memes as part of an “extended phenotype”. The idea, then, is daft, so it must have other attractions than plausibility.45 And the attraction is, of course, the dream of an all-encompassing theory, based on Darwinism, that would, to use Dennett’s already quoted claim, unify “the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law”.46 The extension of evolution from genes to memes props up this exaggerated assessment of the scope of Darwin’s great theory. Memes fill the gap between man the organism and human beings who are persons, conscious agents, genuine individuals, actively leading their own lives with something that has the passivity and automaticity of Darwinian natural selection, marginalizing individuality, the self and agency. From the point of view of those who wish to deny or conceal or underplay our special nature, memes, which have the character of being replicators that use us as mere vehicles to ensure their own transmission, are an extension of the biological story of ourselves as essentially automata, passively and indeed helplessly acting out a predetermined script. Culture is replayed as second nature. My belief in such and such a religion or economic theory, my love of a particular kind of music or literature, my propensity to give money to beggars in the street, the anger I feel about the way Robert Mugabe has destroyed his country: these have nothing to do with me as an individual and everything to do with the survival of the group to which I belong. Human mind–brains in a certain culture will be hospitable to those memes – or, more precisely, susceptible to invasion by those memes (or memeplexes) – that will favour the survival of that group and hence the survival of the memes themselves. Meme theory is an example of the kind of prestidigitation needed to present an image of us as biologically programmed in the face of the 44. E. O. Wilson fudges in a different way. In Consilience he speaks of “gene-culture coevolution” in human beings. Since he believes that there is a genetic basis for cultural evolution, this is really (as Kenan Malik has pointed out), gene–gene-cultural evolution and he admits as much himself when he describes “gene-culture coevolution” as “a special extension of the more general processes of evolution” (Consilience, 128). 45. Even Gray draws the line at memes in “Science as a Vehicle for Myth”. 46. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 21.

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overwhelming evidence that everyday human life is utterly different from the reflex-, tropism-, instinct-driven life of animals (although of course we rely on reflexes to perform our voluntary actions, may be in part guided by tropisms and have a general direction influenced remotely by instincts). An ordinary shopping expedition, a day at the factory, a night sitting with a feverish child, a year building up a stamp collection, several years planning a change in the service one provides for one’s patients: these are not the kinds of things that can be automated, pre-programmed. They need to be led by an informing awareness or self awareness that has its goal explicitly in view.47

DID NATURAL SELECTION GENERATE CONSCIOUSNESS?

It is hardly surprising that Darwinitics, and others who approach the human person from a biological standpoint, have difficulty with the more complex aspects of human consciousness.48 In this section, however, I shall argue that evolutionary theory, although largely unaware of it, has a problem with consciousness of any sort. First, it has to begin with matter and somehow end up with mind. Second, it has to demonstrate that having a conscious mind would be something a replicator would be glad of, as a means of assisting its own senseless task of replication. As we shall see, Darwinism cannot give a satisfactory answer to either of these two questions: how did consciousness emerge; and what is consciousness for, anyway? The second question is particularly pressing. Biology does not tolerate anything biologically useless and, given that my brain consumes a whopping 20 per cent of my energy supply, and quite a lot of this seems to be used by neurons that are supposed to be responsible for maintaining my consciousness, consciousness must have a use, must earn its keep. The argument that

47. Meme theory – and its host discipline evolutionary psychology – is particularly well defended because its propagators deny that they ever said the daft things that they said. This is how certain critics dealt with Rose & Rose, Alas, Poor Darwin. I myself had the experience in a blog exchange (see my “Does Evolution Explain Our Behaviour”) of finding Blackmore denying views that I had found in her writings; I expressed alarm that there was another Blackmore speaking on her behalf. But this is the reason why I have used direct quotes so much. 48. This section is based on a paper that first appeared in The Philosophers’ Magazine: “The Unnatural Selection of Consciousness”.

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it is high maintenance and so must be actively beneficial rather than merely an aberration, an accident we are stuck with, is complemented by the argument that the very complexity of the machinery supposedly underpinning phenomenal consciousness demonstrates that it is an adaptation rather than an accident.49 And it follows from this that all the things that consciousness enables us to get up to – not only fleeing predators more successfully because we are aware of them but also creating art or writing books like On the Origin of Species – must also be directly or indirectly related to survival, now, or at some time in the past. Whether or not this is true, the ubiquity of “neuro-evolutionary” accounts of everyday human life is a testimony to belief in the power of evolution to explain consciousness. But how well founded is this belief? In what non-aberrant way could this seeming aberration in material evolution have arisen? Was it really natural selection that eventually brought into being creatures that could see that they were naturally selected? Was it the blind laws of physics that so organized matter that it came up with creatures like us, that could see the laws of physics and that they were blind? If we are going to address them properly we must start far enough back to see these questions clearly. We need to ask (a) by what means consciousness could have come into being, if it was not there in the beginning, and (b) what advantages it confers.

The origin of consciousness

The zero point of evolution is a primitive (self )-replicator, perhaps a protobiont – an organic molecule enclosed in something like a membrane – hardly differentiated, although beautifully structured, like a crystal. A succession of steps over huge stretches of time, unconsciously guided by the non-random operation of natural selection on random variation, led to single-cell organisms with their nuclei, organelles, membranes and, eventually, one or two bits of kit such as a flagellum to aid swimming. That was the story of life for 2.5 billion years until the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago, when multi-cellular forms arrived. After this came more complex organisms, with distinctive organs and systems, to deal with the business of keeping the organism stable, enabling it to access nutrients, to evade predators and – when sexual reproduction came on the scene – to find mates.

49. See Grantham & Nichols, “Evolutionary Psychology”.

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The belief that these developments can be explained in Darwinian terms seems increasingly well founded, so let us set aside the Creationist appeal to “irreducible complexity”, as evidence that higher organisms could not have evolved step by step, and the related claim that intelligent design has to be invoked to explain the emergence of structures such as the eye. But what of the other great story: the emergence of sentience, subsequently of more complex consciousness and ultimately of self-consciousness and intelligence? How well does this fit into the Darwinian picture? Very badly, notwithstanding Dawkins’s claim that “Cumulative selection, once it has begun, seems … powerful enough to make the evolution of intelligence probable, if not inevitable”.50 Consider one of the most visited examples: vision. Let us begin with the notional “ur-eye”: the lightsensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature. This might confer a tiny survival advantage, perhaps making it easier to avoid shadow-casting predators. And one could see how an ever more complex sensitive surface, tuning the organism to produce ever more precisely discriminated and versatile behaviour, might be explained by natural selection. There are now very good accounts of gradual changes, each conferring an advantage, leading to the emergence of the orbit, the retina, the lens and so on, without appealing to intelligent design. And there are plenty of intermediate forms, demonstrating the benefits of having photosensitive structures marking the staging posts to the kind of complex eye seen in higher organisms, with competitive advantage being sustained throughout the journey. But this story doesn’t address the problems that a satisfactory evolutionary account of consciousness would need to deal with. Consider the emergence of (conscious) sight from (chemical) photosensitivity. We need first of all to remind ourselves that chemical or electrochemical sensitivity to light is not the same as awareness of light. To underline this point: a chemical effect of light is not awareness of the light that has caused this chemical effect. We must not confuse causality (or, more precisely, “effectality”) with intentionality and imagine that the processes by which the light gets in are the same as those by which the gaze (eventually) comes to look out. Second, as we discussed in Chapter 3, the characteristics of the content of visual awareness are not to be found in the light itself. Electromagnetic radiation is not intrinsically bright or coloured; even less is it beautiful or meaningful. These secondary and tertiary qualities are

50. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 146.

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not properties of the physical world and the energy in question. Third, it is not clear how certain organizations of matter manage to be aware – of impingements of energy, and later of objects, and (in the case of humans) of themselves – when very similar organizations of matter do not have this property. This problem, as we have already discussed, is most clearly apparent much further down the evolutionary path, when we compare neurons that are associated with consciousness in the human brain with those that are not. We have seen how little distinguishes them. The biological story of the passage from single cells to full-blown eyes, therefore, tells us nothing about the quite different journey from light incident on photosensitive cells producing a programmed response, to the gaze that looks out and sees, and peers at, and enquires into, a visible world. And this is accepted by some physicists; for example Brian Pippard, who expresses this as follows: “What is surely impossible is that a theoretical physicist, given unlimited computing power, should deduce from the laws of physics that a certain complex structure is aware of its own existence”.51 There is simply no reason to expect that photosensitivity would bring awareness of light, however cunningly the photosensitive structure is wired into discriminative behaviour that will promote survival. An analogy may be helpful here. Computers do not get any nearer to becoming conscious as their inputs are more complexly related to their outputs and however many stages and layers of processing intervene between the two. A Cray supercomputer with terabytes of RAM is no more aware or self-aware than a pocket calculator. There is nothing, in short, that will explain why matter should “go mental” once it assumes a certain form, unless we anticipate and borrow, on account as it were, the very notion of an organism that is aware of its environment. And this is where we have to be on our guard against “anticipatory borrowing”, which may be implicit even in the conceptual distinction between organism and environment. This distinction slips the notion of viewpoint – with the organism at the centre of a view – into a “starter pack” that should contain only the properties of matter, which, as we have seen does not have an appearance in itself nor the means to make anything else appear, least of all as part of a world of appearing with something, such as a subject, as its centre. It is easy to overlook this because the division into “environment” and “organism” already contains a glimmer of the

51. Pippard, “The Invincible Ignorance of Science”, 393.

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differentiation between a subject and its objects, and this remains true (although concealed) even when organisms are treated as physical systems. Without this fudge, energy exchanges between parts of a physical system that includes the organism would not count as “inputs” to and “outputs” from. Physical systems do not, of themselves, have inputs and outputs, except in so far as they have been ring-fenced by an observer who sets them off from the rest of the world that is stipulated as their surroundings. A membrane as a physical entity does not provide that ring-fencing. This has been very well expressed by Stephen Clark: Until there are conscious beings … there is no reason for identifying singular individuals within a distinct environment. Till then there is only biochemical process, without any privileged viewpoints: why think of an acorn as an entity, rather than part of a gene’s environment? Why think of ‘the gene’ as an entity within an environment?52 All viewpoints are privileged. To be a viewpoint is a metaphysical privilege not granted to a piece of matter in a material world just because it assumes a particular configuration. The “anticipatory borrowing” implicit in the differentiation between organism and environment conceptually smoothes out the steps towards consciousness. As a consequence, the dubious claim that, when matter assumes certain configurations, it is automatically awarded mentality, so that it is aware of other pieces of matter, is made to seem less dubious. The claim, however, loses its plausibility as soon as we remind ourselves what the intentionality of consciousness would require if we really believed it to be explained by the properties of matter as understood by physicists; namely, that certain pieces of matter should reach causally upstream and become aware of the causes of the effects of events on themselves. What is more, these effects (such as neural activity) would have to confer on their causes a phenomenal appearance quite different from what, according to science, they have in themselves. So even if consciousness really did bring survival advantage, it is not clear how it could become available to genes via the material organisms that are the vehicles ensuring their replication. This question arises irrespective of

52. Clark, “Aware if Alive”.

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whether we are considering the putative consciousness of a single photosensitive cell, or that of a human eye, or of a human being aware of her fellows in a shared world built up out of pooled experience. The explanatory gap – the jump from (material) energy exchanges to (proto-mental) awareness – just happens to be more clearly evident in the case of single energy-sensitive cells, which lie at the putative beginning of consciousness. It doesn’t help to imagine that the single cell has only a “teeny-weeny” bit of consciousness that can somehow be smuggled into the material world without the latter’s laws being bent or broken. So the question still remains: how is it that certain configurations of matter should be aware, should suffer, fear, enjoy and so on? There is nothing in the properties of matter that would lead you to expect that eventually certain configurations of it (human bodies) would pool that experience and live in a public world. No wonder many materialistically inclined philosophers like to deny the real existence of consciousness. And no wonder Dennett, for example – who claims to have explained consciousness – wants to wave away the basic elements of subjective experience, “qualia”, and to deconstruct intentionality.

The biological value of consciousness

Let’s turn now to our second problem with the Darwinizing of consciousness. Supposing we were able to find an explanation of how, during the course of evolution, matter in organisms managed to “go mental”. Could we be sure that consciousness would be of any use to those organisms?53 Why should consciousness of the material world around their vehicles (the organisms) make certain (material) replicators better able to replicate? After all, qualia, being secondary qualities, aspects and appearances, do not correspond to anything in the physical world. There may be ways around this awkward fact but someone will have to find them. There is, anyway, an even more awkward fact. Long before self-awareness, memory, foresight, powers of conscious deliberation and so on emerged to give a supposed advantage, there is a more promising alternative to consciousness at every step of the way: more efficient unconscious mechanisms, which, what is more, seem equally or more likely to be thrown up by spontaneous variation.

53. For a careful teasing out of the different strands of this deceptively simple question, see Polger, “Rethinking the Evolution of Consciousness”.

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Think, after all, what unconscious mechanisms have actually achieved: the evolution of the material universe; the processes that are supposed to have created life and conscious organisms; the growth, development and most of the running of even highly conscious organisms such as ourselves. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connections in place – consciousness is the last thing you would want to oversee the task. Successful intra-uterine development relies, in the case of higher organisms, on a conscious mother choosing the right mate, getting hold of the right food and so on; but that is to put the cart before the horse. And, yes, once you have a species that depends on consciousness then it is essential for its members to remain conscious. But if we assume the materialist viewpoint and, unlike many evolutionary biologists, adhere to it consistently, if we escape from an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees the entire evolutionary process as something that was always leading up to us or creatures like us, it seems highly implausible that, in an unconscious biosphere, consciousness, even if it were on offer, would seem like a good option. It is far from self-evident that (for example) making light energy something that is experienced would improve an organism’s response to it in the sense of making it more likely for the relevant chemicals within it – its genetic material – to replicate. In other words, there is nothing obviously beneficial in basic sentience. What about higher forms of consciousness? Those who think consciousness must confer advantage tend also to believe that it confers even more advantage as it gets more complex. They argue that complex consciousness has no end of things to offer the organism: it makes available working memory; it permits planning, deliberation, flexible behaviour; it allows the rehearsal of possible courses of action before commitment to one particular course (putting scenarios rather than one’s flesh on the line); it equips the entity to deal with novel situations; and enables organisms to engage with wholes, with singular combinations that cannot be captured by general laws.54 One of the most common strategies for finding a use for consciousness is to suggest that it simplifies the stimuli received by the organism, putting them together in a convenient format, allowing (in the words of Björn Merker) a “simulated real world arena for the control of goal-orientated activities”.55 54. Hodgson, The Mind Matters. 55. Merker, “The Liabilities of Mobility”. I am grateful to Irving Massey for drawing my attention to this source.

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Leaving aside the fact that “parts” and “wholes” and ‘”convenience” count as such only in the context of a consciousness that puts them together or pulls them apart, or that situations are “novel” only to a conscious creature with conscious expectations that allocate probabilities to them, this illustrates a deeper problem, common to many evolutionary explanations of consciousness: that of approaching its origin from the wrong direction – through the lens of existing life, indeed existing conscious life. If we truly wish to address the question of the value or purpose or function of consciousness, we should adopt a prospective view that looks forwards from a preconscious beginning, rather than a retrospective one that looks back from a situation in which consciousness is already in place and there are worlds with the kinds of properties experienced by conscious beings. When we adopt the correct, prospective, view we might see that an organism that has to plan, to deliberate, to remember, to rehearse possible courses of action and to see wholes so as to deal with singulars, in order to survive, is in a mess: at any rate, disadvantaged compared with the unerring unconscious biological machines generated by the laws of material nature. Of course, once in that mess, and dependent on consciousness, the organism is better off staying conscious, and this applies irrespective of whether we are considering threats and opportunities from the material environment, other species, or competition from conspecifics. Yes, my genes would have a better chance of replicating than yours if I had better memory or more foresight than you. But when we start at the right place, at the beginning in other words, and ask by what disastrous processes did conscious, especially complex conscious, species emerge so that there are forms of living matter that can make errors – or where there are errors to be avoided or corrected – and memory and foresight are needed, we can only wonder, unavailingly, at how evolution took this unfortunate turn. After all, at the fundamental level mechanisms do not make mistakes; they are simply the expression of the unbreakable laws of physics. And at a higher level, they do not make “mistakes” with the same frequency as conscious intentions aimed at a goal.56 A deliberating creature that has increased capacity to get things right does so only because it has a propensity to get things wrong. A fully adapted organism would not have to deliberate at all. In the

56. Biologists may choke on this. Isn’t evolution itself driven by mistakes: those mutations that result from imperfect copying of DNA? True, but think of the precision with which DNA is copied compared with the inaccuracy of copying it deliberately without very recent technology or even with this technology in its natural place inside the whole organism.

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split seconds that determine the difference between life and death, he who deliberates is lost. And what is deliberation, planning, anyway? Do organisms really operate on the laws of physics as if from the outside? And if they do not, as the materialist view of life requires us to believe, then there is no way that planning and deliberation – or the illusion of planning or deliberation – could serve a function. No wonder many evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists often deny that free will is possible and marginalize the role of conscious deliberation in human life, even though it seems to the rest of us to play the most prominent part in shaping behaviour. We have seen how the marginalizers of consciousness seize on any evidence that suggests we are not as conscious as we think we are, or that our brain is cleverer than we are, and that we can respond appropriately to what is around us, without being aware of it; that there are automatic psychological processes in perception, memory and action; that we are in the grip of the so-called “cognitive unconscious”.57 This explains the huge interest generated by Larry Weiskrantz’s demonstration of “blindsight”, in virtue of which people with restricted vision may still respond appropriately to cues they are not aware of seeing.58 All this suggests that many neuroscientists would wish we were automatons; “seeingsight” doesn’t fit very comfortably into their world picture. At any rate, there is no means, within the materialist world picture, by which consciousness could inflect the laws of physics in order to make the world a more hospitable place for the organism that is conscious, acting either solely or as a member of a group. From the standpoint of a consistent materialism, no organism that was going to “make the cut” would have had deliberately to work with the laws of physics, never mind work against them or trick them into doing its will. The will has no way in a universe of wall-to-wall matter, of which living matter is only a variant. And there is also a serious difficulty with the notion of “better and better” consciousness that will somehow compensate for the disability of having being dependent on consciousness in the first place. Consciousness, after all, with its secondary qualities, is profoundly dissociated from the

57. Christened thus by Kihlstrom, “The Cognitive Unconscious”. 58. Needless to say, Gray has fastened on these data in order to diminish human consciousness: “Your mind is an illusion. We are assemblages of perceptions and behaviours in which consciousness figures only intermittently” (“I Think, But Who Am I?”, 47). Speak for your (nonexistent) self, is all I can say.

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material world in which organisms are generated and their fate decided. So it is difficult to see how the content of consciousness could get closer to the relevant truths of that material world, which for materialists is all there is.59 For some writers, such as Paul Churchland,60 the criterion for intelligence – that catch-all term for premier cru deliberative consciousness – is that the organism is more closely coupled to its environment. If that were true, then a silicate crystal, so tightly wired into its environment that no wires are required, would be a role model for us all. In practice, as we shall discuss in Chapter 7, intelligence makes us loosely rather than tightly wired into the material world; hence the possibility of stepping back, of deliberation between possible courses of action. In short, if it is difficult (although not in principle impossible) to see how living creatures emerged out of the operation of the laws of physics on lifeless matter, it is even less clear how consciousness emerged or why it should be of benefit to those creatures that have it. Or, more precisely, why evolution should have thrown up species with a disabling requirement to do things deliberately and make judgements. Why would life evolve towards such losers who have to get things right in order to do the right thing by themselves? We humans have of course benefited enormously from being conscious; we dominate the planet. But it is only very recently that our consciousness, and its pooling in a boundless, infinitely elaborated shared human world, have significantly increased our traction on the very laws that are supposed to have brought us into being, and made up for the disabling burden of consciousness and the requirement to be more conscious to get ahead of the game, including in that most intimate competition between replicators: between members of the same species. It is only very recently in the history of life that he who deliberates, or hesitates, is not lost; that we can take complex precautions through collective action; that we can together manipulate the environment to tilt the balance of risks and benefits in our collective favour. In the end, deliberative consciousness, and the pooling of our conscious aims and intentions, has come good, but the evolutionary process did not begin here, did not start anywhere near this end. It began several billion years ago, during which life did without consciousness;

59. And there is no reason why the increasing complexity of the eye should necessarily lead to increased complexity of the scene that is seen. 60. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, see esp. “The Distribution of Intelligence in the Universe”.

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and for much of the relatively brief time it has been conscious, this seems to have been a burden rather than boon. At any rate, it is not clear that consciousness is essential for any capacity that we have, as Thomas Polger has pointed out.61 Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if you do not start far enough back: if, that is to say, you fail to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position. The latter demands that you should begin (as evolutionary theorists should begin) with a world without consciousness, and then consider whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. To proceed otherwise is to succumb to a variation of what Dawkins has dubbed “the conceit of hindsight”,62 a jibe appropriately directed at those who see all of evolution as inevitably progressing towards the human, but equally applicable to Dawkins’s own view (quoted at the beginning of this section) that “Cumulative selection, once it has begun, seems … powerful enough to make the evolution of intelligence probable, if not inevitable”.63 Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed it is no longer self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genetic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states a conscious organism is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move. It may be argued that, when we are trying to make (retrospective) sense of the path taken by evolution, driven by natural selection, we ought to separate different drivers and, in particular, different determinants of differential survival rates. And, yes, there is more than one dimension to “replicative advantage”. There are at least four: (a) being better able to withstand the vicissitudes of the material environment – heat, cold, dryness, wetness, injury and so on; (b) being better protected against other living things such as poisonous plants and predators; (c) being better able to compete with members of the same species for resources including mates; (d) and, finally, being better able to cooperate with conspecifics to maximize overall survival of the group. Teasing out these dimensions of competitive advantage, however, does not help to explain the emergence of consciousness. The first three would most obviously be best dealt with by slicker and 61. Polger, “Rethinking the Evolution of Consciousness”. 62. Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, “The Conceit of Hindsight”. 63. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 146.

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more tuned mechanisms. We are, after all, starting out from the replication of complex molecules and their vehicles; all that is needed are relative probabilities as played out through the laws of (physical) nature. The fourth would look to be the most promising place to seek the benefits of consciousness were it not for the existing of spectacularly complex animal societies, such as those of ants, that work through dovetailing automaticities rather than the mutual awareness and deliberative activity apparent in animals such as ourselves with high levels of consciousness. (Leaf-cutter ants divide twenty-nine distinct tasks between seven castes64 and recent studies have shown that they even enjoy a kind of retirement in which, as their teeth become less sharp, they progress from cutting to carrying duties!65) Recognizing the complexity of the drivers to evolution does not, in other words, give any support to the notion that matter will inevitably be forced to go “mental” if enough pieces of living matter slaughter other pieces of living matter: that unconscious natural selection will generate consciousness; that the bloodbath of evolution will beat matter into wakefulness – to the world and its own existence in it. If there isn’t an evolutionary explanation of consciousness then the world is more interesting than biologism would allow. And it gets even more interesting if we unbundle different modes of consciousness. There are clearly separate problems in trying to explain on the one hand the transition to sentience and on the other the transition from sentience to the propositional awareness of human beings that underpins the public sphere in which they live and have their being, the realm where they: consciously utilize the laws of nature; transform their environment into an artefactscape; appeal to norms in a collective that is sustained by deliberate intentions rather than being a lattice of dovetailing automaticities; and write books such as On the Origin of Species. At any rate, those who are currently advocating evolutionary or neuro-evolutionary explanations of the most complex manifestations of consciousness in human life – preaching neuro-evolutionary aesthetics, law, ethics, economics, history, theology and so on – should consider the failure to explain any form of consciousness, never mind human consciousness, in evolutionary terms. Might this not pull the rug from under their fashionable feet?

64. Wilson, “Caste and Division of Labor in Leaf-Cutter Ants”. 65. Schofield et al., “Leaf-Cutter Ants with Worn Mandibles Cut Half as Fast”.

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Unfortunately, it will not be easy to wake them up to this great gap in their world-picture because neuro-evolutionary ideas are now woven into the very language in which we are invited to think about ourselves. And it is to this language we must now turn before moving on from denying what we are not to affirming what we are.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Bewitched by Language

THINKING BY TRANSFERRED EPITHET

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.1 If you are persuaded that the neuro-evolutionary approach to human consciousness and human life is wrong, and obviously so, you may be baffled as to how it has managed to be so widely accepted. Much of the strength of the case for a Darwinian account of the human person and human society lies, as we saw, in the way language is used to anthropomorphize animal behaviour and animalize human behaviour. The case for the neuralization of consciousness and, in particular, human consciousness has also depended on the misuse of language, but with Neuromania the lexical trickery goes much deeper. While Darwinitis requires its believers only to impute human characteristics to animals (and vice versa), Neuromania demands of its adepts that they should ascribe human characteristics to physical processes taking place in the brain. This depends on a cavalier way with words that is now so universal as to have become almost invisible, making it quite difficult to see the unbridgeable gap between what happens in the brain and what people do. It illustrates the force of Wittgenstein’s observation in the passage that forms the epigraph to this section:

1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 115.

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we are held captive by a picture of ourselves from which we cannot escape because it is written into the very language in which we think about our nature. The linguistic habit that has kept so many in thrall to Neuromania is referring to the brain and bits of the brain in ways that would be appropriate only if we were referring to whole human beings. Treating the part as if it were the whole is the nub of the critique of neurophilosophy by M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker in their Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. This “mereological” fallacy, however, is only part of a wider trend that I have called “thinking by transferred epithet”.2 You may remember being introduced to the concept of the “transferred epithet” at school and may even recall some well-worn examples of this figure of speech: the prisoner is in a condemned cell, but it is the prisoner, not the cell that is condemned; the door to the disabled toilet is locked, but it is the person for whom the toilet is intended who is disabled, not the toilet; and so on. The interest in transferred epithets is in part stylistic, in part grammatical, and in part due to its reflecting a tendency we have to animate the material world around us with our own feelings: the so-called “pathetic fallacy”. The joyful land smiling in the sunshine is neither joyful nor smiling: it makes us feel joyful and (perhaps) inclined to smile. The sad autumnal trees droop with our sadness, not their own. The stubborn rock that does not move has no intention of frustrating us; it is merely the correlative of our frustration. We can sometimes be so moved by the pathetic fallacy that we take action against the harmless insentient world. Who has not cursed material objects for their cussedness? It is difficult not to sympathize with Basil Fawlty (proprietor of the hotel in the sitcom Fawlty Towers) subjecting his car to corporal punishment for breaking down yet again at a crucial time. We infuse the natural world, and the artefacts that populate the human world, with our emotions and sometimes ascribe to them an agency that strictly belongs to their users. Traditional transferred epithets do not invite us to take them seriously. We don’t rush to the defence of the innocent “condemned cell” and return condemnation to the prisoner that occupies it. Nor do we really feel that Basil Fawlty’s mulish car deserved the punishment that it received or imagine that it would cooperate better in future on account of those vicious whacks. Nevertheless, they open the door to a way of thinking in which the transfer of the epithet is no longer noticed: figurative speech is taken literally.

2. See my Why the Mind is Not a Computer, 34–6.

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This begins with the way we talk about machines: hardly surprising because machines are (in Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel) “autonomous tools”.3 They often get on with tasks in our absence and, in the case of electronic devices, they are so bafflingly complex as to seem mind-like. So we don’t smile with disbelief when we are told that a camera “sees” a scene; radar “searches” for the enemy; a “smart” bomb “hunts down” its target; a photoelectric cell “detects” the background luminance and “instructs” the camera shutter to open up or close; an electronic probe “reports” the presence of something or other. We are all perfectly aware that none of these devices would do these things – seeing, searching, hunting down, detecting, instructing, reporting – in the absence of (conscious) human beings. A ruler lying next to an object would not measure the latter’s length unless it was being used by someone to do that. Counters do not count except when they have been employed for that purpose and their output is recognized as numbers that make sense to an observer aware of, and understanding, them. But this kind of talk – a helpful shorthand – has insidious effects. Linguistic permissiveness make us less likely to notice linguistic corruption and the conceptual muddles that may follow from it. We start imagining that machines that help us to carry out certain functions actually have those functions. This is particularly likely to happen when the machines in question are computers. When I speak of a “clock telling the time” I do not for a moment imagine that it is doing so of itself. What I mean is that the clock enables me to tell the time. When, however, I speak of a computer “doing calculations” I might be inclined to take this literally: to think of the calculations going on in the computer itself, rather than simply assisting me in getting from the beginning to the end of a series of sums. In other words, I make the mistake of thinking that a prosthetic aid to an activity actually does that activity. We forget that in the absence of any human beings using the tool its function would not be performed. It is I, not the computer, who make the calculation, just as it is I, not the walking stick, who walk and I, not the umbrella, who shelter my head from the rain. The obvious point that what goes on in a computer would not count as, or be, a calculation, recollection or measurement in the absence of humans who use them to calculate, recollect or measure, was highlighted by Searle in a brilliant thought experiment. It was the basis of one of the most

3. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, 298.

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famous – most cited and most argued over – papers in philosophy over the past several decades.4 In “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, Searle imagined someone sitting in a room, receiving an input of Chinese symbols. He was totally ignorant of Chinese and understood nothing of the symbols. However, he was in possession of rules for processing these symbols, so he could produce an appropriate output. Let us suppose the input symbols amounted to questions and the output symbols amounted to answers. It would appear that the person in the room was answering the questions. The individual did not, however, understand anything that was passing through his hands. Searle used this as a compelling analogy of what goes on in a computer that links inputs with appropriate outputs. The events in computers do not amount to genuine understanding. Indeed, given that symbols are symbols only to someone who understands that they are symbols, events in computers considered in isolation from conscious human beings do not even amount to the processing of symbols. There is merely the passage of minute electric currents along circuits which may or may not cause other physical events to happen, such as the lighting up of a screen in a certain pattern. This becomes symbol processing, conscious understanding, only when the computer is serving a conscious user; for example, the events in the computer amount to calculations only when the computer is being used by an individual making calculations. It is therefore wrong to imagine the mind as being analogous to a computer. In the absence of minds, computers do not do what minds do. I shall return to computers in the next section, when I discuss the computational theory of mind. Here I want to consider the consequences of the rampant transference of epithets that these ubiquitous devices have licensed. Because computers are essentially extremely complex electrical circuits, and brains can also be described as if they were concatenations of extremely complex electrical circuits, the anthropomorphic discourse elaborated in relation to computers is allowed to spread to our descriptions of the brain. If computers “calculate”, “detect”, “signal” and so on, and brains are collections of computers, then brains, brain regions or even individual neurons “calculate”, “detect”, “signal” and so on. You might be surprised that thinking by transferred epithet should ensnare even the brightest of minds. It is irresistible, however, because it enhances the apparent explanatory power of descriptive accounts of the

4. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”.

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brain and, indeed, enables the mind–brain barrier to be overcome without any work being done. By smuggling consciousness into the matter of the brain, via the computer analogy, we make a materialist account of consciousness seem plausible. The ordinary activity of the brain suddenly looks like the ordinary activity of computers, which looks like the ordinary activity of human beings. There is no apparent need for “a ghost in the machine”, an “homunculus”, to stand for the presence of the conscious self in the brain. In fact, this isn’t really how it works out. Anthropomorphic talk applied to the brain, right down to individual neurons, simply disperses the homunculus into a billion billion billion messengers carrying messages from one part of the brain to the other. Let us see this at work in a recent book by someone whom we have already met: Chris Frith of the Functional Imaging Laboratory at the world-leading Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London. In his excellent Making up the Mind, he has the brain doing things that, normally, we would ascribe to full-blown human beings. Person-talk runs through his brain-talk like “Brighton Rock” through the stick of confectionary. There is naked anthropomorphism even at the unicellular level: “Nerve cells are essentially signalling devices”, he says.5 “Activity in dopamine nerve cells”, he claims, “signals an error in our prediction”;6 and (most strikingly) “we can see … predictive activity if we look directly at the activity in the nerve cells”.7 Readers will not need to be reminded that prediction requires a sense of the future while material objects, particularly tiddly little ones such as nerve fibres, do not have explicit tensed time. Single neurons look very unlikely to be forward-looking but it is easy to see how computer-talk, which has machines predicting (for example) the course of a missile, could lead one to this kind of neuron-talk. And once we accept that individual cells are so smart, we are softened up to accept Frith’s claim that the brain as a whole is “an ideal observer”, that “notices”, “predicts”, “produces appropriate models of the world”, “tricks you into thinking something”. To put this more succinctly, when you personify the brain and bits of brain then it is easy to “brainify” the person. Frith, by the way, is not alone in asserting that the brain “actively creates pictures of the world”.8 Thousands of neuroscientists and their fellow travellers in the humanities draw on the same anthropomorphic lexicon. It is

5. 6. 7. 8.

Frith, Making up the Mind, 82. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 17.

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pandemic in neuro-talk. The related idea that we inhabit not the real world but a “mental model” of the world created by the brain has dominated thinking in neuropsychology since it was first proposed in 1943 by Kenneth Craik, a genius who died at the age of thirty-one in a cycling accident. The ubiquitous presence of the computer, which is likewise credited with creating “representations” of things and “modelling” the world or a domain within it, makes it easier to grow mental models out of material neurons. This mental model is elaborated at many levels. The brain, Frith tells us, “works hard” at creating “the illusion that I am an independent being”, and at sustaining “the feeling of agency” and “the sense of self ”.9 The brain, it seems, is rather paternalistic. According to Frith it not only keeps much of its activity hidden but also refrains from bothering our little heads with many of the things it knows. Most of what it knows, like much of what an anthropomorphized computer “knows”, never reaches our consciousness. You could be forgiven for concluding that brains are just like people only, well, brainier. The brain, it seems, has (unconscious) reasons that (conscious) reason knows not. If you are thinking what I am thinking you are probably wondering how we, who are supposed to be the brains that hide our reasons from us, can spot these reasons and, indeed, how we know our brains are cleverer than we are: from what standpoint we see this. Could it be that there, in fact, is more to us than our brains? At any rate, if the world were “a mental model created by the brain” it would be difficult to see how we could discover this. And besides, a model is usually a model of something that has an original: an original known to those who model it. If the entire world were a mental model, there would be nothing it was a model of. These questions are rarely raised and almost never taken seriously. Although it is hotly denied by neuromaniacs, their anthropomorphic approach to the brain is no different from the homuncular one that plants a little man in the brain who “sees” and “does” all that we humans are required to see and do, and who “feels” and “wants” what humans feel and want. The only difference is that the neuromaniacs’ homunculus is broken up into a colloidal suspension of even smaller homunculi who, despite their small size – tiny bits of brain, particular circuits or even individual neurons – are still able to be like humans. Many thinkers are uneasily aware of these objections and have tried to “rehabilitate” the homunculus, most notably

9. Frith, Making up the Mind, 82.

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Pinker and Dennett. Pinker quotes Dennett, who argues that “Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain”. Instead, he says, the jobs are parcelled out to smaller and smaller parts of the brain and eventually you arrive at: “homunculi so stupid (all they have to do is to remember whether to say yes or no when asked) that they can be, as one says, ‘replaced by a machine’. One discharges fancy homunculi from one’s scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work.”10 Dennett’s reassurances aren’t in the slightest bit persuasive. He requires: (a) that activity in minute circuits amounts to answering yes and no to questions (which presupposes they are in tune with an entire world of possibility that they then boil down to a matrix of alternatives);11 and (b) that billions of neurons yes-ing and no-ing somehow add themselves up to a whole person. The second requirement is yet another instance of the fallacy of assuming that a collection of items that we see as a whole can pull itself together and amount to a whole of its own accord – in this case a whole viewpoint – without our assistance. While a newsprint picture may be assembled out of a crowd of dots, it does not do so without the assistance of the person reading the paper. The anthropomorphizations of brain-cell activity we have so far discussed by no means represent the limits to which thinking by transferred epithet can be taken. Just how much further it can go is illustrated by the kind of excited chatter that has been provoked by the discovery of so-called “mirror neurons” in the early 1990s. A team of Italian scientists carrying out single-cell recordings in the cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys found a group of neurons that fired not only when the monkey prepared to act but when it watched another monkey acting.12 They called these neurons “mirror neurons” and it wasn’t long before they caught the imagination not only of the wider scientific community but also of the popular press. Scientists, science journalists and feature writers now talk of them as the physiological basis for human language, learned culture, art, language, empathy and morality. The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has stated that mirror neurons are the reason we are “the one and only species that veritably lives and breathes culture”.13

10. Dennett, “Artificial Intelligence as Philosophy and as Psychology”, 124, quoted in Pinker, How the Mind Works, 79. 11. Just how wrong this is will be clearer after the discussion in the next section. 12. Pelligrino et al., “Understanding Motor Events”. 13. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, 117.

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As the distinguished developmental neuropsychologist Alison Gopnik has pointed out, there are many problems with the claims that have been made for these neurons.14 For a start, they have not been demonstrated unequivocally in humans.15 Second, macaques who do have them don’t seem to major in anything corresponding to human language, learned culture, art, empathy and morality. Even less do swamp sparrows, who rely on them to learn how to sing in tune.16 Third, mirror neurons could just be neurons that have been trained to associate the movement of the monkey’s own hand with the sight of the movement of any hand: in the first instance its own. What’s more, in humans many parts of the brain – not just a putative mirror system – light up when we see someone else perform an action and they overlap only in part with those that light up when we actually perform the action. The greatest problem, of course, relates to what we have just been talking about: the notion that something very complex can be housed, or “represented”, in single cells or clusters of single types of cells. As Gopnik points out, something as simple as seeing an edge is associated with a complex pattern of interactions between hundreds of different types of neurons. One might imagine that empathy would require a bit more than seeing an edge. And yet “mirror neurons” have been leapt on because neuromaniacs are “bewitched by language”. The very name “mirror neurons” invites confusion. A mirror, after all, replicates something that could be consciously experienced but it is not itself conscious of the images it hosts. Indeed, images don’t count as images in the absence of someone looking in the mirror. Mirror neurons are treated as if their activity was both the mirror image and the basis of that “someone”. The attractiveness of the notion of neurons mirroring the world is an expression of a more general idea that we have just spoken of: that the brain “models” the world. And this, in turn, is a manifestation of a more general idea still: that the world is “represented” in the brain and that representation is “encoded” in neural activity. This idea needs challenging. Representation – “re-presentation” – means presentation again. There can be no representation without prior presentation. A representation is a replication 14. Gopnik, “Cells That Read Minds?” “Cells That Read Minds” is the title of the article by Sandra Blakeslee that Gopnik criticizes. 15. The jury is still out. Actually, I have a vested interest in believing that they do exist in humans. In 2006, my colleagues and I published a paper reviewing the possibilities of a new approach to rehabilitation of people with strokes, exploiting their putative mirror neuron systems. See Pomeroy et al., “The Potential for Using the ‘Mirror Neurone System’”. 16. Prather et al., “Precise Auditory-Vocal Mirroring”.

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of a presentation. For example, my face in a mirror counts as a representation of the visual appearance of my face because my face, courtesy of my consciousness, already has a visual appearance. An experience of such a representation has a double intentionality: of the image in the mirror and, via this, of that which the image is an image of. To put this another way, representation is something that happens within the world of phenomena; it cannot be that in virtue of which there are phenomena (“appearings”).17 So we should dismiss talk of nerve impulses being representations of things, creating models of the world. But if you were to deny neuromaniacs the use of the word “representation”, they would be more than a little tonguetied. They would, however, be rendered almost speechless if we denied them the careless use of the word “information”. Neuromania feeds on a diet of “information”. It warrants special treatment in a section to itself. Here goes.

THE COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND

The second half of the last century saw the rise and rise of a discipline that straddled authentic neuroscience and neuroscientism: cognitive psychology. To be fair, cognitive psychology was a welcome corrective to the lunacy of behaviourism. Behaviourism denied that there was anything of much interest to scientific psychology in human beings between their perceptual input and their behavioural output, between stimulus and response. Reports of subjective experiences on the basis of introspection did not seem to produce consistent findings. Psychologists therefore decided that if the study of the mind were to acquire the status of a fullblown science, then it should focus on that which was objectively visible, evident to all and open to observation, preferably with instruments, and expensive ones if possible, that would yield reliable and repeatable measurements. This meant focusing on visible behaviour and sidelining subjective experience; or, indeed, paying little heed to anything between measurable stimuli and measurable responses. Thus a methodological decision about how psychologists should proceed became a decision as to the

17. We have already seen that nerve impulses do not have an intrinsic appearance: they do not have a “looking like”. That nerve impulses seem to have an appearance is due to the fact that they are always encountered through being represented. We overlook what this requires: human consciousness assisted by instruments.

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very nature of its proper object of study. This was a classic example of the way methodological constraints often dictate what practitioners of a discipline are prepared to acknowledge as real. When E. L. Thorndike famously wrote that “Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality.”18 he was also saying that whatever cannot be measured – and measured reliably – does not fully exist. And it illustrates a profound observation by E. A. Burtt: [I]f he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful.19 The “cognitive turn” in psychology away from behaviourism was a rediscovery of the mind as something other than an empty way station between inputs and outputs. It argued that the mind had a structure and components of its own and was responsible for processing what came in to ensure that what went out was more precisely tuned to the needs of the organism. According to one dominant school, “processing” was the manipulation of symbols by rules or algorithms. Early cognitive psychologists spent much time drawing diagrams and connecting up boxes marking intermediate steps between inputs and outputs. A crucial moment in the evolution of cognitive psychology was the shift from the boxes in diagrams towards “mental modules”. These were thought to have real, as opposed to paper, existence, although they tended to be introduced ad hoc. In a famous text published in 1983, Fodor argued that the functioning of mind – or at least certain aspects of it – could be described, or explained, in terms of a cognitive architecture.20 It was composed of informationprocessing modules, or “domain-specific computational mechanisms”. He gave as examples modules for detecting human faces, animal faces or generalized threats. Soon higher-level mental functions, such as reason and emotion, attention and memory, conscience and judgement, were assigned rooms of their own. There were also mental modules corresponding to

18. Thorndike, “The Nature, Purposes, and General Methods of Measurements”, 16. 19. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 226. Quoted in Crawford, “The Limits of Neuro-Talk”, 65. 20. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind.

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specific brain functions that did not have their own single-occupier accommodation within the brain but were distributed over the cortex. The theory of the mental module was the means by which neuroscience became installed at the heart of psychology. Michael Gazzaniga coined the term “cognitive neuroscience” to designate the nuova scienza that concerned itself with identifying what mental modules there were and investigating what they did and how they related to the central processes in the mind–brain. The facts that the roll call of modules was somewhat arbitrary, was added to as required, and that the division of the mind into modules was led sometimes by intuition and sometimes by observation in a decisively pre-scientific way did not seem to worry many cognitive neuroscientists. After all, Fodor’s ideas enabled them to join the BOLD rush. The advent of functional brain scanning – particular fMRI – not long after the “modular turn” could not have been better timed. The anatomy, the structure and function, of the mind–brain was now laid bare and psychology could now truly be a science without having to deny its traditional object of study: the psyche. The problem to which behaviourism had been such a disastrous solution had been solved. We have already seen that the claims for correlations between psychosocial functions and brain activity based on neuroimaging techniques are very dodgy indeed. But one of the greatest problems for the claim of cognitive neuroscience to be a science (as opposed to a creed) is the lack of empirical evidence for the existence of any modules. Even the most widely accepted, Noam Chomsky’s famous “language acquisition device”, the inspiration for modular thinking, remains a mere construct. This is readily forgiven, however, since modularity fits very nicely with a theory central to the emergence of cognitive neuroscience: the computational theory of mind. Are not computers also complexes of processing modules? The idea that the mind–brain is a kind of computer has been around for a long time, as has the complementary belief, reflected in the phrase “artificial intelligence”, that computers will one day acquire mental properties, and quite high-grade ones too. That this metaphor installed itself in the heart of psychology in the second half of the twentieth century was in part the result of the huge advances in computer technology and the development of microprocessors. These practical developments were in turn driven by conceptual advances in thinking about computational machines. We have already seen the refinement of the notion of “processing”: the manipulation of symbols by rules or algorithms. By using the same terminology to apply both to brains and computers, brains could be conceived 193

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as incredibly powerful/sophisticated/fast/versatile collections of microprocessors. The brain was the mother of all motherboards. The computational theory of mind is the most impressive illustration of the power of thinking by transferred epithet: how, by shuttling between machines (in this case computers), brains and minds, the same terms can straddle the mind–brain barrier and make the idea that mind or consciousness is made of nerve impulses almost impossible to question. A picture holds us captive and we can’t get out of it because it lies in our language. So what is the computational theory of mind? At its heart is the assumption that the mind is to the brain as software is to hardware. To put it slightly differently, the mind is a set of computer programs implemented in the wetware of the brain. Allied to this is the key idea, already mentioned, that the essential business of mind is to process information and that processing information is (also) what the brain does. The simple theory has been elaborated in various ways, notably in a Darwinitic direction, which connects it with one wing of evolutionary psychology. Pinker, speaking for many, has stated that the modules of which the mind is composed have been generated by the evolutionary process: “The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors”.21 By virtue of the suggestion that it is a cluster of naturally evolved computers, the mind is both naturalized and computerized. Dennett takes the connection between minds and computers to the extreme. As we have seen he argued that the mind is “a huge complex of memes (or more exactly meme-effects in brains)”,22 but he also believes that minds can: best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque” virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs.23 You don’t need to be able to understand this (I don’t), but you can see where he is coming from.

21. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 21. 22. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 210. 23. Ibid..

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Before I deal with the linguistic legerdemain on which the computational theory of mind depends, it is worthwhile considering why the theory is unlikely to advance our understanding of consciousness. Let me begin with something that few people will contest: computers are not conscious. Not even proponents of the computational theory of mind believe that present-day computers are conscious, in the sense of being aware of themselves and of a world around them, or of being capable of happiness or despair. Cray supercomputers with terabytes of RAM are as zombie-like as pocket calculators. This does not stop people claiming that, while we don’t have conscious computers yet, we shall “soon” or “eventually” develop ones that are conscious. However, those who make this claim are not able to specify what additional features the conscious computers of the future must have. There is much hand waving: conscious computers will be more “complex” or have a different kind of architecture, for example a parallel architecture based on so-called neural networks. I have yet to see a definition of “complexity” that would make consciousness seem inevitable or even more likely in the artefact possessing it: something to which I shall return. It is interesting to note that the appeal to “complexity” as an explanation of the difference between conscious and non-conscious processes is not new. According to Frith and Rees, the eighteenth-century philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie argued in L’Homme machine “that conscious and voluntary processes result simply from more complex mechanisms than involuntary and instinctive processes”. Frith and Rees then point out that this is “in essence the belief held by many of us who are searching for the neural correlates of consciousness in the twenty-first century”.24 At any rate, there is no evidence that currently available, massively parallel computers are more self-aware, prone to suffering or joy, or able to experience the sound of music or the smell of grass than their serial counterparts. In view of what we discussed in Chapter 3, this is totally unsurprising. The intuitions guiding those who specify the characteristics of the conscious computers of the future are often laughably naive; for example, they imagine that feedback loops, or re-entry connections, will awaken circuits to self-awareness. This is nonsense, of course: the smartest artefacts – with the most subtle feedback mechanisms and “self-monitoring” – are unaware of their smartness, of being a self, or of monitoring it.

