Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind is the third in a sequence of books in this blog following John Searle's Philosophy in the 21st Century (see January 21, 2011 post) and David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (see February 27, 2011 post) relating to consciousness and the mind. Searle tees up this sequence by observing that Hume's Enlightenment era view of the mind and consciousness was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." The era of skepticism is now over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." So now we fast-forward to the 21st century, where Damasio undertakes a review of that "certain, objective, universal knowledge" we now possess about the neurobiology of the brain, and empirical research that allows us to draw conclusions about how consciousness emerged, and how it is evolving. This is but one example of just how the skepticism of the 18th century Enlightenment has been overcome by the objective, universal knowledge of the 21st century.
First, that "certain, objective, universal knowledge" about the brain and consciousness is not yet complete. Damasio says that, and Searle states that this is not a problem for declaring that the era of skepticism is over --- that our current state of knowledge is capable of being corrected, revised and supplemented without undermining his conclusion (See January 21, 2011 post).
So what is it that we now know about the mind and consciousness that David Hume and his Enlightenment era contemporaries did not know on this subject? Two things: without doubt our knowledge of the brain and the neurosensory system has grown measurably; second, that Hume's introspective conclusions about the mind and consciousness (which were not necessarily his views alone) were very close to what all that cumulative, objective knowledge has revealed over 300 years.
Our current knowledge of the brain, the mind and consciousness must necessarily begin with an evolutionary understanding of the nervous system to which the animal brain is connected. Hume, as I have pointed out in a previous post (see May 24, 2010 post) probably would have appreciated this approach, although he lived a full century before Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species. Damasio devotes a chapter to the evolution of conscious and non-conscious processes beginning with unicellular organism's sensory and motor capabilities to the multicellular organism consisting of cells with specialized functions --- including neural cells --- that abandoned their "independent status" to cooperate with other types of cells "to be part of a convenient new aggregate." Damasio's discussion is not new --- Steven Rose has a more thorough discussion of the evolution of the nervous system and brains in The Future of the Brain; Nicholas Humphrey's A History of the Mind develops the evolutionary history of the sensory system -- particularly with respect to vision; and Lynch and Granger's Big Brain outline the evolution of primate brains and the auditory sensory system. Damasio's take-away, however, and one that is important to a key thesis, is that the animal nervous system evolved because the organism needed some component to manage and control the organism's survival. As more complex organisms evolved, this required more complex nervous systems and brains to regulate the organism internally as well as externally. Yet even very simple organisms --- organisms without brains --- had the ability to sense changes in their environment: changes in their internal organism environment, as well as their external environment (light, chemicals, even touch) and they could respond to those changes. As Darwin, said, "From so simple a beginning. . ." That early, regulatory "component" is the precursor to the modern human's brain stem. The brain stem is still performing most of the same types of functions in humans that it performed in reptiles millions of years ago --- receiving signals from and monitoring the internal milieu of the body and sending signals back to the body. Certain nuclei in the brain stem are responsible for wakefulness --- a key attribute of consciousness: we know this because when there is damage to specific parts of the brain stem the result is coma and the vegetative state (lack of consciousness).
What we know now, that we did not know in Hume's time, is that the nervous system operates by electro-chemical means. Neuroscience has identified several molecules in the nervous system that are related to states of reward or punishment and are associated with biological value tied to life regulation and survival. There are molecules that suppress and molecules that stimulate, "punish" and "reward," causing the body to generate certain feelings, emotions, and also causing motion to occur. Central to understanding survival mechanisms, says Damasio, is the concept of homeostasis: "In other words, life requires that the body maintain a collection of parameter ranges at all costs for literally dozens of components in its dynamic interior. All the management operations to which I alluded earlier --- procuring energy sources, incorporating and transforming energy products, and so forth --- aim at maintaining the chemical parameters of a body's interior (its internal milieu) with the magic range compatible with life. The magic range is known as homeostatic, and the process of achieving this balanced state is called homeostasis." While we have understood the biological role of homeostasis for most of the 20th century, Damasio asserts that we are only just beginning to understand its significance in terms of neurobiology, psychology, and even sociology (culture).
Damasio is not merely a commentator on this subject. He is a neuroscientist who works with patients suffering pathologies that provide clues about the functionality of certain parts of the brain. He is the author of three previous books that touch on human consciousness: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Self Comes to Mind covers much of the same ground that Damasio ploughed in his previous three works, but he builds on those works in several important ways: he supplements his previous writings with a decade of new research (much of which is his own research) following publication of Looking for Spinoza; he revises some of his previous views; and he introduces new hypotheses relative to consciousness that deserve further research in the accumulation of additional "certain, objective, universal knowledge" about the brain and consciousness.
Beyond the brain stem, the evolution of the brain shows that a part of the brain known as thalamus was constructed on top of the brain stem --- it did not replace it --- and operates integrally with the brain stem in producing consciousness. Evolution ultimately added a third component to the brains of some species --- the cerebral cortex. Damasio describes the thalamus as a way station for information that is collected from the body that ferry signals about the body and about the world, from pain and temperature to touch, hearing, and vision (but not smell). All signals bound for the cortex stop at "thalamic relay nuclei and change into tracks that take them to their destinations in varied parts of the cerebral cortex." The thalamus is understood (believed) to facilitate simultaneous and sequenced activation of separate neural sites --- bringing them together in a pattern. It coordinates cortical activities, and in that capacity it is key to the rich conscious experience some species (e.g., humans) have in being able to integrate different sensory experiences as well as memory. The cerebral cortex co-evolved with the thalamus, and acts to keep us awake and selects what we pay attention to. Equally, if not more important for human consciousness, the cerebral cortex is where memory is triggered and the autobiographical self is created.
In an appendix devoted to the architecture of the brain, Damasio fleshes out the different parts of the brain stem and the cerebral cortex and describes that certain, objective knowledge we now have about the functionality of specific parts of the brain. You can't regurgitate it all here, but the point is that our knowledge of how the brain and the mind works --- significantly developed over only the past 20 years --- while not yet complete, is quite substantial. David Hume would be impressed. Some of this knowledge has been enabled by what we learn from pathologies resulting from injury to specific parts of the brain --- informing us that feelings, memories, emotions, wakefulness remain intact or are impaired when a specific brain region is damaged. Some of this knowledge is gleaned from our ability to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to actually observe what is going on in the brain. (See November 13, 2010 post). Consistent with what Miriam Boelyn-Fitzgerald reported in Pictures of the Mind (id.), Damasio writes, "Conscious minds result from the smoothly articulated of several, often many brain