24. Frith & Rees, “A Brief History of the Scientific Approach”, 10.

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The most striking evidence that very few people really believe that computers will one day be conscious is the way the goalposts recede as computing power advances. Computers many million times more powerful than those available to Alan Turing – one of the fathers of the modern computer – when he put forward his famous test for thinking machines are still not credited with the ability truly to think. Turing argued in a paper in Mind in 1950 that the question whether a machine could think should be replaced by the question “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”25 In this game, a computer behind a screen responds to questions posed to it by a human subject. If the computer can fool someone into believing that it is a human being, that is good enough; it truly is a thinking machine. This outmoded behaviourist definition of thinking is still invoked by some as a test for thinking computers, although many computer games could pass the Turing test with flying colours, without anyone, not even computational theorists of the mind, being prepared to grant them the power of conscious thought. I, for one, would be hard put (without additional information) to determine whether the mind-numbingly tedious football commentary available on various computer football games, seemingly describing, evaluating, applauding what was depicted on the screen, originated from a real person or was the output of a computer program. And I doubt whether anyone could determine without prior knowledge that the output from Deep Blue – the chess program that beat Garry Kasparov – came from a human player or a machine. This tells us that we can be fooled by a machine (or one that is hidden from view and operating in a highly restricted domain) into thinking that it is human. But that does not mean it is thinking or human. Primarily, it reminds us that simulating the behaviour of a thinking, conscious being is not the same as being a conscious, thinking being, particularly since the circumstances under which the simulation would deceive are highly restricted. (Deep Blue was not expected to make its own way to the competition venue, for example, or to see the point of chess or plan its future schedule of games.) What is more, simulation would count as simulation only to a conscious human being who may (or may not) be deceived. The notion of simulation, in other words, presupposes judges whose consciousness is not simulated. (That is why the concept of a “zombie” could not arise in a world populated only by zombies.)

25. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, 434.

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Let me now come to the second strand of my argument against the computational theory of mind: consciousness is not computational. This has been argued by several opponents of the computational theory of mind, often at great and unconscionable length,26 but the arguments are very simple. We just need to do something that those who promote the theory do so rarely: think about what actually happens in a computer. All that goes on at the heart of the machine is the passage of vast numbers of small currents through vast numbers of microscopic circuits. As we have already noted in the previous section, these events count as “information processing”, “symbol handling”, “behavioural control” or whatever only when the computer is being used prosthetically to support and extend the capabilities of conscious human beings. The latter have to provide the consciousness. Computers are no more information handlers in their own right than a clock is something that tells the time. Digital computers, primarily, enable us to compute digital or digitized inputs. For example, they add up 2 and 2 and make 4. If consciousness were made up of a huge mass of such calculations, which aspect of the calculation would be consciousness: the input, the output, the process, the addition sign? You may be uncomfortable with my example: a single, short calculation. But there is no reason why a long calculation should be more conscious than a shorter one; or a multitude of calculations be more conscious than one on its own. The same objections may be directed at those who assert that consciousness is not so much number-crunching as logic-crunching or mathematical operations such as the vector-to-vector transformation. The philosopher Patricia Churchland has criticized this characterization of mind as “a kind of logic machine operating on sentences”.27 At any rate, it begs many questions, leaving aside the difficulty of imputing “rules of logic” and “sentencelike representations” to electrical impulses in isolated computers (or, come to that, in brains). Only magical thinking could enable one to believe that “logic” (a normative term) and “sentences” (a fragment of human discourse expressing a completed thought) could exist without being realized in, and by, a conscious human being. What is more, sentences and logic are highly abstract and hardly correspond to contents of consciousness, such as a feeling of warmth. It is much the same with calculations.

26. See e.g. Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind. 27. Churchland, Neurophilosophy, 350.

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This difference between higher-level abstractions and ordinary experience does not seem to have worried many advocates of the computational theory of mind. In one of the classic expositions of the theory published a quarter of a century ago when computational theories were almost unchallenged within cognitive science, Philip Johnson-Laird actually argued that sense experience actually amounted to doing sums. “Vision”, he wrote, is “rather like finding the value of x in the equation: 5 = x + y”.28 This is wrong but at least has the virtue of being clearly enough expressed to make its error easy to see. The notion that something as basic as vision (enjoyed by beasts even less sophisticated than us when we are merely gawping) is made up of something that looks rather sophisticated (calculation) exemplifies one of the most consistent (and odd) features of the computational theory of mind: that of inverting the normal cognitive hierarchy. Normally, we place qualia and dim, uncategorized sensations at the bottom, and clever operations, such as calculating, at the top. The theory turns this upside down. In part, this is because computers are better at helping us with operations such as calculations than they are at finding their way around the world in which we locate them. This topsy-turvy vision is perhaps also a reflection of the fact that, in trying to understand consciousness, science – a late product of consciousness – is trying to get hold of the more basic states of consciousness on which it is ultimately founded, such as perceptual experience. The more basic the experiences, the more remote they are from the operations of science. I am reminded of the situation depicted by M. C. Escher in those famous pictures of illusions where, for example, the top step on a staircase turns out to be supporting, as well as being supported by, all the others. The computational theory of mind is unsatisfactory in many other ways. It cannot deal with the global nature of ordinary awareness: our everymoment openness to an unrestricted domain of events. Nor can it model those aspects of consciousness that we have already discussed, for example the unity of the moment-to-moment field of consciousness, permeated by an extended past and future, whose myriad components nonetheless retain their distinctness. As we have seen, every attempt to explain “integration” – merging without mushing – has so far failed. Computerizing that problem doesn’t help one bit. You can’t make millions of instances of “2 + 2 = 4” add up to a unified totality while, at some level, keeping them separate, just as

28. Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind, 60.

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you can’t have your rain shower as macroscopic precipitation and at the same time as separate drops and as the pools that result. This, however, is what we in fact do in every moment of our awareness of the complex world we inhabit and the complex life we lead. Some philosophers are not impressed by the fact that computers are not conscious and consciousness is not computational, arguing that the computational theory of mind would still hold up because the mind is not conscious, or not importantly so, as most mental functions are unconscious. I don’t think we need to waste much time on this defence (although Merlin Donald has felt the necessity to argue that “In my world consciousness is king. It defines human nature”29). Instead, I want to pick up where we left off in the last section and focus on the language that is used to give the computational theory of mind its apparent plausibility. This language depends, as we have seen, on the misuse of many terms – “rule”, “grammar”, “goal”, “instruction” – and has computers and bits of computers, brains and bits of minds and bits of brains (even individual neurons) all doing the same mind-like things such as “having memories”, “executing instructions”, “mobilizing logic”, “doing calculations”, “detecting signals”, “weighing uncertainties”, “making decisions” and so on. The most important term in this context, the lexical colossus that bestrides the world of the electronics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, is “information”, and I want now to examine what I think has gone wrong under the smokescreen built up out of the multiple meanings, technical and everyday, of this term. For it is the assumption that what brains, conscious and unconscious minds and computers do, above all, is acquire, process, store and transmit information that seems to provide the most powerful justification for describing the mind in terms of the computational activity of the brain.

MYTH-INFORMATION

Let us begin at the beginning.30 The Oxford English Dictionary lists numerous senses of the word “information”. The most important is: “Knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject or event; that 29. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 8. 30. The discussion that follows is a modified version of my Why the Mind is Not a Computer, “Information (Knowledge)”.

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of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news”. This ordinary sense is very different from the specialized sense used widely in cognitive and other sciences. At first the specialized, technical sense of information was kept distinct from the ordinary sense, and this was emphasized by the communication engineers who first introduced it. The specialized sense was occasioned by the need to quantify information: more accurately, in order to evaluate the work done by, and the efficiency of, communication channels charged with transmitting messages. Since to be informed is to learn something you didn’t know before, information can be understood in part as resolving an uncertainty about how things are or how they are going to be. In engineering terms, the information content of a message is proportional to the amount of prior uncertainty it resolves. The quantity of information carried by any message will be determined by the number of possible alternative messages that it has been selected from, and the relative prior probabilities of the different messages. The more unexpected, or unexpectable a message is, the greater its information content. A totally expected message, one that resolves no prior uncertainties, is redundant and, in engineering terms, has no information content; it is not worth paying for. Redundancy is both good and bad. It is good, inasmuch as it allows for a degradation of the message without loss of information transmission. The redundancy in written messages permits accurate decipherment of the most appalling handwriting, despite our inability to read certain individual letters. (As a doctor, I am grateful for it.) Redundancy is bad in so far as it may be uneconomical. It will be clear from this that the engineer’s sense of information and, in particular, information content has little to do with information in the ordinary sense. Warren Weaver, one of the first to think of information in the way just described, underlined this: information in this theory is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information.31

31. This passage from Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication” is quoted in Hacker, “Languages, Minds, and Brains”.

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A meaningful message may actually have less information content in the technical sense than the meaningless one. Supposing A asks B if she loves him. B’s answer yes is one of only two possible alternatives (the other one being no) and, assuming A has no prior idea of the answer, will have an information content of just one binary digit or bit. Consider, by contrast, a meaningless message composed of randomly generated letters of the alphabet. If all letters are equally probable, then the occurrence of any one letter will have a likelihood of 1 in 26. This will give the letter or message an information content of between 4 and 5 bits: several times higher than that of the answer to the question “Do you love me?” It is all a matter of the range of alternatives from which the message has been selected and their prior probabilities. As Claude Shannon, another pioneer of the mathematical theory of communication, wrote, the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects”.32 Lovers and engineers weigh information differently. In the specialized technical sense, then, information is measured by the reduction of uncertainty; the number of possibilities and their prior probabilities becomes a way of quantifying the information conveyed by a message. Before long, this objective way of measuring information (which is quite separate from how informative – never mind how interesting, important, exciting – the message seems to the recipient of the information) becomes a definition of information itself: information is uncertainty reduction. And this uncertainty may not even have to be experienced as such by the individual but only inhere in the quantity of objective possibilities presented to him. These caveats did not inhibit psychologists from seizing on the engineering notion of information as a handle on the mind. Shannon and Weaver were invoked by the sciences of the mind via the psychology of perception. In the 1940s, W. S. McCulloch and W. H. Pitts had modified the neuron doctrine of Cajal that we talked about in Chapter 1. The neuron, they said, was not just the basic anatomical unit of the nervous system but the basic information-processing unit.33 From the early 1950s onwards, sensory perception was interpreted as the acquisition of information and sensory pathways were seen as channels transmitting information from the outside world to the centre. These “channels”, like electronic

32. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. 33. McCulloch & Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”.

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pathways, had “limited information handling capacity”: they could cope with only so much at a time. Using the notion of information in the engineering sense, it was possible to make certain predictions that proved to be true. In his classic paper, the psychologist William Hick found that human subjects’ reaction time to a stimulus depended not on its actual content but on the number of alternatives that had to be selected from.34 This, in turn, determined how much information had to be processed before the subject could react. (The stimuli in question, it is not irrelevant to point out, were extremely simple: letters, numbers and simple pictures.) Hick’s paper was seized on as a great advance for the psychology of perception towards becoming a proper quantitative science. In fact, it was also the first tottering step towards the slippery slope. The initial move was to re-describe perception as “information” processing and to regard the function of the nervous system as that of transmitting information from one place to another. Although it is hard to see this now, it is a strange and contradictory move because it both dehumanizes perception and anthropomorphizes the organs of perception. The perceiver is placed on a level with a telephone receiver, while the sense organs are treated as if they were devices that had certain goals and aims and functions. Nevertheless, since the 1950s the rhetoric of information processing has increasingly dominated thought about mental, cerebral and neuronal function. Its apparent success depends on an almost continuous, but unacknowledged, vacillation between the engineering and the ordinary senses of information. By narrowing the conception of consciousness or awareness to that of information, and widening that of information way beyond the engineering sense that gives it scientific respectability, and not acknowledging (or noticing) either of these moves, it seems possible to give a scientific, information-based account of both the nervous system and consciousness that brings the two together. Cognitive psychologists learned to speak without embarrassment of consciousness as the outcome of the “lowerlevel information-processing” activity of the nervous system or as identical with “higher-level information-processing” in the nervous system. Let us pause for a moment to consider what’s wrong with reducing consciousness to information or expanding information to encompass the whole of awareness. Under this interpretation, an ordinary conscious being is literally steeped in information; the perceptual field is a multi-modal

34. Hick, “On the Rate of Gain of Information”.

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sphere of information. Sunbathing, for example, is information-bathing. You, the reader, might find it slightly odd, to say the least, to think of yourself as being located in a sphere of information coterminous with your sensory field, and equally odd to think of all-encompassing being-here as reducible to streams of data, to a pot of message. You might want to say (correctly in my view) that being situated does not quite amount to being informed, otherwise simply to be conscious would be to be well informed to the point of saturation. Even less does “being-here-in-the-world” – for all that it might include resolving uncertainties between a finite number of possibilities – amount to resolution of uncertainty, which is what the technical sense of information boils down to. What’s more the notion of “consciousness-as-uncertainty-resolution” overlooks the background, the framing, within which the uncertainties to be resolved are generated and reduced to a finite number.35 Cognitive psychologists somehow can’t see that the engineer’s use of the term “information” does not apply outside its legitimate provenance: that of unconscious devices designed by conscious human beings to help them communicate with other conscious human beings. If we remove this element of human intention, essential to ordinary communication, then “information states” or “information-bearing states” can be made to encompass pretty well everything that happens or exists. We are now at the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lies the lunacy of those who claim that the entire universe is a process of transmitting and receiving information. Let us now take a sleigh ride down that slope. The first step finds information outside the body, in the energy that impinges on the flesh. This is more momentous than it might at first seem: it solves, by bypassing it, a big problem. If you really believe that consciousness arises out of the interaction between the nervous system and material objects outside it, so that the transfer of energy from external objects to sense endings accounts for perception, then you have a bit of explaining to do, as we saw in “Why there can never be a brain science of consciousness” in Chapter 3. How does the energy impinging on the nervous system become transformed into consciousness? Although the nervous system seems quite good at turning various forms of energy into its own in-house dialect (the propagated electrochemical changes we described in Chapter 35. The impossibility of solving the frame problem has brought the dream of artificial intelligence and autonomous robots that would replace humans to a rather sad awakening. See Dennett, “Cognitive Wheels”.

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1), this doesn’t seem to amount to the transformation of energy into information. If, as Patricia Churchland argues, along with most cognitive psychologists, “nervous systems are information-processing machines”,36 someone is going to ask where the information comes from. Clearly you can’t process something you don’t have: a stomach isn’t a dinner-processing machine unless it gets a dinner from somewhere. But now that’s easily solved if the information is actually present in the energy that impinges on the nervous system! The job of the nervous system is no longer the metaphysical task of turning energy into consciousness or material events into information: it simply has to extract and process it. Thus Johnson-Laird argues that “light reflected from surfaces and focused on the retina contains a large amount of information”37 (gossipy stuff, light). This must surely be the easiest solution to the puzzle of how energy is transformed into information: the information is in the energy, although there is still some work to be done: “No matter how much information is in the light falling on the retinae, there must be mental mechanisms for recovering the identities of things in a scene and those of their properties that vision makes explicit to consciousness”.38 Quite so. This may be why, for some writers, concerned to spare the brain an insuperable task, the information that is inherent in energy in particular and the material world in general does not even have to be extracted by the nervous system; it is there for the taking. Or, rather, it is there whether it is taken or not. For example, there is the widely held belief that not only are unconscious organisms information-processing devices, but the individual parts of them are as well. Indeed, information is embodied in all organisms, most notably in the genetic material. Dawkins (whose views on this matter are by no means heterodox) takes it for granted that DNA is itself information, and carries instructions for transmitting and preserving information: “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology”.39 The difference between DNA and a memory stick is merely a question of the storage medium used – chemical as opposed to electronic – but the essentials are the same.

36. 37. 38. 39.

Churchland, Neurophilosophy, 36. Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind, 61. Ibid.. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 112, emphasis added.

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Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.40 The information technology of the genes is digital … We receive our inheritance in discrete particles.41 Dawkins has consistently held to this view. In 2008 he spoke as follows: “What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It’s precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information.”42 And what an enormous number of messages there are! DNA is ROM (Read Only Memory) and it is comparable to a laser disk in terms of the amount of information it packs into a small space.43 “[A]t the molecular genetic level, every one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely-coded digital information as my computer”.44 The idea that the structure or internal physical order of an organism amounts to information (as if one’s material assets can be capitalized as information flow) is, leaving aside the dubious thermodynamics on which the metaphor is based,45 unfounded. The structure of an organism is not available to it in the way that information is available to a conscious creature. It is certainly not part of consciousness. If a structure were equal to information (about that structure, presumably), then being a crystal would be a sufficient condition of being a crystallographer, although one that specialized rather narrowly on a single case. I hope the point that I am making is now sufficiently clear. Once information is uprooted from consciousness – and from an informant or from the experience of being informed and of wanting (or, come to that, refusing) to be informed – then any kind of nonsense is possible. According to the information theorists we have discussed so far, the (unconscious) structure of organisms contains or embodies information and the physical energy 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 126–7, emphasis added. Ibid., 112–13, emphasis added. Venter & Dawkins, “Lfe: A Gene-Centric View”. Ibid., 152–3. Ibid., xiii. For Colin Cherry’s critique of the misuse of thermodynamics in this context, see my Why the Mind is Not a Computer, “Information (Knowledge)”.

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impinging on the nervous system also contains information. It is possible to go further than this: for the fully paid-up information theorist, information is simply and literally everywhere. (I did say the slope was slippery.) The “informationalization” of the universe has been taken to its logical conclusion by theoreticians such as Edward Fredkin, Tommaso Toffoli, Stephen Wolfram and John Wheeler, for whom the fundamental particles that make up the world – atoms, quarks, and so on – boil down to bits (binary digits) of information.46 The universe is combinations of such binary digits. Even atoms are “information-processing systems”. The universe, it seems, is not only incredibly well informed about itself – a huge polymath set out in boundless space, an infinity of omniscience – but also it is information. Fredkin’s “digital physics” has a further twist: it is based on the hypothesis that the universe no longer processes information like a computer but that it is a computer, still processing a program that was installed at the beginning of time, possibly by a “Great Programmer”. Whether or not this computiverse is carried on the back of an elephant has not yet been determined. The rationale behind this kind of thinking is clearly set out by the physicist Paul Davies: Compare the activity of the computer with a natural physical system – for example, a planet going round the sun. The state of the system at any instant can be specified by giving the position and velocity of the planet. These are the input data. The relevant numbers can be given in binary arithmetic, as bit string of ones and zeros. At some time later the planet will have a new position and velocity, which can be described by another bit string: these are the output data. The planet has succeeded in converting one bit string into another, and is therefore in a sense a computer. The “program” it has used in this conversion is a set of physical laws (Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation).47 Physical systems are thus computational systems, processing information just as computers do; and scientific laws may be considered as algorithms. This view is apparently supported by the observation that in postclassical (quantum) physics many physical quantities normally regarded as 46. The clearest (to me at any rate) expression of this barmy idea is in Toffoli, “Physics and Computation”. 47. Davies, The Mind of God, 118.

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continuous are in fact discrete: nature is thus more readily amenable to digitization. In other words, the universe is not merely a huge computer: it is a huge digital computer. Digital physicists do not go so far as to say that it has an IBM operating system or that the Pearly Gates are logic gates designed by Bill Gates, but they do not fall far short of such claims. Digital physics and the notion that the entire universe is composed of information or is a giant information-processing system – that, according to Wheeler, “It = Bit” – is what lies at the end of a long chain of unchecked metaphors. Little by little, we arrive at lunacy. As is so often the case, the first steps on the path to lunacy appear quite sensible, reminding one of G. K. Chesterton’s observation that “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason”.48 The road from informationalist accounts of the mind–brain to panpsychism is short, straight and metalled with iron logic. The most important and the seemingly most innocuous step is that of accepting the idea that information can be “stored” – outside the human body, outside conscious organisms – “in” books or “on” disks. In the loose sense of “inform”, I may regard a book as “informative”. Likewise, a book I am writing may be informative; so (again, in a very loose sense) I am filling my book with information. The books I read inform me and the books I write are informed by me. Once this is taken literally, as opposed to being a bit of shorthand, then information, informing and being informed start to be liberated from a consciousness being informed or wanting to inform. If it sounds odd to talk of one book informing another, consider what is often said about “information stored on disks”: information may be copied from one disk to another; information may be transmitted from disk to disk. This is perfectly normal computer talk. The trouble is, it seems to suggest that information can be given and received without the involvement of consciousness. This is, of course, misleading: the information in a book, or on a disk, is only potential information. And, speaking more generally, it is not information but only potential information that can be inscribed outside a conscious individual. It remains merely potential until it is encountered by an individual requiring and able to receive information, able to be informed. In the absence of such a (conscious) organism, it is sloppy and inaccurate to refer to the states of objects as “information”; but such loose talk is the beginning of a very long journey.

48. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 13.

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At the end of that long journey, we find not only mad physicists but otherwise sane biologists and even respectable philosophers of mind such as Chalmers: [W]herever there is a causal interaction, there is information, and wherever there is information, there is experience. One can find information states in a rock – when it expands and contracts, for example – or even in the different states of an electron. So … there will be [conscious] experience associated with a rock or an electron.49 To conclude, the illegitimately, and at times insanely, extended misuse of the term “information” is absolutely pivotal to establishing the conceptual confusions necessary to the seeming fruitfulness and apparent explanatory power of much modern thought about the mind and the brain – and ourselves. This converges in the computational theory of mind. By playing on different meanings of “information”, and transferring epithets like a volleyball, it is possible to argue that minds, brains, organisms, various artefacts such as computers and even non-living thermodynamic systems are all information-processing devices. Because they are deemed to be essentially the same in this vitally important respect, they can be used to model each other; homology and analogy can run riot. Once the concept of information is liberated from the idea of a conscious someone being informed and from that of a conscious someone doing the informing, anything is possible. Language bewitches us and we imagine that the problem of consciousness has been solved when in fact is has simply been concealed by verbal legerdemain.

49. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 297.

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CHAPTER SIX

The Sighted Watchmaker

DARWINISM VERSUS DARWINITIS

I cannot emphasize too strongly that I have no quarrel with Darwinism; and if I did, I would be wasting my time and yours. Nor does Charles Darwin require any endorsement from me. It is hardly necessary, so soon after the world-wide celebration of the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, to extol his greatness. He is the Newton and Einstein of biology rolled into one: one of those rare thinkers of whom what George Santayana wrote of Spinoza – that “like a mountain … he rises as he recedes”1 – is incontestably true. We have lived so long with his fundamental ideas that it is still difficult, despite the admirable efforts of writers such as Dawkins, to see how great they are. What is perhaps most astonishing about Darwin’s achievement is that he arrived at his theory on the basis of comparatively little evidence. Although he scrupulously gathered and synthesized data from many sources, they were still inadequate. The fossil record was very patchy and the science of genetics, which is central to our contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, did not exist. The theory therefore had a huge surface of exposure to potential falsification and yet every advance in biological knowledge since Darwin has confirmed it: it is supported by, or consistent with, facts he could not have imagined. This is extraordinary since, as

1. Santayana, “Introduction”.

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Dawkins has pointed out,2 discovery of only a few fossils in the wrong geological stratum would have dealt it a mortal blow. Carbon dating, the demonstration of continental drift, the discovery of chromosomes and the analysis of DNA have enabled the chronology of the emergence of organisms and their familial relations to be determined with a precision that Darwin could not have dreamed of. The mass of information that has been gathered since 1859 justifies Dawkins’s assertion that Darwin’s theory should now be upgraded to a “theorum”.3 My attack on Darwinitis, therefore, has nothing to do with a Bible-belt questioning of the truth of Darwin’s central notion that species, including H. sapiens, came into being through the operation of natural selection on random variation. Nor do I presume to question the judgement that the theory of evolution is one of the greatest ideas humanity has ever entertained. What’s more I have very little quarrel with the more recent genecentred way of thinking about biological evolution, popularized by Dawkins, and summarized as follows in his recent publication: Natural selection is the differential survival of successful genes rather than alternative, less successful genes in gene pools. Natural selection doesn’t choose genes directly. Instead, it chooses their proxies, individual bodies; and those individuals are chosen – obviously and automatically and without deliberative intervention – by whether they survive to reproduce copies of the very same genes. A gene’s survival is intimately bound up with the survival of the bodies that it helps to build, because it rides inside those bodies, and dies with them … Statistically, therefore, a gene that tends, on average, to have a good effect on the survival prospects of the bodies in which it finds itself will tend to increase in frequency in the gene pool. So, on average, the genes that we encounter in a gene pool will tend to be those genes that are good at building bodies.4 Natural selection does away with the need to appeal to a designer. Nothing in the organism is designed, intelligently, super-intelligently or even stupidly. There is no need to appeal to a conscious shaping hand to 2. Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, esp. ch. 1, “Only a Theory?”, 3–18. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 248–9.

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explain the emergence of complex creatures. The idea that they are as likely to come into being through the operation of natural selection as a Jumbo jet is to be constructed by a hurricane blowing through a junk yard – one of the favourite analogies of the (un)intelligent designers (and repeated to me by the journalist Melanie Phillips on the BBC radio programme The Moral Maze) – is based on a failure to grasp two things: the first is the sheer quantity of time (several billion years) natural selection has had to operate; and the second is that it is a non-random process. Natural selection is not random pruning but unconscious selection for increased fitness to survive to replicate. It is the non-random nature of selection that enables the ascent of what Dawkins has called Mount Improbable from the most primitive replicators to H. sapiens. As an atheist humanist I reject the idea that evolution has a goal. More particularly, I do not for a moment think it had us in mind as its destination and crowning glory. Living organisms are merely the means by which genetic replicators ensure their replication. I am in entire agreement with the orthodoxy, as expressed by Dawkins, that: “Natural selection is all futile. It is all about the survival of self-replicating instructions for selfreplication”.5 In short, it is a mindless, pointless process. This is captured in the striking metaphor that gives Dawkins’s most brilliant book its title: The Blind Watchmaker. In that book, he confronts the argument from design head on. The eighteenth-century theologian William Paley had argued that the organized complexity of living creatures was proof of the existence of a designer. After all, if we had come across a watch, we would immediately infer the existence of a watchmaker: “the watch must have had a maker: … there must have existed … an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its instruction, and designed its use”.6 Since living creatures are many times more complex and intricately matched to their functions than any watch or other human artefact we must conclude that they, too, had been formed by a maker. Darwin had argued – and every observation since then has confirmed it – that there was an alternative “watchmaker” to a conscious, super-intelligent designer: the operation of unconscious, although nonrandom, natural selection over hundreds of millions of years. Crucially,

5. Ibid., 392. 6. Paley, Natural Theology, 3–4, quoted in Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 4.

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given that living matter had arisen out of non-living matter but still remained matter, this biological process was ultimately a convergence of physical processes: All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics … A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and the apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.7 This is a vision of evolution that seems to justify Samuel Butler’s characterization of Darwin “pitchforking … mind out of the universe”.8 However, mind is not banished from the universe, for there are still human minds operating in, and shaping, parts of the universe. We cover the surface of the earth with our artefacts, among them watches. Darwinism, therefore, leaves something unaccounted for: the emergence of people like you and me who are indubitably sighted watchmakers. If there are no sighted watchmakers in nature and yet humans are sighted watchmakers, in the narrower sense of making artefacts whose purpose they envisage in advance, and in the wider sense of consciously aiming at stated goals, then humans are not part of nature: or not entirely so. To put this another way, isn’t there a problem in explaining how the blind forces of physics brought about (cognitively) sighted humans who are able to see, and identify, and comment on, the “blind” forces of physics, even to notice that they are blind and deliberately utilize them to engage with nature as if from the outside, and on much more favourable terms than those that govern the lives of other animals? On the Origin of Species leaves us with the task of explaining the origin of the one species that is indeed a designer. How did we humans get to be so different?

7. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 5. 8. Butler, Luck, or Cunning, 4.

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While Darwin may have banished mind from the natural world, it is difficult to overlook its operation in human life. Most of our actions are deliberate and, however concrete, typically make sense only with respect to frameworks, which incorporate many layers of abstraction that require conscious minds to engage with. So something rather important about us is left unexplained by evolutionary theory. We are not mindless and yet seem to do things according to purposes that we entertain in a universe that brought us into being by mindless processes that are entirely without purpose. To deny this is not to subscribe to Darwinism but to embrace Darwinitis. I believe that we can reconcile Darwinism with the notion that we humans do not fit into the natural order, and that biological mechanisms are far from the last word on what we are. To do this, we need to find some biological explanation of how we came to be so different: so different that, uniquely in us, the laws of physics have become known and, made explicit, are manipulated increasingly to our advantage. I shall point in the direction of an answer to this question – although neither I nor anyone else can give anything other than a tentative explanation – in the next section. In the final section of this chapter, I shall examine a little more carefully the way we are cognitively different from other living things, in particular our nearest animal kin. This will set the scene for the task of developing a picture of our humanity that restores what has been lost in the naturalism of the neuromaniacs and Darwinitics. My aim in the two sections that follow is less ambitious than it sounds; I simply want to say enough to persuade you that Darwinism does not oblige us to embrace biologism or, more specifically, Darwinitis, and then to make clear what is at the bottom of the great gulf that separates us from beasts.

HOW WE CAME TO BE SO DIFFERENT

In the next section, we shall dig deeper into differences between us and beasts but, for the present, I shall just list some of the key things that set us off from the rest of the natural world, to give an idea of what it is that we have to explain. Above all, we have an enormously complex and sustained selfconsciousness unmatched by any other creatures. This self-awareness is gathered up into a sense of an enduring self, related to a world of almost 213

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infinite explicit complexity. That world is populated by (material) objects, which we intuit as having intrinsic properties and real connections that may be hidden from us. It is also inhabited by other (aware) subjects and groups of subjects located in a shared public realm. The public realm is stocked with artefacts, and regulated by norms, rules and institutions. It has temporal depths in which personal memories and shared histories connect and disconnect. This is the theatre in which we behave as conscious agents who lead our lives rather than merely organically live them. Thus, for the present, our differences. So how did we get to be so different? I have discussed this at length in a trilogy I published between 2003 and 2005 and I will spare you an even denser synopsis of these dense books, although I would be delighted if you were prompted to read them by what follows.9 What follows is, of course, only one of many competing accounts of the gap between us and apes. Some writers, as we have seen, try to bridge the gap between us and apes by arguing that it is not as big as it looks and that it is ultimately not real. Others, however, are aware that the gap is a yawning gulf and seek an explanation that is proportionate to the scale of what has to be explained. Among these writers two stand out for me: Donald,10 whom it will be recalled affirmed the centrality of consciousness in human life and Steven Mithen.11 They do not subscribe to what, it will be recalled, the psychologist Nick Humphrey has described as “one of the most cherished assumptions of contemporary psychology”: that there is no fundamental difference between ape minds and human minds.12 However, in order to be sure that that assumption is truly kept at bay and does not, as it were, creep back into our thinking through the force of others’ habits, it is necessary to emphasize the profundity of the difference between us and beasts, and it is this that I shall focus on: “Schelling’s wonderful idea that nature opens its eyes … and notices that it exists”.13 The challenge is to imagine how, ultimately out of the blind forces of physics, there arose the sighted watchmakers that we are; or, less ambitiously, how we came to be fundamentally different from other creatures and not merely exceptionally gifted chimps. 9. See my The Hand, I Am and The Knowing Animal. 10. Donald, A Mind So Rare. 11. Mithen The Prehistory of the Mind. While I do not subscribe to Mithen’s modular approach to mind, I am grateful for his acknowledgement of the huge distance between human and animal consciousness and of the need for a complex explanation of this distance. 12. Humphrey, “Foreword”. 13. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 369.

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Most explanations of our differences tend to hinge on the fact that we have bigger brains: more specifically that we have a larger frontal cortex than is seen in the great apes. My starting-point, by contrast, is something that directly affects the whole body and its relation to the external world and, even more importantly, to itself: the upright position that liberated the hand so that it could turn our animal – primate – consciousness upon itself. The hand, I shall argue, made the human animal, our hominid ancestor, uniquely aware of its own actively engaged body. This awoke the dim intuition “That I am this body”. (I have called this the “existential intuition”.) From this, over time, there came an endlessly elaborated sense of self and an ever more potent agency. The central plank of my arguments is that this primordial version of the first-person mode of existence – “I am this” – and the selfhood and agency that flowed from it emerged in the no-person world of material events in part as a result of the special properties of the thumb, which, taken in conjunction with the upright position, transformed the primate hand into a proto-tool. It was this that lay at the start of the development that ultimately enabled humankind increasingly to utilize the laws of nature rather than merely being a substrate on or through which they operate. To express it a little frivolously, the thumb enabled us to hitch a ride on the laws of nature to destinations that nature had not prefigured. Put baldly like this, the claim that something so small as the hand – even worse, the thumb – should have had such momentous, indeed massive, consequences, may seem ludicrous. So let me deal with the size issue at once. Size may be important but it is not everything. After all, human beings are pretty small in the scheme of things – smaller than most trees and a good deal smaller than mountains – and no one will deny that their impact on the planet is vastly greater than that of any other creature. And we are familiar with non-linear processes, for example the butterfly effect, whereby small initial differences may lead over a long period of time to massive differences. What’s more, the period of time in question is several million years; this is the interval that separates the first intuition of sustained self-consciousness and agency – delivered, I believe, in part by the hand of the upright animal – from the massive complex cultures and civilizations that we now partake in. The distance between man and non-human animals has been opened up by the work of millions of pairs of hands over millions of years. We are talking about a slow-burning fuse that was lit when primates first stood upright. And that was where much of importance to this story began. 215

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It is widely accepted that the migration several million years ago of Australopithecine hominids out of the safety of the trees to the dangerous savannah, perhaps triggered by climatic changes that devastated the forests, made the upright position of adaptive value; for example, it increased the range of vision, allowing the eyes to assume their full potential as early warning devices, something else that had an important role in our becoming embodied subjects and to which I shall briefly return. Incidentally and most importantly, however, bipedalism – walking on two legs – liberated the forelimbs from the demands of locomotion. Although other animals assume the upright position from time to time, only man is overwhelmingly bipedal. The forelimb, as Sherrington so beautifully expressed it, was thereby transformed from “a simple locomotor prop to a delicate explorer of space”.14 The hands were freed to take advantage of anatomical developments that would increase their manipulative skills and consequently develop from an organ into a proto-tool. Foremost among these anatomical developments were those that enabled full pad-to-pad contact between the thumb and the other fingers: so-called opposability. Some other primates show a degree of opposability but, because their thumbs have limited powers of rotation and are relatively short, opposability is incomplete. Only in humans is there a large surface of very intimate contact between the pulps of opposing fingers. Opposability, combined with the ability (shared with some other primates) to move the fingers independently of one another (“fractionated finger movement”), made it possible for the hand to become a stunningly versatile organ for interacting with the world. The hand is richly supplied with sensory endings, so that the multitude of grips it can draw on may be perfectly adapted to the objects it is exploring and manipulating and be precisely regulated during manipulation by very subtle feedback processes. What is more, in the touching tips of the fingers the body communicates with itself, as well as with the external world with unprecedented intensity. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the biological importance of the wholly opposable thumb; many others have done so already. Its adaptive value has been fully appreciated. Its contribution to the transformation of self-awareness and self-understanding, however, has been less widely understood. Opposability, through its impact on the range of possibilities of the hand, alters our relation to our own bodies and through this to

14. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 352.

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each other and the material world. This transformed relation is a key to the transition from primate consciousness, which for all its complexity is not turned back on itself in any sustained way, to human self-consciousness, in which objects and subjects are explicitly differentiated.15 The hand, I want to suggest, took humans over the threshold (perhaps quite low – chimps were so near) dividing consciousness from self-consciousness and unreflective instinctive behaviour from true agency. You may feel this is a rather large claim. What is the basis for it? Opposability first and most obviously makes available a very large number of grips that the hand may deploy during the course of its manipulative activity. Crucially, at any given moment there is a range of possible grips and strategies, an almost unlimited opportunity for inventiveness and creativity, so we have a choice. At the same time, the range is restricted by the shape and properties of the object we are manipulating and our intention in manipulating it. We have what I have called “constrained manipulative indeterminacy”: the indeterminacy is not mere randomness and this, and the intimate choice it implies – the opposite of stereotyped, programmed movements – is, ultimately, the basis for the intuition of the agency of our own bodies and the intuition of our bodies as our own and, indeed, as ourselves, and hence of ourselves as agents. To see the connection between this choice and the intuition of selfconscious agency one must appreciate that we have a very special relation to our hand when it is engaged in manipulative activity. Manual choosing takes place in the context of the especially intimate interaction with the manipulated object, underscored by constant direct sensory feedback about the position of our hands, their relation to the object of interest and the progress of whatever operation is being performed, through skin sensation, the hand’s awareness of itself – so-called proprioception – and (very importantly) vision. The special relation is highlighted because the opposed fingers not only manipulate objects but also do this by means of a kind of interaction – a self-fingering, a meta-fingering – in which the hand addresses itself. It is within this context that the hand emerges as a proto-tool. Our relation to the hand as a tool is of the utmost significance. It transforms the relation with our own bodies into something that is not seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom: the tool-like status of the hand

15. Self-consciousness in chimpanzees (and in elephants and dolphins, to whom it is also attributed) is episodic: it does not add up to sustained sense of self, even less to a biography.

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spreads back into the body that is using it, which latter then becomes more widely instrumentalized; and gradually humans emerge as creatures who explicitly utilize as well as suffer or live their bodies, or respond to an environment that is a source of stimuli and cues; who truly act as well as react. Humans, then, were unique among the primates in awakening to a sense of agency, of being “one who does”, at least in part because the hand is experienced as a tool; this instrumentalizes the hominid body as a whole, which in turn reinforces the status of the hand as an explicit agent and fosters an emerging sense of being a self that wills things to happen. It is on this basis that deliberate action begins to replace, or to expropriate, instinctive behaviour, tropisms and automatic cue-driven responses to stimuli – in short biological mechanisms – even though agency must still be fashioned out of, or built on, biological mechanisms. This opens a slowly widening gap between the biological mechanisms that make human actions possible and the non-stereotyped nature of those actions: stereotyped mechanisms are increasingly deployed to non-stereotyped ends. The argument that manipulative indeterminacy underpins the sense of agency is open to this objection. We have considerable discretion over how we deploy other parts of our body such as our feet. Why not argue that the human foot lies at the root of the intuition of agency? We may, of course, use our feet as instruments, as the incredible but utterly futile skills of footballers testify. This, however, is consequential on an existing instrumental relation we already have to the entirety of our body, awoken by our hands. To understand why knuckle-walking chimps or primates swinging though the trees did not acquire the intuition of agency, and why humans alone of the beasts broke into sustained self-consciousness, we need to be mindful not only of the hand’s unique versatility (scarcely matched by the foot) and of its close relation to the eyes, but also of its status as the chief organ of the fifth sense – touch. Manual touch is rather special, not only because it is so precise and sensitive. As we have already discussed, the hand addresses itself – meta-fingers – as no other organ does; toes, at best, enjoy sidelong glimpses at each other. What is more, touch is not overshadowed by smell as it is in animals whose faces are typically close to the ground. (We shall return to other consequences of the upright position shortly.) Just how special manual touch is may be illustrated by an experiment that requires no equipment except a human body and a quiet room where one can be undisturbed. Slip off your shirt and let your bared shoulder cool. Touch it with your warm hand. You will find that you are divisible into at least two subjects and two objects. Your hand (subject) is aware of the 218

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coolness of your shoulder (object); your shoulder (subject) is aware of the warmth of your hand (object). There is therefore a double distance within you as an embodied subject. However, this relation is not symmetrical. The hand has, well, the upper hand: it is manifestly the exploratory agent and the shoulder manifestly the explored surface. Although touch is reciprocated – the toucher in each case is also that which is touched – there is this hierarchy of roles because the hand has come to the shoulder and not vice versa. What’s more, the hand has the established track record of being an explorer, unlike the shoulder. The differentiation of roles, so that one part of your body is, as it were, “superior” to another maintains the inner distances: the subject–object distance awoken within your body is not cancelled by an equal and opposite object–subject distance. Opposite, yes: equal, no. (And where it is a dialogue of bodily equals – as when I rub my hands together – we have ourselves as subjects to maintain the hierarchy. I oversee, or chair, the interactions between my two hands.) The role of the hand as an exploratory organ confirms its status as a tool and reinforces its power to awaken in the human organism the sense of being a subject within its body. It does so, however, only once the intuition of agency has been already ignited. That is why the exploratory function of the hand in other primates is not sufficient to awaken in them the sense of self and agency. The subject–object, agent–patient, relation within the body is many-layered. It is elaborated even within the hand itself, where every manipulation has a built-in hierarchy, such that part of the hand (for example the palm and unmoving fingers) is stabilizing background and the rest is active foreground. While in much non-human animal activity too, one part of the body acts as a stabilizing background for foreground activity, this is developed to an unparalleled extent in humans. As a consequence, humans are subjects within, agents acting through, their own bodies to a degree that other animals are not. While we may conjecture that other beasts, particularly other primates, come very close to the threshold that separates consciousness from selfconsciousness and explicit agency, they do not cross it: or not sustainedly at any rate. Nevertheless, human consciousness is built on a foundation already provided by the complex consciousness of the primate ancestors we have in common with everyday higher apes. That is why, say, the octopus’s tentacles or the elephant’s trunk (two examples frequently raised with me when I have presented this argument) do not deliver the animal’s body to itself as an instrument or transform it into an embodied subject. These other creatures, while they use their prehensile organs in a variety of ways 219

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that look as if they are chosen by an agent, are starting too far back from self-consciousness. The non-human primates, by contrast, are close to the threshold that humans overcome. (And this is another reason why the relatively small anatomical differences I have focused on have had such huge effect: why something as seemingly insignificant has had such significant effects.) As Gordon Gallup and many others have demonstrated, there is at least transient self-consciousness in some primates.16 When a gorilla with a lipstick mark on its forehead is placed in front of a mirror it will attempt to rub it off, indicating that it recognizes the image in the mirror as an image of its own body, of itself. But this sense of self is momentary and present only under very special circumstances, as when the image of its body is played back to itself. It is something to build on, but a far cry from the infinitely elaborated, sustained sense of self – reflected in our selfconscious behaviour, mediated through different kinds of self-image, and the narrated, actively led lives – that we humans have. The hand as full-blown tool, that transforms the body into a self-conscious agent, widens the gap within the human body through which the human person enters into the primate organism. Passing over the threshold from consciousness to self-consciousness was not a sudden, complete change. It was the start of a long journey and we are still en route. The emergence of the human self-agent was gradual. Successive generations of hominids began further from the beginning, inheriting the cumulative progress of the previous generations. It now takes a newborn infant perhaps ten years to acquire (“off the shelf ”, as it were) the fruits of several million years of human development. Most of it is acquired in the first two years of life. The millions of years over which the “lighting up” of human selfconsciousness took place are, if my account is correct, precisely the extent by which those versions of evolutionary psychology that claim that human behaviour can be understood in terms that are applicable to animal behaviour selected for by evolutionary processes are out of date. Evolutionary psychology stops at the condition achieved by primates just before the first intuition “I am this”: before the blind forces of biology, and indeed physics, started the long slow unblinding that resulted in sighted watchmakers such as ourselves uncovering and utilizing the blind forces of physics. I have mentioned that our cognitive journey was a collective process. This brings us to another key element of evolving human consciousness:

16. Gallup, “Self-Recognition in Primates”.

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the extent to which our awareness is collectivized and is anchored in an acknowledged public space, a society that is joined together psychologically rather than merely through the dovetailing of pre-programmed behaviours. I’ll come back to this complex notion in the next section but I want to say something now because it relates to the influence of another biological difference: the upright position. The upright position not only liberates our hands in the way we have spoken of, but also raises us above the world that we see, places us at a distance from it. This in itself would not count for much – after all, giraffe vision is more elevated than our own, not to speak of that of a bird in a tree or in the air – were it not for the special nature of our gaze: namely the gaze of an embodied subject.17 This combines with the liberated hand in a special way to create an important gesture that strengthens shared attention: pointing. The human hand can take advantage not only of its fully opposable thumb but also of the unique freedom of movement of the index finger that enables it to point.18 The sense that I am a subject has as its correlative the sense that I am surrounded by objects that are other than me and that belong to a world shared with other subjects. Through pointing the index finger can be used to make the common world – in part public, in part private to me – more explicit by soliciting joint attention. This is not the only one, but it is the most important (and the most universal), of the pre-verbal signs by which humans exchange information about a world that is in part visible and in part hidden. We shall return to it in the next section. For the moment, we note the increasing importance of the gaze in the upright animal: joint attention is most readily secured by joint visual attention. In the gaze of the upright animal, the objectivity of the object, the sense that it is other than me, the subject, is heightened. This underpins the intuition of a world had in common, that is the arena of both one’s own life and the lives of others with whom one is connected and from whom one is separated. I have described the hand as a “proto-tool”. We may imagine a feedforward mechanism involving secondary drivers. The most important of these are tools ultimately inspired by the tool–hand. Our collective genius as toolmaking animals is an extension of the special, instrumental relation

17. There are, incidentally, unique features of the cerebral structures supporting vision in humans: another biological difference to drive the escape from biology. See Preuss & Coleman, “Human-Specific Organization of Primary Visual Cortex”. 18. See my Michelangelo’s Finger.

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we have to our hands, and consequently to our bodies and, through our bodies, to the world. This is more contentious than it should be. Many biologists, as we have seen, have denied that there is anything special about human tool use, arguing that sophisticated technologies are seen in many other organisms, including apes, octopuses and crows. We are now in a position to grasp what it is that is unique about our tool use and to see that employing the same phrase for how humans use artefacts and how animals use sticks and stones is actively misleading. Granted, other animals seem to use tools, and even modify sticks and stones snatched at random. However, only humans are tool users in the true sense. The fact that humans alone routinely use tools to make tools – so-called secondary tool use – itself suggests that we alone have the concept of a tool. The unimpressive range of animal tool use and its failure to develop betrays the profound difference between genuine tool use and what animals do with sticks and stones and thorns. The poverty of apparent tool use in animals is striking: the small number of the stereotyped tricks clearly indicates that the underlying principles are not appreciated by the animals. There is nothing in the history of chimps, say, corresponding to eras marked by the discovery of different types of tools. The lack of variety and the virtual absence of innovation (as result of which animals do not have to teach their young how to use tools) is striking. The absolute pinnacle of chimp tool use is the employment of a stone to break a nut and this takes the beast about five years to learn! And, as far as we know, chimps’ tool use is little different from what it was when H. sapiens first came on the scene. Where there are new developments – very few and none that open up an entire field of technology – their significance is grossly exaggerated. For example, when macaques started washing nuts by the seashore, and octopuses started collecting coconut shells, this was described as “cultural variation” and hence evidence of a distinctive local culture! We can now understand this dismal performance, this ludicrously low ceiling of technological achievement, seen even in primates. What is described as “tool use” by animals is not rooted in a fully developed instrumental relation to their own bodies. They are still organisms rather than embodied subjects. Human tool use, by contrast, is anchored in a fullblown sense of the body-as-instrument. That is why it has no limits. The journey from the eolith and pebble chopper to the Cray supercomputers and the nuclear power station, which has been so rapid, is just the first step in a story that has no conceivable end. Even at the dawn of human toolmaking there was complexity beyond the ken of animals. Flint-knapping 222

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to make a stone axe (which began about 400,000 years ago) involves many hundreds of steps. No animal gets anywhere near this. Moreover, human tools are implicitly composite, even where they are not explicitly so. The first most obvious tool, the pebble chopper, was a composite, with a rounded end designed to fit into the palm of the hand and a jagged sharp end designed to do the business. It is a forerunner of handled tools in which the end that is adapted to the hand that holds it and the end adapted to the tasks that it has to do the business are explicitly differentiated. The handle is unequivocal evidence of an instrument that is not assimilated into the body schema; it signifies an interaction between the body and its environment that is explicitly agentive and from a distance; and is a startling demonstration of the fact that humans grasp the tool as an agent of their agency that exists in its own right, rather than, as seems to be the case in animals, being assimilated into the body, dissolved into a body–tool complex, somewhat as the ground is when we are walking. Seen in their true light, composite tools are a miracle of explicit understanding: an emphatic expression of an awareness of the self, or the body as agent, separating the connection between the body and its agent – the tool – and the tool and its substrate. The handled tool is an expression of this fundamental ability of humans to uncouple themselves from the material environment in order to engage with it on more favourable terms: reculer pour mieux sauter. This is taken further even in prehistoric times. Think of the separately manufactured elements, such as thread and glue, used to hold composite tools together. Think of technologies, such as the needle, designed to take threads to the places where the thread is required. How perceptive Aristotle was, therefore, in characterizing the hand as “an instrument that represents many instruments”.19 (Significantly, the Greek term “organon” means both “organ” and “tool”.) He saw that the human hand is the ur-tool, the tool of tools, the inspiration of the implement. Tools directly and indirectly mark the distance between the nature in which other animals are immersed and the culture that distances humans from nature. The reference to Aristotle, by the way, is an admission that there is nothing brand new in the idea that the hand has a central role in enabling us progressively to distance our self from nature. And he was anticipated by the Presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras. Many other thinkers have felt that the clue to the origin of a distinctively human nature lies in the hand. Erasmus Darwin,

19. Arist. Part. an. IV.x.687a.

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the grandfather of Charles, even expressed this view in verse (although he would have been advised not to give up the day job): Nerved with fine touch above the bestial throngs, The hand, first gift of Heaven! to man belongs; Untipt with claws the circling fingers close, With rival points the bending thumbs oppose, Trace the nice lines of form with sense refined And clear ideas charm the thinking mind. Whence the first organs of touch impart Ideal figure, source of every art …20 And the great anatomist F. Wood Jones wrote that: “Man’s place in nature is largely writ upon the hand”.21 A story that gives such a central role, at least initially, to the hand is also consistent, at least in its emphasis on motor activity, with Donald’s account of “the three major cognitive transformations by which the modern human mind emerged over several million years, starting with a complex of skills presumably resembling those of a chimpanzee”.22 Donald finds in motor evolution the first step in the passage from the non-symbolic cognitions of animals to the fully symbolic representations that are wall-to-wall in everyday human life. The key element was the ability of hominids to use the body as a representational device, which he calls “mimetic skills” and “auto-cueing”. This, he suggests, “is based on an abstract model of models that allows any action of the body to be stopped, replayed and edited, under conscious control”.23 The connection between this kind of motor activity and first-person being, the sense of self and the sense of one’s self as an explicit agent, will be clear, especially in the light of the foregoing discussion. Donald links this with self-teaching and the refinement of action by purposive repetition: something not seen in animals. We shall return to practice when we consider free will (“Welcome back, freedom” in Chapter 7) but it is manifestly germane to what Donald calls our unique human ability “to transcend the immediate environment”.24 And we shall relate “lexical cueing” to

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

E. Darwin, The Temple of Nature, Canto III, “Progress of the Mind”. Wood Jones, The Principles of Anatomy as Seen in the Hand, 5. Donald, “Précis of Origins of the Modern Mind”, 737. Donald, “The Definition of Human Nature”, 46. Ibid., 44.

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the discussion of the human realm in the next section. But I want first to focus on something else that Donald emphasizes: that the brain is only one out of many drivers of human evolution, and not the sole, or indeed central, source of the ever-widening gap between us and beasts. Given what I have said at many places in this book you will not be surprised that I have placed less emphasis than is customary on brain size as the explanation of our uniqueness. But is it not odd to ignore the brain altogether? It would be, if I did; after all, the relative brain size of Homo erectus (about 1.5 million years ago) was much larger than that of previous hominids. This cannot be accounted for by increase in his body size to maintain the brain to body weight ratio. The brain of H. Erectus eventually ended up at about 70 per cent of the modern human brain; and the size of the brain continued to increase until Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago.25 Over the millennia since then, the changes in brain size have not matched the changes in human life. And it is pertinent to note that Neanderthals, who lost out against modern H. sapiens 40,000 years ago, had larger brains than their successful rivals.26 These “recent” changes cannot be traced to biological changes in the brain. And this is consistent with the fact that they take place in, and belong to, the human collective. To put this bluntly, we shall not find the evolution of the community of minds in the growth or restructuring evident in individual brains. Of course, increased brain size and connectivity may have been a necessary condition that had to be in place before we “opened up” and came to dwell in a different realm – the public sphere that is the theatre of human lives and which I will discuss in the next section – but it is not a sufficient one. Likewise, it was necessary that we should at least have the cognitive equipment of a chimpanzee from which we could take off into our own world. But we have to look beyond the brain to get a complete picture of the biological basis of the emergence of those differences that make Darwinian accounts of what we are inadequate. It was only after the hand – combined with the upright position and the altered status of the gaze – directed humans along a track of increasing self-consciousness and ever more effective agency that increased brain size could be exploited to deliver modes of understanding and behaviour that had never before been seen in the living world. That is why, to echo Humphrey, our bigger brains did not merely give

25. Lieberman, Uniquely Human. 26. Holloway, “Toward a Synthetic Theory of Human Brain Evolution”.

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us more of the same but helped to facilitate something qualitatively different: why we are not just very bright chimps. The interaction between the visible hand and the outside world and the interaction of the hand with itself, rather than the mere increased volume and increased internal connectivity of a self-numb brain, is the immediate condition of the awakening of the sentient organism to itself as the subject of its body. The development of humans away from the mode of consciousness enjoyed by other primates was not a private, organic event in the intracranial darkness; it took place in public, where the visible hand was operating. Granted, for most of human history after the hand awoke “am” or first-person sense of existence it has not worked alone; but the hand was a key element in the process. Neuromaniacs, obsessed with what lights up in the darkness of the skull, seem unable to appreciate that brains by themselves are pointless. As we have seen, some of them even think that a human being may as well be a “brain in a vat”. But brains have point only if they are attached to organs that deliver behaviour. Brain expansion, therefore, will be driven by adaptive interaction with the peripheral organs and events that go beyond the periphery of the body. Only when opposability gave the hand the potential for its unique dexterity was there any point in increasing complexity of its neural control. After this, it is possible to envisage a dialectic or a ratcheting up between brain and hand such that increasing dexterity would drive increasing brain size and shape cerebral organization and the latter would promote increasing dexterity. This novel dialectic that made possible the necessary conditions of cognitively modern humanity was, however, in the first instance, driven by the hand: opposability, which brought with it manipulative indeterminacy and consequently the intuition of selfhood and agency, started the process. This took place in the shared, visible, public world. It is relevant to this argument that the real leap in brain size began a mere 2,000,000 years ago, nearly a million years after the pebble chopper was invented (about 2.8 million years BPE) by creatures who must have had at least a dim sense of themselves as agents. Moreover, this expansion tailed off, as we have noted, when the community of minds and the arena of human life were, as far as we can tell, still in their infancy.27

27. The discovery of Lucy in 1974, an australopithecine about 3.2 million years old, demonstrated beyond doubt that the upright posture – which freed the hands and turned our heads into watchtowers – evolved long before our big brains. This should have put paid to the idea of human evolution and our deviation from the other primates as exclusively brain-driven or even brain-led.

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Language has, of course, had a crucial influence in the dissemination of know-how and the onward transmission of accumulated factual knowledge. But it is a latecomer compared with the hand tool; the earliest unequivocal evidence of language is about 40,000–100,000 years ago, whereas the first manufactured tools date from about 2.8 million years ago. (This is not to deny that the rapid development of toolmaking over the past 40,000 or more years owes much to the interaction between hand-based technical skill and linguistic communication.) What is more, tools – and so the hand – were arguably crucial precursors to the development of language, to the cognitive sharing and the sense of ourselves and others that are presupposed in language. I have time only to gesture towards the powerful arguments in favour of this claim, but it is important, as it emphasizes a key stage in the passage from nature to civilization.28 To understand the relation between tools and language it is important to bear in mind something that has already been discussed: the profound difference between human tool use and the apparently analogous use of tools by animals, even higher primates. The most important difference is that when humans use tools the latter are not completely assimilated into the body image or schema, as they are in animals. This is because the body schema in humans is already differentiated into a hierarchy of agents and patients, subjects and instruments, as a result of the “toolness” of the hand. Hominid tools are therefore explicitly extra-corporeal, and hence explicitly what they are. They are manifestly signs of themselves. Consequently they are ripe to be used as signs. Hence their aptness to be precursors of language. Tools, as abstract, general and visible signs of invisible states such as needs, are proto-linguistic. Shared tools and artefacts in the widest sense thus become a means by which consciousness – which is not opened up to their conspecifics in non-human animals – is partially collectivized. Being shared, tools underpin pooled agency and awareness, and thus contribute to developing the sense of a truly social world, shared in a way that the biosphere is not. The social world is the forum for genuine collective action, which is quite different from the pre-programmed dovetailing of activity, based on stereotyped and automatic responses, that characterizes the quasi-social behaviour of animals, notwithstanding that the latter, as in the case of insects, may be very highly developed, generating spectacular

28. For a less perfunctory account of the role of the hand in allowing humans to go down a path different from all other animals, see my The Hand.

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monuments of collective endeavour. There is, as Susanne Langer pointed out, a world of difference between a hive and a city.29 Locating one of the key drivers to human development outside the brain in a part of the body that is visible to other people makes it easier to see how gene-based human evolution, enacted through individual organisms, could be replaced by the progressive development of a collective sphere belonging to all: a world of facts, customs, laws, roles and so on, rather than merely of material objects; a world in which “Thatter” (see below) is at least as important as “matter”. By placing language – now the overwhelmingly predominant substrate of “Thatter” – where it should be, on the far side of an already existing cognitive gulf from beasts, we shall immunize ourselves from the temptation to biologize the structure and function of human language, and more broadly symbolic systems, and assimilate them to animal cries. I have merely glanced at something that is very complex, simply to emphasize that it is possible to offer a biological explanation of how it is that we have taken a unique path, opening up ever greater non-biological distances between ourselves and other animals, and to do so without giving the brain sole or even major credit for what has happened, which might license a drift towards Neuromania. By locating a major driver towards our uniqueness outside the brain, in a part of the body that (unlike the brain) is visible to the body’s owner, we find the basis for the inkling of agency and the sense of self. The hand is the ur-tool, the precursor agent delivering human agency and human culture into the natural world. It remains the master tool until the much later development of autonomous tools or machines, which reduces the hand in some instances to a mere presser of buttons. The kind of speculative reconstruction of “How we came to be so different” that you have just read has often been dismissed as a just-so story, in mocking echo of Rudyard Kipling’s famous tales. Although it may not be apparent from the contents of the preceding pages, I am somewhat allergic to such stories (including Kipling’s originals, although they were meant humorously), if only because they attempt to account for a unique process and do so post hoc. So I am prepared to be persuaded that other factors may have propelled us along the unique path out of nature that we took when we forked off from our common primate ancestors. I will change my

29. Langer, “Man and Animal”.

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mind, if emerging evidence requires it, about the central role of the hand.30 My main purpose, however, has been to demonstrate the possibility of a biological account of how it was that we (partially) escaped from biology, and thereby to support my contention that being a good Darwinian does not require succumbing to Darwinitis or denying that we are – profoundly – different. I want to end my critique of Darwinitis by digging a little deeper into our differences, focusing on those things that are overlooked, as a result of which evolutionary psychology and, more broadly, neuro-evolutionary reductionism can command such acceptance.

THE HUMAN WORLD: A TRILLION COGNITIVE HANDSHAKES

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of the mind.31 On the great Darwinian stage we call Earth … there has not been an upheaval as big as us since the origin of life.32 This section is perhaps the most important in the book but inescapably the most difficult. The intuitions behind it are elusive and yet it is essential to hold on to them if we are to avoid either lapsing back into biologism or drifting towards a dualism that holds not only that we are ghosts in a machine but that there is “mind” free-floating in the world between bodies. I want to avoid both errors and to do so by drawing attention to a new kind of space, an arena we humans have collectively created, which is the theatre of our freedom, to which our selves relate: the place in which we live our lives as persons rather than as organisms.

30. Other accounts of how we came to be so different may be traced back to the transformation of our bodies into tool-using, toolmaking agents but they do not dig deep enough. For example, Richard Wrangham’s intriguing Catching Fire, which attributes our difference to cooking, does not go to the very source of our differences for this reason: the capacity of H. erectus to cook clearly presupposes an advanced sense of what can be sustained through a many-stepped process. 31. Anonymous, The Dhammapada, 35. 32. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, 4.

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As we saw in Chapter 4, many thinkers feel obliged to ignore what is in front of their noses. Even those who can see how profoundly different we are still argue that this is a mere surface appearance concealing a fundamental similarity or that it is a matter of degree rather than kind. To counter this we need not only to argue that the generous interpretation of animal behaviour as “almost human” is underdetermined by the facts of that behaviour but also to look more closely at the way we humans behave. The difference between animal tool use and human tool use is not simply evident in the contrast between the ad hoc exploitation of a coconut shell by an octopus that leads to nothing else and the human journey from spearthrowing to nuclear power stations and satellite communication systems. The difference is present even in spear-throwing. A chimpanzee using a stick “as a weapon” is not doing the same thing as a human using a stick as a weapon. That which superficially appears the same or can be described in similar terms is in fact profoundly different: precisely the opposite of the Darwinitis that would have us believe that behaviours that appear different on the surface are in fact identical underneath. You may recall Povinelli’s criticism of the logical weakness of “the argument from analogy”: the assumption “that the similarity in the natural behaviour of humans and chimpanzees implies a comparable similarity in the mental states which attend and generate that behaviour”.33 Once we free ourselves from the spell cast by the argument by analogy, we can see that the local or particular differences we observe between humans and beasts are simply the most striking manifestations of what is a universal, wall-towall difference. What is this wall-to-wall difference? In The Explicit Animal, I identified making things explicit as the crucial, global difference between us and other beasts. This propensity to live by explicit rules and make explicit sense of the world we live in – its material properties and their laws that govern them, its norms and rules – is manifested in many different ways. We are uniquely self-conscious (and conscious of a uniquely enduring self ) and uniquely other-conscious (both of the otherness of material objects and processes in the material world and the otherness of our fellow men and women). We have objective, factual knowledge as well as experience and, linked with this, have fully developed categories of truth and falsehood. These are differences in kind, not just of

33. Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes, 9.

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degree. They are expressed in the extent to which we lead our lives rather than simply pinballing from event to event as other living organisms do. Language is the most literal expression of our nature as explicit animals. But it is only a symptom of our fundamental difference, and, what’s more, a relative parvenu, appearing at most 100,000 years ago, long after we had parted cognitive company with the rest of the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, it is worth having a quick look at it. Reminding ourselves how verbal exchanges differ from animal communication helps us to see what is exceptional about us, which is why the advocates of biologism have expended so much effort in trying to persuade us that speech is simply our particular brand of animal communication and that animal cries are proto-linguistic. The most obvious reason why this is wrong is that our language has an incomparable lexical variety: a vast quantity of terms that mean different things and, what is more, have different functions (nouns, verbs, articles, conjunctions). Through combining words in different ways we can generate an infinity of sentences from these impressive, but still finite, lexical resources. It has syntax regulating the way in which words with different functions may or may not be combined. From this arises our ability to refer both to singular situations and also, explicitly, to generalities, to classes of situations, to possibilities as well as actualities, and to rule in that which is the case and rule out that which is not, or even could not be, the case. Verbs have tenses that enable past and future events to be referred to. These referential capabilities are expressed in a variety of distinct speech acts that are not matched in the animal kingdom: assertions, questions, commands, speculations and so on. Human speakers deliberately use language in a way that takes cognizance of how what is said may be received; it is the instrument of meant meaning. This self-consciousness is elaborated in a multitude of modes of meta-language: quoting what has been said; imitating others’ speech; calculated greetings and snubs; jokes that play on linguistic register, on the sounds of language, on the possibilities of misunderstanding; and so on. A crucial consequence of this complexity is the fundamental capacity of human language truly to refer: to referents that may or may not be present, that may be particular or general, concrete or abstract, and may or may not exist, now or in the future or in the past. Out of this is created a world of possibilities, of facts, of “that” such and such is (or is not) the case. This world of “Thatter” is something humans have explicitly in common. Facts, unlike experiences, belong to everyone: the world of knowledge is communal in the way that organic experience is not. It is immeasurably 231

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larger than the material environment to which early hominids and all animals relate. Bodily experience is so massively supplemented by a propositional awareness (with the general form “That such and such is the case”) that it is at least as true to say that we live in a common space of facts (that are not connected with a particular individual) as that we live in physical space revealed to us directly through our own sense experience. The space built out of knowledge – extended, modified and handed down from generation to generation – is not just compressed or summed sense experience which would remain confined to individuals. And it underpins beliefs that are not simply implicit in a set of responses to material events, but explicit and shared and woven into a network of beliefs.34 If we remember this, then we won’t be tempted to succumb to the kind of anthropomorphism that assimilates human speech to, say, the sixty cries of the much-admired vervet monkeys,35 or to whale music or dolphin discourse. We operate with symbols that are produced and consumed as (explicit) symbols. Utterances are fashioned, and symbol systems use, signs that are combined in unique ways. What is more, unlike animal cries, they are not stereotyped biological effects triggered by particular events or occasions, explained by their function of bringing out biological effects in other creatures. They are not, that is to say, stitched into the causal chain of stimulus followed by a response that brings about another stimulus. “Cat” refers to a (possible, actual, general, particular) cat and it does not do so by being a mere effect of an encounter with a cat. If the utterance of “cat” were always and only the result of encountering a cat, it would not be possible to use it to entertain explicitly general possibility, or to perform the variety of speech acts – assertions, questions, commands – we have referred to. The fact that the utterance is not the direct effect of a material, proximate cause, nor itself a mere such cause in turn, so that we genuinely initiate speech, is connected with something that we have already identified as being central to human consciousness: intentionality. Our utterances are explicitly about, or directed on, referents that are distinct from those utterances. Darwinitics who want to close the gap between animal cries and human discourse like to rush past this intentionality, just as the neuromaniacs who want to identify human consciousness with material events in the brain do the same with the intentionality of perception. There

34. Davidson, “Rational Animals”. 35. Cheney & Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World.

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is even a school of thought that has the biological reduction of intentionality as its central doctrine: “teleosemantics”.36 There is another aspect of human language or symbol use. In virtue of reaching into a realm of possibility and generality, it underlines, or reflects, and elaborates the world we have in common. Possibility belongs to us all: it is a marker of a collectivization of experience that has consequences for our relations to the material world and to each other. We are, to reiterate what Goodall said, unlike the non-human primates that “are trapped within themselves”.37 To explore this a bit further, let us go back to basics and think again about the gaze of the upright animal H. sapiens. When I, an embodied subject, look at an object I am aware that it is separate from me. By this I mean that I intuit that it exceeds the experiences that I am presently having of it. More precisely, my sense of being “this” (person, body), of being a self, underlines the otherness of the object. This may manifest itself in many ways but here are two salient ones. First, I am explicitly aware that I am seeing the object from a particular angle and that there are other angles from which it may be seen. Second, I am explicitly aware that the object has (currently) hidden properties that might be disclosed if it is seen from another viewpoint. The unique development of the sense of self in humans has a further correlative: the sense of others as selves. These others will have a different viewpoint on the object. My view is consciously perspectival, as it objectively is in all animals with welldeveloped vision. What is special about humans is that we are aware of this; we see ourselves seeing and see that we see from a particular viewpoint. We are conscious that others may not be conscious of what we are conscious of. Seeing what the other can and cannot see (again unique to humans, as Povinelli’s experiments have demonstrated) prompts us to draw each other’s attention to things. This is primordially mediated by gestures, the most important of which is pointing. I can see what you can or can’t see, I point to it and you see my pointing finger and respond to it, so that we now have joint visual attention to what was hitherto hidden from, or at least not noticed by, you. The object is thus explicitly located in a public domain that is not that of mere physical space but of a world had in common. In vision, and shared visual attention, and through pointing and other pre-verbal signs, we have the means by which a human world,

36. See e.g. Papineau & McDonald, Teleosemantics. 37. Goodall, Through a Window, 208.

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distinct from the natural world, is built up, prior to language. It is woven out of a trillion cognitive handshakes.38 This is a key step in constructing a new kind of public, human space, rooted in acknowledgement of each other’s consciousness. It provides the necessary background to true linguistic communication, which in turn hugely elaborates that space. This is how we are able to have our human being in a non-biological domain as well as in a biological one; this is the arena of our lives as persons rather than as mere organisms. The collectivization of experience through sign-mediated shared attention lies at the basis of human groupings that are the only true societies, notwithstanding talk of “social animals”. Jesper Hoffmeyer has spoken of the biosphere being supplemented in man by a “global semiosphere”.39 The semiosphere is the very fabric of the human world, mediating our access not only to each other but also – except in extreme circumstances (illness, injury), when we may be in part or whole returned to our organic state – to the biosphere. At any rate, this shared realm is one in which our experience is not only collectively acknowledged but, as it were, collectivized, so that we are not confined to the organism and its sensations. It is against the background of a shared “that”, our cohabitation in “Thatter”, that we develop a feeling about how things ought to be as well as how they are: of rules that are to be respected that go beyond mere regularities; a normative sense that lies at the root of ethics40 and of rational enquiry – the sense of the proper, the logical and the true. While animals may be deceived into inappropriate behaviour this is not on the basis of wrong explicit general assumptions: they do not have a category of truth (or falsehood) that arises in the (public) realm of “that” in which possibilities are entertained and found to be realized or not realized. There is no possibility in matter – matter just is – and the jungle is a network of living and non-living material entities not of facts. The world we humans advance through is a sphere of possibility, a dense wickerwork of facts. As Donald says, “the individual mind is essentially a node in a larger networked structure supported by external memory”. We have escaped, he says, from the

38. See my Michelangelo’s Finger. 39. Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics. 40. Susan Stuart speaks of an “ethiosphere”, additional to the biosphere and the semiosphere, in which the deep roots of morality are to be found. See e.g. Stuart, “Enkinaesthesia, Biosemiotics, and the Ethiosphere”. She first mentioned the idea in “The Mindsized Mashup Mind Isn’t Supersized After All”, a critical review of Clark, Supersizing the Mind.

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constraints of individual working memory to “exographic storage”, which is held in common and has an infinite capacity; he adds, “The externalization of what is internal deepens the internal and this in turn deepens and extends the external”.41 The world woven out of joint attention, explicitly shared awareness, is the key to understanding our human behaviour and to seeing how it is fundamentally different from the behaviour of our nearest DNA kin. This deep-rooted collectivization has many surface manifestations. The obvious ones are the public spaces marked out by artefacts, gathered into cities (although cities are a relatively recent symptom of our differences). While the distinctively human realm is most obviously an all-encompassing environment of physical artefacts, this is underpinned by a cognitive landscape, implicit in and beyond this: the world of facts, of social facts. Our emotions, too, are transformed by “that”: they are propositional attitudes riddled with words. When we experience fear, we fear “that [such and such may be the case]” and that which we fear may be an object in front of us or an examination we are going to take next week. Unlike the physiological emotions of animals, our feelings are forever articulating themselves, making sense of themselves, narrating themselves, appealing to moral and other expectations, and rights and wrongs, and possibilities and impossibilities, to uphold or question themselves. They are often normative, as in the case of the anger felt at an injustice. They interact with that infinite nexus of interactions called “the world” and they transform that world. While they are “modes of attunement” to the world, as Heidegger called them,42 they are also world-makers, world-organizers, casting a light that picks up one version of what-is, as opposed to another. They are a far cry from the rapid heart rate and increased respiratory rate of a beast being prepared for fighting, fleeing, feeding or copulating. In defence of his claim that magpies hold funerals for their fallen colleagues, “saying a farewell for a fallen friend”, Marc Bekoff asserts that “It’s bad biology to argue against the existence of animal emotions”.43 I would suggest that it is even worse biology to assimilate animal emotions to human feelings. Our emotionswept consciousness can be seen as a supersaturated solution of proposi-

41. Donald, “Précis of Origins of the Modern Mind”, 737. 42. See Heidegger, Being and Time, §30, “Fear as a mode of attunement”, 131–4. 43. Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals, xviii.

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tional awareness that crystallizes out into propositional attitudes and, from time to time, propositions.44 At any rate, we inhabit a shared world of acknowledged actuality afloat in a shared ocean of explicit possibility: a world of facts not just one of bumped-into objects and forces. One manifestation of this world beyond the biosphere is that, alone of all the creatures, we teach our young facts, norms, skills, practices, customs. Another is the way our shared sense of the hidden prompts individual and collaborative enquiry and the pursuit of general principles. A late manifestation of this is science and its precursor, the everyday technology of prehistoric life, which is rooted in a sense of causation unique to humans.45 What is more, just as we collectivize our present so we collectivize our past and future, in shared memories, in local, national and international history and in timetabled time where our projects are coordinated. This enhances our “biographical” sense of our being, our feeling of a personal past, and our experiencing our lives as something actively led rather than merely lived, an experience that not only gives us a sense of direction but enhances our ability to direct ourselves and shapes our interactions with others. Human societies, in short, are utterly different from the primarily spatial aggregations of animals that are supported by dovetailing pre-programmed behaviours rather than the individual psychology of the members of the group. Human groups – from tribes to armies to guilds – are not explained by spatial aggregation; they rely on a shared history, customs, agreements and so on. They are networks of networks of interacting embodied subjects, who buy into, or opt out of, various things, and they support the numerous identities, ascriptive and elective, that we all have. Notwithstanding the claims of ethologists such as Frans de Waal,46 there is nothing corresponding to the apparatus of government – in the very broadest sense – in animals. Man, as Aristotle said, is the political animal, and this is because he is the symbol-using animal; and this in turn is rooted in the fact that he is the explicit animal who negotiates his relations to others, often using complex symbols that rest on a multitude of unspoken but understood assumptions. That is how it is possible for us to engage in

44. This is linked to the difference between animal appetites and human desires: the latter have no definitive object (although they may settle on a particular intentional object) and (connected with this) they narrate themselves. See my Hunger, ch. 3. 45. Wolpert, “Causal Belief and the Origins of Technology”. 46. De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics.

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actions – such as buying a can of beans – whose meanings and enabling frameworks are sourced from many directions and whose frameworks are largely invisible. All of this is bypassed by those who would biologize us and see our behaviour and our entire lives as the activity of ourselves as evolved organisms. Ironically, it is the very fact that human consciousness, the human person and human society are different across the board that makes that difference difficult to see. This, at any rate, is the most charitable explanation of why neuromaniacs and Darwinitics seem unable to notice or accept that, for many hundreds of thousands of years, we have been drifting away from our biological origins and from our solitary bodies and solitary brains and have been weaving a collective space on which we each have our own individual take. Neuro-evolutionary interpretations of our behaviour – supported by an anthropomorphic interpretation of animal societies – collapse this space. Neuromania tries to pack what has grown out of, and beyond, so many brains over so many millennia back into the stand-alone brain examined in the laboratory. But even those who locate the roots of consciousness in the brain should still recognize that brains together create a space that cannot be stuffed back into the brain. The events in the community of minds are not electrical discharges in the isolated brain; to maintain that they are is to collapse all the separateness-from-the-brain that begins with the intentionality of perception that reveals or yields an object that is other than the perceiving individual. Trying to discover the contents of our ordinary Wednesdays in the tropisms of the evolved organism as reflected in brain activity is like applying one’s ear to a seed and expecting to hear the rustling of the woods in a breeze. The collective rustle cannot be heard in the solitary seed. Even neuromaniacs should appreciate this, for at least two reasons. First, their basic claim that consciousness is located in the brain still requires the brain to transcend, to get outside, itself, beginning with the full-blown intentionality of human perception. Those who believe that mental function is rooted in the brain must at least acknowledge that the collective of brains has left individual brains behind a long time ago. So to try to find our public spaces, lit with explicitness, in the private intracranial darkness of the organism illuminated by fMRI scans and other technology is to look right past what it is that makes us human beings, and makes us what we, and our lives, are. Even if the primary engines of our unique journey were (just) better brains, with larger frontal lobes and so on, the destination of the journey is not defined, even less prescribed, by the possibilities of the 237

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brain. Second, neuromaniacs do not deny the existence of knowledge which transcends experience, most obviously the knowledge that neuroscience itself comprises. When we are told that “the brain knows more than we do”, or that the brain works in such and such a way of which we are unaware, then we are being informed about what the brain (supposedly) keeps from us. If we truly were identical with our individual brains, such knowledge would not be possible: we would not be able to look at our brains and observe the relation between what we are aware of and what the brain takes account of. There must, that is to say, be a viewpoint that transcends the transcendence of our brains. This viewpoint is located in the community of minds, which has left the biosphere behind. It has grown over many hundreds of thousands of years and has involved many millions of people and their brains. As José Ortega y Gasset said, “man is never original man, the first to arrive on the scene, but always a successor, an inheritor, a son of the human past”.47 Our individual brains are a condition of our very limited capacity to transcend themselves but when this is shared, accumulated, we become something totally different. The frail transcendence of the individual human being is woven into a dense fabric of togetherness, of human being: a world that is outside nature.

CONCLUDING NOTE: TO HEAD OFF MISUNDERSTANDING

Before I continue my defence of humanity against biologism by examining the two most fundamental distinctive features of human beings – the ability to act freely and full-blown first-person being – I want to confront head-on some misunderstandings that I fear the past few chapters, in particular the present chapter, may have implanted in the minds of even the least prejudiced reader.48 I have referred to them already but I wish to reiterate them briefly, so that my position will not be misread.

47. Gasset, Man and Crisis, 161. 48. I owe much of the discussion in this section to Mary Midgley’s response to the manuscript of this book. Her incomparably lucid thought about our conception of animals and about science and scientism has established her as one of a handful of leading philosophers in the English-speaking world.

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It will, I hope, be clear that I do not question the biological origin of the organism H. sapiens. The truth of the theory of evolution lies beyond reasonable doubt. What may be less clear – although it follows from my acceptance of Darwinism – is that I believe that, while human beings have transformed all the biological givens that they have inherited from their predecessors, they have not ceased to be biological in important respects. As a doctor treating patients for thirty-five or more years, I am hardly likely to believe that we have become free-floating spirits. Our illnesses – not to speak of our mode of birth, reproduction, sustenance and death – are brutal and engulfing reminders of the continuing presence of our biological inheritance. What may be less clear is that I do not deny the consciousness, or even the complexity of the consciousness, of animals. I am not of Descartes’ view that animals are insensate machines. The precise nature of the experiences of beasts will always be contested but there is, as we have seen, a regrettable tendency to see their behaviour as being prompted and shaped by experiences, emotions and thoughts like our own. It is this that I have been criticizing. But I have no doubt that animals are aware and that they are capable of suffering and that this imposes a moral obligation on us to treat them with as much kindness as is compatible with their playing their necessary role in human life. Nor do I doubt the complexity, the subtle organization, the multilayered structuring, of much animal behaviour. One has only to think of the singing, migrating and nest-building of birds to appreciate this. The steps that go into the construction and adorning of a bowerbird’s dwelling are countless. Nevertheless, this does not require us to believe that the construction of what is not, after all, an artefact comparable to the tools manufactured by humans is guided by deliberate reflection rather than programmed and cue-driven sequences of events. The migration is a general instance of a type, unlike my journey to London to attend a meeting at the Royal College of Physicians, which is a singular instance and has to be motivated by my personal take on things. And while there are remarkable examples of collective behaviour, such as the construction of anthills and the manufacture of honeycombs, that do not require anything other than programming, the uniformity of the behaviour seen in higher animals, as in the interaction between animals and their young by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz in geese (imprinting) or Nikolaas Tinbergen in herring gulls (supernormal stimuli as releasers for programmed behaviour) underline this difference between humans and beasts. The “fixed action 239

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patterns” and “innate releasing mechanisms” that unfold, once triggered, without any further input of stimuli, let alone conscious intention, illustrate how much can be achieved in the absence of anything corresponding to deliberation. There are more complex examples of seemingly “social” behaviour in animals that have a division of labour, such as, for example, wolves that hunt cooperatively while others babysit the cubs (to use an example suggested to me by Mary Midgley), but these are not the result of personal choices, a personal commitment to a particular role, connected to a biographical sense of a “who” that one is. The fundamental point is that animal behaviour – even that of higher animals – is not “social” in the sense of being mediated by an individual assuming a particular take on an explicitly acknowledged public sphere. And this applies to apparently more individualistic behaviour, such as (to take another example from Midgley) an elephant’s repeatedly visiting the bones of dead conspecifics. You may object to what seems like a dogmatic assertion of truths that are not directly testable, given that we cannot enter the viewpoint or consciousness of an animal. How do I know that animals do not grieve in the way that we grieve, that they do not have ambitions as we have ambitions, that they do not consciously accept their place in a particular hierarchy within their troop or hive as we might accept the roles of leader or follower? Of course I do not know this directly but can infer it indirectly. Consider, again, one of the examples I mentioned earlier. We concluded from the fact that bees did not count beyond a certain number, did not develop a system of numerical symbols as we do, and do not show other evidence of a quantitative approach to their Umwelt, that what some entomologists describe as counting behaviour in them is not the real thing. Or, to take another example from the insect world, consider the semiretirement of leaf-cutter ants when they get old and their teeth give out. I do not have direct evidence that they look forward to being assigned lighter duties and relish a portfolio career but it seems to me that we do not have evidence from other aspects of the ant’s life that they have a developed sense of a future tense or a personal future. More generally, we may conclude from the failure of non-human species to build on behaviours that some have assumed are informed by explicit intentions related to formulated goals, that these behaviours do not express the same inner contents (beliefs, etc.) that prompt analogous behaviour in humans. In the absence of independent evidence of the mental states behind the behaviour, it is wise to assume that such mental states are not present. 240

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The reader may also worry that, in my endeavour to reconcile acceptance of Darwinism (which gives a true account of our biological origins as organisms) with rejection of Darwinitis (which gives a false account of our current status as people) I am in danger of self-contradiction. Surely, it may be argued, “a biological account of how we partly escaped biology” is an attempt to found a metaphysical difference on a physical one: precisely the error I have identified as lying at the heart of Neuromania, which appeals to neural complexity as the basis of consciousness and, in particular, the distinctive features of human consciousness. My reference to such small biological differences – the fully opposable thumb, the independently moving index finger, the upright position and the gaze of the upright primate – simply underlines the problem. To meet this objection it is necessary to reiterate several points. First, we may assume that other higher primates are close to the threshold at which episodic self-consciousness passes over into sustained self-consciousness. In short, they have almost everything in place and the small differences that we have identified are sufficient to start a trend at which larger differences open up. Second, the initial differences are such as to lead to a collectivization of human consciousness so that it can then evolve in ways that are unknown to biology. These small differences make possible the explicit joint attention that enables humans to build, enter and live in a new realm in which they can evolve in ways that are unknown to biology. This brings us to a third point: we are not talking about an overnight transformation. The journey from solitary creatures immersed in their Umwelt to a genuine society of individuals addressing a world of objects explicitly offset from themselves as self-conscious subjects, sustained selves, was a long one: perhaps some five million years. During this time there has been a dialectical process involving bodies that are informed by their own agency, enhanced by tools and other artefacts, and the emergence of a shared public space, whereby the sense of self and of the material and human other is gradually elaborated and deepened. As a consequence it is possible to see how our nearest ape kin should have become so remote from us that it is absurd to look to the animal kingdom for mirrors in which to see ourselves more clearly. As Ramachandran says (somewhat surprisingly for a neuralizer of humanity), humans transcend “apehood to the same degree by which life transcends mundane chemistry and physics”.49 (Unfortunately,

49. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, xv.

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he does not remember this when he develops an evolutionary theory of art, as we shall discuss in Chapter 7.) There is, however, an area in which my position needs further clarification and here there are serious unresolved issues. In the early sections of Chapter 3, I emphasized the difficulties that beset a neural account of any aspect of consciousness, even those basic elements such as sensations, which we clearly share with many animals. In “Did natural selection generate consciousness?” in Chapter 4, I questioned whether evolution could have generated consciousness of any sort, never mind distinctively human consciousness. This is a more radical questioning of the explanatory power of biology and cuts deeper than the main thesis of this book; namely, that biology does not explain many of the unique aspects of human consciousness, notably propositional awareness, and that human consciousness has increasingly come to develop independently of biology. I do not know how to relate the two questions – about the origin and nature of consciousness and about the origin and nature of human consciousness – but I am aware that I have at times slipped from one to the other without clearly signalling that I have done so. At any rate, it is impossible, ultimately, to move on from the negative positions I have set out to a positive account of the place of consciousness in nature and the origin of specifically human consciousness from the biosphere, without embarking on a metaphysical enquiry. I shall set out the parameters of such an enquiry in the final chapter, although I am sorry to say that I shall not arrive at any firm conclusions. In the meantime, I shall build on the story so far. Of our animal origins there is no doubt, but this does not define what we are now or the destinations that we are able to define together and apart. Increasingly man is what he has made of himself. We help create others and are in turn helped to create ourselves. We are moulded so that we can mould. We have put together worlds – the work of an infinity of individuals – and created a common space outside nature that enables us to act on nature as if from without: it is the theatre of our freedom; where we actively lead our lives rather than merely live them. Unlike those of animals, our lives are not simply one damn thing after another. We are not mere “Humean” beings: a flow of perceptions. And so we arrive at our next themes: human freedom and the human self.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Reaffirming our Humanity

WELCOME BACK, FREEDOM

Freedom is the first blessing of our nature.1 Neuromania and Darwinitis leave little or no room for human freedom. If we are identical with our brains, and our brains are evolved organs, how can we do anything other than act out a preordained evolutionary script? How can we “do” at all? Aren’t our actions just happenings? The philosophical doctrine of determinism, that our actions are determined by forces outside ourselves and so are not initiated by us at all, starts to look like a scientifically respectable theory. After all, hasn’t it been shown that we are subject to all sorts of influences of which we are unaware: that the reasons we give for doing things sometimes have little relation to the reasons why they happen? And even if we accept the difference between ourselves and our brains, is it not the brain that is calling the shots? The obvious objection that if we travel like a pinball through the world, shaped by stray influences, and if the reasons we gave for our actions were always incorrect, and our brains were always calling the shots, then ordinary, shared, communal life would be impossible does not cut any ice with many biologizers. But if “The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational”, as Gray claims,2 and if the self and free

1. Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, 51. 2. Gray, Straw Dogs, 28.

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will are illusory and the world is a brain-built illusion that simply facilitates organic existence, then – leaving aside the question of how the science, on which these statements are founded, would be possible – it is difficult to see how the world as we know it, flooded with wall-to-wall explicitness, as I have described it in the previous chapter, could have arisen or seemed to have arisen. The illusion of a shared objective reality, of deliberation, of agency, of complex joint projects, of appeals to norms and so on would be difficult to sustain or to explain. Why should the implausible scenario in which the world, and our everyday lives in it, are merely “a consensual hallucination”3 be taken seriously? There is, in part, the glamour of science, which, since it is so spectacularly and usefully right over so many things, is often given authority where it has none.4 This is reflected in the assumption that what neuroscience cannot find in the brain isn’t really real, since the sum total of what we are is the sum total of what is in our brains. If you cannot find free will in an EEG or the self in a brain scan, there is no free will or self, period. The arguments in Chapter 3 showed that this is an invalid (and indeed unscientific) assumption. We demonstrated that there are more (undeniable) things in consciousness than neuroscience can accommodate. Even neuromaniacs cannot deny intentionality, the unity of consciousness, our sense of the past and so on; and yet they cannot be reduced to visible neural activity. So we have examples of mental phenomena that neuroscience cannot see but has to admit exist. Freedom and the self, however, do seem especially vulnerable to the charge of being illusory and these are the themes of this chapter. I want first to look at the question of freedom. Remember that if we think of the brain as the only possible locus of our freedom it is difficult to see how we could be free. There are inputs of experience beginning with the sense organs and outputs of behaviour from the muscles and other effector organs. Between them there appear to be unbroken causal chains, linking inputs and output. There does not seem to be a point within the brain at which the (behavioural) output or any part of it can be initiated. Multiplying the number of intermediate steps between input and output hardly alters this; the causal chain gets longer and more complicated, that’s all. Our seeming actions are merely the inflection neural tissue gives to the flow of energy through a certain locality in the material world.

3. Gray, Straw Dogs, 147. 4. Lavazza & de Caro, “Not So Fast”.

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Of course, the case for neuro-determinism could ride on the back of the general case for determinism, as we saw in Chapter 2. The brain is a material object in a material world and what happens in it is simply a multitude of strands in the massive causal nexus that is the connectivity of the material world unfolding according to the laws of nature. This step is taken by E. O. Wilson when he states that “total consilience … holds that nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can eventually be reduced”.5 However, neuroscientists think they have brought something additional to the determinist case; namely, that they have shown that certain actions that we imagined were under our control proved to be prompted by influences of which we were unaware. You may, like me, think there is something suspect about the idea that empirical observations could help us to decide whether or not we are free. And you would be vindicated by the fact that those who want to prove our universal helplessness do so by selecting unusual situations in which we are less in control than we think we are. Now if we really were mere nodes in a causal net, there would not be any point in selecting some actions rather than others to demonstrate our passivity. All actions, being equally unfree, would illustrate our lack of free will. The discovery that some actions are not as freely chosen as we may have thought does not take us to the conclusion that no action is freely chosen. Degrees of freedom imply freedom. Take a much picked over example, which I referred to earlier. When I am stopped by a beggar in the street, I sometimes do, and sometimes do not, respond to the request for “spare change”. When I hold on to my “spare change”, I usually give reasons for my lack of generosity: I have already given to the last beggar; I have listened to a piece on the radio telling me that the money I give will end up in the pockets of drug barons or that supporting beggars on the street keeps them on the street; or I am in an irritated hurry and temporarily out of love with the world and my fellow men. These, I am told, are only rationalizations of a choice that is influenced by other things. We have seen that a study, for example, showed that if people are approached outside a baker’s shop, where there is a delicious aroma of freshly baked bread, they are more likely to be generous, so the reasons for giving or not giving are irrelevant.6 The decision was made by

5. E. O. Wilson, Consilience, 55. 6. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics.

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forces of which the individual was unaware and truly free actions depend, at the very least, on knowing why you are doing them. The example has certain features that should make us doubt its general philosophical significance. First, there is a simple yes or no response to the beggar’s request. And second, the action is not integrated into part of the complex day I am putting together as I hurry down the road, so there is room for capriciousness. By contrast, the presence or absence of nice smiles in the car park would not determine whether I entered the hospital where I was due to carry out a clinic. Being solicited by a beggar is, effectively, an isolated event and not one that digs particularly deeply into our biography, a point that I shall explore presently. Third, the fact that we can expose how we are sometimes deceived illustrates the very thing that is denied: that we transcend our individual moments in order to arrive at a position from which we can judge the truth of what seems to be revealed to us in that moment. Anyway – and this must be the decider – I am perfectly aware of the kinds of things that presuppose me to give or withhold charity. I know my behaviour is influenced by my moods and do my best to limit this, so that I am not unreliable, capricious and so on. But those who extrapolate from the observation of our being less aware of the reasons for our actions than we think we are to the notion that all our actions have unconscious (and ultimately physical) causes that make reasons irrelevant, seem to be, whether they know it or not, committed to denying the distinction between, say, having an epileptic fit and giving to a beggar. Blakemore, whom we quoted in Chapter 2, embraces this consequence of neuro-determinism: “It makes no sense (in scientific terms) to try to distinguish sharply between acts that result from conscious attention and those that result from our reflexes or are caused by disease or damage to the brain”.7 There is thus no fundamental difference visible to neuroscience between having an epileptic fit and dealing with its consequences, from which we are invited to conclude that there is no fundamental difference between these two things. In fact, while we can readily correlate the impairment of consciousness in an epileptic fit with abnormal cerebral discharges, it is a mere assumption that we can correlate such discharges with the patient’s decision to go to see the doctor, his organizing a friend to babysit while he does so, and his willingness or otherwise to trust the doctor, accept her advice and be willing to embark on a lifetime’s course

7. Blakemore, The Mind Machine, 270.

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of medication. All these things, which involve deliberation, planning and a sense of who one is and what one ought to do, seem far removed from having a fit. They seem more obviously free. There is a distinction, in short, between the epileptic fit, and the person who has the fit, and the actions by which he tries to cope with it. So the appropriate response to Blakemore would be to say that, if science cannot accommodate that (indubitable) distinction, so much the worse for neuroscience. Instead, neuromaniacs say that neuroscience has the last word on the matter and deny the distinction. My position, then, is that if neuroscience can’t see something that seems indubitably real, then it is not the whole story. In order to defend this, it is necessary to look at bit more carefully at real human actions. We shall see that our freedom is a feature of selves operating in worlds, not just of organisms in environments. Those who deny our freedom do so on the basis of experiments that remove selves from their worlds and focus on elements of behaviour that are uprooted from the contexts that make sense of actions: or, more precisely, reduce actions to movements. This is our cue to return to Dr Libet’s laboratory, where we shall see this process at work.8

NEURO-DETERMINISM DISMANTLED: A SECOND VISIT TO DR LIBET’S LABORATORY

You will recall the experiment we described in “A farewell to freedom” in Chapter 2. Libet asked individuals to flex their wrists at will, and also to note the time when they felt the intention to perform the action by observing the position of the fingers on the face of a large clock recording the time in milliseconds.9 He found that subjects timed their intention to act as occurring at least a third of a second after the onset of the physiological activities associated with the initiation of movement, the so-called readiness potential. Subsequent experiments, using fMRI scanning, suggested an even longer interval between the onset of physiological activity and the inten-

8. The following observation is highly pertinent: “Historical analysis shows that the decline and fall of [the concept of ] the will was due not to any major piece of empirical work demonstrating that the concept was unsound but to general changes in philosophical fashion, and the … influence of the anti-mentalistic tenets of behaviourism and the anti-volitional assumptions of psychoanalysis” (Berrios & Gill, “Will and its Disorders”, 87). 9. Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative”.

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tion to move.10 This, so it was argued, was proof positive that our intentions have little to do with our actions. Our brains act or decide to act first and we follow with the intention to act, hastily rubber-stamping a fait accompli. To see just how shaky this conclusion is, we need not only to look at the action Libet’s subjects were asked to perform but also to fill in some of the context in which they performed it. The action was the simplest imaginable: a flexing of the wrist; a mere movement. That movement was itself only a minute part of a long sequence of movements amounting to a large-scale action that could be described as “taking part in Dr Libet’s experiment”. This large-scale action began at least as far back as getting up in the morning to visit Libet’s laboratory (after, perhaps, setting the alarm to make sure one was not late); involved consenting to take part in an experiment whose nature and purpose and safety was fully understood; and required (among many other things) listening to and understanding and agreeing to the instructions that were received – and then deciding to flex the wrist. In other words, the immediate prior intention, the psychological event timed by Libet, was not the whole story of the action but only a tiny part of it. It was preceded by many others that were minutes, hours, perhaps days before the action. The real story is not just the flexing of the wrist, but one of a sustained and complex resolve being maintained over a very long time. This includes many large items of behaviour – getting on and off buses, looking for the laboratory, cancelling or declining to accept other commitments so as to be free to attend the lab, and so on – that have many thousands of motor components. Once this is appreciated, the temporal relation between the last step, the wrist flexing, and the readiness potential seen in the lab becomes unimportant. The decision to participate in the experiment, which alone gave the wrist flexion its meaning, began not milliseconds, seconds, or minutes, but hours before the wrist was flexed: perhaps weeks before, when the person decided to become a subject in the experiment. The flexing of the wrist is just the last component of this action called “taking part in Dr Libet’s experiment”, which would itself be part of a greater intentional whole, such as “wanting to please Dr Libet” or “wanting to help those clever scientists understand the brain as it might one day help doctors to treat my child’s brain injury more effectively”. It now seems less disturbing (or exciting, according to your taste) that the readiness potential preceded the intention to make a movement by a

10. Soon et al., “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions”.

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mere 300 to 450 milliseconds, or the brain activity seen on the scan was up to ten seconds in advance of the intention. The specific intention to flex the wrist belongs to a much wider field of intention, which has temporal depth and “existential” extensity, and is connected with great swathes of the acting individual’s self-world (including her know-how, know-that, motives, principles, etc.). As the philosopher Tim Crane expressed it,11 our actions are interconnected, as are intentions, decisions and plans. The fact that the decisions in the Libet experiment seem to follow the actions is also irrelevant, Crane argues, because our actions unfold without there being explicit decisions – except broadbrush ones – at every node. When I am walking to the pub to meet you, there isn’t a separate decision corresponding to every one of the hundreds of steps I take to get there. Libet’s experiment illustrates how the (neuro-)determinist case against freedom is based on a very distorted conception of what constitutes an action in everyday life. If you want to make voluntary actions seem involuntary, the first thing to do is to strip away their context – the relevant portions of the self-world that make sense of, and motivate, them – and then effectively break them down into their physical elements. This gets you well on the way to eliminating the difference between a twitch and a deliberate action; or between, say, my involuntarily taking part in the experiment (having been carried to the lab in a coma and woken up simply to move my wrist) and my participating in it because I want to help those clever scientists. It is possible to take this denaturing of actions even further. I can, for example, break up the process of writing this book into physiological events, such as the formation and rupture of cross-bridges in the fibres of my hand muscles. Now it is perfectly obvious that “I” cannot do this. I would not know how to make or break a muscle cross-bridge if I tried. But it does not follow that I am not writing this book freely or that I am not really intending to write it. All that follows is that frameless atoms of actions cannot be specifically intended. The intention of the person who is asked to flex her wrist – in life, as in Libet’s lab – is aimed not at the movement itself but at the goal of the movement: to do as Dr Libet requested; to cooperate with the experiment; to help to advance science.. My participation in the experiment originates in a huge space of possibility, the human world, to which my self is addressed, the theatre of its activity, which has been fashioned

11. Crane, “Ready or Not”.

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out of the pooling of our transcendence in the way described in “The human world” in Chapter 6. That world – on which I have an individual “take” and through which I make individual tracks – includes the institution of science, my understanding of it and my attitude towards scientific research, which is interested and sympathetic enough for me to be willing to give up my time to participate in experiments that make sense to me and look as if they may advance our knowledge. It is my self-world that provides the framework and theatre and rationale of the action of flexing my wrist: a boundless hinterland of meanings that has many layers before it reaches something as simple as a biological or material cause. So it is no surprise that we cannot find free will in this isolated movement in a laboratory, if we treat it as an isolated movement. The locus of free will is a field of intention, rooted in the self and its world, that extends beyond the laboratory. No wonder, in this setting, actions look like events that happen to the actor. Indeed, because our actions are so irreducibly complex, the simple notion of “a cause” – cerebral or otherwise – loses its application, and even the more sophisticated notion of “motive”, understood as a force external to the agent, and certainly that of instinct, cannot easily be applied. What is the cause of your reading this book? What material cause would you invoke? You may say: swathes of my entire past. But such a swathe is hardly a cause; and, if it were, it would be interesting to know who or what gathered it up so that it was able to act as a single cause. If it was I, then we are a long way from the notion of causation of my actions being something somehow outside me. The idea of myself as a cause of my actions, or of my actions as an expression of myself, is close to the idea of freedom. Let us dwell on this a bit more. While we concede that our past – and the sense of the future it informs – is deeply implicated in our actions, it is equally a mistake to think of “the past” or a subset of past states of me as a mere cause of which we are passive effects. For a start, the past, or parts of it, is there as an explicit presence. Just think of the million components of know-that and know-how necessary for me to learn about Libet’s experiments, decide to participate in them and succeed in doing so. The temptation to see all this as a deposit of effects in my brain that then become causes can be resisted when we realize that they have to somehow be brought together to act on me. The only way of synthesizing the disparate elements, so that they operate as occasions for ordinary actions, is through a sustained, forward-looking, explicit intention; in short, not through causes pushing from behind but through reasons pulling from in front. 250

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Reasons do not grow out of some putative biological substrate but are a forward-looking affirmation of, assertion of, expression of, myself. The countless events that are subsumed in reasons cannot be generated – requisitioned, orchestrated – by ordinary causation or by processes of the kind that are described in neuroscience. We have already seen how even the unity of the conscious moment eludes neural, that is to say material, explanation. And it is wrong, for the same reason, to imagine that the orchestration of a multitude of movements and thoughts, rooted in knowledge and emotion, could be achieved by biological drives or motives that are themselves seen as quasi-material causes. Wishes, intentions and other propositional attitudes are not simply caused, nor simply causes. Like the actions that can be explained to some extent with reference to them, they are portions of a self-world that is more or less of a piece with other parts of the self and its world. It is easy to see why committed determinists, including neurodeterminists, want to think of actions as caused; it prepares them to be reinserted into a causal chain extending backwards from a present material event to the Big Bang. But this is wrong. Yes, a journey to London to attend a meeting is a succession of movements; but it is more than that, which is why there is a difference between moving and travelling. Actions are not – and could not be – caused in the narrow, atomic, linear sense implied in the term “cause”. To see actions aright, we have to invoke the notion of an explicit purpose, which pulls us towards goals we have ourselves envisaged and articulated, and shapes the succession of action-components we undertake. This is the hidden nerve of association gluing together the myriad “subroutines” that make up components of actions, the countless elements that make up ordinary-sized actions (such as taking a train to London) and the innumerable actions that make up our lives, which we consciously and often effortfully lead rather than merely organically or material live or experience. To reduce reasons to, or to absorb them into, mere surface expressions of material or biological motors such as “motives”, “instincts” or “drives” (never mind unconscious motors) is not only to misrepresent them but also to remove their explanatory force and to deprive complex but utterly ordinary actions of any kind of explanation. While “drives” may activate quite elaborate types of behaviour, these forms of behaviour are stereotyped and general. “Flying south in winter” may be driven by instinct; the action of “going to the Royal College of Physicians to make a case for improving epilepsy services” could not be driven in this way because its goal and content are utterly singular and are rooted in my private, understood, recollected, past. 251

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You might want to object that building a nest likewise requires many thousands of moves that are not stereotyped. There is no particular muscular signature, for example, corresponding to finding a wisp of straw to weave into the wall of the nest. Even so, there is a fundamental difference between this kind of complex instinctive behaviour and our everyday actions. First, the overall action of nest-building is stereotyped at a very clear and simple level. The creation of a dwelling of a highly standardized form that has a clear function does not have to be articulated by the organism; nature takes care of that. Second, each of the elements is cued in by the previous element and the non-stereotyped components are clear instances of definite types. They do not require sustained intention informed by an explicit goal. This is the fundamental difference between plan-driven holiday-making and instinctive migration. The many components of the former, unlike those of the latter, are justified by, make sense with respect to, each other. The components are subordinated to explicit overarching goals. Any voluntary action is a part of a nexus of behaviour that extends over swathes of what we might call “am-soil” or “I-territory”: in this respect quite unlike the events that an epileptic fit or an animal’s programmed “courtship” ritual comprise. That is what I mean when I say that my actions are free in the sense of being expressive of myself. They belong to a field of action that is unique to myself; make sense only with respect to a frame of reference, a “present past”, a “present future”; are rooted in “am-soil”, “I-territory”, related in turn to “we-soil”, “we-territory”. In short, they truly are manifestations of self-assertion or self-expression. Shoving our actions back into the chains of causes and effects that make up the material world by breaking them up into small components not only reduces them to mere movements but also imprisons them in the present tense. It denies their temporal depth, which has at least two dimensions. The most obvious is the forward and backward connectedness of the components necessary to make sense of them and hence to make sense of the fact that they have occurred. For example, the complex movements involved in locking and bolting my front door are intelligible only in relation to my having come out of my house and my intention to leave the house empty (so that it is vulnerable and needs protecting) while I am in London. And there is the additional dimension, which comes from the past self and the envisaged future self, from which the trip to London draws its meaning and motivation. These two temporal dimensions are a particularly sophisticated elaboration of the intentionality or aboutness that characterizes my consciousness; indeed, it is the orchestration by this aboutness 252

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that links the components of my action in (to borrow a phrase from Roger Scruton talking about music) a “virtual causality”,12 a connectedness that is in another sphere from that of the material interactions of (say) my body and the pavement necessary for me to be able to propel myself to the railway station. It is easy to overlook the hinterland of self, the massive, tangled back story behind behaviour, if we focus on individual actions lifted out of their context. And we don’t have to go into Libet’s laboratory in order to be misled. Consider catching a ball.13 The more brilliant the catch, the less it seems voluntary. We seem to have done it without thinking about it, without deciding to do it. Indeed, when you consider what catching a ball involves, it seems impossible to perform it as a voluntary act. You have to fling yourself across empty space in such a way that your outstretched hand intercepts the ball. The hand has to be sufficiently open at the time of contact as to admit the entry of the ball but not so wide open that the ball escapes. The fingers then have to close rapidly around the ball. You also have to allow a certain amount of compliance so that the ball does not at once bounce out of the hand before you have managed to trap it between your fingers. There are many other variables that have to be fixed, none of which you could deliberately control. So surely you did not catch the ball; your body did, and you were just a fortunate bystander who took the credit. No one really thinks this, and for good reasons. First, in order to catch the ball, you had to participate in a game of cricket. This requires that you should have (voluntarily) turned up to a particular place on a particular day, that you understood and assented to the rules of cricket and that you understood the role of the fielder, in particular that of the slip fielder. More importantly, in order to make the catch, you would have had to practise. This means hours spent in the nets, preparing yourself for this moment,

12. Scruton’s description of music as having a “virtual causality” linking its successive components seems to me to capture the nature of action and of the freedom it expresses. There is a direct causal relation between the actions on the instruments and the sounds they produce, and then a different kind of connectedness in what we hear. This, he writes, is “not a succession of sounds, but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that resides in the musical line. Only a rational being – one with self-consciousness, intention, and the ability to represent the world – can experience sounds in this way” (Scruton, Understanding Music, 5). In the case of music, it seems as if meaning is lifted more completely from matter and it then has an inner dynamic quite different from that dictated by the laws of physics. This must surely be the key to the link between art and freedom. 13. The discussion that follows is based on my article “Who Caught that Ball?”

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which would bring such glory upon you. You would have to order your affairs so that you would be able to go to the nets at the booked time: negotiating the traffic; making sure your day was clear so you could take up your booked slot; and so on. You would listen hard to your coaches’ advice and do your best to translate it into action. In other words, behind this quasi-involuntary action there would be a huge and complex hinterland of actions that could not have taken place without your deliberate intent. Over the months, you have carried out a vast number of voluntary actions so that you might be able when required to perform an action that you could not carry out entirely voluntarily. Many of these preparatory actions have taken the form of positioning yourself to have experience and acquire knowledge, deploying many intermediate steps in doing so. And this is how it is with much of our life, which consists of acting on ourselves in order to change ourselves: from going to a pub to have a drink to cheer ourself up to paying good money to improve our chances of cutting a figure in Paris by polishing up our French. You may think this is so obvious that it hardly needs to be spelled out but it is important not to underestimate the extent to which neuromaniacs overlook the obvious. Consider a recent study by Jan Scholz and his colleagues.14 The researchers found that people who learned to juggle over a period of six weeks had clear changes in the white matter of a part of the cerebral cortex (the intraparietal sulcus) that is associated with visuomotor skills. One of the authors, Heidi Johansen-Berg concluded from this that “it’s possible for the brain to condition its own wiring system to operate more efficiently”.15 In fact, it is not the brain that is doing this but the participants who enrolled in the experiment, and committed themselves to training to juggle. They would have to remember to go upstairs to practise every day, to look after the juggling balls and set time aside for this purpose: in short, to engage in a set of actions of immense complexity that would not have been sewn together except by an individual who had a sustained and conscious intention to conform to the protocol of the experiment. The experiment, in short, provides clear evidence that it is true that we train our brains; our brains do not train themselves. The trainer, in short, is not the brain but the person. The whole enterprise involved a large number of individuals, including the person who set up the experiment,

14. Scholz et al., “Training Induces Changes in White Matter Architecture”. 15. Ibid., 1371, emphasis added.

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an understanding spouse, children who kept quiet and played nicely while mummy was practising her juggling, and so on. The experiment demonstrates how persons (not brains) increase their own agency by deliberate training: something, as we have already noted, that no animal does. The acquisition of the skill was not a brain-directed plasticity of the brain but a person-directed plasticity of a person, interacting with the society that is the arena of the self.16 While it is not entirely misleading to describe the acquisition of a skill (or the bodily basis of a skill) in neurological terms or to talk about neuroplasticity, we need to be reminded that neuroplasticity is often persondriven and that the person who does the driving cannot be understood without invoking the collective and individual transcendence that is the world and the self. We should not be so impressed by neuroplasticity that we forget bodily plasticity, plasticity of consciousness (including increased confidence in our abilities, which can be self-fulfilling), plasticity of the self, and, yes, plasticity of the world, as when I decide that others should work with me in a different way to ensure that one or other of us holds that so-important catch. It is a mistake to try to stuff all that back into the brain and see it in terms of changes in synaptic connections at the microscopic level or alterations in cortical maps at the comparatively macroscopic level. Stuffing it all back into the brain, of course, is the first step to handing action back to the no-person material world and sneaking back to determinism. It is an attempt to eliminate the fundamental change that takes place when an “I” emerges in the world. The “I” is a new centre in the world, a new point of departure and a new destination, and this is the key to our freedom. We are not talking about an anomalous or magical kind of causation but about the appropriation of the material world and its causal relations, as handles to help realize possibilities – possibilities-for-me – that we project. This begins with the appropriation of the body as one’s self – the existential intuition – and, through this, of the material world surrounding it as one’s arena, and, far beyond one’s material surroundings, through the community of minds and its boundless body of knowledge and know-how and technologies.

16. A particularly stubborn neuromaniac might argue that one part of the brain is rewiring another part of the brain, so that it is still correct to talk of the brain conditioning its own wiring system. I am not persuaded. It does not seem likely that a particular part of the brain corresponds to six weeks’ juggling, with all the commitment and organization this involves.

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This ability to act on the material world, as opposed to being merely a site through which the material world passes, is, ultimately, anchored in intentionality that points in a counter-causal direction. It is intentionality that tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material world. It transforms what-is into appearances, and appearances-for-me, and opens up the world of possibility and the explicit future in which it can be realized. I still remain a material object in the material world; I can fall down the stairs, I have to push and shove objects (including my body) around the place, and the same material processes that brought me into being also guarantee my death. The world is not a construct of my thoughts or perceptions. But intentionality opens up a widening margin of freedom between the interactive human organism and the active person. We stand up, gaze, grasp our world with the hands by which we grasp ourselves; we stand back and from that position we move forwards. Again: reculer pour mieux sauter.17

THE FREE SELF

Even readers untouched by Neuromania may still have a sneaky suspicion that there are powerful arguments for determinism and that, while neuroscience may not provide additional proof that we are unfree, its failure to find anything corresponding to a basis for our freedom should not be held against it. Neuro-determinism, you might think, is true because determinism is true; all our actions have causes that, ultimately, we ourselves cannot cause. We are, after all, “made of many things that know nothing of us”, as Paul Valéry said.18 I have shown how we can distinguish voluntary actions, deliberate behaviour and so on from mere material events by looking beyond the movements that constitute actions to the self-world that gives them their sense, their meaning, and hence their raison d’être, without which they would not happen. But does this really prove that it is possible for events that are actions to have a place of origin – the self

17. The last paragraph of Robert Kane’s The Significance of Free Will movingly captures this: “We might say that free willers are always trying to be better than they are by their own lights. The questing or striving for worthy ends is the goal of free will – and indeed the goal of life itself … Without this questing, life would become, in the words of Herman Melville in Moby Dick, ‘an ice palace of frozen sighs’” (ibid., 215). 18. Valéry, “Letter from a Friend”, 49.

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– without their being either mere effects of a material cause or mysteriously uncaused causes? What, anyway, is the standing of the self to which I refer? Isn’t this also stitched into the world? Isn’t it merely a set of effects of events that have impinged on it or its body? One of the clearest and most succinct recent statements of this case against the belief that we are free comes from the philosopher Galen Strawson. His father, Strawson père, also a distinguished philosopher, had argued that those who do not believe in freedom cannot pass moral judgement on others. Resentment of others’ transgressions would be inappropriate if they were mere physical events caused by other physical events. It would be as absurd to feel angry with someone who had physically attacked us as it would be to feel angry with an avalanche. Since we have a profound intuition of moral responsibility, we must truly be free. Strawson fils has accepted some of this argument but concluded that, as we are not self-caused, freedom is impossible and moral responsibility is consequently groundless. Galen Strawson’s argument is very simple:19 Nothing can be the cause of itself. In order to be truly morally responsible for one’s actions, one would have to be the cause of one’s self. Therefore nothing (and hence no one) can be truly morally responsible. In order to be able to perform an act for which we are truly morally responsible, we would have to be self-determining, and this is impossible because the notion of true self-determination runs into an infinite regress. Supposing I choose my actions on the basis of certain principles. Where did those principles come from? If they were foisted on me, then I am not free. But suppose these principles were not foisted on me but I had a second set of principles to justify my choosing the first set. Then I would require a third set of principles to justify choosing that second set. And so on. Strawson’s argument is useful because it makes clear the assumptions behind determinism and, incidentally, reduces them to absurdity. In order to escape being determined, it seems, I have to have brought myself into being: a trick that, of course, only God can pull off. In order to be responsible for anything I do, I have to be responsible for everything that I am, including my

19. Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility”.

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very existence. Given that I cannot pre-exist my own existence, in order to be able to bring it about, this is a requirement that cannot be met. It is clear that I cannot be a cause of myself, if cause is understood as something like a material event. But I hope it will be clear from the previous section that the self is quite different from a material effect that subsequently becomes a material cause in the way that a pebble is the effect of geological events and itself is the source of other events, as when it rolls down the hill. Our actions, however, although they operate on the material world, do not originate in it; they arise from the soil of the self-world. This is ultimately grounded in the existential intuition: the sense “That I am this”, where “this” in the first instance is our own body. We appropriate our own bodies and by this means we are inserted in the world that exists for us. Our human world of pooled transcendence creates a theatre for our actions. Given that my actions have grown out of all those items, events and processes that I have appropriated – beginning with my body – in the service of my evolving and increasingly self-conscious, other-conscious and world-conscious ends, they have emerged from a soil that I more or less am: less, or hardly at all, as an infant; much more as an adult. This is sufficient causa sui for me to be justly held responsible for my actions. To put this slightly differently, the first person is self-appropriating and its actions are ultimately rooted in the unfolding of the primary act of self-appropriation: the existential intuition that makes “is” into “am” and sets the “I” off from the world, which is the theatre and substrate of its led life. No one, at any rate, can gainsay my intuition that my body is me and its actions mine. This is the version of causa sui that should answer anything meaningful in Strawson’s demand. If we were to interpret this demand that, in order to be free, there should be nothing “given” about ourselves, then freedom would be reserved for entities that were nothing and had nothing to be free about. This is a rather empty account of freedom, one would have thought. Freedom does not require that we should be free of the given – that, for example, I shouldn’t have a particular body that began at a particular time – but that we should take the given and run with it. Our self is neither a thing (like a pebble which, to an observer, has causal “inputs” and effects as “outputs”) nor a mere succession or shower of material events. What I do makes sense with respect to a narrative that is my actively led life. Now it may be argued that we merely narrate what was going to happen anyway: we are deluded in the belief that we are free; as neurodeterminists might express it, the brain calls the shots and we retrospectively claim them as our own. That argument is in part dealt with by looking, 258

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as we have done already, at the nature of actions. But a lingering suspicion may remain that we can’t be free unless we can somehow break the laws of nature. Only in this way could we deflect the course that events were going to take anyway. We need to address this seemingly insuperable objection to the claim that we are free, the materialist bedrock on which biological determinism ultimately rests. And to do so, I want to borrow an idea from John Stuart Mill, one that he put forward in a paper published posthumously.

FREEDOM AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

Mill was exercised for much of his life with trying to reconcile his materialism with his passion for liberty. How can there be free agents when we are material parts of a material world and subject to the laws of nature? He agreed that, yes, we have to obey the laws of nature; indeed, there is no choice. But we should appreciate that, at any given juncture, there is more than one law of nature operating. By aligning ourselves with one law, we can use nature to achieve ends not envisaged in nature: Though we cannot emancipate ourselves from the laws of nature as a whole, we can escape from any particular law of nature, if we are able to withdraw ourselves from the circumstances in which it acts. Though we can do nothing except through laws of nature, we can use one law to counteract another.20 We utilize the laws of nature by aligning ourselves with the one that leads to our goal and we do so from a virtual outside-of-nature that is the world opened up by intentionality. This virtual outside-of-nature is the realm we described in “The human world” in Chapter 6: the human world created out of a trillion cognitive handshakes. This public sphere, which is not just a semiosphere but also a “technosphere”, in which we live and have our being beyond the material of our body, is where we elucidate the laws of nature and get them to work on our behalf. It is where we use our outside, constructed and maintained in common, and our pooled strength to operate on the material world. This outside gives us a place in which to

20. Mill, “Nature”, 17, quoted in Aiken, The Age of Ideology, 152.

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step back. The stepping back is a huge collective and individual stepping back into a space collectively and individually created. Let me illustrate Mill’s idea with a trivial example: going to a park in order to enjoy slithering down a slide. The descent is courtesy of the laws of gravity, but positioning ourselves to enjoy the descent is something else. The trip to the park has to be organized, other things have to be fitted around it, there is a journey to the park, to the playground, and thence to the slide, guided by know-how and know-that, and there is an ascent to the top of the slide. The slide itself has been erected in order explicitly to utilize the laws of motion; it is a standing possibility of the joy of safely succumbing to the gravitational field. This example illustrates how our ways of acting involve knowledge, as well as artefacts (which, of course, operate within the laws of nature), so that we can subordinate them to our own ends and can, as Mill said, quoting Francis Bacon, “obey nature in such as manner as to command it”.21 Our actions are not uncaused miracles; they go with the grain of causation. But we are able to step back into the great extra-natural space that is the human world, of thatter as opposed to matter, and from there use material causes as handles on the material world. The ultimate expression of this is our exploitation of the laws of nature in science-based technology, a supreme expression of accumulated knowledge that is the property of the great community of minds. Technology is possible because we approach nature from an outside whose seed is intentionality. It is built up as an expanding space of possibility, a first-person plural reality, constructed through the joined endeavours of the human race, and expanded since the first hominids first awoke to their own existence. Such conscious exploitation of the laws of nature lies beyond description in terms of material causes and material effects: it cannot be described in terms of biological tropisms or instincts or drives as proxy for intermediate material causes.22 Let us look more closely at the claim that we really are able to act freely. When we think about the characteristics of a free act, three things seem to me to be paramount. First, the action should be expressive of what

21. Mill, “Nature”, 17. 22. Selective attention is one of the keys to free action. This is most obviously expressed in the gaze of an embodied subject choosing to focus on one object or another. This, of course, is just the beginning. Just how far ordinary human actions are from that beginning is illustrated by the ways in which we regulate our gaze; as when, for example, we go on holiday to see a particular view or enter a laboratory to look through a microscope.

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I am. This requirement is met by the fact that my actions are rooted in great swathes of myself: the “am-soil” of which I spoke earlier. Second, I should seem to be the initiator or source of my action. This is evident in the example of the slide, or of catching the ball. I carry out all the preparatory action to make a certain event happen, even one that ends up in helplessness (going down the slide) or automaticity (catching the ball). The counter-causal nature of intentionality lays the seed for our distance from the world, for our sense of self and our freedom, which, shared or joined, is the basis for the human world offset from nature. It is this that makes us a point of origin, so that we are individually the centre of a centreless universe, a place where “the buck can start”. Finally, my actions should deflect the course of events rather than merely conform to what was anyway going to happen. What evidence is there for such deflection? Anyone who doubts that we can individually deflect the course of events should consider what we have achieved in building up a human world so extensive as virtually at times to conceal the natural one. As was said of Christopher Wren, “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”: if you seek his monument, look about you. The artefactscapes of cities that cover the surface of the earth with man-made objects, the human institutions to which we relate for so much of our lives, and the extra-natural social facts and preoccupations that fill our waking hours, to which there is nothing corresponding in nature: these are eloquent testimony to how, collectively at least, we deflect the course of events and operate within a space outside the material world construed according to the laws of physics. From pointing, through artefacts and spoken, and ultimately written, language, we get ever greater purchase on the natural world from an ever greater outside built up by thousands of generations, each comprising, at first, thousands, then millions and ultimately billions, of people. This should be enough to satisfy everyone that we are capable of truly free actions. There will still be some who are dogmatically opposed to the idea of our being free because it doesn’t fit with what they believe to be the scientific world picture. To them, we offer this question: if freedom really is an illusion, where on earth did the illusion come from? And it is a tenacious illusion. As Samuel Johnson observed, “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it”.23 Perhaps not all theory – just some theories of some philosophers: and clearly not all experience – just most of our

23. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 681.

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everyday experience. Even so, like Johnson, you might be inclined to agree with his tetchy assertion that “we know our will is free and there’s an end on’t”.24 Why, after all, if freedom is an illusion, and such a stubborn one, and material causation reigns unchecked and undeviated, should one section of the infinite causal nexus of the universe decide, apparently without any foundation, that it is itself a point of origin of certain events – actions – that are not simply part of an endless chain of causes whose ancestry ultimately lies in the Big Bang? It seems an odd idea for a causal net, or a bit of it, to entertain. There is (inevitably) a Darwinitic response. Anything is possible (even, as we have seen, consciousness itself ) if it is of adaptive value. The reason Johnson can’t get rid of the idea that he and his fellow humans are free is because this will be good for his, and our, morale. The sense that I am the source of my actions gives me an enhanced potency, and also, by making me feel responsible for certain events that I deem to be my actions, makes me ethically more biddable. I can, for example, feel shame. As Carter says: The illusion of free will is deeply ingrained precisely because it prevents us from falling into a suicidally fatalistic state of mind – it is one of the brain’s most powerful aids to survival. Like many of our survival mechanisms, however, it no longer works entirely to our benefit. By creating the illusion that there is a self-determining “I” in each of us, it causes us to punish those who appear to behave badly, even when punishment clearly has no practical benefit.25 This is an interesting claim because it suggests that our belief that we are free can (after all) alter what happens in the world: initially, as far as we are concerned, for the better because it helps us to survive. In short, the illusion of free will does deflect the course of events, and hence is self-fulfilling. It is not an illusion. For if we really cannot deflect the course of predetermined events, then the idea that we are free cannot change anything, any more than the idea that we are not free can change it.26

24. Ibid., 303. 25. Carter, Mapping the Mind, 201. Note also that the same argument has been used to explain our propensity towards dualism: see Humphrey, Seeing Red, 124–34. 26. I have located the source of our freedom in first-person being, and I have not been at all impressed by attempts to find it in the no-person world of post-classical physics, in particular

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FINDING THE SELF

All human actions, whether conscious or not, come from complex interactions between memes, genes and all their products. The self is not an initiator of actions, it does not “have” consciousness, it does not “do” the deliberating. There is no truth in the idea of an inner self inside my body that controls the body and is conscious. Since this is false, so is the idea of my conscious self having free will.27 It is entirely to be expected that those who deny the reality of human freedom are also sceptical of the common-sense notion of the self. The principle that, if neuroscience can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist eliminates both free will and selfhood because neither is translatable into patterns of neural activity. But this is not the only reason why freedom and the self are put to the same sword. It is also because they are tightly connected aspects of personhood: freedom, as we have seen, cannot be understood without appealing to the notion of the self. There is no freedom in the third-person or no-person realm of the material world revealed to the gaze of science. Free actions require the first-person world, elaborated in a self with sustained intentions rooted in the self-world. And it will also be recalled that the self and agency developed together as aspects of the existential intuition that separates hominids from other primates; the embodied subject that arose out of the organism was an “agentive self ” – an agent and a self. It is time to dig a little bit deeper into the notion of the self. The self has caused problems even for philosophers who have not been influenced by the glamour of neuroscience. They have felt obliged to question the reality of the self, the enduring “I”, and “personal identity”. Many have done so because they mistakenly think that to believe in the self is to believe in a little man, a ghost inside the machine, that somehow

in the wiggle room that some believe is opened up by quantum mechanics. The fact that the quantum future is indeterminate does not liberate us from the causally closed material world in a way that could translate into freedom. Subatomic indeterminacy does not scale up into something that could be used at the macroscopic level of action. To put this another way, the quantum indeterminacy of the future does not make it more manipulable. And while observation may confer determinacy on an indeterminate micro-system, this does not correspond in any way to the kinds of things we endeavour to determine, shape or deflect in the exercise of our will. 27. Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 264.

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operates on the world although it is not part of it. Homunculi, apparently, are permitted if you are a neuromaniac but not if you are not. It is, possible, however, as we shall see, to develop an account of the self that is both robust and homunculus-free. Pretty well everything that matters in the notion of personal identity and the self is gathered up in the idea of the “I” as something enduring, singular, unified, and tightly interconnected. For this notion of being internally stitched – biographically coherent beyond mere succession of events – seems to lie at the heart of any claim we have to dignity as moral agents. It is, as Thomas Reid said, “the foundation of all rights and obligations, and of all accountableness”.28 This connection is evident in the passage from Carter quoted in the previous section where, speaking for many of those who dissolve the self into successive states of bits of the brain, she points out that “By creating the illusion that there is a self-determining ‘I’ in each of us, it causes us to punish those who appear to behave badly, even when punishment clearly has no practical benefit”.29 We cannot hold a no one accountable. A key notion is that of “integrity”: the sense that I am one, enduring entity; that there is a unity across the different aspects of my life and behaviour; that I am a whole and at a certain level undivided, like an integer. This justifies our expectation that we shall be respected for something that we are. Other people feel that they know what to expect of us. In return, we shall feel entitled to expect that others, too, will be consistent; that they will have stable dispositions. And it is not enough that people should be programmed to replicate the same patterns of behaviour; that same pattern has to have a coherent inside. The most famous challenge to this idea of the self as coherent and enduring was lodged by Hume in what may be one of the most quoted passages in all philosophy (which we have already quoted in Chapter 2!). Hume, it will be recalled, sought his self through introspection and this is what he found: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat, cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I

28. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, essay 3, ch. 4, “Of Identity”. 29. Carter Mapping the Mind, 206.

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can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception.30 He concluded that humans “are nothing but a bundle of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”. “The identity we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictional one”, he finally says. Unfortunately, Hume was looking in the wrong place. He assumed that the self should be a perception among perceptions, and that, if it existed, it could be grasped by turning his attention inwards. At the same time, in contrast with the fugitive impressions that cross our minds, it should endure over time – the entirety of our life – and hence be unlike any ordinary perception. These are two irreconcilable demands. As Kant recognized, it is a mistake to think of the self as an object of perception, or even as a kind of super-percept, not the least because the self is presupposed in perceptions, in the implicit sense that they are mine, that it is I who am perceiving them, that I am their subject. Kant suggested, in response to Hume, that there was something above and beyond experiences that tied them together: “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations”.31 This is not a very satisfactory solution and much puzzled over. A constant iteration of “I think” seems implausibly donnish. What is more, the “I” of the “I” think, which he specifically denied had a place in the empirical world of experiences, seemed to have no home at all. It was not easy to see how it engaged with, attached itself to, the actual experiences of actual beings. One consequence was that it was always at risk of being crash dieted to a skinny, size zero, purely logical subject. But at least Kant’s intuitions were sound. It is easy to see why some thinkers have rejected the challenge to find an enduring basis of personal identity that surmounts all the changes suffered by the experiencing self. Indeed, some have embraced the Humean vision, out of suspicion that any notion of personal identity that ignores Hume’s critique will inevitably appeal to a Cartesian, Kantian or quasi-theological transcendental ego: some updating of a superannuated notion, like a soul.32 And this has made it easier for neuromaniacs to dismiss the self, as

30. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I, pt IV, §6. 31. Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason, B131. 32. This seems to have motivated many twentieth-century interpretations of the self, notably those of certain existentialist philosophers who, emphasizing its non-material nature and its

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well they might, given that its every characteristic lies beyond the reach of neuroscience. First-person being – the sense that “I am this”, “This is happening to me”, “I am doing this”, “I am having this experience” – can hardly be found in no-person neural activity. Most neuroscientists are not persuaded by the hopeful claim, made by people such as Gerald Edelman,33 that neural circuits bending back on themselves, having branches or re-entry loops, are somehow reflecting on themselves and hence are self-aware. And quite right, too. After all, many computers have a multitude of feedback and re-entry loops and we do not expect them to feel that they are themselves, or to refer their activity to themselves. They remain obdurately apersonal, lacking a sense of “am”. And Ramachandran’s appeal to mirror neurons as the basis by which “your brain also turns its view back on itself to generate your sense of self-awareness”34 doesn’t take us much beyond a tautology, given apparent explanatory force by a misleading metaphor. Second, as we have seen, the self is unified at a particular time, although it is also aware of the multiplicity of its experiences and its aspects. Third, the self has temporal depth: it has the sense of having existed in a past of its own or reaching towards a future that is its own future. And, finally, it acknowledges the multiplicity of its present and its past while also affirming their unification within itself. The self is transcendent – in the obvious sense of not being reducible to a succession of experiences and existing in and over tensed time – in the way that neural impulses could not be.

role as the source of freedom, wanted to liberate it not only from thing-hood but from being any kind of substantive entity. Analytical philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle argued that the “I” was not only elusive but systematically so; it could never become its own object, any more than I could stand on my own shadow. In the second half of the twentieth century, structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers, mainly located in Paris, dissolved the self: it is a mere node in a system of signs; it is in the grip of various modes of the unconsciousness – political, sociopolitical, historical, psycho-analytical, linguistic and so on – through which it misrecognizes and is alienated from itself; it is a bourgeois or tropological “construct”; or (in Jacques Lacan’s echo of Hume) a “fiction”. (The full story is available in my In Defence of Realism.) Finally, there have been many philosophers influenced by the eminent contemporary neo-Humean Derek Parfit, for whom the self is merely the sum total of a series of psychological states, mainly memory. Its continuity lies in the overlap of such psychological states, rather as the continuity of a rope lies in the overlap of strands that do not go all the way from one end to another. So the neuroscientists are not alone in finding the idea of an enduring self and personal identity unacceptable. 33. See my review of Edelman’s Wider than the Sky, in “Trying to Find Consciousness in the Brain”. 34. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, 248.

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So wherein does the self reside? To answer this, it is important to separate two things: the sense of self at a particular time; and the sense of being the same self over time. Although the endurance of identity over time makes sense, as I shall argue, only on the basis of identity at a given time, the former provides a helpful entry into the primary question of what personal identity is and why it matters. What is the basis for my continuity over time in the face of change? What is there about me that is continuously and unchangeably present? Pre-modern philosophers would have invoked an enduring immaterial substance: the soul. Descartes partly modernized this as “thinking substance”. (And I myself have been accused of being a closet Cartesian dualist who believes in the human ghost in the animal machine.) The truly modern engagement with the notion of personal identity over time, however, began with Locke, who also chose an immaterial basis, although not a substance but the connectedness of the psyche.35 For Locke, identity lay in our consciousness. What was continuously present was not some individual mental item, such as an impossible Humean super-percept, but continuity over time located in the internal connectedness of consciousness. This connectedness was secured most obviously through memory: the memory of our own experiences. Locke’s account has powerful intuitive attractions. Continuity of memory seems to underpin so many other continuities: my enduring sense of what, where, who; the familiarity that makes the world my world and guides me through my life; my commitment to my commitments; my responsibility for delivering on my promises; and, most directly, my sense of having temporal depth. Psychological continuity seems like the inner truth within the external facts of my constancy, reliability, predictability: the private, essential “take” on the framework that gives stable sense to my life, and enables me to make sense of myself and others to make sense of, and to recognize, me. But there are problems with Locke’s theory. First, the temporal extent of our self would seem to depend on the reach of my memory, but memory doesn’t seem to go back far enough. My memory gets patchier and patchier, and more and more re-processed and hence unreliable, the further I go back. To describe my childhood, as Philip Larkin does, as “a forgotten boredom”,36 would be a little harsh on my parents, but I remember little of

35. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, ch. 27. 36. Larkin, “Coming”.

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the nearly 131,500 hours of experiences of my first fifteen years of life. And yet that child Raymond Tallis and I are the same person. We can mitigate the implications of this blankness a little by imagining a kind of relay, as did Reid (who was opposed to Locke’s theory).37 He gives an example of an aged general who does not remember the boy he once was who, so he has been told, got whipped for stealing apples. However, he can remember being a brave young subaltern, and the subaltern in turn recalls the lad who was whipped for stealing apples. This, however, does not really solve the problem; for we do not by this means regain possession of our past through our memories. We may infer that there is a chain of “rememberers”, going right back to the two-day-old infant who presumably has some kind of recall of the previous day’s nappy changes. This, however, contributes nothing to our sense of personal identity and enduring selfhood. We have a merely theoretical rather than living connection to our remote past, not in our own keeping. Derek Parfit advances the notion of overlapping chains of “strong connectedness” tying together successive phases of our psyche; these would include not only memories but other psychological components.38 Memory, however, it seems to me, remains central to the intuitive attraction of the theory; it is psychological connectedness made explicit. If memory is so important to enduring personal identity, it is reasonable to ask whether memories have to be in a state of being remembered to bind the person together. It is obvious that we are not at any given time engaged in remembering more than a minute fraction of even those memories we have. If we had to keep a large number of our memories in play in order to count as being adequately connected with our past, so that ourselves at t1 could count as the same person as ourselves at t2, the price of having an enduring personal identity would be to live like Borges’ mnestic monster Funes the Memorious, who could forget nothing.39 We live by leaving things behind and we need amnesia if an over-replete present consciousness is not going to become a kind of delirium of reminiscence. Most importantly, Locke’s account, which has a rather vague view on what would amount to sufficient psychological connectedness to constitute continuity of self, seems to be at odds with our intuition that personal identity – to use Reid’s phrase – “has no ambiguity, and admits not of 37. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, essay 3, ch. 4, “Of Identity”. 38. Parfit, Reasons and Persons. 39. Borges, “Funes the Memorious”.

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degrees, or of more and less”.40 To translate this, “I” does not pass through a penumbra of “I-ish” as it fades to “Not-I”. As the line of connectedness becomes less dense, the sense of “I” does not attenuate. For Parfit, who does not believe that personal identity is determinate, yes–no, and believes that what matters is not the continuation of something called personal identity, but the future of the Humean series of experiences we have, this is not a problem. For me, who does not believe that Raymond Tallis dissolves into a succession of experiences, it is a problem. Either Raymond Tallis is or Raymond Tallis is not; at least, that is what Raymond Tallis thinks. He doesn’t think he can be a teeny-weeny bit Raymond Tallis any more than anyone can be a teeny-weeny bit pregnant. There is another problem for those who would locate continuing personal identity in psychological connectedness through memory. How can I be sure that a memory I am having now is a true memory of an actual experience – of an experience that I had? Vividness of recall is no sure guide to authenticity of apparent memories. The great psychologist Jean Piaget reported that his earliest memory was a very precise and terrifying image. He remembered very clearly being in the Jardin de Luxembourg with his nurse when she was attacked by a man wanting to steal him from his pram. It was only many years later that his nurse confessed that she had fabricated the entire incident to earn herself praise. This question of validation – what makes these memories authentic memories of experiences I have had – connects with the profound insight expressed by Bishop Butler, when he rejected Locke’s rooting personal identity in “sameness of consciousness”. This, he said, was “a wonderful mistake”, for it is “self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity”.41 In other words, personal identity is not an objective given, which we then discover, say on the basis of memories that we feel confident are ours. And this seems sound: to found one’s sense of identity on anything else, even memories that are felt to be valid because one had the experiences corresponding to them, and one has evidence that there is the right kind of causal relation between the memories and the experiences remembered, is to put the cart before the horse. Just as, while quizzing me on little known facts about the life of Raymond Tallis seems a good way for others to check my claim to be

40. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, essay 3, ch. 4, “Of Identity”. 41. Butler, “Of Personal Identity”, emphasis added.

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Raymond Tallis, a high score on such a quiz could not underpin, or even strengthen, my own sense of being myself. Imagining that it could do so is connected with a failure to recognize that personal identity goes deeper, or is presupposed in, identification and re-identification. The feeling that these memories are mine, and are authentic because they are of experiences that I have had, must be itself rooted in a pre-existing sense of personal identity: that “I am this”, a “this” that is currently having these memories and previously had the experiences preserved in the memories. It certainly seems odd to think of personal identity as something you arrive at as a kind of conclusion. We are led down this peculiar path, as Bishop Butler pointed out, because we are using the term “identity” loosely, as we do when we (illegitimately) apply it to objects such as trees, ships and gentlemen’s clubs, when we do indeed have to invoke external criteria for justifying the use of the term and for arriving at what is an identification. The iteration – that I am – is a presupposition that precedes any determination of what I am. Psychological connectedness does not, therefore, deliver the sense of personal identity; it is presupposed in it. So is the notion of the self doomed? Are those neuromaniacs who deny that it corresponds to anything real on to something, even if their reasoning is faulty? There is another possible basis for my continuing identity over time, and which could also underwrite my identity at any given time; namely, my body. I am my body, it is argued, and my enduring self is rooted in my relatively stable body. Certainly, the body that I, and only I, have had all my life seems a plausible repository for my personal identity, at least when we focus on its continuity over time. This needs clarification, however; I am not just the physical material of my body – which, after all, is still there, stretched out on the mortuary slab, after I have died – even though it does not outlive me. My corpse, which, for a while at any rate, is not materially much different from my body at the time of death, and certainly less different from my body immediately prior to my death than it is from my body as a child, is not a continuation of my personal identity. Eric Olson argued in The Human Animal that identity resides not in the material of the body but in the biological processes in the living organism that is H. sapiens. This leads him to the conclusion that even people in a permanent coma or a persistent vegetative state retain their identity. He enthusiastically welcomes these, to me unwelcome, consequences of his position, because he wants to separate personal identity from consciousness: the subtitle of his book is “personal identity without psychology”. Persons are human animals and “no sort of psychological continuity 270

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is either necessary or sufficient for a human animal to persist through time”.42 This is a view, of course, that would fit nicely with Neuromania and Darwinitis, that would prefer to see people as organisms, but it would suggest that we could do without the notion of people distinct from their bodies altogether. Admittedly Olson’s identification of personal identity with the living animal body does dispose of some difficulties. It deals with my undeniable, but seemingly puzzling, connection with an object in the remote past that does not have personal identity: for example the foetus I once was. How can Raymond Tallis be the same self or person as a foetus or neonate that seems to lack an “I”? The answer is straightforward if I believe that my identity resides in my animal body. I am this animal body, which just happens to have an ego-less phase preceding a phase with an ego. Locating personal identity in the body is helpful in another regard. The body stands outside the vicious circle that caused so much trouble when we attempted to find continuing personal identity in psychological connectedness through memory. The body, unlike our experiences, endures through space and time, and has a public observable, as well as a privately experienced, face. It can therefore act as a check on the relation between past experiences and the present moment. For example, there is, as it were, an audit trail connecting the successive moments of the body. It has the handy property of being in a definite location at a particular time and of having to occupy all intermediate locations in between times. If I authentically remember being in Paris at a particular time, I know that I cannot also authentically remember being in Cambridge at that time. Nor could I have been in London ten seconds later: nor even one day later, without a remembered form of transport. My publicly observable body also provides a means by which others may either vouch for or contest my memories. By means of the body, our memories and other psychological states are tied into a nexus of objective fact and checkable reality. Experiences, and the memories that make them part of my enduring identity over time, are tethered to real places and real times. (It is particularly unfortunate, then, that Olson is happy to do without these psychological items!) There is something else in Olson’s favour. My body, the public face of my identity, also connects identity with identification: with that reinforcement or confirmation of my sense of the self I am that comes from others whose

42. Olson, The Human Animal, 124.

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lives intersect or intertwine with mine. The body links the private space of recollection with the public realm, with micro- and macro-society: the subjective sense of being me with the objective data recorded in identity cards. But there are many problems with this. Not the least is that quite a lot of my body (my spleen or my bone marrow, for example) doesn’t have much to do with my identity either, as it is experienced either by others or by myself. But Olson’s theory has another flaw. It seems to bypass the very essence of what lies at the heart of personal identity: the sense, the intuition, the feeling, the assertion that I am what I am. While it gives a plausible marker of continuity of the self over time, it doesn’t seem to offer continuity of the self as such. As Locke says, “Person stands for … a thinking intelligent Being … that … can consider itself as its self ”.43 Most damningly, without this subjective dimension it is difficult to see how identity could arise in the body, for a person-less body does not have the status of being a single, coherent thing. It can be taken as one body, many organs, millions of cells, trillions of atoms and so on. Unity does not come free, as we saw when we looked at the failure of neural activity to provide the basis for the unity of consciousness. The body, like the brain, is not self-unifying. Olson, you will recall, wanted to incorporate the foetus that my body was in 1946 into my personal identity. While there is, of course, a continuity between the foetus and the body that is the ground floor of my identity at present, it is perfectly obvious that a foetus does not have a personal identity; in short that, being “I-less”, it is not only not what I am but it is not an earlier phase of the “I” that I am. It may be what the “I” emerges from, but it is not the “I” that I have become. We may, therefore, draw several conclusions from our discussion. First, personal identity is not a matter of the psyche solely: stand-alone memories cannot provide the basis for the moment-to-moment sense of self, nor for the confidence that we have in being the same person over time, that we are temporally extended. They are rootless or untethered. We need the body as well. But, second, a stand-alone body (or part of it, such as the brain) cannot provide personal identity, either. It is person-less and as such does not have an identity. We need both psyche and soma, with the psychological continuity providing the inner aspect of the enduring self and the corporeal continuity that outer aspect, but not just one added to the other or merely conjoined like an engine and a chassis, or a ghost and a

43. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, ch. 27, §9.

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machine. A satisfactory account of the self based on the mind–body must begin not with continuity of identity over time – however important that is – but with identity at any given time. The reader may sense what is coming next: an appeal to the notion of the existential intuition, which I introduced in “How we came to be so different” in Chapter 6, and that lay at the root of the freedom I have been arguing for in the previous section. Personal identity is something that begins with the awakening of the conscious human body to itself: the intuition that it is and that it is itself. This, it seems to me, is the sine qua non, the beating heart, of personal identity. Asserting this, however, makes me aware of how elusive it is. The existential intuition is immediately experienced, but I have tended in this book and elsewhere to cast it in this form: “[That] I am [this…]” where “this”, in the first instance, is one’s own body, although it grows beyond the body in ways that are too obvious to need spelling out. The existential intuition looks, perhaps, too much like an assertion or a proposition or a thought; and to present it in this way would seem to replicate in part the error of Kant’s notion that “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations”. Even the word “intuition” is too narrow, suggesting as it does an inchoate thought. We may, perhaps, think of the sense that one is (or am) “this item” – in infancy “this body” – initially as a slowly spreading blush, engaging more and more of the body, with key landmarks such as the discovery of one’s hands and, later, of one’s toes. The human body, we might say, is itself by virtue of the fact that it “ams” itself. At the point of origin of personal identity – in a newborn wakening towards itself – psyche and soma are one: the inchoate “I” identifies with the sentient body. We may envisage a gradual awakening to the body as one’s own, as one’s self, and through the body to the world, so that bodily self-awareness becomes the elaborate correlative of a personal world. This is the context in which the “I” emerges in the body and personal identity is established in and of a body that will precede and outlast it. The mature “I” is forged in the community of minds, in the human world, the public sphere that lies beyond the organism. There is, of course, a gradual evolution of the self over time, and in the early days there is no self to speak of at all. But for the greater part of adult life we are internally connected autobiographically, not merely factually, but through first-person recall, from a viewpoint that is uniquely our own. We have privileged information not only about what happened in our past, but also about what it felt like at a multitude of levels. And there is a 273

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huge amount of implicit knowledge in the fact that we make moment-tomoment sense of ourselves, and of our world, of what is happening and what we are doing. Just how much knowledge is required becomes evident when writers attempt to achieve an effect of immediacy by plunging the reader into the moment-to-moment existence of a first-person narrator.44 Without the existential intuition, which lies at the heart of first-person being, without this sense that I am this, at any particular time, there is no basis for the sense that I am the same thing over time. The intuition “that I am this” must precede any question as to whether I am or am not the same “this”. Without self-appropriation, self-stipulation, the question cannot arise as to whether or not something is the same thing over time. Or it can be resolved only by an external fiat that says that the acorn is or is not the same as the oak tree, that the club is or is not the same club as the club that went under the same name but had different premises, rules and membership, as it did a hundred years ago.45 In invoking the existential intuition, I have not provided a fully worked-out theory of personal identity; indeed, you may feel that, had you blinked, you would have missed my positive ideas. (Most notably, I have not made enough of, even less attempted to give an account of, the sense of temporal depth that informs the moment-by-moment self, which draws on a past and reaches into a future.)46 What I have tried to do is show that it is possible to have a robust sense of self rooted in objective reality and an account of enduring personal identity that doesn’t require us to imagine a homunculus, or a Cartesian ghost in the cerebral machine. This is what underpins the aspects of the self that matter to us. The aspects of the self that I am referring to are: that I have enduring traits; that it is correct to relate my actions, and feelings and curriculum vitae to an individual who endures over years and is the source of his actions, so that today in 2011 I am responsible for the actions committed by the person answering to my name in 1973; that I am bound by promises because the self who made them is the same self as the one who has

44. See my “Getting Consciousness to Speak Itself ”. 45. Carter’s suggestion that people with multiple personalities show what the self really is – that they are just like us only more so – is analogous to suggesting that having a seizure is a model of walking. I would say that they are just like us only less so. And even those who seem to have multiple personalities require a dense internal interconnectedness simply to function as one of their personalities. 46. For more on the endurance of the self over time, see my I Am, “Personal Identity: What I Am”.

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to deliver on them; and that I am the originator of my actions. This self – all the self that is worth having – is possible because I am a continuing body animated by a relatively stable, densely internally stitched together, psyche (memory, roots of behaviour, frameworks, etc.) supported and confirmed by the scaffold of continuing office, and more broadly by a sense of who I am, a sense reinforced by others. This identity itself is not to be reduced to the objective basis of, or the criteria for, its own continuity over time, although the latter are important. I have to own my continuity and this means that I have to “am” myself at any given time. Promises and regrets are felt in the first person; they are not reducible to consequences of objective contracts. “I did that action” or “I made that promise”: these are felt and cannot be reduced to objective events. While enjoying, or suffering, this sense of self will depend on a brain in some sort of working order, the self is not translatable into neural activity. The personally apprehended connectedness cannot be reduced to some impersonal connectedness of synapses, not least because it is upheld in part by the community of minds to which we belong and is lived out in the realm that community of minds has created. No wonder it cannot be found in a part of the organism, the brain, or in a part of the brain, such as the claustrum, which Crick and Koch appealed to. Once that is clear, we are in a position to argue that the failure to find a neuroscientific basis or correlative of the self is evidence not that the “I” is an illusion, but that neuroscience is limited in what it has to say about us. And when we encounter an assertion such as the following, by Blackmore, “We are meme machines by and for the selfish replicators. The only true freedom comes not when we rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but when we realise that there is no-one to rebel”,47 we can shrug our shoulders, say “Speak for your non-self ” and reject the charge that we are subscribing to an outdated “folk psychology”.

47. Blackmore, “The Evolution of Meme Machines”.

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Defending the Humanities

NEURO-EVOLUTIONARY PSEUDOSCIENCES: A SCEPTIC’S PRIMER

It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, including the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis.1 If the imperialist ambitions of Neuromania and Darwinitis were fully realized, they would swallow the image of humanity in the science of biology. Our distinctive nature, our freedom, our selfhood and even human society would be reduced to the properties of living matter, and this in turn would be ripe to be reduced, via molecular biology, to matter period. So it is particularly sickening that the humanities, traditionally a bulwark against the encroaching tides of scientism, have proved so willing to collaborate with the invaders. Neuro-evolutionary thought has been welcomed with garlands of flowers. Unforced marriages with the occupying forces have produced a multitude of “interdisciplinary” children bearing names that testify to the happiness of the partnership, although not to the equality of the partners. Worse still, neuro-evolutionary thought is breaking out of the academy (where it can probably do little direct harm except interfere with the endeavour to make post-religious sense of ourselves) to more dangerous areas such as education, social policy and politics, where it may do much harm in the medium term. And there is a potential for even

1. Wilson, Sociobiology, 4.

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greater damage in the long term, as I discussed in “To hell in a hand cart?” in Chapter 2. Ideas have consequences. These new disciplines therefore warrant critical examination. Before I examine individual examples of the new “sciences”, some general observations about the humanities-turned-animalities are in order. What they have in common is that they minimize the non-biological reality of persons, societies and institutions. They either do not acknowledge, or pass over, or try to eliminate, the public sphere, the very world from which the humanities and their proper objects of concern have grown. The shots are called by our brains transmitting our evolutionary inheritance, and the bullets are manufactured in intracranial darkness, where only neuroscience can see. The humanities must acknowledge that, hitherto, they have only been immature biosciences. It is consistent with this ideology that things which belong to common sense are presented as truths uncovered by the biological sciences. You and I know, for example, that if a child is treated badly, it may grow up to lead a catastrophically unsatisfactory adult life. The worse the child is treated, and the earlier the ill treatment begins, the greater the likelihood of such an outcome. This, of course, is what we might expect: our picture of the world, and consequently how we engage with it, will be more profoundly affected by early events when none of the basic elements of that world picture is yet in place. Early experiences have less preceding experience to put them into any kind of context. This common-sense observation is not enough for those who want to wear the mantle of science: neurosociologists are increasingly speaking of delinquent behaviour as being “hard-wired” by early experience. This is not only pseudo-science, but wrong in another respect: it turns a probability into a certainty. The appropriation of common sense by neuro-talk can sometimes reach ludicrous depths. One of the most ubiquitous neuro-groupies, and a past master of giving the obvious a lick of neuroscientific paint, is Matthew Taylor, whom we met in the Introduction. A one-time Chief Advisor on Political Strategy to Tony Blair, he is now the Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts. In his annual lecture to the RSA, he listed some of the things that “the brain tells us about politics”. You won’t be astonished to learn the following, although you may be astonished that he feels he has to tell us them: • we are all susceptible to social influence – because it is “hard-wired” (that term again!) in everyone; 278

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• we are optimistic and take more risks when things go well; • a child who can’t delay gratification is likely to underachieve or behave antisocially; • inequality leads to anxiety; • commitment through family, church or civic groups protects us against psychological frailty; • damaged emotional systems lead to inability to make decisions; • schoolchildren work better if the school feels part of a community; • we are less rational than we think.2 As Alexander Linklater pointed out, you could take out all mention of neuroscience in Taylor’s lecture, “and you would simply have a shorter and clearer statement of his views”.3 Sometimes common-sense observations do need to be checked against the findings of properly controlled studies. Many of the most important scientific advances have overturned what common sense tells us. But the studies need to be of the right kind, and it is not clear why neuroscience (with all the methodological and conceptual problems we discussed in Chapter 3) should be equipped to make us feel more confident that “schoolchildren work better if the school feels part of a community”. There is a hint as to why people like Taylor believe this, from a reply I received from one of his collaborators, Matthew Grist, when I criticised “Neuro-Trash”.4 Grist drew my attention to Camila Batmanghelidjh’s work in educating and rehabilitating desperately abused children, teaching them to see the world from others’ points of view. Although by the usual measures her work seems to have been highly successful, she has “now embarked on research with neuroscientific partners so that she can present evidence of her success in terms of brains scans”.5 I was reminded of the old joke: “It works in practice. Well and good. But does it work in theory?” And Grist admits as much in his defence of the RSA Social Brain project; it has not discovered anything that could not have been observed by behavioural research, adding only “the seductive allure of neuroscientific explanations”. At any rate, “the lesson that being a rational, creative, happy and well-behaved human being is a social achievement that takes time, dedication and a certain kind of

2. 3. 4. 5.

Taylor, “For Left and Right”. Linklater, “Bad Science”. See my “Neuro-Trash”. Grist, “Neuroscience can Help Tame the Elephant”.

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environment or environments” is not something that neuroscience could tell us or, even if it could, is not something we would need neuroscience to tell us. But neuroscience has a unique authority and brain images are especially potent.6 The psychologists David McCabe and Alan Castel found that brain scans had “a particularly powerful persuasive influence on the perceived credibility” of claims about the human mind.7 Undergraduates were given the results of fictitious studies that made claims not fully supported by the data, such as that “Watching television improves maths ability” or “Playing video games benefits attention”. Where the results were presented in the form of brain scans, rather than as bar charts or words, the work was more likely to be judged to be of high scientific merit and the reasoning in it deemed sound. This is a striking validation of Matthew Crawford’s characterization of a brain scan as “a fast-acting solvent of critical faculties”.8 Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence offers some striking examples of the new science of neuro-truistics, which looks to the latest findings in neuroscience to tell us what we know already. In order to flourish in life, he tells us, we need “neural exchanges”: Vitality arises from sheer human contact, especially from loving connections. The people we care about most are an elixir of sorts, an ever-renewing source of energy. The neural exchange between a parent and child, a grandparent and a toddler, between lovers or a satisfied couple, or among good friends, has palpable virtues.9 If you don’t believe that, you had better believe it now, because the men in white coats have shown that our brains light up when we have social contact. And David Sloan Wilson, who is, according to Grist, “at the vanguard of a new breed of evolutionary psychologists who talk unabashedly about how genes function in a social context”10 has made an even more unsurprising observation: “people” become “stressed when

6. Skolnick Weisberg et al., “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations”, is highly relevant here. 7. McCabe & Castel, “Seeing is Believing”. 8. Crawford, “The Limits of Neuro-Talk”. 9. Goleman, Social Intelligence, 318. 10. Grist, “Evolution and the Social Brain”.

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they aren’t touched”,11 and we know that from work with monkeys – and we are monkeys. Grist, commenting on this article, asserts that evolutionary psychology will also show us that, because we are not well served by our monkey brains, exercising self-control and planning for the long term requires “practice, social support, and the right environment and incentives”.12 So now it’s official: a good upbringing and encouragement will increase your chance of turning out well. Soon those clever boffins will demonstrate that eating three square meals a day might fend off starvation. I cannot resist one more example. Martin Lindstrom (“a brand futurist” and one of the world’s most influential people according to Time magazine),13 reports, in his “guide to the neuroscience of shopping”, that scientists have found that shopping floods the brain with the hormone involved in motivation and reward.14 Who could have guessed that shopping was associated with motivation and reward? Soon someone is going to tell us that we engage in sex because orgasms are pleasurable. What makes this seem to be a discovery that goes beyond the bleeding obvious is reference to hormones or, more generally, to “brain chemicals”. This particular flourish, however, actually adds nothing because the concept of “reward chemicals”, such as dopamine, is not at all clear. As Stuart Derbyshire and Anand Raja have emphasized, dopamine has been implicated in the causation of schizophrenia, depression, and addiction: far cries from ordinary shopping and its empty joys.15 The neuro-evolutionary pseudo-sciences tend to base their – truistic or counter-intuitive – conclusions on experiments that grotesquely simplify human life. Zeki, you may recall, thinks he can shine a light through the mystery of love by showing subjects pictures of loved ones and ones to whom they are indifferent, and subtracting the response to the latter from the response to the former. He also thinks he can advance understanding of aesthetic responses by treating works of art as if they were merely visual stimuli. A similar approach characterizes Jonah Lehrer’s neuroinvestigation of “consumer behaviour”. He presents subjects with simple

11. 12. 13. 14.

Wilson, “Policymaking the Darwinist Way”. Grist, “Evolution and the Social Brain”. Gregory, “How Shoppers Make Decisions in a Recession”. Lindstrom, Buy.Ology. Gluttons for punishment might enjoy a treasury of neuro-truistics in an article called “Brain Lessons” in Slate. Leading neuroscientists and popularizers such as Pinker and Oliver Sacks say how learning about the brain “changed the way they lived”. You will be astounded at the banality of their replies. I won’t spoil the surprise. 15. Derbyshire & Raja, “Shopping and the Stone Age Brain”.

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choices between “having less now” and “getting more later”. The title of his book, The Decisive Moment, betrays his assumption that decisions are essentially a matter of the moment. In fact, most of our decisions are not snap. Even when they are, they have a non-snap hinterland. Similar simplifications lie behind some widely reported work, that Lehrer makes much of, on the impact of cognitive load – how busy your mind is – on willpower. These are experiments by Roy Baumeister, a Florida neuroscientist.16 Baumeister invited his subjects to choose between two kinds of food: healthy but less tasty (fruit salad) and unhealthy but tasty food (chocolate cake). The choices were made in two different conditions: while the subjects are busy remembering random numbers; and while they are not thus occupied. It appears that when they are engaged in the memory task, people are more likely to be weak-willed and choose the cake instead of the fruit. Needless to say, the results of the crude study have not been supported by other work with a slightly more subtle experimental design closer to real life decision-making.17 The neuromaniac bandwagon has not, however, been slowed; and in this case, as so often, the negative findings received little or no coverage in the press. As Andrew Scull expresses it, “the neuroscientific findings that are so proudly proffered reflect simple simulated experiments that in no way capture the intricacies of everyday social situations, let alone the complex interactions over time that make up human history”.18 The reduction of human behaviour to responses to stimuli or to making trivial, often dichotomous, choices is the same as we saw in the Libet experiments: the isolation of an action from an entire field of action, from the flux of life. The simplification is not accidental. It makes the experiments easy to perform and the analysis of the response more tractable. Reducing the appreciation of art, the experience of love, the decision to get into debt or to look after your health to simple responses to stimuli brings them closer to something that can be seen in terms of brain activity, just as it is easier to examine the flexing of a wrist to activity recorded using electromyography than to interpret a performance of Giselle in this way. This simplification squeezes out personal and collective history. “Reward”, “pleasure”, “emotion” – linked to regions of the brain supposedly specializing in these very general items – are the kind of broad categories 16. See Lehrer, “Blame it on the Brain”. 17. See e.g. Converse & Deshon, “A Tale of Two Tasks”. 18. Scull, “Mind, Brain, Law and Culture”, 587.

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neuro-evolutionary disciplines feel able to handle. Martians may believe that there is something called “reward” that encompasses the pleasure of food, of drugs, of orgasm and the satisfaction that comes from success or from a life well spent, but for non-Martians they are not the same. The satisfaction that comes from improving the patient care system in one’s hospital is not the same as the pleasure that comes when you take a drug or masturbate. The apparent fact that the same brain areas are activated when we listen to pleasurable music19 and during sex confirms how uninformative imaging is. Techniques that cannot distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one’s organs played with tell us little about them. Moral rewards and pharmacological ones are not the same. Denuded abstractions such as “reward” – as in “brain reward mechanisms” – are dehumanized and dehistoricized. Indeed, the notion that the brain is ahistorical is a key assumption espoused by those – most notably the evolutionary psychologists – who believe we are held to ransom by an organ that, since it evolved to serve certain primitive purposes, is often at odds with what is required of us in contemporary, or indeed civilized, life. The brain, apparently, does not know what time of the epoch it is and, for some, its responses are those of a creature adapted to live in the savannah, or the jungle, or to hunt and gather for its livelihood. The neuro-evolutionary stories that I shall examine, steadfastly look straight past all that makes us distinctively human; and they are proud of doing so. The methodological flaws in neuromaniac studies deliver what biologism needs. If you reduce human life to responses to stimuli, then you will seem to be justified in seeing us as biological devices programmed to respond to stimuli. And this links with one of the master-assumptions behind the neuro-evolutionary pseudo-disciplines: that we are so devised that everything we do directly or indirectly serves the project of gene replication. That this fails to capture so much that is central to our nature should not need spelling out. No one has done it more clearly than the father of scientific psychology, William James: “Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities … Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.”20

19. Mannes, The Power of Music, 35. See also Blood & Zatorre, “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music”. 20. James, The Works of William James, 104.

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It is extraordinary that so many humanist scholars should be committed to concealing (rather than celebrating or exploring) this wonderful, distinctive fact about human beings. And yet the turkeys have been voting in excited gaggles for Christmas. In his discussion of the use of evolutionary theory to explain the novel, literary critic Jonathan Gottschall argues that this represents “‘a new moment of hope’ in an era when everyone is talking about ‘the death of the humanities’”.21 I think the reports of both the death and the resurrection are exaggerated, although attempted suicide, it appears, is not ruled out.

REPAIRING THE CANVAS Art on the brain

Evolutionary explanations of why people create and enjoy art, “neurocognitive frameworks” for aesthetics, and neural-network-based explanations for the perception of beauty converge in the idea that our experiences of art are processes in a brain developed to support survival. Neuroaesthetics is most advanced in the field of the visual arts, which already boasts an institute and a chair dedicated to this pursuit (at University College London), occupied by Semir Zeki, who was a neurophysiologist in an earlier incarnation. Zeki believes that brain mechanisms explain the different effects that paintings executed in different styles have on us. To understand these effects, he believes, we need to determine the areas of the brain, in particular in the visual pathways, that light up when we are confronted with paintings. For Zeki, artists are instinctive boffins, aware, although unconsciously, of how to stimulate different pathways in the brain: The artist in a sense is a neuroscientist, exploring the potential and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach.22 21. Cohen, “The Next Big Thing in English”. 22. Zeki, Inner Vision. He is not alone in this belief. Ramachandran and William Hirstein argue that “artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy certain rules or principles … to titillate the visual areas of the brain” (“The Science of Art”, 17).

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As we have seen from his work on “the beauty spot” – located in the orbito-frontal cortex – Zeki means what he says to be taken literally.23 Mondrian, he tells us, speaks preferentially to cells in regions V1 and V4 while the Fauves stimulate V4 plus the middle frontal convolutions. His views are by no means those of an eccentric loner. Margaret Livingstone argues that cubism may affect us because there are “neurons that will respond exclusively to a particular object, at various viewing angles. This means that some memory templates in our brain are view invariant; that is that you can recognize an object or person seen from any angle.”24 Consequently “cubism is pleasing because it resonates with a view-invariant part of our memory system”. As Massey points out in his excellent review of neuroaesthetics, this does not bring us “closer to understanding why we prefer some cubist works to others, or why some viewers do not take any particular pleasure in cubist techniques to begin with”,25 a point to which I shall return. John Onians, in Neuroarthistory, takes neuroaesthetics to its logical conclusion, and he is to be commended for the remorseless consistency of his ideas. Given that the creation of art and its appreciation are a reflection of the genetically programmed properties of the brain, plus plastic changes induced by the material environment, even the propensity of art historians to espouse certain theories can be explained by the kind of experiences to which their brains have been exposed, which will have reinforced certain neural pathways during their period of development. For example, the difference between the aesthetic theories of the Baron de Montesquieu and of Johann Joachim Winckelmann are to be accounted for by the differences between the experiences of the son of a wealthy winegrower (Montesquieu) and those of the son of a poor cobbler (Winckelmann). Their different experiences, Onians says, would have had a major influence on their respective “neural formations”. Hence Montesquieu’s emphasis on the importance of climate on artists. In Winckelmann’s case, “repeated looking” made him particularly apt to study ancient sculpture because it developed “neural networks” that were better adapted to the task in hand. John Ruskin’s skill as an art critic and his emphasis on the relation of art to its environment is connected with his being driven round large parts of England in a specially adapted cart, by his father, who was a wine 23. Zeki & Kawabata, “Neural Correlates of Beauty”. 24. Livingstone, Vision and Art, 77. 25. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 137.

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merchant: as a result, “his neural networks will have increasingly predisposed him to reflect on the relation between art and the environment”.26 The twentieth-century art critic E. H. Gombrich, who would have spent much time waiting for buses and tubes in wartime London, acquired by this means “a distinctive neurobiology” that accounted for aspects of his approach to art. (If these influences were sufficient for the individuals in question to be outstanding art critics then, of course, their ranks would run into very high numbers.) The appeal to material influences of this kind bypasses the conscious reflections, the reading, the dialogues with others living and dead that I would submit are crucial to the formation of the outlook of a wordsmith such as an art critic. Onians also grades art critics according to how closely they anticipate the theories that he and his fellow neuroaestheticians espouse. Aristotle, for example, is praised for understanding the biological basis of artistic activity and for seeing the importance of neural plasticity induced by repeated similar experiences. Apollonius of Tyana gets a pat on the back for “acknowledging the way in which the imagination, the emotions and the body are all linked”,27 which is apparently a discovery of modern neuroscience. In short, he is to be congratulated for so nearly being Semir Zeki. E. P. Thompson famously spoke of the “enormous condescension of posterity”,28 according to which historians praise those figures in the past who came closest to being as clever as we are. Rarely can the past have been condescended to so comprehensively. While neurology is supposed to explain how art works, evolutionary theory explains what it is for: why the brain, which should concentrate, with singleness of mind or doubleness of hemisphere, on the serious business of survival should be tuned to enjoy such a time-wasting activity as looking at pretty pictures, and why it should be disposed to find them pretty. According to Onians, art is a universal activity “because it produces a pleasure analogous to that which is associated with the activities most essential for our survival”.29 Many others concur with this view. Dutton’s lavishly praised The Art Instinct has this as its central thesis: our appreciation of landscape painting is rooted in our prehistoric sensitivity to landscapes themselves, necessary to survival, which was forged in the

26. 27. 28. 29.

Onians, Neuroarthistory, 93. Ibid., 36. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 12. Onians, Neuroarthistory, 72.

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Pleistocene era, between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago. We like pictures of landscapes that would have been favourable to hunting and gathering. If this causes you to smile, then you will enjoy what E. O. Wilson had to say about Mondrian, who seems to have been singled out for especially thorough biologizing. We like his paintings, apparently, because his patterns of lines and colours create an effect “not unlike that of a mottled sky viewed upward through a woodland canopy”.30 We can, of course, retrospectively read visual analogies into any abstract work of art. In fact, a typical Mondrian is closer to a crossword I once saw tattooed on a barmaid’s arm than a mottled sky viewed through a jungle canopy. This example of evolutionary visual aesthetics at work is by no means the most tendentious. In his recent book, Ramachandran suggests that the impact of Picasso’s painting can be explained by their amounting to “supernormal stimuli” of the kind that Niko Tinbergen described in herring gulls. A herring gull chick responds to the red spot on its mother’s beak by begging for food. It will apparently respond even more vigorously to a stick with a bigger spot or a stripe. Picasso likewise provides us with supernormal stimuli.31 And what about the creation of art? Why does anyone bother with this useless activity? The answer is easy peasy: great art, like the peacock’s tail, is a marker of the health of the genes of the creator and therefore has a key role in sexual selection. Artists produce art in order to maximize their chances of mating with desirable members of the opposite sex. Even the sponsorship of the arts is regarded as a manifestation of the “reputation reflex”, by which, like the peacock whose useless tail advertises the health of his genes, the sponsor advertises the health of his business.32 The case against neuro-evolutionary aesthetics is clear and straightforward. If our tastes were forged in the Pleistocene era, it is difficult to see how art could have evolved as it does: how we went from Giotto to Picasso in such a short period of time. Neuro-evolutionary aesthetics casts not a quantum of light on the specific nature of art, the distinctive contribution of individual artists or the basis for the evaluation of art as great, good, mediocre or bad. In short, it bypasses everything that art criticism is about. It doesn’t even distinguish aesthetic from other forms of pleasure, or indeed many forms of visual experience. The so-called “beauty spot” behaves rather similarly to other parts of the brain and has many other jobs 30. Wilson, Consilience, 221, quoted in Malik, “Why We’re Different from the Animals”. 31. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, 212. 32. Wight, The Peacock’s Tail and the Reputation Reflex.

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to do. If art, like chocolate (which is much more immediately relevant to survival), stimulates the reward centres, what is special about art? Or is this why chocolate-box art is so popular: it marries two sources of reward? And there are other forms of showing off that seem to be likely to pull more chicks more reliably. Building up one’s muscles in a gym, making a load of money and driving an expensive car beat the pants off Beethoven’s creation of his late quartets as responses to the evolutionary imperative. The eight years James Joyce spent on Ulysses would seem to be a biological scandal of the first water. And, by the way, the lady who eventually became Mrs Joyce didn’t like it. What is striking about truly great artists is how much they are concerned with their art, how much they love the medium and the opportunities and challenges it provides, and, relatively speaking, how little they are concerned with the material benefits it brings. Shakespeare’s plays are just too good – ridiculously, unnecessarily good – at every level, in ways I hardly need to spell out, to be explained by his desire for the material advancement that would attract mates. The lines that he wrote to be just about heard or overheard by a noisy, pongy crowd, who may have come to the theatre for quite other purposes (although he was immensely popular), somehow manage to repay a lifetime of attention, and can be mined forever for meanings without the rift running out of ore. The gulf between what Shakespeare would have had to have achieved in order to deliver on contract and what he actually achieved is poignant testimony to an artistic ambition that demands to be understood in terms of something that goes beyond the requisites of the commission. Examples – numerous even in the era of the patron, the prince and the jobbing artist – of creative activity that delivers crazily beyond contract suggests another aim than material advancement and pulling chicks. Artists have suffered – starvation, contempt, neglect – for their art. Hardly the biologically correct thing to do. Great artists are more often biological losers than they are alpha semen spreaders. At any rate, as Massey (who has acquainted himself fully with the literature of neuroaesthetics, having been initially impressed by its claims) says, “neuroscience … has little to say about the unique qualities of any single work”.33 To show “the neurological processes by which we respond to colours, luminance, surface and depth, edges and angles, and straight lines”

33. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 18.

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will not take us very far into understanding art, particularly as there are no neurons that respond specifically to curves whereas they are hardly absent from the history of what is to be found painted on canvases or shaped in marble. If we really were Zeki-zombies, it is difficult to see how we could derive so much pleasure from those curvaceous items that have been such constant presences in the art of the past (i.e. clouds). Just how crude neuroaesthetics can be is illustrated by Onians’s claim that artists make portraits of others look like themselves because mirror neurons (those explain-alls again!) influence the movements of their hands. He illustrates this with Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait of Thomas Masaryk, which, he claims, looks like the artist.34 To me it looks like the sitter. And if mirror neurons were so influential in this way, it is difficult to imagine how a male artist could portray a woman, a young artist an old one, or any human artist portray an animal, a plant or a rock. When the hype settles, we shall see neuroaesthetics for the sterile exercise it is. If a work of art is treated as an isolated stimulus or set of stimuli – so that Mondrian’s paintings, for example (which seem to lend themselves most readily to a neurological analysis) are merely devices for the preferential excitation of V4 pathways using an emphasis on lines – then they, and those who enjoy them, will be divorced from their cultural context, and from their individual and shared history. This scorched-earth approach is not only reductive but also mechanistic: if Mondrian’s paintings work in a certain way, it is difficult, as Massey pointed out, to see how they took so long to be accepted, how different people evaluate them differently, and how we react to them differently on different occasions. They leave me pretty cold (although I like the idea of them); is this because I suffer from Mondrian Receptor Deficiency Syndrome? Only neuroaestheticians need to be told that works of art are not merely sources of stimuli that can be understood as acting on bits of the brain. More than anything else, they engage us as whole human beings. Their impact will reach deep into our personal depths, which in turn will have been shaped, although not entirely determined, by the post-Pleistocene, neurally irreducible culture in which we have grown up. Works of art, what is more, are in dialogue with the world in which they are produced, with other works in the same and different genres and with the earlier and later works of the same artist. They invite us not only to have experiences

34. Onians, Neuroarthistory, 172.

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but to examine those experiences: not merely to have visual tingles but to think about what is before us. In the case of representational works, we are encouraged to reflect on what is shown, to accept or refuse the symbols, to rejoice in the beauty of the world or deplore its horror. Rembrandt’s series of self-portraits is not merely a parade of coloured surfaces but a profound meditation on the tragedy and beauty of the course of life. An array of pixels or voxels lit up, or not, hardly captures that. Onians’s art lover, Zeki’s art appreciator, is an ahistoric brain, whose activity is not qualitatively different from that of a chimpanzee. Even if, as Massey points out, neurology were “of great value in exploring the ‘how’ of aesthetic processes” it would not be of much use in exploring “the ‘why’ or the ‘what for’, or in helping to decide whether one work of art is of greater value than another”.35 As even Zeki admits, according to Onians, who identifies Zeki as the hero of his Neuroarthistory, our knowledge of the brain is “certainly not enough to account in neurological terms for aesthetic experience”, although Zeki’s approach “enables him to set aside the emotional content of art, its ability to disturb, arouse and inspire”.36 No comment is needed; except perhaps to add that this still gives neuroaesthetics too much credit. By virtue of the fact that it aims to explain the power of visual art in terms of the basic functions of the visual system, it cannot clearly differentiate art from ordinary perception; which is why, perhaps, as Massey says, “even the most sophisticated book on art and neurology starts to look like Keith Kay’s Little Giant Book of Optical Illusions” and the illustrative works of art “begin to look like illustrations for an ophthalmology textbook”.37 The case for not reducing the production of art to brain tingles is even more decisive than that for the appreciation of art. A work of art is produced over days and weeks and months or even years, and may be visited and revisited, envisioned and revised. The mature work is the result of endless attention to the craft at the highest level of self-consciousness and involves the assimilation and overcoming of the influences of other artists, and responding to, or resisting, the advice of others. The artist is aware of one or more additional parties: the patron, the buyer, the public, to whom the result is in some sense addressed (howsoever fashionably and/or hypocritically an artist may deny this). This is not something to 35. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 18. 36. Onians, Neuroarthistory, 192, emphasis added. 37. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 41.

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which mirror neurons – which are just as busy whether one is learning the art of gurning or the skill of wiping one’s bottom – could make a distinctive contribution.

Neuro-lit-crit

There is an equally thriving industry in the field of neuro-evolutionary literary criticism. This, as I have mentioned already, has caused me considerable sorrow, as two of its leading advocates are critics I have counted as personal friends, as comrades in the 1990s in the struggle against the massive pyramid of bullshit called “literary theory”, and as excellent critics in their own right. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I first became fully aware of the neurological approach to literary criticism through an article by the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt,38 in which she purported to explain why, since she discovered John Donne’s poetry as a schoolgirl in the 1950s, she had found him “so very exciting”. Byatt discussed some of Donne’s most compelling love poems, and in places showed the kind of sensitive attention to the writer’s language and intention that we look for in a good, that is to say helpful, critic. This made it puzzling, indeed exasperating, that the primary concern of her piece was to explain the poems and their effect on her by appealing to contemporary neurophysiology. And it is for this reason that I would like to examine her engagement with neuroscience in more detail. If neuro-lit-crit has anything to commend it, it would be found here. For, in fairness to Byatt, it has to be said that, unlike that of some of her fellow practitioners, her engagement with neuroscience is no mere hand-waving to a discipline that sounds impressive. She has read the theories of a very distinguished French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, with care and attention. Changeux made his professional reputation with studies of the stereochemistry of nicotinic receptors in the brain. He became famous among the wider public in the 1980s, however, with the publication of Neuronal Man, an early manifestation of Neuromania. In this volume, he argued that there was no justification for dividing mental from neuronal activity and

38. Byatt, “Observe the Neurones”.

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that even the spiritual and transcendental aspects of humanity could be understood in terms of the biology of the central nervous system. In Changeux, Byatt found an explanation of the Donne who excited her as a schoolgirl. Yes, Donne is “a pattern-maker – with language”;39 but his verse has its effects by virtue of provoking a certain kind of neuronal activity that Changeux has described. Reading Donne’s poetry leads to the formation of “mental objects”, and the excitement induced by the poetry is due to the specific nature of the mental objects created in the reader. To explain this, Byatt summarizes Changeux’s account of the construction of mental objects from the activation of a large number of neurons in different layers of the brain that all come together: an idea we dismantled in Chapter 3. Changeux’s account is hierarchical. He distinguishes: “the primary percept – a mental object constructed by direct contact with the outside world”; “the image” (an object of memory); “the concept” (memory with diminished sensory content, an “algebra” derived from the isomorphs of perceptual acts); and “linked or associated concepts”. These correspond to increasingly complex contents of consciousness physically realized in ever more complex linkages in the brain. While Byatt admits that we are not “yet within reach of a neuroscientific approach to poetic intricacy”, she reports that she was “convinced on reading Changeux that the neurones Donne excites are largely those of the reinforced linkages of memory, concepts, and learned formal structures like geometry, algebra and language”.40 The poems knock on the right cerebral doors and are given a lavish welcome. She illustrates her theory with accounts of some of Donne’s most wonderful poems, “Air and Angels”, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Cross”. Much of what she says about them could stand up as enraptured readings without reference to brain physiology. And the connection between the neurophysiology and her exposition of the poems is highly tendentious. For example, she claims that Donne, in playing with the idea of “crossing the heart” (in “The Cross”) is “making an elaborate graph, in Changeux’s terms, of images and connections with which to construct a world of ideas – derived oddly and distantly from percepts”.41 “Graph theory”, in fact, is a highly generalized mathematical model in neurobiology that links functional with anatomical development in the 39. Ibid. 40. Byatt, “Observe the Neurones”. 41. Ibid.

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brain in response to experience, and involves the deployment of matrix algebra. The very abstract and general nature of the graphs indicates at once that they could hardly account for something as specific as the effect of Donne’s verse. Even more tendentious is her explanation of why Donne’s poems are so easy to learn by heart, why they convey “the feeling of thought”: their syntactical quirks – such as delaying the verb to the end of a line – gives them a hotline “to the deepest and strongest neuronal reinforced links, where the firing of cells is surest, most frequent, steadiest”.42 This is neuro-speculation rather than neuroscience. What is more, as with the neuroaesthetic approach to painting, it is evident that there is something deeply wrong about invoking rather general neural mechanisms to explain something as specific as the particular excitement produced in a clever and bookish schoolgirl by Donne’s poems. And this is the key point. The range of “mental objects” that Changeux’s theory encompasses is hardly confined to up-market experiences such as those associated with reading poetry. The processes leading up to mental objects – if they really do correspond to distinctive realities and are anything other than artefactual dissections of consciousness – are ubiquitous. Working oneself up into a rage when one discovers that there is no milk in the fridge because some selfish person has drunk the last pint and failed to replace it would involve the same very processes Byatt invokes in explaining the particular impact of the poems of a genius, if such processes do occur. For the mental objects constructed under such irritating circumstances also involve percepts, memory images, abstract concepts and a confection-by-association of them, as one justifies one’s rage and allocates blame, and deploys sophisticated neural algebras that simultaneously locate oneself next to an unsatisfactory fridge and an uncaring world populated with thoughtless people. By adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and another metaphysical poet; between reading the metaphysical poets and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and many other activities – such as getting very cross over missing milk. That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose.

42. Ibid.

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I have focused on Byatt because she is one of the better practitioners of neuro-lit-crit. One doesn’t have to look far to find much worse examples. My favourite, quoted by Massey, is one in which a neuroscientist and a literary critic (Paul Matthews and Jeffrey McQuain) examine the famous moment when Macbeth attempts to clutch the imaginary dagger. This is glossed as “an illustration of what each of us does scores of times each day: reaching and grasping”. The authors go on to explain that “when moving his right hand, an actor playing Macbeth would activate the right cerebellar hemisphere and the left primary cortex, as shown in figure 14” (indeed, as we do when we scratch our noses).43 This, as Massey points out, helps us neither to understand Shakespeare nor to advance our understanding of neurology. There opens up a grim prospect of critics developing an entire lexicon of movements performed by Shakespearean characters (kissing Bottom, doing the Five Men’s Morris, exhorting the troops before the battle of Agincourt, and so on) being translated by the neuro-lit-critic into undergraduate neurophysiology. This is not entirely fanciful. Massey also quotes Mary Thomas Crane’s analysis of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. She describes the structures activated during the formation of its component sentences: [This] probably involved activity first in the occipital, posterior superior parietal, and posterior inferior temporal lobes, central to the generation of mental images, and then in the perisylvian cortex (those regions of the brain located near the sylvian fissure, also called the lateral sulcus), where the images (slings and arrows, arms, sea) and concepts … would be associated with appropriate words and formed into a grammatically acceptable sentence.44 I would take much persuading not to believe that precisely the same structures are implicated when I am forming the sentences expressing my rage that the milk has run out and I am denied my evening cup of coffee, or when I am reading out a laundry list. Byatt might wish to distance herself from such nonsense but it is there, embedded in her neurological approach. What we have in essence

43. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 84, quoting Matthews & McQuain, The Bard on the Brain. 44. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 85, quoting Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 15.

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is a mode of literary criticism that addresses the most complex and rich of human discourses, not with an attention that aims to reflect, or at least respect, that complexity and richness, but with a simplifying discourse whose elements are blobs of the brain (and usually the same blobs), wheeled out time after time. But there is something more important (and more worrying) in Byatt’s neuroaesthetics than its failure to deliver on its mission to explain the distinctive effect of certain poems or of literature at all. By locating aesthetic pleasure in the stand-alone brain, and indeed in small parts of such brains, and invoking data obtained in part from animal experimentation, she and her fellow neuro-lit-critics are performing a reduction that even the most hard-line Marxist literary critics might shrink from. In her discussion of “The Cross”, Byatt argues that the comparison Donne makes between different crosses, including the crossed sutures in the skull containing the brain, “is nonsense at any level of logic except the brain’s pleasure in noticing, or making, analogies”.45 Note that she writes about the brain’s pleasure – not the poet’s pleasure. Donne the poet is reduced to Donne the brain, and the latter is “Anybrain”, formed, of course, in the prehistoric past. Just how reductionist Byatt’s “neuroaesthetic” approach is – in common with many others – is illustrated by her attribution of the force of those wonderfully randy lines from “On His Mistress Going to Bed” to (who would guess it?) the operation of mirror neurons. Byatt thinks they account for the particular erotic charge of the famous lines: “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below”. The fact that mirror neurons were first seen in monkeys watching other monkeys reaching for peanuts should warn us that their activity can hardly contribute much to explaining why Donne’s stanzas should have the particularly intense effect they (sometimes) do. The identification with the poet (or his mistress) and transplanting lustful caresses from the poem to one’s present experience involves much more than mirror neurons operating in a way seen in monkeys. Our enjoyment of those lines owes much to the thrilling transgression of the poet’s demand, its delicious directness in a context (poetry) that is traditionally indirect, complex and subordinated to custom. There is also the “scandal” (to use Roland Barthes’ term)46 of

45. Byatt, “Observe the Neurones”. 46. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 87.

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rhyming, which forges links at the level of sound between words that have quite different meanings, so stitching the lines together. There is the driving rhythm of the second line after the relatively circumspect opening request to “license” the poet’s licentiousness. There is the (verbal – not visual) image of the frantic hand of the poet wanting to possess all of his mistress’ body at once, and itemizing the places he wants to visit. Beyond this, there is the issue of literary taste, of consenting, for all sorts of reasons, to enjoy a work of art, or to be prepared to give it a chance – a second reading, even. We are a long way from mirror neurons, firing when an action is observed with an intention to imitate it, rather than when an imaginary or generic act is read about in the context of a poem that at once respects and thrillingly transgresses the conventions of its genre. If literary criticism is to have any use, it is to be concerned not with putative mechanisms of reader responses but with helping the reader to make sense of, and put into larger context, a work that repays careful attention. And it is to be concerned with evaluation, answering the questions Coleridge says we ought to ask when thinking about a work of literature: what was the author intending to do? How well was it done? Was it worth doing? Neural pathways are not interested in the background and the niceties of hermeneutics. Even less are they concerned with aesthetic judgement. As Nicholas Carr writes, “Whether a person is interested in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are the same”.47

Literature in the lab

In the course of my response to Byatt’s piece,48 I somewhat ironically remarked that I would be interested, given that she had embraced a new discipline that made empirical claims, to know what experiments she might devise to support them. Did she envisage a generation of white-coated critics, dissecting rat brains with one hand and texts with the other, and congresses on experimental neuroaesthetics? I did not realize that moves were afoot in that direction until my friend Philip Davis drew my dismayed attention to work he was doing in that area.

47. Carr, The Shallows, 72. 48. Tallis, “License my Roving Hands”. The discussion Byatt’s piece here is based on my response published in the Times Literary Supplement.

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Towards the end of his otherwise excellent Sudden Shakespeare, Davis argues that the impact of Shakespeare’s verse depends on the specific effects certain syntactic constructions have on the nervous system. When, as often happens, Shakespeare uses a noun as a verb or an adverb as a noun (a technique known in the business as “functional shift”), as in the phrase “he godded me” from Coriolanus (a verb my spell-checker chokes on), or “the dark backward” of time in The Tempest, we are pleasurably surprised. Davis suggests that this is due to “heightened brain activity”, and this “may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic effect on their readers”.49 Davis has gone beyond mere speculation and (with apologies to Dr Johnson) “the strong contagion of the white coat”. He has collaborated with neuroscientists in his own university to do studies to examine brain electricity with EEG, and is planning further studies with magneto-encephalography and (inevitably) fMRI. He has reported on his first results.50 Using a group of sentences, one of which contained a functionally shifted word, a grammatical anomaly that did not impair the sense of the sentence, he found an increase in the amplitude of p600 – a particular wave on the evoked response to stimuli-registering syntactic violations – but no change in the N400, which is associated with semantic processing. The brain, he argued, was allowed to know what the word meant before it understood its function in a sentence and this forced the brain to work backwards before fully grasping what Shakespeare is trying to say. He concluded from this that Shakespeare’s language is so powerful because his grammatical transgressions pressure the brain “into working at a higher adaptive level of conscious evolution”. This would be equally true, of course, if we were straining to understand speech that was marked by grammatical transgressions due to idleness or incompetence. The claim that this gives us insight into the unique potency of Shakespeare’s writing is unfounded. Let us leave aside the facts that we do not know how to interpret changes in p600 even in neurological terms and that there are many other surprising experiences that might influence the height of p600. Instead, let us ask ourselves whether examining a particular linguistic trick or tool in isolation will allow us to see more deeply into

49. Davis, Sudden Shakespeare. See www.liv.ac.uk/news/press_releases/2006/12/shakespeare_ brain.htm (accessed April 2011). 50. Most accessibly in “The Shakespeared Brain”. The primary data are reported in Thierry et al., “Event-Related Potential Characterisation of the Shakespearean Functional Shift”.

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Shakespeare’s genius. First, the grammatical anomaly would be of interest only in the service of an observation or an utterance that carried especial potent meaning. “Godded” adds only a little to the impact of the line in Coriolanus. Second, the line itself makes sense only as part of its revelation of character, its contribution to the unfolding of the plot, to the dramatic interactions on the stage, and to the effect of the play as an illustration of human life. Third, the vast majority of the lines of Shakespeare do not rely on such grammatical transgressions. They are few and far between and they are often absent from some of the great passages. The syntactic tricks may add to the energy of the language but they do so only as auxiliars to the greater unfolding sense. Shakespeare’s genius has little to do with brain-teasing. Only where language is disconnected from the purposes it serves – in the degenerate prose of, say, John Lyly’s Euphues (1578) – does it make sense to examine it in isolation, when it takes on the character of a trick or an ornament to hide what might be rhetorical emptiness. What’s more, functional shift is widespread in language, instantiated in the distinctly non-poetic observation that someone “ballsed something up”. The eighteenth-century satirist William Combe dispatched an impoverished Dr Syntax in 1809 to the Lake District on his grey mare Grizzle. The good doctor vowed: “I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, / And picturesque it everywhere”.51 And the surprise or double-take is evident in many utterances, including, for example: “Rapidly righting with his uninjured hand, he managed to prevent the canoe from hitting the rocks”. As Massey points out, “no matter how many neurobiological universals we identify as contributing to our general response to art, they never determine our particular response to any particular work”.52 (Such is the attraction of neuroscience, however, that even this eminently sensible and perceptive critic cannot resist speculating that “oxytocin may have some role in the pleasure associated with the experience of metaphor”!53 What a versatile molecule; it not only has a hand in the pleasure of breastfeeding, in causing uterine contraction, and in the female orgasm – and in promoting trust and cementing long-term relationships – but also in helping us to enjoy innovative uses of language!) To Shakespeare we bring not just a brain attuned to tricks but ourselves, our experience, our knowledge of the world and of ourselves, our lives. And we are rewarded by seeing those things 51. Quoted in Campbell-Johnston, “Wild Thing, You Make Our Hearts Sing”. 52. Massey, The Neural Imagination, 143. 53. Ibid.

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illuminated by a stronger light than is afforded by our own reflections or unaided consciousness. This is remote from the energization of a brain by syntactic anomalies causing extra tingles. What’s more, the reduction of the impact of Shakespearean language to such tingles leaves two things unexplained. First, why do all those who encounter Shakespeare’s language not tingle in the same way? This was the question occasioned by neuralizing explanations of Mondrian and other visual artists. If we respond to Shakespeare’s language with neurological universals, why is the response not universal?54 Second, in what respect is the experience of great language, with or without syntactic anomalies, different from that of other stimuli such as drugs, alcohol, sex, nasty surprises or loud music, and regarded as worth teaching to young people in Departments of English Literature?55

Evolutionary criticism

To neuralize the experience of art, to reduce it to a succession of separate sensations, of bonbons for bonobos, overlooks its deeper purpose: to bring together things from the four quarters of our consciousness, and to link the small facts that detain us with the great facts that enclose us.56 More importantly, art speaks to needs – such as for example, to make a larger and more complete sense of our world, of our lives, of our destiny – that are remote from those that are experienced by apes and centipedes, which are not even aware of their mortality. That is why we sometimes argue bitterly about the merits of different works and why we often try to justify our tastes by linking them with some notion of a fundamental good. Indeed, aesthetics proper may be seen as the (probably doomed) endeavour to root our preferences in an understanding of our nature and its true needs.

54. This applies even more obviously to Byatt’s neural story, in which she claims that Donne’s poetic techniques – such as delaying the verb to the end of a line – give his verses a hotline “to the deepest and strongest neuronal reinforced links, where the firing of cells is surest, most frequent, steadiest” (Byatt, “Observe the Neurones”). How is it that most people can escape their potent charm? 55. Pinker – doyen of evolutionary psychology – has argued that the arts are equivalent to masturbation and the taking of recreational drugs: clever ways of tickling up the brain’s pleasure centres; pleasure technologies (How the Mind Works, “The Meaning of Life” (!), 524–6). 56. See my Hunger, “The Fourth Hunger”, 99–126.

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These objections are particularly relevant to critics who appeal to evolutionary theory to uncover the true (but hitherto hidden) meaning or purpose of literature. Evolutionary criticism takes as its starting-point the truism that storytelling may have been of benefit to mankind. As Boyd writes: Art is a specifically human adaptation … It offers tangible advantages for human survival and reproduction, and it derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among animals with flexible behaviours …57 [O]ur fondness for storytelling has sharpened social cognition, encouraged cooperation, and fostered creativity.58 This may be so. But it hardly identifies what is special about great works of literature and what is differently special about different works of literature. Perhaps that is not the intention of evolutionary criticism, in which case, it hardly amounts to literary criticism. There is, however, another problem with any approach that sees literature as a tool for survival. If writing is any good, it should rise above the off-the-shelf automated perceptions, unreflective judgements and narrow consciousness of ordinary gossip. Magnanimous, ironical, questioning, wide awake in every respect, it is profoundly different from ordinary storytelling, which, by the way, as often blunts our social sensibilities by simplifying other people and their worlds, encouraging competition and envy and conflict, and fostering imitation, as it awakens deep humanity. At any rate, a broadbrush theory of literature, which narrows the gap between pub prattle and War and Peace, will hardly sharpen literary criticism. Ultimately, it seems doubtful that sophisticated, more challenging works of art contribute to social solidarity of the kind that would optimize the chances of the genome replicating. Worse still, an organism that devotes many hours to the solitary pastime of reading, and reading-inspired daydreaming, would surely be less fitted for the hurlyburly of everyday life than one satisfied by the one-sentence paragraphs of the tabloid newspapers. In short, it would be another evolutionary loser. The use of the word “adaptation” to close the gap between storytelling

57. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 1. 58. Ibid., back cover.

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as a means of social solidarity among hominids and truly great works of literature, should, of course, put us on red alert. Joseph Carroll, a leading evolutionary critic and author of many papers and several hefty volumes,59 has argued that “knowledge is a biological phenomenon, that literature is a form of knowledge, and that literature itself is thus a biological phenomenon”.60 This is his rationale for examining the classics through the lenses of Darwinism and evolutionary psychology. It is wrong. Knowledge is not a biological phenomenon: only humans hold “That x is the case” and only in the human world are states of affairs translated into facts held in common.61 Even if knowledge were merely “a biological phenomenon”, that which is distinctive about literature would not be captured by describing it as “a form of knowledge”. Is poetry usefully described as “a form of knowledge”? If it is, it is not knowledge in the way that a maintenance manual or a telephone directory or a scientific paper is a knowledge. There is a world of difference between Shakespeare’s sonnets and a book of fishing tips or an exhaustive list of the causes of chronic cough. So Carroll’s conclusion is based on two false premises. The first overlooks the difference between (uniquely human) propositional awareness and animal sentience. The second illustrates the tendency to homogenize or to eradicate the differences between things that are profoundly different: not merely between individual works of literature but between works of literature and all other written discourses. Such an approach is hardly going to help us to see a particular work more clearly, just as Dutton’s view that sees art from the standpoint of 200,000 years ago is unlikely to help us to discriminate between a poor and a great work of art, or even to think interestingly about the differences between landscapes by Giotto, Gainsborough and Anselm Keifer. Undaunted, Carroll states, “There is no work of literature written anywhere in the world, at any time, by any author, that is outside the scope of a Darwinian analysis”.62 I suppose that makes sense: blunt instruments are not troubled by fine distinctions – such as those between the works of Jane Austen and Jeffrey Archer, or between great writing and mediocre imitations of the same, or even between good writing and garbage – that have detained unenlightened earlier generations of critics. It seems unlikely

59. 60. 61. 62.

E.g. Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory. Ibid., 1. See my The Knowing Animal. Carroll, “Human Nature and Literary Meaning”, 79.

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that we should find a biological basis for the production and consumption of complex discourses in the different activities of bits of the brain that were laid down even before discourse began, and which (size apart) were evident in our shared pongid kin 5,000,000 years ago. (Biologism, by the way, represents an astonishing volte-face for the literary critical brigade, who for many years did not countenance any suggestion that human life had biological roots and argued that even sexual dimorphism – man versus woman – was entirely socially constructed.) The a priori expectation that evolutionary criticism, which looks at literature from as remote a distance as one could imagine, would be unlikely to advance the task of interpreting, evaluating and illuminating individual works (and serious works of literature are individual to the point of singularity) or, more broadly, of mediating between the reader and the writer, is confirmed when we see evolutionary critics on the case. Carroll examines Wuthering Heights not for its style or descriptive power, for its literary virtues, but for its plot, after he has subjected it to a Reader’s Digest-style digestion.63 He concludes that the motor of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is the fact that they were raised as siblings and so were “genetically programmed to find sexual relations distasteful”. With respect, I don’t think that tells us much about the particular genius of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece. And I don’t think that we needed Brontë’s genius to point that out to us. (And besides, it is not always true: cousinage est un dangereux voisinage, as the old aphorism had it; and the transition from childhood friendship to adult sexual relations is often negotiated without the kind of agonizing storm and stress that characterizes the evolving relationship between the two protagonists.) In Mimesis and the Human Animal, Robert Storey focuses on the roots of tragedy and comedy. He examines “laughter and smiling – universal reactions of human beings to specifiable classes of stimuli – as evolved responses of an apparently adaptive kind”.64 His imaginary reader is linked with the crab-eating monkey, in whom “any sudden, intense, or discrepant stimulus may lead … to laughter and smiling”.65 A gaze that assimilates monkey behaviour to the appreciation of Shakespearean comedy would, it seems to me, to be more than somewhat blurred.

63. Carroll, “The Cuckoo’s History”. 64. Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal, 158. 65. Ibid., 162, on Mary Rothbart’s “model for laughter”.

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These two examples illustrate something well expressed by William Deresiewicz: that “Darwinian criticism sets out to say something specific, only to end up telling us something general”.66 He discusses an essay by Boyd that tries to explain Shakespeare’s pre-eminence as a playwright by pointing out that he portrays the sociobiological dynamics of small groups. So too, of course, do nearly all novels and plays, including the great majority that are mediocre: The Valley of the Dolls as well as Middlemarch. Increasingly, novelists have become obsessed by neuroscience. As Marco Roth has noted, “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel – the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind – has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain”.67 Whether or not this is true, there are many critics who wish it were so or think it should be. And they praise novelists of the past for being neuro-novelists avant la lettre. In Proust was a Neuroscientist,68 the novelist, an incomparable observer and analyst of himself and of the world, is patted on the back for doing intuitively and patchily what is now being done objectively and systematically by neuroscientists: understanding the mind. As Roth said, if Proust were a neuroscientist (an assumption that requires us to broaden the notion of neuroscience and narrow our understanding of Proust’s observations of his own and other’s minds), this would not be in virtue of “cribbing from contemporary case studies, but by observing himself and others outside of any consulting room. Surely the way for a novelist to be a neuroscientist today is still to anticipate rather than follow the discoveries of brain science”:69 and to visit places that lie, and will always lie, outside the scope of brain or any other science. None of the arts is safe from the attention of the neuro-evolutionary critics. Music, we are told, emerged through the process of sexual selection. Geoffrey Miller, for example, argues that some of our most human mental abilities – art, music, language, kindness, intelligence and creativity – evolved not just for survival but for reproduction, and that animal bodies and behaviour evolve largely as advertisements for their genes.70 By singing (and possibly, although not in my case, dancing) a man demonstrates his fitness to a woman. (How badly the greatest artists – Bach, Beethoven,

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Deresiewicz, “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism”. Roth, “The Rise of the Neuronovel”. Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist. Roth, “The Rise of the Neuronovel”, emphasis added. Miller, The Mating Mind.

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Bartók – fared in this respect! They must have been too busy doing their art to remember its purpose.) While it is almost certainly the case that artistic ambitions in males are often fuelled by a desire to impress the female of the species, this “peacock’s tail” explanation fails at four levels. The most obvious is that it does not explain the role of women as producers of art: as singers, and instrumentalists and (more recently recognized) as composers, writers and painters. Or does the human peahen also have a tail? Second, there is little or no connection between the propensity to show off and actual talent. Mediocrities may be as successful in advertising their wares as the truly talented; indeed, it is not unusual for the genius to suffer neglect and poverty, as we have noted. The untalented are more likely to spend time promoting their worthless wares. Third, the truly committed artist will often be led along evolutionarily unsuccessful paths by his determination to realize his vision. These points are connected with the failure of the “peacock’s tail” theory to take account of the intrinsic value of the work of art or the values that are expressed in it. And, finally, while peacocks’ tails evolve in a particular narrow direction, art has intrinsic structures, cultural influences and generic constraints that are in no way comparable to the influences that direct biological evolution. Another manifestation of the evolutionary approach to music is to suggest that it promotes social bonding; but this, again, would not predict the actual content of music and its internal evolution towards ever more varying forms. Much music is actually socially disruptive. In rebellion against earlier manifestations, it may also raise two fingers to other parts of humanity. No one, surely, will suggest that Beethoven’s late quartets had a net effect in promoting social cohesion – and hence the replicative capacity of the genome – either when they were written or even subsequently. For every individual who is bound tighter to his fellow men by such music, as many, or more, are alienated. Music may divide elders from youngsters, man from woman, and may create as many divisions as it fosters bonds. The lives of those in cultures in which art is important are distinguished from those of creatures, including our fellow men, struggling to survive on the margin of subsistence. They spend a lot of time doing things that are not relevant to survival. And humans, as William James pointed out, can pass many hours behaving in a biologically useless way, as they have a considerable amount of free disposable energy. The assumption that these biologically useless activities are really disguised expressions of biological drives, as if we are driven by neurotic genes that cannot believe the organism’s luck, and cannot give up fretting about survival, is absurd. Just how 304

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absurd is clear when we think of things that we tend to give up, or which lose their attraction, when we are exposed to direct biological threat. Art becomes of less compelling importance when we are hungry or in pain. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the purpose of art; I have done this in several places.71 For the present, suffice it to note that it is connected with two linked features that are unique to human consciousness: our awareness of our own mortality; and a dissatisfaction that runs through the very consciousness of “the explicit animal” – a sense of the incompleteness of meaning. The former accounts for the tragic sense that haunts the greatest art. The latter is perhaps more difficult to express succinctly. Here goes. We are in the curious condition of being creatures that have woken to a greater or lesser extent out of the state of an organism. Half-awakened, we are constantly engaged in making explicit sense of our fellow humans and of the overpoweringly huge world in which we find ourselves. This sense remains tantalizingly incomplete and stubbornly local. With it comes the feeling that we have not fully appreciated our own existence, not fully realized that we are, or the scale and scope of what we are and of the world we live in. Everything in us falls short of what we know of our condition. To feel this is to experience a kind of existential numbness. This numbness may present in different ways but it is most evident when we seek out experience for its own sake; then the numbness is felt as a mismatch between experience and the idea we had of it when we sought it out. Our experiences seem insufficiently connected: they do not add up as, with increasing haste, we move from one thing to another. We are condemned to be deployed in a world made up of small spaces and tiny moments, in which we pass on from one thing to another, without ever being entirely in any of them. It seems almost as if we are fated to die without ever having been fully there or ever having fully grasped our being there. We cannot close the gap between our experiences and the life and world of which they are a part, between what we are at any given instant and what we know. It is this that leads us to seek, not entirely consciously, a kind of consummation of consciousness, most completely developed in the mystic idea of supreme mindfulness, or a hunger for finality, for some kind of ultimate cognitive arrival. It is this hunger that art may address. It is a profound expression of our freedom to make meaning; indeed, JeanPaul Sartre once described the goal of art as being “to recover this world by

71. See e.g. my Newton’s Sleep, “The Difficulty of Arrival”, and Hunger, “The Fourth Hunger”.

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giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom”,72 something at the greatest possible distance from a biological prescription, answering needs beyond biological necessity. Now, apparently, evolutionary theorists and neural critics think they know better: art is something that makes the hard wires in our hard-wired brains reverberate. How could we have been so mistaken?

GETTING THE BRAIN OFF THE STAND

All of this may seem pretty harmless stuff. After all, art can survive the craziest and most reductionist critical theories. Marxist aesthetics in the West did not crush the creativity of great artists, although, when aesthetic theory was backed up by the threat and reality of starvation, imprisonment and murder in the Eastern bloc, it did constrain them somewhat. And the nonsense that was structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory was ignored by most writers and the vast majority of readers in the decades in which it dominated the academic study of literature. So we can smile at neuroaesthetic nonsense and move on. There are, however, other areas in which the pseudo-neurosciences may actually cause real damage to human institutions and actual human beings. These include the courts of law and those seeking justice within them. At first sight, neuro-law may seem liberal and friendly. The idea that we are biological sleepwalkers, acting out an agenda dictated by our evolved brains, may seem to offer salvation. Imagine you have left someone for dead or you are confronted with a person whose life you have ruined through raping them, and the likely outcome of the trial, if you are proved responsible, is a long time in the slammer. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to lay the blame for your wicked action at the door of your brain, an organ programmed thousands of years before you were born, for whose activity you are not responsible. Supposing you could say, “It was my brain made me do it, your honour”? Your terrible deed would then simply be one material event among others in a material world and you would be free and your conscience clear.

72. Sartre, What is Literature?, 41.

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The philosophy behind this plea is, of course, applied patchily. “My brain made me do it” is usually invoked to excuse actions that will attract moral disapproval or legal sanction. People don’t normally deny responsibility for good actions or for neutral actions such as pouring out a cup of tea at a tea party or just getting a breath of fresh air after a long time at the computer. I am more likely to say “My brain made me do it” when I drink fourteen pints of beer in a pub and then reduce the establishment to rubble because I have been denied a fifteenth than when I have one pint of beer and talk to my friends about epistemology. In other words, there tends to be a bit of pick and mix: strong grounds, I would say, for treating this particular plea of mitigation with some suspicion – suspicion we need to keep in play when we consider recent developments in “neuro-law”. Academics (in both neuroscience and the law), practising lawyers and members of the judiciary are taking an increasing interest in what brain science is supposed to be able to tell us about criminal liability and (as we shall see) in new neuroscience-based technologies to determine whether or not a defendant is telling the truth. As Carter Snead has observed, cognitive neuroscience, with those brain scans that impress the impressionable, “has captured the imagination of those who make, enforce, interpret, and study the law”.73 This is particularly true in the US, where neuro-law is big business and growing bigger. The defence “my brain made me do it” is not, of course, entirely new. It is a variant of the plea of diminished responsibility due to impairment of mental function. What is new is the use of neuroscience, in particular functional imaging, to extend the application of this defence beyond the kinds of gross and obvious cases that began with the M’Naughton Rules. It is perfectly obvious that, if someone is hearing voices that tell them that unless they kill a particular individual God will punish them forever for disobedience, or a massacre will not be averted, they cannot be held responsible for the murder they have committed. The perpetrator is the victim of a brain illness and is more appropriately treated as a patient requiring medical care rather than as a criminal deserving of punishment. Similar considerations apply to people with the automatisms associated (rarely) with epilepsy, to individuals who have sustained frontal lobe damage due to head injury or tumours, as a result of which they may be disinhibited, and to people with serious mental illnesses.

73. Snead, “Neuroimaging and Capital Punishment”.

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In Chapter 1 we discussed the case of Phineas Gage, who, so the story goes, changed, as a result of injury to the frontal cortex of his brain, from a prudent, reliable, individual of impeccable manners into an extremely dubious character – impulsive, unreliable and disinhibited. This, and much subsequent research, has led to the conclusion that the frontal lobes are responsible for, among other things, self-control, conscience and restraining the impulse to act on one’s appetites in the light of possible bad consequences for one’s self or others. Indeed, it has been suggested that acceptable behaviour is the result of the correct balance between the amygdaloid body, where our appetites and aggression are supposedly housed, and the frontal lobes, where they are constrained or channelled into pro-social rather than antisocial behaviour. Studies using various kinds of brain scan, including fMRI and PET, have demonstrated, so it is claimed, that the balance between those two parts of the brain is altered in criminals: the amygdala is too active and/or the frontal lobe is underactive. For example, Adrian Raine found that the brains of a group of individuals with antisocial personality disorder had a reduced amount of gray matter and neural activity in the prefrontal area.74 Other studies have shown that such people, who have increased impulsiveness, have less activation of inhibitory areas in the cingulate gyrus of the frontal lobes. Most importantly, fMRI scanning can demonstrate putative abnormalities of brain function that had previously gone undetected. It is no surprise, then, that there are “neuro-lawyers” seeking to extend the scope of diminished responsibility due to brain abnormality, even in the absence of clinical evidence of insanity, on the basis of brain-scan findings. If my brain scan shows that the balance between the potential for impulsiveness and aggression originating from the amygdala and the control of this drive by the orbito-frontal region is disturbed or not up to the mark, then I can claim that my bad behaviour, which had disastrous consequences, was not my fault at all. I am the unlucky owner of a brain in which the mechanisms for inhibiting violence or impulsiveness behaviour are impaired. As the cognitive neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Megan S. Steven have observed: “Defence lawyers are looking for that one pixel in their client’s brain scan that shows an abnormality – some sort of malfunction that would allow them to argue: ‘Harry didn’t do it. His brain

74. See e.g. Raine et al., “Selective Reduction in Prefrontal Glucose in Murderers”.

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did it. Harry is not responsible for his actions’.” 75 A smart criminal retains not only the smartest attorney but also the most powerful neuroimaging devices. There are several problems with this. It is not merely a matter of how accurate the scans are, although this is not a trivial issue, as we have seen when we discussed the falsely high correlations between the arousal of various emotions and the quantity and distribution of brain activity as measured by fMRI. There is also the question as to whether correlation can be translated into causation. But there are more practical grounds for questioning reliance on brain scans. If I claim that, say, balance between the activity in the frontal lobes and in the amygdala is abnormal, this must be judged against a normal population, as must always be the case when we determine the normal range for a particular measure. There has been a pitifully small amount of work done to establish norms and the numbers of subjects studied would not be sufficient to validate a clinical test. Consider a study that claimed to suggest that psychopaths had differently wired brains: the uncinate fasciculus, which connects the amygdala and the frontal cortex, was thinner.76 It attracted huge coverage in the media, even being discussed on the BBC radio programme Today. If you look at the article, however, you will find that only nine subjects were studied. What is more, there was no attempt to control for other life events that might have had an impact on the uncinate fasciculus – such as being treated differently for bad behaviour or sustaining injuries in fights or substance abuse – things that might figure in a psychopath’s CV. There are no grounds for assuming that scans can trump evidence derived from traditional sources, such as the individual’s behavioural track record and upbringing and all the other sorts of things a psychological or psychiatric report would investigate. After all, scanning techniques, as far as they have been assessed at all, rely on assigning individuals to different populations (normal or impaired) by the conventional means. If brain scans are a new gold standard, they depend on the platinum standards established by ordinary judgements. Just how unhelpful scans are as forensic tools, except in well-recognized cases of serious cerebral damage or disease, is demonstrated by a report from the American Psychological Association of the “anatomical immaturity” of

75. Gazzaniga & Steven, “Neuroscience and the Law”. 76. Craig et al., “Altered Connexions on the Road to Psychopathy”.

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the adolescent brain.77 The areas of the brain supposedly responsible for risk assessment, impulse control and high-level cognition are not fully developed, whereas the areas from which impulsivity and violence are supposed to originate are more active in teenagers than adults. Could this be used to influence assessments of culpability and criminal liability, or to override the judgements and intuitions based on experience and arguments derived from traditional sources? No, because only a minority of adolescents commit serious crimes. As Stephen Morse has expressed it, “whether adolescents are sufficiently less rational on average than adults”, to treat them differently is “a normative legal question and not a scientific or psychological question”.78 Scanning may increase the detection rates of putative cerebral impairment but the fact that it is possible to extend the diagnosis of brainbased mental disturbance beyond those who have undeniable pathologies to entire populations, such as adolescents, shows how little the technique can contribute to identifying those in whom it is appropriate to file a plea of mitigation on the grounds of diminished responsibility. There are, as we have seen, clear-cut examples of the brain calling the shots, as when someone has an epileptic fit. But these unusual cases underline the differences between those situations where brain activity is the primary cause and others where it is not, as when we carry out actions in full consciousness and with a clear end in view, an end necessary to put together the components of the action: the difference between my having fits and, say, arranging for the children to be cared for while I go to the doctor at the appointed time several weeks hence to ask her advice about my fits. But the boundary between brain-caused events and person-originated deliberate actions is not sharp, or even continuous, and scans will only rarely help to allocate behaviour to one or other of these categories. People may have brain illnesses that cause them to behave oddly, and perhaps violently, but in ways that are as elaborate as going to see the doctor. (Think of the behaviour of a person acting violently owing to paranoia.) There is not always a clear distinction between aggressive behaviour when it is due to mental illness, on the one hand, and, on the other, when it is due to what we might called “ethical disability” following appalling childhood abuse and privation that has conditioned the individual to expect the worst of other people and to believe he can survive only by behaving badly.

77. Cited in Snead, “Neuroimaging and Capital Punishment”. 78. Morse, “Psychopathy and Criminal Responsibility”.

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Even so, we can still maintain the distinction between a purely braincaused event that results in behaviours that are inconsistent with my character, intentions, aims, traits and so on (such as an epileptic fit), and an action that is part of a pattern of behaviour over time (such as is seen in psychopaths). And when we have made this distinction, we may also apply moral judgements as to whether or not the actor should be held responsible. No one is going to hold me responsible for having an epileptic fit; but I most certainly will be held responsible for driving illegally, and against medical advice, after omitting to take my medication and causing a fatal crash. In other words, even in the case of clear-cut brain causes of abnormal behaviour, there is sometimes the possibility of controlling that behaviour or its consequences. This is equally true in cases of addiction. By the time you have reached the fifteenth pint, your sozzled brain may be calling the shots. But it was you who handed yourself over to your brain, either on that occasion, or on the many occasions before you became an alcoholic, when you chose to drink unwisely. Equally there is plenty of opportunity, between episodes of the famous “red mist”, to learn how to control the red mist and avoid those situations where it rises up and you beat up your wife, children or the chap who seems to be looking at you in a funny way. We can, in short, regulate our character, and modify those propensities that we might like to blame on the structure and function of our brains (or our hormones, or our genes), by cultivating good habits in non-emergency situations. We can train ourselves ethically. It may seem paradoxical that we can act on ourselves in this way, but anyone who sets out to learn something, or to acquire a new skill, does precisely that, as we observed in the case of the person training himself to catch a ball. We have this capacity because, as we have emphasized throughout, we are not isolated brains. We can get a purchase on ourselves in part through the collective vision we train on ourselves; we assume an external view, the view of anyone, whether we are following instructions as to how to get to the pub, or seeking assistance in controlling a drink habit, and from this standpoint we can act on ourselves. The levers we pull are multiplied and strengthened by our being part of a community of minds who will support us in different ways in endeavours to behave pro-socially. It isn’t a matter of being brainwashed but rather of assenting to a desirable course of action, and subscribing to a principle. This is possible because of all those things we discussed particularly in “The human world” in Chapter 6; we are complex, temporally deep selves in complex, temporally deep worlds, not chains of reflexes, or of instinctive reactions, in a permanent present tense. The margin of freedom within 311

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which we operate will vary; it will be far less in someone who has severe brain damage or a severe mental illness, or has had an abominable childhood, than in someone who is not so extensively deprived. The moral and legal assessment of our behaviour is, therefore, best conducted by the less glamorous process of history-taking than by brain scans that simply give snapshots of a small part of brain activity in response to very simple stimuli. In any case, scans will never automate moral judgement, or the decision as to whether it should be applied. Supposing a scan showed that my amygdala was overactive or my frontal lobe was underactive: could this not be because of a habit of self-indulgence or my taking no effort to control myself? The only way to be sure that we are entirely and unequivocally justified in shifting the blame from the sweating individual in the ill-fitting suit to the contents of his cranium would be to adopt a whole-hog determinism. “My brain made me do it” would then apply not only when the defendant was trying to kill his spouse (because a red mist had spurted up, like oil from an uncapped deep water well, out of his amygdala) but also when he was taking a bunch of flowers to his elderly aunt or talking to the lawyer acting on his behalf. If we extend the range of those circumstances under which we pass responsibility on to our brains, we are in danger of seeing everyone’s actions as being the product of this impersonal force appropriating a bit of our biography.79 And there would be no reason why we should stop at our brains. If my actions are unchosen effects, why confine their causal ancestry to a piece of matter in my skull? The brain itself, being a material object, is merely a conduit for effects of causes: it is causally wired into nature at large. “My brain made me do it” therefore means that (ultimately) “The Big Bang made me do it”. Neuro-determinism, as we have seen, is not fundamentally different from determinism tout court. We arrive at the position expressed by Einstein in a statement to the Spinoza Society in 1932: “human beings, in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion”.80 This is a sentiment that would have been echoed by the patient whom the writer and psychiatrist Anthony Daniels

79. “The philosopher Zeno was once flogging a slave who had stolen some goods. ‘But I was fated to steal,’ the slave protested. ‘Yes and to be beaten too,’ Zeno responded. He might have added, ‘And I to beat you’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VII:23). 80. Einstein Archives, 33-291. Einstein didn’t deliver the invited lecture, preferring to make a statement instead.

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reports as telling him (with respect to fracas in which much damage was done to persons and property): “The beer went mad”.81 If you are going to blame something other than yourself, it seems as reasonable to blame the alcohol that acted on the brain as the brain that is acted on. One could even accuse the sugar and the yeast that made the alcohol of being “jointly and severally” at fault. But the rot does not stop there. If we are remorselessly consistent, we should give up at least four of the words in the short statement: “My brain made me do it”. “Made” and “do” disappear, because neither I nor my brain is an agent. A brain, after all, seems less likely to be an agent than a person. At any rate, in attempting to excuse myself of agency, I cannot displace it to another location in a causal net. The very distinction between events that are mere happenings and those that are actions is lost. This is obvious. Less obvious is the fact that first-person possessives (“my”) and first-person pronouns (“me”) also go. Bits of matter (brains, bodies) in a boundless causal continuum of more bits of matter are ownerless. In the world of physical determinism, there is no toehold for the first-person (or indeed any-person) viewpoint. The viewpoint that calls the brain “mine”, the self that appropriates it as mine, vanishes into a boundless, person-less net of causes and processes unfolding undeflectedly from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch. Without the viewpoint that is me, the brain is not set off from the material world as a source or centre. Why should a brain make me do anything? Why should this impersonal bit of matter single out me? The plea “my brain made me do it” works only if I have a particular brain as both first person – my brain – and third person: a material cause with all the innocence of material causes. Another unlooked-for consequence of this dissolution of personal responsibility is that there would no longer be any point at which individual rights could be applied. There is poetic, if not legal, justice in this: accepting responsibilities and claiming rights are two sides of the same coin. It is no use imagining that rights can be taken care of by society as a whole because the community has a vested (“group-selective”, perhaps) interest in justice, since the idea of justice would be unable to find a home in the brains of individuals as helplessly wired into the material world as the defendant. What is more, the notion that “society” might somehow transcend the individual brain and be the guardian of norms that ensure that we have actions that

81. Daniels, pers. comm.

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are more than the mere effects of causes is not one that hard-line, or indeed consistent, biologism can subscribe to. Or at least it is a massive concession towards the common-sense view. As we saw in Chapter 6, the human world, created out of pooled transcendence, is precisely what Neuromania and Darwinitis overlook, and feel obliged to do so. Biologism takes away rights with responsibilities. To restore them, we have to discard biologism and recognize that persons are not just brains, or their playthings. To suggest that we are possessed by our amygdaloid bodies is simply a materialist updating of appealing to possession by the Devil. There may be other unattractive consequences for the defendant. If the brain is to be blamed, and we rule out the possibility that those who have committed crimes may actively reform their own behaviour, we should perhaps dish out harsher sentences, as Snead has pointed out.82 If my brain made me do it, then I am going to do it again, unless I have a brain transplant. In the absence of available donor organs and the right technology, preventative detention would seem to be in order. In other words, shifting the emphasis from retribution against a blameworthy individual to a forward-looking policy that reduces future harm may argue for longer custodial sentences and even the ultimate custodial sentence of death. An ethically empty brain may require that its owner should be kept away from places where he may cause harm: he should spend more time in the slammer. What a bitterly ironical outcome for those cognitive scientists active in the law who “seek to use the premises and tools of neuroscience – and neuroimaging in particular – to embarrass, undermine, and ultimately overthrow retributive justice as a principle of punishment”!83 The excuse “My brain made me do it” will therefore undermine itself, once it is used as an explain-all. Just in case you think this is the end of its troubles, think again. If it really was “my brain” that “made me do it”, my brain is presumably not me, or the plea would lose its force. For if I were my brain, then “My brain made me do it” would boil down to “I made me do it”, and that would not be much of an excuse. And yet, if I am not identical with my brain, there would not be the kind of irresistible compulsion – the ich kann nicht anders – that neuro-determinism seems to envisage, and which gives the excuse its compelling power. It’s no good saying “a bit of my brain made me do it” and I am the rest of my brain, so my brain is

82. Snead, “Neuroimaging and Capital Punishment”. 83. Ibid.

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guilty and I am innocent, because this pick-and-mix approach would have to modify the mind–brain identity theory in various ad hoc ways. The neuro-mitigation of blame, therefore, has to be used critically and treated largely with suspicion except in those instances where there is unequivocal evidence of grossly abnormal brain function, or abnormal mental function due to clear-cut illness, which may have its origin in brain disease. And scans can only occasionally be of use here, as when they turn up otherwise undiagnosed gross brain pathology. In most cases we can uphold the distinction between the direct consequences of stand-alone brain activity and what we as humans do. The latter is the activity not of a brain but of a person: a brain in a body, in an environment that has both material extensity and temporal depth. This environment is a nexus of significations, with which the person actively engages as an equal partner, imposing and receiving meanings, encountering them, seeking them out and making them. It is a semiosphere and ethiosphere (to use the philosopher Susan Stuart’s term) as well as a biosphere. Maintaining that distinction lies at the root of our commitment to personal development, in particular to active self-improvement, and also to collective advancement (whose monuments we see all around us): to the story of our lives as something that we lead. In short, it lies at the heart of all that humans have been and have achieved. We must, therefore, temper neural mercy with scepticism if we are not going to allow our image of humanity to be effaced in a tidal wave of determinism and if the human world is not to become Herman Melville’s ice palace of sighs.84 And that scepticism must be extended to the inappropriate use of technology, whose glamour and expense conceals its bluntness as a forensic tool. Scepticism is in order also because neuroscience may not always be a friend of the accused, as already indicated. Prosecutors, too, are alert to the persuasive powers of neuroimaging. It seems to the gullible to hold out the possibility of reading minds, so that the truth or otherwise of a defendant’s testimony can be determined. Psychologists, legislators, security forces and many others have long dreamed of 100-per-cent-accurate lie detectors and quacks of many stripes have in the past claimed to have fulfilled their dreams. Some lawyers, and worse still judges, think that the Holy Grail of a 100-per-cent-reliable lie detector is now within reach. On the basis of the belief that it takes more cognitive energy to tell a lie than

84. Melville, Moby Dick, 26.

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to tell the truth, and this extra effort is reflected in increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex, fMRI scans have been used to determine which statements an individual makes are false. Despite the primitive and speculative state of the art, there is now huge investment in lie detection by this technique. According to Ian Leslie, a US company called No Lie MRI is already selling brain scans to people seeking to prove their innocence or to check out potential spouses.85 Your brain may be the chief prosecution witness, speaking through expensive scans. A hint of what this might lead to was illustrated by a murder trial in India in 2008. A woman called Aditi Sharma was accused of killing her former fiancé by lacing his food at McDonald’s with arsenic.86 (There are greater dangers, it appears, than being Supersized.) The accused agreed to take a lie-detector test (brain electrode oscillation signature test) in which electrodes recorded the activity of her brain while she responded to the allegations posed in the first person: “I bought the arsenic”, and so on. According to the prosecutor, the parts of the brain associated with memory were very active when events related to the crime were read out to her. It was concluded from this that she was being forced against her will to remember the crime, from which it was further concluded that she did carry it out. Sharma was convicted and received a life sentence. Fortunately, she has been bailed pending appeal on the basis of lack of material evidence. But it does suggest a possible future in which the prosecuting team may plead “The brain scan made me do it”, that is, find the defendant guilty. The science, however, seems to fall well short of the claims made by those who want to exploit its commercial potential.87 The appeal to the brain as an excuse for bad behaviour has relevance to our attitude to addiction and the argument about whether addicts should be treated as delinquents or as individuals suffering from brain disease. Sally Satel has looked critically at the notion of addiction as a chronic and relapsing brain disease.88 It is obviously not a brain disease in the sense that Parkinsonism or Alzheimer’s dementia is a brain disease. A twelvestep programme along the lines used by alcoholics would hardly have any impact on the course or outcome of Alzheimer’s disease or even schizophrenia. What is more, people tend to recover from addictions more

85. 86. 87. 88.

Leslie, “No Kidding”. Ibid. See e.g. Wolpe et al., “Emerging Neurotechnologies for Lie-Detection”. Satel, “Addiction and Freedom”.

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effectively if there is something in their lives that they value that is at stake. Incentives work in these cases, but they don’t do much for dementia. Imagine the result of trying to bribe a patient with Alzheimer’s disease to get better. Telling him that he would not get his job back if he did not shape up would be futile and cruel. The conceptual muddles, methodological inadequacies and hype of neuro-law make implausible the prospect, welcomed by Zeki and Goodenough, of a legal system no longer mired in error-prone human justice but “in biological justice”,89 and one that “put a biologically informed psychology front and centre in jurisprudential study”:90 unless, that is, sufficient people ignorant of neuroscience get together with sufficient people ignorant of the law to bring it about. In which case it will be terrifying.

RESCUING ETHICS

The law is in part rooted in ethical intuitions, particularly about justice and personal responsibility. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that neuro-law looks plausible at a time when so many thinkers are reducing our status as moral agents to the properties of our evolved brains. Neuro-evolutionary ethics is flourishing. An early proponent was Patricia Churchland, who in 1986, with the publication of her landmark Neurophilosophy, established herself as the Queen of Neuromania: “as we understand more about the details of the regulatory systems in the brain and how decisions emerge in neural networks, it is increasingly evident that moral standards, practices, and policies reside in our neurobiology”.91 I hardly need comment on the notion of “decisions” emerging “in neural networks”, except to note that decisions are made or taken rather than “emerging”. So let us move on quickly to Ramachandran, who tells us that quite a lot of the brain is devoted to making normative judgements: while the left brain specializes in what is, the right brain records what ought to be – or deviations within what-is from what-ought-to-be.92 The material world,

89. 90. 91. 92.

Zeki & Goodenough, Law and the Brain, xiv. Ibid., xii. Quoted in Snead, “Neuroimaging and Capital Punishment”. Ramachchandran, “The Evolutionary Biology of Self-Deception”. See also Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’”.

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it seems, has learned the trick of getting an “ought” from its own “is”, something that Hume said was impossible. One bit of matter is able, it transpires, in virtue of being on the right side of the cranium (and hence presumably on the side of what is right) to pass principled judgements on another bit of matter (on the left side of the cranium – and hence sinister) and stands back from the world it serves up. This is nonsense of course: the is–ought distinction, the normative sense, belongs to the community of minds, the realm of “Thatter”, rather than a piece of matter such as the brain. The key point is that “ought” relates to possibilities judged against abstract principles (although they are often passionately espoused) and the material cannot house what might “generally” be, only what actually and particularly is. Such philosophical niceties haven’t worried neuro-evolutionary ethicists. For some, the brain is a Saint of Ought, extraordinarily progressive in its views, arriving at egalitarianism well ahead of those morally retarded creatures called people. It cannot, apparently, abide inequality, even though it was forged in the Pleistocene era, when distributive justice was hardly the flavour of the epoch. According to Elizabeth Tricomi and her co-workers, the brain’s “reward centres” respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does; and this still holds when the brain in question is that of a rich person.93 We have learned this cheering fact through some cunning studies involving brain scans. The researchers looked at brain activity in the “reward centres” (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, for the neo-phrenologists) while subjects were watching potential money-transfer scenarios. Before the imaging began, the subjects had been given small sums of money (“starting out poor”) or large ones (“starting out rich”). People who started out rich had a stronger reaction to other people receiving money. The researchers concluded that the brain is hardwired to dislike inequality and that it is not entirely self-interested. If only people were as ethical as their brains! Neuro-evolutionary explainers argue that ethical behaviour is devised to support the survival of the organism so that it can be an effective vehicle for ensuring the replication of the genetic material. Ethical codes are not primarily about treating others as you would yourself be treated, out of a sense of decency, respect for the other person or acknowledgement that they are like you. They are about maximizing inclusive fitness. They do not address the otherness of the Other; nor is the behaviour in the organisms

93. Tricomi et al., “Neural Evidence for Inequality-Averse Social Preferences”.

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they requisition to replicate themselves mediated by explicit acknowledgement of others. Or, if they are, science has now shown us that these are simply masks for the real drivers to ethical behaviour: the general imperative to make more of themselves. The key term for those who argue for neuro-evolutionary accounts of ethics and offer us a science of morality is one of which we have already heard too much: “wiring”. Even those who emphasize the role of culture, nurture and learning in the acquisition of moral sensibility, still speak of wiring, albeit of the soft rather than the hard variety. Soft-wiring is cultural, learned; hard-wiring is genetic, implanted by evolution. (Very early learning, we are to understand, may result in fairly hard-wiring that is resistant to change.) The hard-wirers tend to see morality as “an evolutionary mechanism with survival implications”. Evolution implants morality through shaping brain development.94 Even that extreme expression of altruism, namely laying down one’s life for another, which at first looks pretty ill advised from the point of view of individual survival, and would seem to be a disgraceful betrayal of the replicator by the vehicle, can be understood in Darwinian terms. The trick is to invoke group selection – evolution is concerned not with the individual but with the genetically homogeneous group (which maximizes the chances of the genome surviving) – and to throw in a bit of game theory. By this means, the utterly amoral genetic material, which has only its own survival to consider, can programme the phenotypes to behave in such a way as to optimize its own chances of replicating, by behaving morally and saving the expression of its own genes in other vehicles. These are the amoral roots of the supreme self-sacrifice of laying down one’s life for another; it makes evolutionary sense, as Haldane teasingly argued, if one does it to save two brothers or eight cousins.95 By this means, the quantity of genetic material that is lost is offset by an equivalent amount that is saved. So what is wrong with this kind of analysis of ethics? First, the experiments used to demonstrate the evolutionary basis of our ethical sentiments are, as we have seen, laughably simplifying and remote from real world situations. Second, if ethics were simply a matter of programmed behaviour, it would be difficult to see how it could ever be made explicit, how it could

94. Craig & Loat, “The Evolutionary Genetics of Morality”. 95. Quoted in McElreath & Boyd, Mathematical Models of Social Evolution, 82.

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be presented as a series of precepts, and, most importantly, how it could be argued over between peoples, between individuals and within individuals weighing the right thing to do or resisting or succumbing to temptation. The golden rule – “Do unto others as you would be done unto” – would not have to be articulated if it were simply a way of ensuring that the genome maximizes its rate of replication in surviving organisms: precepts would be pointless. The appeal to conscience, the commitment to resisting temptation, not to speak of the underpinning of ethics with reference to supernatural validation, would seem to be very odd things for molecules to engage in even when they utilize items as elaborate as organisms to ensure their replication. What is more, evolutionary ethics does not offer any explanation of the huge variation between and within cultures as to what counts as good behaviour, or in the extent to which individuals behave ethically under different circumstances. In short, ethics seems even more unlikely to emerge from matter than consciousness is, and an even more improbable way of maximizing reproductive success than reason and rationalization. In saying this, I am not, by the way, claiming that, in virtue of our appeal to explicit precepts, we are morally superior to animals. A lion is no more moral or immoral than a tree. Morality is a human construct and is therefore not amenable to explanation in biological terms. And it is no use arguing that our ethical principles are a mere rationalization of biological instincts, because rationalization is just as inexplicable in biological terms as are ethical principles. No other beast glosses its natural behaviour as principled or objectively good, even less feels obliged to. For that we need the community of minds, which lies beyond the biosphere.

NEURO-EVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL ECONOMICS

For almost everyone, evolution is about fossils, dinosaurs and human origins. But it should be about governance, education, health, peace and virtually every other public policy relevant to human welfare.96

96. Wilson, “Policymaking the Darwinist Way”.

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If politicians are going to be successful in delivering policies, it has been argued, they will need to go with, rather than against, the grain of human nature. To know what that grain is, we have to see that human nature is animal nature. The wise politician will therefore be a neuro-evolutionary physician to the body politic. The economic and the broader “well-being” agendas will be informed by the latest findings from neuroscience and evolutionary theory. What do we learn from these sources about those central human activities of getting and spending? They tell us that the decisions we make as consumers are not wise or even narrowly self-interested. They are programmed, and our reflective self is impotent to deflect them: the die is already cast. Our decisions are snap and the snap snapped shut a long time ago, perhaps as far back as the Pleistocene era. That is why David Sloan Wilson, creator of the Evolution Institute, “the world’s first evolutionary think tank”, aims to “connect the world of evolutionary science with that of public policy formation”.97 Some of our most important political decisions are indeed economic, and formulating and selling such policies would be easier if we understood what truly motivates us when we spend our money. Traditional economists tend to exaggerate the extent to which consumers are rational actors. Darwinian behavioural economists are not so foolish. Let’s look at neuro-evolutionary political economy in action. Geoffrey Miller (billed on the back of his book as “a tenured professor of Evolutionary Psychology”) has seen through the superficial rationale of our economic behaviour: Although common sense says we buy things because we think we’ll enjoy owning and using them, research shows that the pleasures of acquisition are usually short-lived at best. So why do we keep ourselves on the consumerist treadmill – working, buying, aspiring?98 Why indeed? Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all-important, not only for

97. Ibid. 98. Miller, Spent, 1.

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survival, but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children … Our vast social-primate brains evolved to pursue one central social goal: to look good in the eyes of others. Buying impressive products in a money-based economy is just the most recent way to fulfil that goal.99 John Naish has even put a date on when your decision to make that impulse purchase was made: “The desire-driven wiring of our primitive brains evolved in the Pleistocene era, between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago. It was moulded by half-starved hunter-gatherers and farmers [sic] whose crops frequently failed”.100 The shelf life of the impulse to buy that tin of beans seems to be rather longer than that of the tin of beans. But it may be even older. Conspicuous consumption, like the creation of art, is a way of advertising the health of your genes, and necessary for all beasts that replicate sexually and thus exercise sexual selection. Your being able to waste money, comparable to the peacock’s ability to maintain a costly tail, proves that you are in good nick, and that, in short, you are a suitable partner. This flaunting of your genetic fitness is all mediated by your brain, of course; hence the need for neuro-economics, which will use “ever more sophisticated brain imaging methods to identify which parts of consumer brains respond to brands and products”.101 Neuro-economics certainly seems to be booming. Claiming to combine neuroscience, economics and psychology, it relates the allure of the brand and purchasing decisions to the activity seen in different parts of the brain.102 The key to this scienza nuova is to understand that the brain implements automatic processes that are faster than conscious deliberations. What’s more, they occur with little or no effort or feeling. Lehrer, one of the authors of a paper regarded as a landmark in the field, is confident that this has fundamental implications for our understanding of Homo economicus, not least because it finally nails the fantasy (exposed by Miller) of the rational economic actor:

99. Ibid. 100. Naish, “Enough is Enough”, quoted in Derbyshire & Raja, “Shopping and the Stone Age Brain”. 101. Miller, Spent, 125. 102. See e.g. Camerer et al., “Neuroeconomics”.

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Because people have little or no access to these [brain] processes, or volitional control over them, and these processes were evolved to solve problems of evolutionary importance rather than respect logical dicta, the behaviour these processes generate need not follow normative axioms of inference and choice.103 If you thought you were following “normative axioms of inference and choice” when you wandered starry-eyed and covetous in the shopping mall, think again. You are in the grip of “brain emotional systems” that are similar in human and animal. The affective (emotional) side will preempt decision-making before the cognitive (logical, rational) side has had a chance to kick in; automatic processes will dominate over controlled ones. Rather than using your brain, you will be used by it. Lehrer and his fellow neuro-economists think they have pinpointed the neural bases of bad financial decisions.104 Why are we so willing to run up debts, often at ruinous interest rates, when we pay by credit card? Brain imaging has shown that paying by credit card reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative emotions such as, for example, worrying about acquiring debts. “As Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist … says, ‘The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anesthetized against the pain of payment.’ Spending money doesn’t feel bad, so you spend more money”.105 Credit cards “take advantage of a dangerous flaw built into the brain”: the emotional brain overvalues immediate gains at the expense of future costs. It “doesn’t understand things like interest rates or debt payments or finance charges”.106 As a matter of fact some people – most people, most of the time – do understand these things; but presumably they are able to override their brains, although with what is not clear. Undaunted by the obvious, neuro-economists crack on with their work of anatomizing the soul of the shopper. Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, believes that he has helped us to understand “the circuitry of temptation”, identifying the brain regions responsible for “the allure of credit cards” and (who would

103. Ibid., 11. 104. Lehrer, “The Science of Spending”. 105. Lehrer, How We Decide, 86. Loewenstein’s views are most accessibly summarized in his “Lottery Tickets and Credit Cards”. 106. Lehrer, How We Decide, 87.

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have guessed it?) of those notorious sub-prime loans.107 When individuals put their heads into an fMRI scanner and are asked to choose between a small gift card they could have right away or a slightly larger one they could have in two to four weeks, different additional parts of the brain are activated. When the subjects think about the delayed gift, the prefrontal cortex – which, you will recall is identified by neo-phrenologists as the seat of judgement and rational planning – is more active. When, on the other hand, they think about getting a gift card straight away, the brain areas associated with emotion – the midbrain dopamine system and the nucleus accumbens – are turned on. This is the basis for the impulsive financial choices we make and for the preference for immediate over deferred gratification. “When we opt for a bad credit card, or choose a 2/28 mortgage, or fail to put money in our [retirement plan] …, we are acting just like experimental subjects choosing the wrong gift card”.108 All of this seems to support Gray’s assertion that “The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational”.109 However, it rather conspicuously fails to explain how we acquired the science, with its supremely rational methods of enquiry, that is supposed to demonstrate this; or, indeed, how we arrived at the conclusion that we are irrational. Irrationally, presumably. It is rather like the assertion that “life is a dream”, or, as Gray puts it a “consensual hallucination”.110 How did he find out? Even if it is a question of the one-eyed man being king in the kingdom of the blind, one would still like to know where that one eye came from. And it also fails to explain how it is that many of us make rational financial decisions, save up for a rainy day, and do not take on sub-prime mortgages. How did we wake up out of the nightmare of evolution, escape the prison of our Pleistocene brains? Neuro-economists and others would like to pretend that we haven’t, as a result of which they remove the basis for their own “science”. The fallacy at the heart of neuro-economics and cognate modes of thought will be evident from our previous discussion of action and free will in Chapter 7. Contrary to the assumptions of Miller, Lehrer, Cohen and others, the roots of our actions are not to be found in the immediately preceding stimuli. Likewise, most decisions – and certainly those such as to

107. 108. 109. 110.

Lehrer, “The Science of Spending”. Ibid. Gray, Straw Dogs, 28. Ibid, 147.

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take on a mortgage, even in response to high-pressure salesmen – are not snap. If they seem to be snap, the hinterland behind them, the things that make sense of them, are not snap. And the procedures that make it possible to take on a mortgage, after the decision has been made, are most certainly not snap, nor so simple that brain scans could cast light on them. They are less simple even than going down to London to attend a meeting, which, as we saw, could not be seen as a chain of causes and effects, of reflexes (unconditioned, conditioned or operant), or of pre-programmed behavioural products of instincts implanted in us 10,000, 200,000 or 5,000,000 (take your pick) years ago. Just how little of the complexity – the reality – of getting and spending is captured by pop neuroscience is highlighted when we remember that spending is only one half of a transaction: for every buyer there is a seller. No one, surely, is going to suggest that selling is a matter of following impulses made possible by the temporary domination of one part of the brain over another. After all, it requires all sorts of multi-layered, conscious activities on the part of the vendor, such as maintaining stock, setting prices, making the goods attractive, turning up to work on time, persuading the potential buyer to buy, writing brochures, researching brand preferences and so forth. There is no reason for assuming that the process of buying is any simpler than that of selling; or that we “go Pleistocene” when we flip (as we do every day) from being buyers to being sellers; that a teller in a building society regresses tens, hundreds or thousands of years when she nips out to the shopping centre at lunchtime and then returns to the twenty-first century when her break is over. Economics lies at the heart of political decision-making. It is not surprising, therefore, that neuro-economists have started to move into social policy. Understanding the emotional brain, Loewenstein argues, “will help policymakers develop plans that encourage us to make better decisions”.111 There is talk of “asymmetric paternalism”: a political philosophy that “help[s] you make the choices you would make for yourself – if only you had the strength of will and the sharpness of mind”.112 This entered popular consciousness through the international bestseller Nudge.113 Nudge has attracted the approving attention of both UK

111. Lehrer, “The Science of Spending”. 112. Wikipedia, “Soft Paternalism”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_paternalism, quoting The Economist, “Soft Paternalism: The State is Looking After You”. 113. Thaler & Sunstein, Nudge.

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Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative) and Matthew Taylor (New Labour), whom we have already encountered several times. Taylor has nailed his flag as Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts to the mast of something he calls “neurological reflexivity”, in which social policies are informed by neuroscience, and guided by the knowledge that (as he says on his Social Brain blog) “we don’t make half the decisions we think we do. Rather the brain makes them for us via unconscious cognition”.114 One particular striking example of “neurological reflexivity” is the use made of neuroscience by Iain Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and a key figure in developing Conservative social policy). He has argued that early childhood abuse resulted in reduced brain size. Hardwired like many contemporary politicians to use the word “hard-wired”, he argued that antisocial behaviour might be hard-wired into such children and that early intervention was therefore essential.115 The thought that those who currently have much influence (in Cameron’s case, as Prime Minister) and who might have influence again (in Taylor’s case, as a key Labour think-tanker), are agreed on this kind of thing, that Neuromania and Darwinitis command a cross-party consensus, is yet another reason why we should take these ideas seriously. The return of political scientism, particularly of a biological variety, the notion that neuroscience ought to guide social policy, while motivated by good reasons, should be a matter of concern, in view of the historical record of the impact of such approaches.116 I am not reassured that scientism will lead to wiser or less disastrous consequences than in the twentieth century. This is why I have spent so much of your time on the groundlessness of the claim that observing brain activity in artificial experimental conditions can enable us to understand everyday real-world human behaviour to the point where neuroscience could usefully inform, even less safely guide, social policy. If you are still not persuaded of the potential influence of

114. Taylor, “Social Brain” blog. 115. Woolf, “Broken Homes ‘Damage Infant Brains’, Says Tory”. 116. I cannot resist a recent example referred to in Minogue, “Disinterest Rates”, a review of Norman, The Big Society, which brings together evolutionary psychology, neuroaesthetics and neuropolitics. According to Minogue, Norman “agrees with the rest of us in thinking music a good thing. He therefore judges that we should do more to encourage it (and the ‘we’ here is the State as subsidy provider). The reason given is that music aids brain development, facilitates self-discipline and ‘releases oxytocin, a neurochemical which appears to increase feelings of trust between people’”.

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these ideas, then consider this offering from Julian Savulescu (an increasingly loud, and possibly influential, voice): The coming decades will be a time when neuroscience really goes forward exponentially. We will be able to influence the basic human condition, our cognitive abilities, our mood and perhaps even our romantic relationships. Further down the track, we may be interfering in early human development or contributing to augmenting early human development or even genetic engineering.117 For Savulescu, this is a prospect not to be feared but rather to be welcomed. He has argued that, as technology advances more rapidly than the moral character of human beings, we are in increasing danger. We must therefore seek biomedical and genetic means to enhance the moral character of humanity.118 Be afraid, be very afraid.

THE GOD-SPOT SPOTTERS: NEURO-THEOLOGY

Things must be pretty dire when even an atheist like me wants to rescue, if not God, at least the idea of Him (or Her or It). But it’s true. Neuromaniac and Darwinitic approaches to religion do such inadequate justice to the most profound, and possibly the most terrible, idea mankind has ever entertained, that I feel almost protective towards the Old One. Atheism has certainly had some eloquent advocates in recent years. Indeed, they have been so effective that they have provoked their religious opponents not only to criticize – often quite savagely – their grasp of theology but also to accuse them of being “fundamentalists”. Unfortunately, some of these deicides – notably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins – do indeed have their own fundamentalism, namely biologism. They provide the most direct and clear-cut illustration of the tendency that I deplored in the Introduction: rejecting supernatural accounts of human nature only to embrace the opposite error of concluding that humans must therefore be 117. Savulescu, speaking on the BBC radio programme Analysis, “Minds of Our Own?” (21 March 2010). 118. Persson & Savulescu, “The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement”.

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simply parts of the natural world. It is as if a consistent atheism is obliged to tie itself to the anti-humanist view that we are, at bottom, just organisms. This brings atheism (and mankind) into disrepute and should be equally repugnant to believers and disbelievers. It is because I do not believe that rejecting a divine origin of the universe in general, or of us in particular, necessarily leads to a naturalistic account of what we are that I have written this book. Biologizing religious beliefs is an even more extreme manifestation of naturalism than neuroaesthetics. Religious belief, we are told, is a property of the evolved brain. Theism exists because it is good for social animals, as it promotes solidarity and cooperation, therefore increasing the probability of the genome replicating. The brain is designed to generate theological illusions. Hence the interest in self-styled “neuro-theology”. Take a recent study, headed up by Harris. He and his colleagues used fMRI scans to compare the brain activity associated with religious and non-religious beliefs (or disbeliefs) in two groups of individuals: fifteen committed Christians and fifteen non-believers.119 The subjects were scanned as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious propositions such as “The biblical God really exists” and non-religious propositions such as “Santa Claus is a myth”. In the case of both believers and non-believers, and in both categories of stimuli, belief was associated with a greater signal in the ventromedial cortex. This is an area, the authors state, that is important for (take a deep breath) self-representation, emotional associations, reward and goal-driven behaviour. However, religious thinking was more strongly associated with brain regions that govern (take another deep breath) emotion, self-representation and cognitive conflict. Thinking about ordinary facts, by contrast, is more reliant on memory retrieval networks. According to Harris, this “further[s] our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world”.120 Moreover, it explains why, despite the predictions of Marx, Freud, Weber and others, the spread of industrialized society has not spelled the end of religion. It confirms what the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has asserted, namely that religious thoughts and behaviour survive because they are by-products of ordinary brain function.121 It is not because they have relaxed their standards of rationality that people accept implausible 119. Harris et al., “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Non-Religious Belief ”. 120. Ibid. 121. Boyer, Religion Explained.

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religious doctrines but simply because these doctrines fit the “inference machinery” of their brains. Religion is a spin-off of a more general trait to draw inferences beyond what experience tells us and to seek a coherent explanation of what is around us. I have already discussed the serious methodological flaws in this kind of study. But it is also obvious, once the glamour of high science is removed, how little they tell us. To argue that religious belief is a manifestation of a more general belief-forming tendency – in virtue of which we make inferences about our surroundings that exceed our experience, so that we, say, expect a fair rather than a random world, and seek an overall meaning in our lives – may seem like yet another dose of the bleeding obvious. No brain scan is needed to demonstrate that we are sense-making creatures and the sense that is made might include the idea of a Sense-Maker or God. What is more, no brain scan can explain how it is that we actually do make an abstract, elaborate, general sense of things, or the particular sense that we make of things in general. In short, brain scans add nothing to our understanding of religion, which, it should not need pointing out, has distinctive features. Loose correlations with brain activity in different parts of the organ in question, which find no fundamental difference between religious and non-religious beliefs, hardly capture this. The study has merely shown that brain scans cannot distinguish between everyday factual beliefs and the most profound ideas human beings have ever had. Surprise, surprise. Brain scans are blunt instruments. Since this failure might have been anticipated before the study, and was evident after the study, it is interesting to enquire why the study was undertaken in the first place. What motivates Harris and some other neurotheologians is the wish to cut religion down to size. The trouble is that this not only diminishes religious belief, but also diminishes all kinds of belief and, indeed, diminishes humans as believers. Irrespective of whether you are an atheist or a religious believer, to naturalize one of the greatest (for good or ill) and most extraordinary expressions of our distinctive humanity cannot be a good thing. Just how damaging this is to our sense of ourselves becomes apparent when we examine some of the other literature in this field. The crudest expression of the “neuralization” of religion (an accolade for which the competition is fierce) is the claim that there is a “God spot” in the brain. Ramachandran arrived at this conclusion by observing people who had seizures affecting the frontal lobes. They sometimes had intense mystical experiences and became obsessed with religious spirituality. He 329

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inferred that the seizures caused an over-activity in the part of the brain he called “the God module”.122 The British neurologist Michael Trimble also studied patients with epilepsy and concluded that God must be located in the temporal lobes, especially as these are the areas affected by LSD and other drugs that are supposed to induce spiritual experiences.123 Dimitrios Kapogiannis and his colleagues have claimed that religious belief is associated with a change in the size of different parts of the brain. Experiencing fear of God is associated with decreased volume of the left precuneus and the left fronto-orbital cortex BA 11, while experiencing an intimate relationship with God is associated with increased volume of right middle temporal cortex BA21.124 More recent “God-spot” spotters have been less specific. Beauregard recruited a group of Carmelite nuns who claimed to have had an intense experience of union with God. He invited them to insert their devout heads into an fMRI scanner in order to locate the areas that were active when they recalled the moments when they experienced the most profound connection with the divine. Beauregard’s God spot was all over the brain: more like a rash than a single spot.125 Other studies, such as those by Kapogiannis and colleagues, have also given God more spacious accommodation, encompassing not only the parts of the cerebral cortex unique to humans but also less salubrious locations in the more ancient parts of the brain shared with other primates.126 This alone should make one doubt the relevance of the findings. There is a great distance between Church primates and jungle Primates. Throughout this book, I have said very little about “genes for” this, that and the other. Most thoughtful writers, even those inclined to biologism, know that the “gene-for” notion, when applied to human behaviour, has had its day.127 But every now and then it rears its head, even in the most unpromising places. God-spot spotting has been complemented by Godgene spotting. The observation that identical twins (with the same genes) reared apart (in other words with different environmental influences) still showed a greater than chance concordance on attitudes to Sabbath 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Ramachandran et al., “The Neural Basis of Religious Experience”. His views are set out in extenso in Trimble, The Soul in the Brain. Kapogiannis et al., “Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity”. Beauregard & Paquette, “Neural Correlates of Mystical Experiences in Carmelite Nuns”. Kapogiannis et al., “Cognitive and Neural Foundations of Religious Belief ”. See Ridley, Nature via Nurture, for a demolition of all those “gene-for” claims. The idea, however, still enjoys quite a healthy posthumous existence.

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observance, divine law, church authority and the truth of the Bible seemed to some to support a genetic influence on religious belief. It has been suggested that a variant of the dopamine receptor gene (DRD4) – which reputedly has a powerful role in our sense of well-being (“reward”, and all that – vide supra) – may be more biologically active in those who have a religious bent. Dean Hamer caused a big splash, and propelled himself to the cover of Time magazine, when he announced that a particular gene, which he called the “God Gene”, vesicular monoamine transporter 2 or VMAT2, was linked to the trait of spirituality and religious belief.128 God lets himself into his creation in a mysterious way. The notion that religious belief is due to machinery in the brain fits with the idea that it has (as Kapogiannis puts it) an “adaptive cognitive function”. Religion is “hard-wired” into the brain because it is of evolutionary benefit. The communal sense conferred by religion, we are told, would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a more developed feeling of togetherness. Other writers, such as Hood in Supersense have suggested that religiosity, although hard-wired, is a by-product of evolutionary adaptations – an exaptation or spandrel – and that it is an expression of the way our minds are structured. That all of this is insanely reductive would cut little ice for some: reduction is their point. It is, however, profoundly point-missing. The suggestion that the God might be a tingle in our heads, rather similar to epileptic seizures, or religiosity a propensity to have such tingles, is to misconceive the nature of religious belief. We must distinguish between religious experiences (of well-being, of joy, of terror, of shame, of expanded awareness) and the translation of those experiences into, say, a revelation of a God with certain characteristics. Isolated brains or, even less, bits of brains, do not have the wherewithal to make this translation, which depends on many things: for example, the culture in which one has been brought up, one’s education, the kind of person one is. It belongs to that extra-cranial semiosphere we discussed in “The human world” in Chapter 6. Admittedly, some of the studies I have discussed do acknowledge that religion is a matter of belief rather than of the kinds of sensations one might have in a seizure; but, since they are unable to show a profound difference between religious beliefs and non-religious beliefs, they tell us nothing about the former. Besides, there are other problems with the “neuralization” of religion.

128. Hamer, The God Gene.

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Take the “God spot”. What part of the brain, a material object, could one conceive of as cooking up and housing the notion of something infinite, eternal, all powerful, all seeing, all wise and yet systematically invisible? What kinds of nerve impulses are capable of transcending their finite, local, transient, condition in order to conceive of something that is infinite, ubiquitous and eternal? Religious believers may explain how (finite) people manage to connect with the idea of an infinite God; they are thought to have eternal souls that are non-localized. This can hardly be claimed of the brain. No one surely expects to find the idea of a supreme being, with all those almost unthinkable and often contradictory characteristics, in sodium ions passing through membranes in the limbic circuit or even in an upper-crust arondissement such as the pre-frontal cortex. There are other problems with “neuralization”. Religion is immensely complicated and certainly not just a matter of mystical experiences or beliefs captured in sentences. It includes, among other things: a set of prescriptions for codes of behaviour and the customs and practices that are to flow from those codes; a very elaborate nexus of institutions, expressing the mediated authority of a putative deity, that exert power in the private and public sphere in a myriad of often but not always malign ways; and the collective and individual sense of a hidden all-powerful agent underlying the totality of things and validating a set of beliefs about the origin and nature of the universe and of our nature and place in the order of things. Our engagement with these dimensions of religion is not captured by discharges similar to those that are associated with epileptic fits or even with ordinary beliefs. Religious experience and all that follows from it is in the keeping of the community of minds to which we belong: it is there that it is interpreted, developed and maintained. This is where we must look for the source of the inspiration for cathedrals a hundred years in the making; the evolving styles of church music; the Catechism; the Council of Trent; the division of labour that has led to the development of the role of (full-time) shaman or priest; confessional bloodbaths such as the Thirty Years’ War; and all the use and abuse of power that religion authorizes. And there, too, look to find the prescribed codes of behaviour that are connected with a multitude of shared ideas about the meaning of our lives, our relationships with others, our infinitely nuanced appreciation of right and wrong. Anyone who believes that churches and their institutionally mediated power can be understood in biological terms has to overlook that, unlike gene products but like moral codes, they are argued into place. Take, for 332

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example, the response to the Reformation by the Catholic Church: the eighteen-year Council of Trent that brought together delegates from many countries. The lengthy debates that led to an agreement on a variety of canons and decrees do not look to me like anything that happens in the natural world. Religion may have begun as something less organized hundreds of thousands of years ago. One might assume that Pleistocene man did not cross continents to discuss the sub-clauses of this or that creed. The point, however, is that it had the capability of developing into the highly complex institutions that humans have known for several thousand years. And I can no more imagine cathedrals being built out of brain tingles than I can see a gene product requiring a Thirty Years’ War to defend it. Of course, some of the biologizers are aware of this. That is why they appeal to “memes” in a desperate attempt to bridge the great gap – that yawns widest in the case of religion – between animal behaviour and human institutions. And we have seen how little the concept of the “meme” delivers. An interesting, indeed dismaying, measure of the extent to which neuro-evolutionary accounts of religion have gained acceptance is that some believers have embraced the notion that God is (guess what?) “hardwired” by evolution into our brains, as a way of defending their continued religious belief while at the same time reconciling themselves to the truth of Darwinism. Perhaps it is not an atheist’s place to second-guess the mind of God but I don’t think he would like being hard-wired very much. At any rate, he would be right to treat the notion with divine suspicion. The implication that our vision or intuition or experience of God is simply a good idea from an evolutionary point of view somewhat diminishes the Almighty. It makes him merely a useful notion to help one small part of the universe (we human beings) ensure the replication of their genetic material. What a come down for the author of everything to become a product of a tiny part of something! Patronizing, or what? Darwinizing the idea of God makes prayer and the holding of theological beliefs a mere organic function, a bit like secreting urine. If you naturalize belief in God, then it is very difficult to see how God can remain as a supernatural Being with all those characteristics that have been ascribed to Him. Some believers might parry this last argument by saying that the biological value of entertaining an idea of a god does not touch God himself. He still remains the all-powerful, infinite, eternal, creator of all things. What is biological is that in virtue of which humans gain access to him: their brains, or whatever. Indeed, biology-friendly believers may go further 333

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and suggest that God designed us in such a way that, by adaptations that have survival value, we come to have knowledge of him. He set in motion a process – evolution – that would eventually be destined to result in a creature that, for its own benefit, formed an image of God; that, in other words, God indirectly hard-wired himself into the human brain so that he could be ultimately mirrored in his own creation. This assumes, however, that the outcome of evolution was pre-ordained: a profoundly anti-Darwinian idea. For at the very heart of Darwin’s theory is the operation of natural selection on random variations. Its outcome is not predetermined. As Stephen Jay Gould famously pointed out, if you ran the tape of evolution twice, there is no reason why human beings should emerge next time round. In which case, God would lack a mirror in which to admire himself. So believers’ attempts to reconcile evolutionary theory with their religion, by arguing that such beliefs have adaptive value, because human groupings that worship the same gods will have a better chance of going forth and replicating, must ultimately diminish religious beliefs to the level of other biological phenomena linked to survival, unless it is also argued that God somehow rigged the outcome to ensure that these biological phenomena did emerge and he could guarantee his daily fix of worship. But the notion of God rigging the outcome would not be compatible with evolutionary theory, as I have already indicated. It would certainly be at odds with Darwin’s vision, expressed in his Autobiographies: “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows”.129 At any rate, his mode of rigging would leave much to be desired. Evolution is a shockingly cruel and inefficient process that has nothing to do with love, mercy or even common decency. This would make it rather odd that God, seemingly indifferent to the horrors necessary to ensure the survival of the fittest – after letting nature, red in tooth and claw, rip in order to generate humanity on a pyramid of dead predecessors – should then be concerned with the details of individual human lives. Or, indeed, that he should have a late fit of morality, in which he intervenes with direct and mediated voices in the lives of men and women and guides them how to behave well and care for their fellow creatures. What is more, biology does not distinguish between false gods and true ones, although this is a very important distinction for believers. As far as

129. Darwin, Autobiographies, 50.

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biology is concerned, all that matters is whatever floats the sociobiological boat and thereby enhances inclusive fitness. But, if you believe the sacred books, God is very exercised by the difference between false and true gods. His wrath on this matter is well documented. What is more, for many religions, the kind of survival that matters is survival of the spirit rather than of the gene-bearing flesh. Prioritizing survival of the spirit would be an anti-Darwinian first for nature. At first sight, it might seem that a humanist atheist like me should welcome the reduction of religious belief to tingles in parts of the brain. But it will be clear why neuro-theology is as displeasing to me as to believers. The idea of God is the greatest, although possibly the most destructive, idea that mankind has ever entertained. The man-made notion that the sum total of things originated from, and is controlled by, a maker is a profound and distinctively human response to the amazing fact that the world makes sense. This response is more, not less, extraordinary for the fact that it has no foundation in truth and that, indeed, God is a logically impossible object.130 How mighty are the works of man and how much more impressive when they are founded on an idea to which nothing corresponds! Cutting this idea down to size, by neurologizing and Darwinizing it, is to deal not only religion but also humanity a terrible blow. Religious belief is possible only for a creature that is sufficiently selfconscious to be aware that it will die. Without that awareness, it would not be possible to formulate the idea of a world existing in one’s absence, of the Creation (of the universe coming into being before one’s own existence) or of an afterlife. If animals do not have a sense of temporal depth, of an explicit past and an explicit future, they are hardly likely to entertain the idea of eternity. And since they do not have a totalizing vision of their surroundings and of that which surrounds their surroundings, a vision that requires a community of minds, they cannot have a concept of “the world”, even less of “this world”, brought into being by a creator. The culturally specific expressions of religion, in the idea of a god who will make all things better or intercede in daily life, in rituals, churches, precepts, sacred books, complex power structures, are consequences of awareness of mortality and a reactive dream of immortality, an afterlife, that is not possible for non-humans.

130. See my “Why I am an Atheist”.

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To naturalize religion is to naturalize even those parts of humanity that are most remote from the natural world. It is the supreme expression of a devastating reductionism that disgusts even an atheist like me. In defending the humanities, the arts, the law, ethics, economics, politics and even religious belief against neuro-evolutionary reductionism, atheist humanists and theists have a common cause and, in reductive naturalism, a common adversary: scientism.

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CHAPTER NINE

Back to the Drawing Board

REFLECTIONS ON THE BRAIN OF ULLIN PLACE

When I was Visiting Professor in Medicine at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in 2003, I was invited by the Professor of Anatomy, with whom I shared an interest in the human hand, to take a look at something in the pathology museum. He thought it might intrigue me. It most certainly did. In a glass cabinet, there was a brain – with a slightly squashed left hemisphere – in formalin. Below the brain was a photo-portrait of a handsome, largeheaded man, with floppy grey hair, 21” screen bi-focal glasses, and a wry smile. He was smartly dressed in an un-Australian jacket and tie. This was the erstwhile owner of the brain, Dr Ullin T. Place, whose name the retentive reader may recall from Chapter 1. Beneath the photograph was a brass plaque with the following wording: DID THIS BRAIN CONTAIN THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF U.T. PLACE? Ullin T. Place (1924–2000) was a lecturer in philosophy and psychology at the University of Adelaide from 1951–1954. Together with his Adelaide professor J. J. C. Smart, he was responsible for a revolutionary change in how philosophers view the nature of mind and consciousness. Place’s famous 1956 British Journal of Psychology paper “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” argued against the major theories of the time, behaviourism and dualism, and contended that consciousness should be seen as a brain process and nothing more. In defending this position, Place and Smart entirely changed the methodology of the philosophy 337

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of mind. Their position is now known internationally as “The Identity Theory of Mind” or “Australian materialism”. Place died on 2.1.2000, bequeathing his brain to the University of Adelaide, to be displayed with the above message to be seen.

Well, I hope you feel that you are now in a position to answer the question on the brass plaque in the negative, and to say why the brain did not contain the consciousness of U. T. Place. Ironically, the exhibit itself adds yet another reason for saying no. The very question posed by Place, and the answer he and Smart gave to it – not to speak of the arguments they used to defend their answer – take us beyond the past history of the isolated brain preserved in formalin. For many steps are required to get from activity in the brain to arguments about the nature of brain activity and its relation to consciousness. They begin a long way from the brain as it is delivered to us by biology, and take us even further away. The mind–brain identity theory cannot explain the very distance opened from neural activity that has been necessary to enable Place and Smart, and their many followers in the subsequent sixty years, to identify (or, as I believe, mis-identify) neural activity as the stuff out of which their thoughts are made. The display in the pathology museum is an instance of what another Australian philosopher, John Passmore, spoke of as “pragmatic selfrefutation”.1 The very existence of the mind–brain identity theory demonstrates the extent to which the mind transcends, and so is not identical with, activity in the brain. If consciousness were simply brain processes, it would not be able so to distance itself from brain processes to discover, or imagine that it has discovered, that it is brain processes. We have seen how this kind of self-contradiction pervades much of the literature we have criticized. You may recall our first exhibit: Gray, the man who thinks we are animals and not very important ones either. He mocked “the faith that through science humankind can know the truth”. But, as we saw in the Preface, he says, “if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals”.2 Like many of those who relativize truth, and argue that objective knowledge is an illusion, he appeals to certain truths, to

1. Passmore, “Self-Refutation”. 2. Gray, Straw Dogs, 26.

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(very large) items of objective knowledge, to prop up his case. In short, he saws off the branch on which he is sitting. It is, of course, true that if we were mere evolutionary products, then we should not be able to arrive at knowledge; we would merely have sentience linked by a multitude of routes to behaviour that would maximize the chances of our genetic material being replicated. The distance between what is there (for us) and what is articulated collapses, and with this truth (and, indeed, falsehood).3 We could not, at any rate, achieve the kind of knowledge and understanding that is gathered up in On the Origin of Species and draw the moral that Gray draws from it. So Gray is not alone in undermining his own position at a very fundamental level; if he were, then he would not be worthy of our attention. He is important because he happens to be a particularly naive exemplar of the kind of ubiquitous error in the pseudo-sciences we examined in the previous chapter. Neuroaesthetics breaks down the barrier between the appreciation of art and ordinary perception and hence removes its own distinctive object. Neuro-evolutionary literary criticism takes away the basis for a distinctive value in literary art, so that the critic loses his function as a helpful judge. Neuro-law, by using neuroscience to extend the scope of mitigating circumstances, potentially eliminates criminal responsibility altogether, as well as the culpable agent, so there is nothing to be discussed. The perpetrator, the man who stabs another person, and the victim, the person who bleeds to death, are equally caught up in the causal mesh. Goodness and badness are simply strategies that replicators use through their vehicles to maximize their chances of replicating and so ethics is empty of content: it collapses into molecular causation. And religious belief, assimilated into brain activity shaped by evolutionary imperatives, ceases to be anything other than a manifestation of general cognitive processes requisitioned by selfish genes. Perhaps the most amusing example of pragmatic self-refutation is the claim we have looked at that, if we really understood the extent to which we are the prisoners of our evolved brains, we should be able to develop social policies that would go with, rather than against, the grain of our nervous systems. Only a neuromaniac would need to have it spelled out that, unless we were at a great distance from the kind of activity revealed in our brains and unless our shared lives were profoundly different from the kinds of animal aggregations seen in the natural world, then the voluntary adoption

3. See my The Enduring Significance of Parmenides.

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of social policies, influenced or not by the latest whizz-bang neuroscience, would be impossible; for there would be no outside from which policies could be dreamed up, judged and tested. Indeed, there would be no outside of the organic world. The notion that our brains are calling the shots and that, most of the time, we don’t know what the shots are, is equally vulnerable on this account. If this were true, how could the brains of (for example) neuroscientists ever come to know just how clever the brain is and, indeed, how reality differs from the way our brains present it to us: how “red” light energy, for example, is not red in itself? How could neuroscientists outwit their own vastly superior brains to unmask what they are up to, and what do they outwit it with? The claim that we are unconscious of what we are makes it impossible to explain how the conscious science of our unconsciousness should have arisen, never mind be believed and understood by our (conscious or unconscious) selves. We have already seen how Frith teetered on the verge of philosophical scepticism when he considered whether or not we do gain access to an extra-cerebral reality, which we more or less see aright.4 He certainly makes it difficult for himself to understand how he, or his brain, could have arrived at the conclusion – central to his thinking – that we model reality. Or that “our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality”,5 an assertion that presupposes an ability to stand outside both the perception and the reality, and compare the two. Where is that standpoint located? In another bit of the brain? This is even more difficult to understand, given that he is “firmly convinced that I am a product of my brain, as is the awareness that accompanies me”.6 The illusion of the “I” is, apparently, the product of the brain washing itself. The self-washed brain produces an illusion called Chris Frith, although that illusion is so firmly of the belief that Frith exists that he attaches his name to the book he has written about the brain. The fundamental point is that cognitive neuroscience demonstrates – by being such an impressive part of it – the existence of the community of minds that transcends the brain and enables us to see it at work, and to claim that most of its work is hidden from us. A science of consciousness does seem to be rather like the famous ouroboros: a serpent that was able to swallow its own tail. Indeed, it would be a super-ouroboros that swallowed its entire body and the world that it 4. Frith, Making up the Mind. 5. Ibid., ch. 5. 6. Ibid., 23.

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inhabited, re-describing it as a model made out of nerve impulses. Some may argue that this is not fair on the science of consciousness. There is, after all, a very healthy science of matter despite the fact that scientists are at some level small pieces of matter; we can, it seems, encompass the entirety of matter with physical theories. Is this not also an example of the super-ouroboros at work? Well, it isn’t, or not at least for those of us who are not committed to a materialist account of consciousness. For us, the process of understanding matter is not itself purely an expression of the laws of matter that physicists have uncovered. For example, the discovery of the laws of motion as articulated by Newton are not themselves manifestations of motion governed by those laws. It is only because individually (and in the case of science collectively) we transcend the matter of which we are made that we are able to develop immensely powerful accounts of matter. It is because we are able to stand outside matter, to reflect on it, to have it as an object of thought, through the collective consciousness developed through our various modes of discourse, that we have a science of it. We cannot stand outside consciousness in this way. Moreover, by collapsing the public sphere, in which abstract truths are established and can be tested and argued over, and by reducing the human world to an inlet of the biosphere, neuromaniacs and Darwinitics have taken away the very place where objective knowledge could arise and be known. This is what led Gray to argue that, since Darwin has shown that our minds are subordinated to the need for survival, we are not committed to discovering objective truth. He failed to notice, of course, that it undermined his own position, whose premises were based on the objective knowledge made available through science. Likewise, meme theory must itself denigrate itself as a mere meme. Neuromania and Darwinitis together throw into question their own basis; they saw through the branch on which they are sitting. It is for this reason that we need to look to the discipline that, traditionally, has concerned itself with trying to understand the nature, basis and limits of knowledge (epistemology) and with the kinds of things there are (ontology). I am referring to philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY AND “SCIENCE CRINGE”

Some readers may be less impressed by the complexity of my arguments in this book than puzzled by the fact that I have had to make them. Of 341

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course the brain does not explain consciousness. Of course human life is profoundly different from animal life. So how is it that Neuromania and Darwinitis have been allowed to advance and spread with so little challenge? What have the philosophers been up to? Alas, many have either conceded leadership in the philosophy of mind to science or, hostile to anything that smacks of metaphysics, turned their attention to other things. There have been some honourable exceptions and I mention a few whose work has been a particular inspiration to me. Mary Midgley has exposed, over many eloquent books, the pretensions and fallacies of scientism.7 And Max Bennett and Peter Hacker have examined in detail the misuses of language by those who create the illusion of crossing the mind– brain barrier by describing neural activity in terms that would apply to minds or, often, to whole persons:8 the kind of thing that we discussed in “Thinking by transferred epithet” in Chapter 5. There are others, such as Colin McGinn, who have argued that there will be no way of seeing how the water of neural activity becomes the wine of consciousness, although he blots his copybook, as far as I am concerned, by explaining this fact as a cognitive limitation that arises from our biological nature.9 Such is the lure of biologism that even someone who is opposed to it does so on meta-biological grounds! (And his position is self-contradictory. For if our biology stopped us from solving the mind–body problem, it presumably would stop us from seeing that there is a problem, that it is insoluble and that the reason it is insoluble is because of the limitations imposed on our minds by biology.) There are, of course, many philosophers who have expressed their opposition, in many cases from a dualist or even idealist perspective. Notable among these is my friend Howard Robinson, whose twenty-five-year critique of materialism has been insufficiently appreciated outside the realm of academic philosophy.10 These opponents, however, despite individual eminence, lack the collective visibility of those who, under the leadership of hard-line philosophical materialists such as Dennett and cognitive psychologists with a commitment to a materialist metaphysics, such as Pinker, Gazzaniga and Damasio, seem to carry all before them in the popular discussion of the mind. Even Searle, a witty scourge of computational theories of the mind, still regards

7. 8. 9. 10.

See in particular Midgley, Poetry and Science. Bennett & Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. McGinn, “Can we Solve the Mind–Body Problem?” Robinson, Matter and Sense.

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consciousness, as we have seen, as a biological phenomenon and deploys false analogies to support this view. The capitulation to scientism – the view that the last word on what we are is to be spoken by natural science – is not new. It is a recrudescence of a long-standing trend in philosophy that came to prominence in Europe with the Enlightenment, and was elaborated in the English-speaking world (and in some European philosophy) in the nineteenth century. It was explicitly adopted by logical positivists as the true path of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. For many in the analytic tradition, science was the only source of knowledge and understanding. The role of the philosopher, apart from that of providing a conceptual cleaning-up operation, was to be the grateful recipient of the light cast by science. The rejection of metaphysics was the most striking manifestation of this humility, which, at times, bordered on self-contempt. Ernest Gellner’s aphorism, “A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling, a philosopher who loses his re-defines his subject”,11 was originally applied by him to Oxford linguistic philosophers. For me, the current capitulation to science seems to illustrate this more clearly than Gellner’s original targets. One figure stands out among those many who prepared the ground for the handing over of the philosophy of mind to neuroscience: W. V. Quine. Possibly the most eminent American philosopher since William James, he bestrode the English-speaking philosophical world like a colossus. He made a two-pronged attack on the notion that philosophy might make an independent contribution to our understanding the nature of mind. First, he insisted that we were organisms first and last and that all modes of human consciousness could be explained in Darwinian terms. He naturalized knowledge, arguing that there was a continuity between the irritability of sensory endings and science.12 Second, he challenged philosophy’s distinct role in analysing and critiquing the conceptual framework within which any theory of mind or the world might be developed. In his famous paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, he denied the distinction between knowledge that could be acquired through conceptual analysis and knowledge that could be acquired through experience: in short between the a priori and the empirical.

11. Gellner, Words and Things, 339. 12. Quine, The Nature of Natural Knowledge”, 68.

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Quine’s assertion that epistemology, the most fundamental branch of philosophy, which deals with the nature, origin and limitations of our knowledge, “is best looked upon … as an enterprise within natural science”13 runs into self-contradiction, of which Quine himself is aware but somehow brushes aside. He asks how science works so well, and states that this, too, is a scientific question “about a species of primate”. It is “open to investigation in natural science, the very science whose acquisition is being investigated”.14 Apart from the fact that there is something forlorn about an investigation that would have to investigate itself, there is Quine’s failure to see the unnatural nature of knowledge. Knowledge is not simply the product of successive experiences of an organism, heaped up in the brain, but belongs to the community of minds. Yes, human beings, like other animals, are surrounded by living and non-living material objects; but, unlike other animals, their world is a world of facts, as we discussed in “The human world” in Chapter 6, and facts are not like lumps of matter. Contrary to what he asserted, science is not at all “like the animal’s simple induction over innate similarities … a biological device for anticipating experience”.15 The sawn state of the branch on which Quine’s philosophy of science and his epistemology perches is beautifully encapsulated in a passage from a famous essay by the great evolutionary theorist J. B. S. Haldane: It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of the atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.16 And there is even less reason for assuming that my mind is atomic agitation schooled by the semi-permeable membranes that form the boundaries of nerve fibres. The fact that the neuroscience of knowledge, not to speak of consciousness in general, undermines its own foundations should give heart to those

13. 14. 15. 16.

Ibid., 68. Ibid. Ibid., 72. Haldane, “When I am Dead”, 209.

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in the humanities who are sceptical of the neuro-prefixed disciplines and yet feel helpless before this alien invasion (as in earlier decades they felt helpless before the invasion of poststructuralism, and so-called Theory that could explain everything), cowed by a one-size-fits-all account of all those things that critics, economists, theologians, philosophers and so on have previously regarded as their domain.17 Neuro-evolutionary reductionism has neither the empirical facts of human life nor a logic of knowledge in its favour. There are no grounds for “science cringe” and the over-humble belief that human sciences are immature intellectual enterprises waiting to be admitted to a greatly extended neuroscience. Philosophers, and others in the humanities dazzled by the great explanatory power and practical usefulness of the natural sciences, should reassert the autonomy of their disciplines. Even if we accepted (which I do not) that brain activity is a complete explanation of ground-floor phenomena such as sensations, neuroscience cannot capture what happens in the human world created by the joint activity of hundreds of millions of brains over tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years. This lies beyond the reach of those sciences that look inside the individual brain. Neuro-evolutionary science casts as little light on the subjects studied by the humanities as physics does on the law of tort, electromyography on ballet, or pharmacology on the culture of the lounge bar or the coffee house. The subordination of ethics to neuroscience – in so called “experimental philosophy” – is a striking example of self-loathing in philosophy. Its most well-known manifestation is the research programmes based on the belief that philosophers should investigate ethical issues by scanning the brains of people thinking about them.18 Consider the famous thought experiment in which there is a runaway train approaching a branch in the line. One branch leads to a platform in which two very elderly, desperately disabled people

17. See my Not Saussure. 18. For an excellent brief account of this aspect of experimental philosophy, see Edmonds & Warburton, “Philosophy’s Great Experiment”. The Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman, in “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology”, argues that moral philosophy will never grow up until it matures into social psychology. There are, I hasten to add, some aspects of this kind of philosophy that are perfectly valid and, indeed, continue a long tradition of testing people’s intuitions about what is the right thing to do, or what counts as “linguistic reference”, or what truly amounts to knowledge, by presenting them with hypothetical situations. For a lukewarm defence of this non-scientistic kind of experimental philosophy, free of fMRI scans and surveys of unconsidered responses, see Frank Jackson’s review of Knobe & Nichols, Experimental Philosophy, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

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are sitting in their wheelchairs and the other branch leads to a platform in which one able-bodied individual is standing. The train is going so fast that it will mount the platforms. You are able to switch the points and can choose whom to save. What considerations would or should influence your choice? Experimental philosophy takes the thinking out of philosophical thought: you simply place the brains of subjects into a scan and see which parts of the brain light up and this will tell you what intuitions are guiding people. Two seconds’ actual thought would show why this is not philosophy but social psychology: and bad social psychology, too. There are the methodological problems we have already discussed: the crudeness of the correlations between parts of the brain and thought processes or decisions; the absence of knowledge of what they mean; and the grotesque simplification of those real-life situations in which we have to make ethical decisions, and of the decision-making process itself. More importantly, however, such studies are irrelevant to the business of moral philosophy. The discipline is not about the population distribution of moral intuitions, beliefs or principles. Nor is it a sociological or psychological enquiry into what people spontaneously, unreflectingly, think. No, it is concerned with examining the validity of those intuitions, beliefs and principles: their implications for the health of society and their consistency with one another and with broader values. The purpose of classical thought experiments is to make moral assumptions, intuitions, beliefs and principles visible so they can be disputed or defended. Moral philosophy is a normative activity – that is to say, one that establishes, investigates or criticizes norms – which is quite different from a descriptive account of mental states. It is not about what people happen to think but about what they ought to think if, for example, they wish to be consistent in their principles and not entertain beliefs that could have consequences, if followed consistently, that they might find undesirable. Since the time of Socrates, moral philosophy has endeavoured to clarify beliefs, and examine and challenge the conceptual framework within which they are generated. It is a “meta-” discipline. Richard Holton underlined the difference between “scientifically informed philosophy”, on the one hand and, on the other, doing science of a sort – mainly psychology, exploring people’s intuitions, often using fMRI scans.19 We must distinguish between scientifically informed philosophy and philosophy that grovels before the supposed superiority of science.

19. Holton, “Red in the Lab”.

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It is time for philosophy to reassume its fundamental duty: to look critically at the conceptual framework and presuppositions within which contemporary thought operates. It should challenge claims, which are increasingly being nodded through, of the kind made by E. O. Wilson: that “the master unsolved problem of biology” is “how the hundred million nerve cells of the brain work together to create consciousness”.20 A philosopher who had not fallen asleep would assert that this is not a problem for biology because understanding consciousness requires also that we should understand how there is biology, how we come to think of ourselves as organisms, and what it is that makes science possible and what is the nature of its truths. This take us far beyond, indeed beneath, biology to a conceptual space where we can ask questions about the nature of knowledge, and of man the “knowing animal”, which philosophers in the Western tradition have been clarifying (and sometimes obfuscating) over the past 2,500 years. To accept science as the last word on the mind is to overlook that which made science possible: the mind itself.

RETHINKING MATTER, BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.21 Let us suppose that you are persuaded of the errors of Neuromania and Darwinitis; that you agree that consciousness is not identical with brain activity; and that you can see we are so profoundly different from other living creatures that it is simply daft to try to make sense of our own behaviour by looking at what chimps, ants and sea slugs get up to. You may feel, nonetheless, more than a little dissatisfied. If you are, like me, hungry to develop a clear idea of the kind of being that you are, to construct a world picture that does not escape from supernatural myths only to fall into naturalistic ones, if you want to develop a post-religious account of our nature that does not assign us to the material world, you will want to know where we go from here. Okay, you might say, you have told us what is wrong with

20. Wilson, Consilience, 45. 21. Hardy, “In Tenebris II”.

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the biological account of human beings but isn’t this only the beginning, not the end, of the matter? Now tell us what you will put in its place. The truth is that I don’t know; but I am sure that no one else knows either. What’s more, the problem of human consciousness is not one that can be solved by further empirical research in the biological sciences, as will become clear when we think at a philosophical level about how to frame the question. Demolishing Neuromania and Darwinitis is a first and, I would submit, a much-needed step: indeed, perhaps more than a first step. In this book, I have, I hope, also made clear the nature of the differences between us and beasts and have made some concrete suggestions as to how we came to be so different. Even so, I can’t deny that my argument has been mainly negative, focusing on the fallacies of neurologizing our minds, Darwinizing our lives and biologizing the human world. Surely, as Francis Bacon asserted, my pars destruens (criticism) should be followed with a pars construens (positive suggestions).22 I have not done this. However, the pars destruens has been necessary to clear a space in which new ideas, a pars construens, might germinate. I could cite the precedent of John Locke, who found it “ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge” and hope that “an incomparable Mr Newton” will arise to show us what lies at the end of this path.23 And I could argue, along with Thomas Hardy in the verse quoted above, that we shall make progress only if we acknowledge how bad things are at present; in this case, if we recognize that most of our neurologically based knowledge of human behaviour and consciousness is not knowledge at all; if we arrive at the Socratic wisdom of knowing how little we know. Socratic wisdom, by the way, does not mean glossing our ignorance into a form of knowledge: seeing it as a kind of demonstration that something such as a God (occupying the gaps in our understanding) must exist as an explanation of consciousness; or as evidence for dualism; or more broadly support for the notion that the mind and the body are entirely separate, so that our minds are only temporary inhabitants of our bodies. I mention this because I have often been accused of harbouring a hidden religious agenda, of being a closet spiritualist, or of questioning Darwin’s theory of

22. Bacon, Novum Organum. 23. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “The Epistle to the Reader”, 11.

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evolution. I am an atheist humanist; but this does not oblige me to deny what is staring me in the face – namely, that we are different from other animals and that we are not just pieces of matter.24 My position – and yours if you agree with me – is not easy. Even if you are not accused of having beliefs that you do not subscribe to, you will also face some very difficult questions. Why, if the brain is not the basis of consciousness, is it so intimately bound up with our awareness and our behaviour? Why, of all the objects in the world, is the brain the most relevant to our lives as persons? The striking advances that have come from neuroscience in our ability to understand and treat diseases that impact on voluntary action, consciousness, and mood – something that has been central to my own entire professional career – make that question especially pressing. If consciousness, mind, volition and so on are not deeply connected with brain activity, what are we to make of the genuine advances that the neurosciences have brought to our management of conditions that affect these central underpinnings of ordinary life? We could respond to the question of what to do with the facts of neuroscience in another way, taking the great chasm between brains and persons as a reason for challenging the very notion of the brain as a starting-point for our thoughts about human consciousness. Other questions would then arise. Where would the brain figure in a world picture that denied it a place at the centre? How shall we deal with the fact that we are evolved organisms as well as persons? How shall we think about our hybrid status as pieces of matter subject to the laws of physics (brought home to us when we fall down the stairs), as organisms (underlined when we eat and defecate or fall ill), and as people who have a complex sense of themselves, narrate and lead their lives, and who are capable of thinking thoughts like the ones you are reading now? At any rate, if the aim of philosophy is, as the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars defined it, “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense”,25 we need a new approach to making sense of the relation between pebbles and human bodies and thoughts, between material things and the appearances of material things, between causes and deliberate actions.

24. And, by the way, to reiterate, my defence of human exceptionalism does not mean that I am in favour of cruelty to animals. Highlighting our differences from beasts does not provide justification for animal abuse or for carelessness in matters relevant to animal welfare. 25. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, 1.

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Three mysteries loom large: first, that (material) things (at least according to physics) that have no appearances in themselves somehow appear to certain entities in the world – to conscious beings like you and me; second, that these appearances are organized and synthesized into a world that makes some kind of coherent and common sense; and, third, that collectively we really do seem to make progress in our ability to make sense of the world, as is reflected in the growth of knowledge. If, in addressing these mysteries, we start from the brain, the solution to the first mystery eludes us: we simply cannot explain how one item (a sensed object) appears to, or in, another object (the brain); or how it is that, thanks to the brain, things have appearances. There are different responses to these seemingly intractable mysteries. The least radical is to look beyond the brain but still keep it at the centre of the enquiry. A more radical approach would be to question the orthodoxy of materialism (which is presupposed in neural accounts of consciousness) by looking critically at the notion of “matter”. Third, one could go for that most radical of all approaches and deny the privileged relation between brain and mind and consider that mind might be more widely, even universally, distributed. Let us look briefly at each of these responses.

Reconnecting the brain with the body and beyond

Those who believe that consciousness is to be found in the stand-alone brain subscribe to a “body–body” dualism, with the brain being a “mind– body” and the rest of the body being just a body. To me, this is no advance on the traditional Cartesian mind–body dualism that neuromaniacs see as the primitive mindset that they have grown out of. One way forwards from this position is to acknowledge: (a) that the brain is situated in a body from which it cannot be separated; (b) the embodied brain is inseparable from a biosphere; and (c) in the case of humans, we are inseparable from a community of minds and the worlds that its component selves have built. This is a view that was adumbrated by the twentieth-century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a thinker steeped in neuroscience but able to resist capitulating to it. His vision is summarized by Eric Matthews: Being a conscious being is engaging in complex relations with objects, and these relations depend on the whole human being, not simply on the brain; a disembodied brain could not be said to 350

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have conscious experiences of objects, but only to provide some of the necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for such conscious experiences.26 A contemporary expression of this is by Evan Thompson: The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and the environment. Our mental lives involve the body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes in the head.27 This view is gathering adherents by the day, and some of the converts come from a surprising quarter. For a long time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its affiliated university press (MIT Press) was the capital of mind–brain identity theory, particularly in its computational forms. It was here that the artificial intelligentsia (sometimes called the “MITniks”) churned out the party line. Now MIT Press has discovered the body and even the environment; and grudging acknowledgement has turned into fulsome recognition. Some excellent work has been done in what Andy Clark has called “supersizing the mind”,28 most notably by Alva Noë: The locus of consciousness is the dynamic life of the whole, environmentally plugged-in person or animal. Indeed, it is only when we take up this holistic perspective on the active life of the person or animal that we can begin to make sense of the brain’s contribution to conscious experience. … Human experience is a dance that unfolds in the world and with others. You are not your brain. We are not locked up in a prison of our own ideas and sensations. The phenomenon of consciousness, like that of life itself, is a world-involving dynamic process.29

26. 27. 28. 29.

Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, 57. Thompson, Mind in Life, xi. Clark, Supersizing the Mind. Noë, Out of Our Heads, xiii.

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Clark deserves particular acknowledgement for pioneering the rediscovery of what was obvious to non-philosophers. The title of his Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, published in Bradford Books by MIT Press, speaks for itself. Michael Wheeler,30 who shares Clark’s commitment to “an extended functionalism”, is part of a loose coalition of philosophers who subscribe to dynamical, embodied, extended, distributed and situated (DEEDS) theories of cognition. They seek to develop a cognitive science in which brain, body and world intertwine, and “beyond-the-skin” factors are accorded fully paid-up cognitive status. For another Bradford Books author, W. Teed Rockwell, consciousness is to be found in a dynamic field that encompasses the extra-cerebral body and the surrounding world, particularly in so far as we engage it in practical activity: “Even the most private, subjective, qualitative aspects of human experience, he argues, “are embodied in the brain-body-world nexus”.31 Such thoughts, although they represent a welcome return to something that might one day lead to common sense, are not new philosophically; they represent a partial recovery of a philosophical position that was fully developed in, for example, the early work of Heidegger. In his masterpiece Being and Time, Heidegger underlined that neither consciousness nor the self was like something “in” the cabinet of the body. The situation of a human being was not that of a mind located in a body but “Da-sein”, or “being there” or “being-in-the-world”. Unfortunately, Heidegger commits the opposite error of paying too little attention to the nervous system and he even seems to ignore the body. What is more, while liberating consciousness from a location in bits of the brain is an advance, he leaves important, indeed fundamental, questions untouched, discussed in my I Am.32 The most important, and most obvious, is that he has no explanation why Da-sein (“being there”) is being-at-a-particular “there”. At any rate, the embodied cognition movement, represented by Wheeler and Noë, which reaches beyond the brain, reminds me of the kinds of concessions that are squeezed out of imperial powers by their enslaved dominions when the writing is on the wall: too late, possibly, but certainly too little. Much of the old and misleading language (consciousness as “information” or “informa-

30. Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World. 31. Rockwell, Neither Brain Nor Ghost, 158. 32. See my A Conversation with Martin Heidegger, and (for the really keen students) I Am, “The Existential Necessity of Embodiment”.

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tion processing”) is retained, and the organic brain keeps its place at the ontological heart of the human world.

Rethinking matter

As we have seen, the most fundamental and pervasive difficulty facing a brain-based theory of consciousness is that it requires a material object – the brain, or parts of it, or events in parts of it – to be “about” events other than itself, and out of that aboutness to create a world in which the brain’s owner is explicitly situated. Supersizing the mind, which still leaves the brain at its centre, does not get round this difficulty of explaining how a material object can play this role in conferring appearances on other material objects. It is, after all, of the essence of matter, understood scientifically, to have no appearance in itself and, indeed, to have nothing to do with appearances. The physicalist gaze, of which neuroscience is a part, squeezes consciousness, appearances, out of the world, and then Neuromania tries to get them back by appealing to certain arrangements of matter that generate awareness: “Just like that!”, as the comedian-conjurer Tommy Cooper used to say. A logical response might therefore be to suggest that we need to rethink the notion of matter. Perhaps a richer, reformed account of this basic concept or stuff than that delivered by physics will give us what is needed: perhaps, one that could incorporate the mysterious counter-causal intentionality that we see in ordinary perception or (even) provide the basis for unity of consciousness, selfhood and agency. Some thinkers would agree with this. Unfortunately, they look to postclassical physics to deliver it. I think this is a mistake. Yes, matter as seen through the eyes of quantum theory seems less clod-hoppingly zombie-like than the mindless items that make up the push–pull universe of Newton. To some, this means that it is more mind-like, or at least mind-involved: there are ghosts, as Davies and Brown put it, in the atom.33 For example, subatomic particles such as photons show wave-like properties if they are observed or measured in one way and particle-like properties if they are observed or measured in another. The thing in itself is neither a wave nor a particle until a measurement is performed on it, at which point it settles into one or the other. In short, the observer lies at the heart of matter.

33. Davies & Brown, The Ghost in the Atom

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Alas, the new physics – with its underlying (according to Shahn Majid) “conviction that somehow the observer needs to be a partner in the very concept of reality” has not helped.34 There are two fundamental reasons why quantum mechanics doesn’t make matter more hospitable to mind. First, quantum mechanics applies to all matter, not just matter that is associated with minds, such as conscious human beings. It therefore offers no explanation of the difference between a thoughtless pebble and humans who think – among other things, about pebbles.35 Second, while quantum mechanics seems to locate appearance in the heart of matter, and thus to overcome “the disappearance of appearance” seen in matter as it is presented in classical physics, it doesn’t make things any better; indeed, it makes them worse. For it cannot explain the observer who makes the measurement that causes the wave–particle to settle for being either a wave or a particle. On the contrary, it presupposes the observer. The observer, however, is, of course, exactly what we are trying to explain. If matter at the subatomic level is in itself neither particulate nor wave-like, it is hardly going to generate the appearance (or the reality) of being either of these things without assistance from conscious beings. The ghost, in other words, is not in the atom but in the observation of the atom. To imagine otherwise is to succumb to the mother of all transferred epithets, placing mind not merely in the brain, or bits of the brain, but in subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics, far from helping us to understand consciousness in material terms, requires consciousness; without it, without the consciousness of the measuring observer, the elementary constituents of matter do not have a definite nature – a location, a momentum, the condition of being a wave or a particle. The fundamental objection to appealing to quantum notions of matter to make it seem more likely to house mind – namely that the strange properties observed by quantum physicists are just as much present in things that are and things that are not conscious – carries equal force when quantum phenomena are appealed to in order to explain particular aspects of consciousness. We made this point in “Brain science and human

34. Majid, “Quantum Spacetime and Physical Reality”, 98. 35. Nor, for a similar reason, does the replacement of the causally tight universe of classical physics with one in which indeterminacy reigns. The difference between a statistical–probabilistic world and one that is a causal nexus cannot deliver the difference between certain material objects that are free (human beings) and the overwhelming majority (non-human matter) that are not.

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consciousness, III” in Chapter 3, against the suggestion by Hameroff and Penrose that the unity of consciousness could be explained by “quantum coherence” that would bind together activity across different parts of the brain. According to them, quantum coherence is due to a particular structure in the neurons; namely, a folded membrane called the endoplasmic reticulum. Unfortunately, this membrane is seen in all neurons (including the vast majority of them that no one would accuse of being conscious) and in many tissues outside the nervous system and in the cells of organisms that are not conscious. There is also the little problem that macroscopic coherence in a warm, wet brain is somewhat short-lived: approximately 10–13 seconds, a rather thin sliver of time. This is not the kind of interval out of which you could get much sense of unity, or indeed coherence, never mind a biography.36 Why on earth have so many writers thought that quantum theory might seem to solve problems that classical understanding of the material world does not? It is, I think, because certain phenomena, such as delocalization (the fact that elementary items do not have an absolute position) and “spooky” action at a distance (whereby events at one place, such as wave– particle collapse, instantaneously, non-causally, determine events such as a wave–particle collapse at another), seem to be mind-like, at least to the extent of sharing the non-material mystery of mind. In other words, because contemporary physics makes matter almost as weird as mind looks from the point of view of materialism, it may give us insights into mind. The twisted logic does not impress. If we are going to seek a materialist account of mind, whether or not we look for it in the distinctive material properties of the brain, we need a richer, not just a weirder, idea of matter or (since we cannot escape thinking of “matter” as that on which physics has the last word) of some otherwise-named universal substance of which the world is made. At any rate, we need to look beyond the (fruitfully) impoverished account of matter that reigns in physics and, indeed, in all the natural sciences (chemistry, biology, neuroscience and so on) that look to physics as their ground floor, their destination, their ultimate truth. Such an account will not only have to find room for the interaction between insentient lumps of stuff, energies and forces shorn of the properties and qualities we ordinarily experience in the world, but it will also have to explain how they come to appear to, and be experienced, suffered and

36. See Stapp, “Quantum Mechanical Theories of Consciousness”.

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enjoyed by, sentient creatures and actively made sense of by self-conscious individuals such as ourselves. And it will need to think again about how the material universe and that small part of it that experiences parts of the universe are related. Such an account will not come from physics that erases appearances (even if it at first appears to weave them into matter in quantum mechanics), but from a way of thought that is not beholden to existing disciplines. These surface reasons why it is wrong to look to quantum mechanics for answers to the problem of consciousness conceal a deeper reason; namely, that it comes from the same place as generated the problem of the observer, ultimately the objective quantitative view of physical science. The observer has been allowed in slowly, through cracks in the theory of light and contradictions in the physical understanding of space and time. But it is allowed entry into the physical world only on physics’ terms and, in the case of quantum mechanics, is present as only part of a system that generates “observations” that are measurements. The observer is not a living individual. Ultimately, a theory of consciousness will have to make sense of science and, more generally, knowledge itself: of the fact that the blind laws of physics have given birth to a sighted watchmaker who makes those laws visible and sees how they may be used to shape the world according to her perceived needs. There is at present nothing in matter as understood through natural sciences – no, not even in the wildest reaches of quantum mechanics – that would lead one to expect matter to assume forms in which it would become conscious, self-conscious and knowing, so that it might be able to formulate universal laws that encompass its own existence. We should, anyway, have anticipated that quantum theory would not help us much given that it is currently in something of an unholy conceptual mess on the domestic front.37 If it can’t sort out the matter in ordinary material objects, there is little chance that it can sort out mind. Only politicians are allowed to use successful foreign policies to make up for problems on the domestic front. And it is ironical that neuromaniacs should be looking to extend the empires of physicalism just when it seems to be having such problems at home. So we need, perhaps, to remove the concept of matter from the jaws of physics, or, more radically, to deliver a new mode of thinking about “being”, or the fundamental stuff of the

37. See e.g. Smolin, The Rise of String Theory.

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universe, which straddles the subjective and objective views. Some thinkers are taking this path.

Spreading mind

Ascribing consciousness to bits of the brain is actually a form of magic thinking – the inclination to believe that mind might inhabit material things – rather than tough-minded materialism. As we discussed in “The computational theory of mind” in Chapter 5, such magic thinking, combined with, or propped up by, the notion that consciousness is essentially information (or information-processing), and that the world is full of information, opens the door to panpsychism. This is the belief that mind or consciousness is present throughout the entire universe, or even that they are the entire universe. Chalmers has argued that consciousness or protoconsciousness is as fundamental to what we regard as the material world as is mass or charge or spin.38 This goes further than Samuel Butler’s narrator in Erewhon, who argued wittily that “Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning which serves him in excellent stead”.39 Chalmers is not a lone panpsychist, although his views have been singled out for mockery by other biologizers of consciousness, such as Searle.40 Panpsychism has a certain logic; if consciousness boils down to material events in a piece of matter, then perhaps any bit of matter can boil up to consciousness. This is close to the argument of respected British philosopher Galen Strawson (whose assault on free will we discussed in “Welcome back, freedom” in Chapter 7).41 If all the items in the universe – minerals, plants and animals – are made of the same sorts of elementary particles, there can be no explanation of how consciousness arises out of a consciousness-free world and how awareness is a characteristic of some objects but not others. The usual idea that experience will inevitably emerge when the elementary particles are arranged in a certain way

38. More recently, Chalmers has developed this view in more detail; see Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness. For a detailed critique, see my forthcoming article in The New Atlantis. 39. Butler, Erewhon or Over the Range, 153. 40. Searle’s wonderfully funny review of Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind is collected in The Mystery of Consciousness. 41. Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature.

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doesn’t hold up.42 Strawson therefore concludes that consciousness must be present in even the lowest forms of matter: in the elementary particles. This is not a new idea. Its most compelling and influential expression was in seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Spinoza’s espousal of the notion that mind and matter are simply two aspects of the same substance, both being ubiquitous. Unfortunately, Strawson’s vision, like Spinoza’s, doesn’t explain most key facts about consciousness: notably that some things (like you and me) seem to have it and others (such as pebbles) don’t. Panpsychism – like the appeal to a postclassical understanding of matter – does not help us to make sense of the difference between a pebble and a creature that thinks about a pebble or, indeed, between a pebble and a thought about a pebble. It is no use suggesting (for example) that the minute packages of consciousness in elementary particles add up in me, while they don’t add up in pebbles, which is why I am conscious and they are not. This just multiplies the questions; for example, what is it about me that makes them add up to my awareness of the world around me? We can’t appeal to the arrangement of elementary particles to explain this difference; this was the solution that led Strawson to reject standard materialism. It is anyway inadmissible because, as we saw in “Brain science and human consciousness, I” in Chapter 3, the adding up of components into a pattern requires consciousness to pick out the components and see them as a whole. There is also the unanswered question of what the individual experience of these dust clouds of elementary particles would be experience of: themselves? Their immediate surroundings? A macroscopic object of which they are a part? And if the glimmers of experience did somehow add up, would they set aside their own dim intuitions for the clear awareness of the conscious mind that was aware of being aware? The problems faced by this commendably radical idea – which at least acknowledges that, by locating mind in (a piece of ) matter, the mind–brain identity theory naturally leads to panpsychism – are greater by many orders of difficulty even than those faced by the neural theory of mind.

42. You may remember a similar argument in “Did natural selection generate consciousness?” in Chapter 4, where I pointed out that evolution could not explain the emergence of consciousness.

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CONCLUSION

We can’t, as things stand now, so much as imagine the solution to the hard problem. The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling … There’s hardly anything we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.43 None of this should discourage us from thinking in radically different ways. We should see the failure of the neural theory of consciousness as a crucial symptom of the limitations of a physics-based materialism that is already in great trouble from the quantum paradoxes that beset the notion of matter and, avoiding the mistake of embracing neutral monism or dualism as an alternative to materialism, to settle for ontological agnosticism. You might be uneasy about drawing a conclusion of this magnitude. Surely, you might argue, the difficulties thrown up by the mind–brain identity theory are too local a problem to justify putting into question what is not only the standard, but also the most successful, way of conceiving the entire universe. But there is a precedent for this kind of response, from within physics itself. Remember how those rather uninteresting observations made by Max Planck on blackbody radiation brought about a massive revolution in physics, and our thinking about the material universe, when they were thought about with an open mind and a respect for the data? They replaced a physics based on the notion of cause with one based on that of probability, and they imported indeterminacy into the very fabric of the universe. A revolution triggered by the failure of materialist, or brain-based, theories of consciousness may centre on thinking about that most fundamental property of mental phenomena, most clearly present, and limitlessly elaborated, in human consciousness; namely, intentionality. Intentionality, which tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material universe, could be the equivalent of black-body radiation. If we fully acknowledge its counter-causal nature – that it points in the direction opposite to causation – and if we do not pretend to ourselves that it can be assimilated to the causal transactions between living and non-living matter, then we shall see that it is incapable of being accommodated in the materialist world picture

43. Fodor, “Headaches Have Themselves”.

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as it is currently construed. Since it is the basis of the sense of subjectivity and selfhood, of explicit possibility and generality, of agency that treats causes as handles, of tensed time in a material world that in itself is confined to what-is, and of a shared human world, made of “Thatter” as well as matter, that is distinct from the biosphere, it does not seem absurd to suggest that it may undermine not only Neuromania but the scientistic orthodoxy that underpins it, according to which everything consists of different configurations of matter. An enquiry that begins here could mean the beginning of a new dawn in human thought: an awakening sense of possibility that need not retreat to stale supernaturalism or warmed-over spirituality handed down from previous ages. The brain will still, of course, have an important place in this enquiry. As a clinician and neuroscientist, I cannot but be aware of the dependency of the condition of our consciousness on the condition our brains are in. The devastating impact of brain damage on our ability to construct and function in a world, not matched by the effects of damage to any other organ in the body or any other object in the world, still presents a problem even to those of us who deny that the brain is the beginning and end of consciousness. Why is a bang on the head so different in its effects from a bang on the leg or a bang on the chair on which we are sitting? No revolution in our thinking about the nature and origin of consciousness that does not keep the implications of the neurological facts steadily in view will be worth taking seriously. To ignore them is to indulge in magic thinking, although of a kind opposite to that embraced by mind–brain identity theorists. More generally, we must acknowledge that, although we are offset from the natural world – and enjoy a collective destiny that takes us ever further from the natural world, from the biosphere – we are always answerable to nature, and individually end where we began: engulfed by nature. Brain science, what is more, may give us a handle on the mystery of ourselves by making the fact that we are aware not only of actual but also possible worlds doubly mysterious. And the claim that a collective of brains weaves together a world – of possibility, facts, knowledge, beliefs, norms, principles, signs and artefacts that we all share – makes the mystery of our human world more apparent. And imagining the brain, a material object subject to the laws of physics, as a place where the products of the blind laws of physics discover those laws and utilize them to shape the material world must drive us to think harder about ourselves. Thinking harder about ourselves is essential if we are not to fall victim to the fallacious belief that doffing the shackles of religion obliges us to don 360

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the shackles of a naturalistic viewpoint from which we are seen as organisms whose significance is no different from that of any other life form. Criticizing the Neuromania and Darwinitis that locates us entirely in the material world is the first step in the task of understanding the place of the human spirit in the great drama of existence and seeing more clearly than we do at present what it is to be a human being. There is no more important or exciting intellectual – or, dare I say, spiritual – adventure.

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378

Index

aboutness of consciousness 108–10 action potential 17 actions collective 227–8 context of 250, 315 denaturing 249 free 260–61 origins 258 as physical events 51–3 preparatory 253–4 reasons for 250–51 voluntary 252–3, 260 active transport 17 adaptation 19 adaptive interaction 226 adaptive value 262 addiction 311, 316–17 adolescent brain 309–10 aesthetics 281 agency 218–20 agnosticism, ontological 359 altruism 43, 63–4, 319 animal behaviour, complexity 239–40 animal research 25 animalization of humanity 44–6, 59–65, 156–7 animals ascription of beliefs to 160 consciousness 239 exaggerated claims about 152 humanizing 157–61 numeracy 158

tool use 158–9, 222, 230 anthropomorphization 44–5, 157–61, 183–91 anticipatory borrowing 173–4 Aplysia research 15, 125–8 appearance 141–5 Appleton, Josie 148 argument from analogy 161, 230 argument from design 211 Aristotle 30–31, 223 art 60–61, 284–91, 305–6 Art Instinct, The (Dutton) 286–7 artefacts 261 artificial intelligence 193 artistic ambition 288 aspects, version of identity theory 95 atheism 327 atoms 145 attraction 48–9 Australopithecine hominids 216 authenticity, of memory 269 auto-cueing 224 autobiographical memories 127 autocerebroscope 96–7 autonomy 52–3 awareness 99, 101–2, 112, 117, 173 axons 16 background rhythm 134 Bacon, Francis 348 bare shoulder experiment 218–19 Bartels, Andreas 76–7

379

INDEX

Batmanghelidjh, Camila 279 Baumeister, Roy 282 Beauregard, Mario 74, 77–8, 330 beauty 74 beauty spot 287–8 becoming 133 behaviour criminal 308–14 ethical 317–20 influences on 245–6 instinctive 252 moral and legal assessment 312 simplification of 79 behaviourism 40, 191 Being and Time (Heidegger) 352 being-in-the-world 352 Bekoff, Marc 235 beliefs, ascription to animals 160 Bennett, M. R. 184, 342 Bercolani, Paco 159 Berger, Hans 25 Bergson, Henri 129, 131 biologism challenging 71 consequences of accepting 51, 70–71 dangers of 8–9 influence of 7 pessimistic 4–5 view of humanity 148 Blackmore, Susan 164–5, 275 Blakemore, Colin 52, 246–7 blame, neuro-mitigation 308–15 Blind Watchmaker, The (Dawkins) 211–12 blindsight 178 blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) MRI 38–9 body 270–73, 350–53 Boyd, Brian 62–3, 300, 303 Boyer, Pascal 328 brain as ahistorical 283 circuitry 19–22 and evolution 225–6 as evolved organ 42–4 as integrated unit 81 reconnecting with body 350–53 role in body 30–31 “Brain in the Vat, The” (Putnam) 91–3 brain-damage studies 89–90 brain mapping 25–6 brain scanning 73, 309–10, 328–9

brain waves 25–6 Brentano, Franz 104 Broca, Paul 23, 35 broken cup 130–31 Brooks, David 68 Bryson, Norman 62 Burtt, E. A. 192 Butler, Samuel 212 buying, and selling 325 Byatt, A. S. 7, 291–5 Cabanis, Pierre Jean 30 caching food 135–6 Cajal, Ramón y 19, 201 Cameron, David 326 Carroll, Joseph 301–2 Carter, Rita 53, 262, 264 Castel, Alan 280 catching a ball 253 Caton, Richard 25 causal theory of perception 107 causality, and correlations 85–9, 95 cause 250–51 central processes 40 cerebral deposits, memory as 129, 131 cerebral theory 29–31 Chalmers, David 161, 208, 357 change 132–6 Changeux, Jean-Pierre 291–3 chimpanzees 161, 222 choice, manual 217 Chomsky, Noam 193 Churchland, Patricia 197, 204, 317 Churchland, Paul 179 circuitry 19–22 circuitry of temptation 323–4 Clark, Andy 351–2 Clark, Stephen 174 claustrum 120 Clayton, Nicola 135–6, 158 cognition, DEEDS theories 352 cognitive architecture 192–3 cognitive load 282 cognitive neuroscience 193 passim cognitive psychology 40, 191 passim cognitive unconscious 178 Cohen, P. 323–4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 102–3 collective action 227–8 collective awareness 221, 227 collectivization, of experience 234, 236–7

380

INDEX

colour preference 48 common neural oscillation 134 common sense 278–81 compartmentalization 34 competitive advantage 180–81 complexity 195, 239–40 composite tools 223 computational theory of mind 6, 40, 191–8, 199–208 computer analogy 186–7 computer systems, physical systems as 206–7 computerized tomography 37 computers 123, 173, 195–6 conditions, necessary and sufficient 90–95 conscious agency 53 consciousness see also soul of animals 239 biological value 175–81 as brain activity 29–31 collectivized 221, 227 as experience of nerve impulses 144 founded on primate consciousness 219–20 level and content 137 location in brain 31–2, 101 and natural selection 170–81 neural account of 242 neural correlates 99–102 not computational 197 origin of 171–5 problem of 348 in quantum mechanics 354–6 as uncertainty resolution 201–3 unity of 114–20, 133 unity over time 121–3 Consciousness Explained (Dennett) 103 conspicuous consumption 322 consumer behaviour 281–2, 322–4 consumers, rational choices 64 contemporary orthodoxy 41–2, 137–8 contempt 69 contradictions in natural science 3 neural theories of consciousness 137–44 Copenhagen interpretation 119 correlations, and causality 85–9, 95 Cosmides, Leda 47 counting 158 courtship 162 Craik, Kenneth 183–91 Crane, Mary Thomas 294

Crane, Tim 249 credit cards 322 Crick, Francis 30, 119–20, 134, 275 criminal behaviour 308–14 criminal liability 307 Criminal Man (Lombroso) 69 criminality, and morphology 69 cultural evolution 168 cumulative selection 172, 180 Da-sein 352 Damasio, Antonio 82–3 Daniels, Anthony 312 Darwin, Charles 45–6, 154, 209–10 Darwin, Erasmus 223–4 Darwinism vs. Darwinitis, risk of contradiction 241 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Dennett) 67 Davidson, Donald 160 Davies, Paul 206 Davis, Philip 62–3, 296–7 Dawkins, Richard 43, 70, 153, 159–60, 163–70, 172, 180, 204–5, 211–12, 327 de Waal, Frans 69 DEEDS theories of cognition 352 deliberation 177–8 della Porta, Giambattista 45 Dennett, Daniel 41, 46, 58, 67–8, 103, 108–10, 137–8, 161–2, 164, 166, 169, 175, 189 depolarization 17–18 Deresiewicz, William 303 Descartes, René 32, 239 Descent of Man, The (Darwin) 45, 154 desensitization 20 design stance 108 determinism 51–3, 56, 243, 245, 256–8, 312 diffusion MRI 38 dinner date 121–3 discriminative responses 21 Disneyfication 157–61 DNA, as information 204–5 Dobbs, David 81 doctrine of specific energies 21, 98 Donald, Merlin 199, 214, 224–5, 234–5 Donne, John 7, 291–3, 295–6 double aspect theory 85–7, 95 double intentionality 128 drives 251–2 dualism 350 Duncan Smith, Iain 326

381

INDEX

Dutton, Denis 61, 286–7, 301 dynamical core 120

fear 235 feeding 156–7 Ferguson, Niall 66–7 Ferrier, David 35 fitness, inclusive 165 Flourens, Jean Pierre 34–5, 122 Fodor, Jerry 192–3 food caching 135–6 Foucault, Michel 62 fractionated finger movement 216 free actions 260–61 free self 256–9 free will 3, 51–7, 68, 178, 259–62 free won’t 56 freedom 243, 244–7, 258–63 Friston, Karl 83, 121–2 Frith, Chris 43, 58, 110, 187–8, 195, 340 function, localization of 22–5 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 37–9, 193 legal applications 64–5 limitations of 76–7, 82 reliability of research 80–82 spatial resolution 81 voluntary actions 53 functional shift 297 functionalism 107–8 functionalism, extended 352 future 67, 134–5

economic behaviour 78 Edelman, Gerard 266 egocentric space 113 Einstein, Albert 124, 312 electroencephalography (EEG) 25–6, 37 elementary particles 358 embodied cognition 352–3 emotions 78–9, 235–6 empathy 69 encoding, of memory 126, 127–8 endoplasmic reticulum 355 endurance 132–6 enduring self 135, 267–70 Enemies of Hope (Tallis) 6 energy 144, 203 environment, influence of 152–3 epilepsy 25–6, 29–30, 36, 90–91, 246–7 episodic memory 127 epistemology 344 equipotentiality 36 Erasistratus 31–2 Escher, M. C. 198 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 34 ethical disability 310 ethics 68, 317–20, 345 evoked potentials 26 evolution 181, 224–5 evolutionary criticism 299–306 evolutionary psychology (EP) 44, 46–9 evolutionary theory 170–81, 286–7 evolved organ, brain as 42–4 excitation 17, 20 existential intuition 215, 273–4 experiences 85, 93, 96–9, 141, 234 experiments 76–7 explanatory gap 175 Explicit Animal, The (Tallis) 5, 230 explicitness 230–31, 237 expression 24, 45–6 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The (Darwin) 45–6 externalization 235

Gage, Phineas P. 23, 35, 308 Galen 44 Galileo 140–41 Gall, Franz Joseph 33, 36 Gallup, Gordon 220 gaze 221 Gazzaniga, Michael 193, 308 Gelbard-Sagiv, Hagar 128–9 Gellner, Ernest 343 generator potential 18 genes, sharing with animals 153 genetic determinism 152–3 genetics, as information technology 204–5 God Delusion, The (Dawkins) 164 God gene 65, 330–31 God spots 65, 329–30, 332 Goleman, Daniel 280 Goodall, Jane 233 Goodenough, Oliver 67, 83–4 Gopnik, Alison 190 Gould, Stephen Jay 334

facial expressions 45–6 faculties 34 fallacy of misplaced explicitness 157–8, 159, 160

382

INDEX

government 236 graph theory 292–3 Gray, John 1–2, 4, 57, 67, 324, 338–9, 341 Greenfield, Susan 30 Grist, Matthew 279–81 grooming 162–3 Grünbaum, Adolf 133

neuro-theology 327–36 political economics 320–27 storytelling and literature 300–301 humanity, effects of Darwinized understanding 68 humanizing animals 157–61 Hume, David 57–8, 124, 264–5 humours 44 Humphrey, Nick 214, 225–6 Huxley, Thomas 45

Hacker, P. M. S. 184, 342 Haggard, Patrick 54 Haldane, J. B. S. 319, 344 Hamer, Dean 331 Hameroff, Steven 118 Hamlet 294 hands 216–28 hard-wiring 319 Hardy, Thomas 348 Harlow, John 23 Harris, Sam 327–8 heart, as locus of intellect 30 heat 96 Hebb, Donald 26 Heidegger, Martin 235, 352 Herophilus 31 Hick, William 202 hindsight 180 Hippocrates 29–30 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 234 Holton, Richard 346 Homo sapiens, biological origin 239 homunculi 188–9 Hood, Bruce 89 Hubel, David 21, 81 Hughlings Jackson, John 24, 35, 56 Human Animal, The (Olson) 270–72 Human Animal in Western Art and Science, The (Kemp) 44 Human Genome Project 152 human world 229–38 humanities as animalities 59–65 art 60–61, 284–91, 305–6 ethics 317–20 evolutionary criticism 299–306 experiments 296–9 influence of biologism 277–8 literary criticism 61–2, 291–6 Marxist aesthetics 306 music 303–4 neuro-evolutionary pseudoscience 7–8 neuro-law 306–17

I 57–8, 113–14, 264 identification 271–2 identity 57–8, 267–78 inclusive fitness 165 individualism 237 information 199–208 information processing 40, 202–4, 357 informationalization 206–7 inhibition 20 inner faculties 34 instinctive behaviour 252 integration 115–18 integrative action 20 integrity 264 intelligence 179 intention 248–50 intentional stance 108 intentionality 103–11, 256, 261, 359–60 interpretation 111 introspection 58, 264–5 intuition 87 isolated sensations 112 James, William 130, 283 Jeste, Dilip 75 Johansen-Berg, Heidi 254 Johnson-Laird, Philip 198, 204 Johnson, Samuel 261–2 joint attention 221 juggling 254–5 Kandel, Eric 125–9, 158 Kant, Immanuel 265, 273 Kapogiannis, Dimitrios 330–31 Kawabati, Hideaki 74 Kemp, Martin 44, 69 Kingdom of Infinite Space, The (Tallis) 6 knowledge 62, 231–2, 238, 260, 301 Koch, Christof 119–20, 134, 275 Kong, Jian 77

383

INDEX

Lange, Friedrich Albert 35, 122 Langer, Suzanne 228 language 24 complexity 231 computational theory of mind 199–208 functional shift 297 and possibility 233 as referential 231–3 and tools 227 use of 183 language acquisition device 193 Lashley, Karl 36 law 64–5, 306–17 laws of nature, and freedom 259–62 Leake, Jonathan 74 learning 157 Lehrer, Jonah 281–2, 322–3 level of consciousness 25–6 Levitin, Daniel 61 lexical shuttle 162–3 liberty, and materialism 259 Libet, Benjamin 8, 54–6, 247–50 lie detectors 315–16 light 96 Lindstrom, Martin 281 literary criticism 7, 61–2, 291–9 literary taste 296 literature 300–301 Livingstone, Margaret 285 localization in the brain 21, 22–5, 35–6, 82 Locke, John 34, 267–9, 272, 348 Loewenstein, George 78–9, 325 Lombroso, Cesare 69 Lorenz, Konrad 239 love 74, 76–8, 281

Master and His Emissary, The (McGilchrist) 144 material world 140–44 materialism 259, 355 matter 341, 353–7 Matthews, Eric 350–51 Matthews, Paul 294 Matrix, The 91–2 McCabe, David 280 McClure, Samuel 78 McCrone, John 128 McCulloch, W. S. 201 McGilchrist, Iain 144 McGinn, Colin 342 McQuain, Jeffrey 294 meant meaning 231 measurement 141, 158 Meeks, Thomas 75 Mele, Alfred 55–6, 68 meme theory 163–70, 341 memes 46, 166–8, 194 memory 123–32, 267–9 mental faculties 34 mental items, properties 104 mental models 110, 188, 190–91 mental modules 192–3 mental objects 292–3 mereological fallacy 184 Merker, Björn 176 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 350–51 meta-language 231 Midgley, Mary 342 Mill, John Stuart 259–60 Miller, Geoffrey 303–4, 321–2 Mimesis and the Human Animal (Storey) 302 mimetic skills 224 minds 166–8, 213, 238, 357–8 “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (Searle) 186 mirror neurons 64, 189–90, 266, 289, 295 missing link 46 Mithen, Stephen 214 modern humanism 3 modularity 82 Mondrian, Piet 287, 289 moral degeneracy 69–70 moral judgements 63 moral philosophy 345–6 moral responsibility 257 morality 319 morphology, of criminality 69 Morse, Stephen 309–10

Macbeth 294 machines 185 magic thinking 357 magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) 37–8 Majid, Shahn 353 making explicit 230–31 manipulative indeterminacy 217–18 manual choosing 217 manual touch 218 mapping, of brain 25–6 Marxist aesthetics 306 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 351 Massey, I. 285, 288–90, 294, 298

384

INDEX

motivation 250 motor evolution 224 Müller, Johannes Peter 21, 98 music 61, 303–4 myelin sheath 18

neurons 16–17, 21, 119–20 neurophilosophy 40–42 neuroscience, as manifestation of consciousness 94 neurosciences advances and benefits 349 disciplines and scopes 15–16 importance of influence 8–9 power of 279–81 rise of 5 as self-refuting 338–9 neurotransmitters 20 New Scientist 80–81 nihilism 68 nihilistic Darwinism 68 no-person view 113 nodes of Ranvier 18 Noë, Alva 351–2 norms 309, 313–14 novels, and neuroscience 303 Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein) 325–6 numeracy, in animals 158

Nagel, Thomas 113 Naish, John 322 narrative 258 natural science, contradictions 3 natural selection 170–81, 209–10 naturalism 148 necessary condition 90–94, 95 neo-phrenology 36, 75–6 nerve impulses 16–19; see also neural activity appearance 95–6 and experiences 96–7 lack of intrinsic nature 138–40 location in brain 97–8 monotony of 97 travelling and arrival 100–101 triggers 96 nerve stimulus 18 neural activity 85, 100–101, 138–40; see also nerve impulses “Neural Basis of Unconditional Love, The” (Beauregard) 74 neural circuits, as self-aware 266 neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) 99–102 neural theories of consciousness 137–44, 359 neuro-determinism 7, 56, 244–5, 246–56 neuro-economics 64, 78–9, 322 neuro-law 64–65, 306–17 neuro-lit-crit 7, 61–2, 291–9 neuro-theology 65, 327–36 neuro-truistics 280 neuroaesthetics 7, 60–61, 284–5, 289 neuroarthistory 60–61 Neuroarthistory (Onians) 285–6, 290 neurogenesis 27 neuroimaging 83–4; see also functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); positron emission tomography (PET) scanning neurolinguistics 24 neurological novels 303 neurological reflexivity 326 Neuromania 5, 29, 73–84 neuron doctrine 19 Neuronal Man (Changeux) 291–3

object constancy 105 objective truths 62 observation 87 observers 114, 354–6 Offray de la Mettrie, Julien 195 Olson, Eric 270–72 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 45 On the Sacred Disease (Hippocrates) 29–30 Onians, John 285–6, 289 ontological agnosticism 359 opposability 216–17, 226 organisms, in relation to environment 113–14 Ortega y Gasset, José 238 Other, the 67 others, as selves 233 ouroboros 340–41 pain 79–80 Paley, William 211 panpsychism 357–8 parenchymal theories 31–2 Parfit, Derek 268–9 particles 358 partnerships 48–9 Pashler, Harold 80 Passmore, John 338 patch clamp method 18

385

INDEX

pathetic fallacy 184 Penfield, Wilder 36, 91, 93 Penrose, Roger 118 people differences from animals 4, 148–51, 213–14 as explicit 151, 230–31, 237 as political animals 236 as sighted watchmakers 212 suggested similarity to animals 147–8 thumbs 215 upright posture 215 use of tools 222–3, 230 why different? 214–19 perception 105–7, 109, 202 persistence of original motivation 153 personal responsibility 308–13 personhood 272 Pfeiffer, Sven 93 philosophy 341–7, 349 phrenology 33, 34–5 physical registration, and perception 106 physical stance 108 physical systems, as computer systems 206–7 physics 118–19 physiognomics 44–5 Piaget, Jean 269 Picasso, Pablo 287 Pinker, Steven 43, 61, 189, 194 Pippard, Brian 173 Pitts, W. S. 201 Place, U. T. 41, 337 planning 177–8 plasticity 26–7, 36, 254–5 Pliny the Elder 30 pointing 221, 233–4 political economics 320–27 politics 236 population-based approach 165 positron emission tomography (PET) scanning 83 possibility 233 potential information 207 Povinelli, D. J. 161, 230, 233 power and knowledge 62 pragmatic self-refutation 338–9 preparatory actions 253–4 present 132 present state, and past state 129–30 primary qualities 140–42 primates, self-awareness 220

processing 192 progress, contempt for 4–5 propositional attitudes 104, 235, 251 proprioception 217 proto-tools, hands as 217–19, 221–2 protobiont 171 Proust was a Neuroscientist (Lehrer) 303 psychology 40 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Brentano) 104 public sphere 259–60 Putnam, Hilary 91–2 qualia 95, 102–3, 175 qualities 140–42, 172–3 quantum coherence 118–19, 355 quantum mechanics 353–6 quantum physics 118–19 Quine, W. V. 343 racism 67 radiology 37 Raichle, Marcus 83 Raine, Adrian 308 Ramachandran, V. S. 189, 241, 266, 287, 317–18, 329–30 rational choice 64 readiness potential 54 reasons 250–51 red hat 95–6, 98–9, 104–6, 110, 115–16, 133 redundancy 200 Rees, G. 81–2, 195 reform, possibility of 314 Reformation 333 refractory period 17 Reid, Thomas 34, 264, 268–9 religion 65, 327–36 repolarization 17 representation 112, 190–91 reputation reflex 61, 287 responsibilities, and rights 313–14 responsiveness, regulation of 20–21 rewards 283 rights, and responsibilities 313–14 Robinson, Howard 153, 342 robots 108–9 romantic love 76–7 Röntgen, Wilhelm 37 Rorty, Richard 62 Rosenberg, Alex 68 Roth, Marco 303

386

INDEX

RSA Social Brain project 279 Russell, Bertrand 104, 113

simplification, in neuroscience 282–3 Simpsons, The, memory experiment 128–9 simulation 196 Singer, Peter 70 Singh, Devendra 48–9 Sloan Wilson, David 280–81, 321 smile, memory of 127–8 Snead, C. 307–13 social attitudes 79 social brain project 9 social evolution 168–9 social policy 325, 339–40 Socrates 129 Socratic wisdom 348 soft-wiring 319 Soon, C. S. 55 soul 29–37; see also consciousness spatial aggregation 236 speciesism 148 speech 24 Spinoza, Baruch 358 spitting 148–9 squid axon 17 stand-alone brain 90–94 Steven, Megan S. 308 Storey, Robert 302 storytelling, and literature 300–301 Straw Dogs (Gray) 1–2, 4 Strawson, Galen 257–8, 357–8 strong connectedness 268 structure, as information 205 Stuart, Susan 315 subatomic particles 353 subtraction 20 Sudden Shakespeare (Davis) 297 sufficient condition 90–95 summation 20 synapses 20 synchrony 134

saliva 148–9 saltatory conduction 18 Sartre, Jean-Paul 305–6 Satel, Sally 316 Savulescu, Julian 327 Scholz, Jan 254 Schooler, Jonathan 68 Science of Morality, The (Walker) 63 scientism, capitulation to 343 Scruton, Roger 253 Scull, Andrew 68–9, 70, 282 sea snail research 125–8 Searle, John 86–9, 185–6, 342–3 secondary qualities 140 secondary tool use 222 seeing 115–18 self see also I; personhood aspects that matter 274–5 denial of 57–8 enduring 135, 267–70 evolution 273–4 finding 263–75 free 256–9 self-appropriation 258 self-awareness 213–14, 231–3 self-hatred 66 self-washed brain 340 selfhood 114, 233 Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins) 163 selfish genes 43, 46, 159–60 Sellars, Wilfrid 349 selling, and buying 325 semantic memory 127 semiosphere 234 sensations 95–103, 112 sense experience, as sums 198 sensitization 20 sensory field, experienced as unified 115–17 sensory pathways 201–2 sensory perception 201 sensus communis 34 sexual bonding 162 Shakespeare, William 288, 297–9, 303 Shannon, Claude 201 Sharma, Aditi 316 Sherrington, Charles 20, 36, 216 sight, emergence from photosensitivity 172–3

table as an example 141 tabula rasa 34 Taylor, Matthew 9, 278–9, 326 teaching 236 technological evolution 168–9 technology 260 Teed Rockwell, W. 352 tenses 124–5, 129, 132–6 Thatter 228, 231, 234 Theophrastus 44–5 theory of consciousness, demands on 356

387

INDEX

theory of evolution 209–10, 239 thinking by transferred epithet 183–91, 194 third-person view 113 Thompson, Evan 351 Thorndike, E. L. 192 thought experiments 345–6 threshold of awareness 101–2 thumbs 215–17 time 121–3, 132–6 Tinbergen, Nikolaas 239, 287 Tooby, John 47 tools composite 223 hands as 220 and language 227 use by animals 158–9 use of 222–3, 230 touch 218 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 63 tractography 38 transcendence, of matter 341 transferred epithet 183–91, 194 Tricomi, Elizabeth 318 Trimble, Michael 330 tuning, of neurons 21 Turing test 196 “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Quine) 343

ventricular theories 31–2 Vermeule, Blakey 61 view from nowhere 113 virtual causality 253 visual consciousness 100 visual field 117 Vohs, Kathleen 68 voltage-dependent gates 17, 18 voluntary actions 252–3, 260 von Haller, Albrecht 34 von Soemmering, Samuel 32 voxels 81 Vrecko, Scott 73 Waal, Franz de 236 waist-to-hip ratios 48–9 Wallace, Brendan 47, 71 War of the World, The (Ferguson) 66–7 water analogy 87–8 Weaver, Warren 200 Weiskrantz, Larry 178 western scrub jays 135–6 Wheeler, Michael 352 White, Thomas 148 Why the Mind is Not a Computer (Tallis) 6 Wiesel, Torstein 21, 81 Willis, Thomas 32 willpower 282 Wilson, E. O. 245, 287, 347 wiring 319 wisdom 74–5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 63, 183–4 Wood-Jones, F. 224 world, as represented in brain 190–91 Wuthering Heights 302

uncertainty 200–201 unconditional love 74, 77–8 unconscious mechanisms 176 unity 114–20, 264 unity, of consciousness 133 upright posture 215–16, 221 ur-eye 172 Uttal, William 75

X-rays 37

validation, of memory 269–70 value systems 78

Zeki, Semir 67, 76, 83–4, 281, 284–5, 290 zombies 108–9

388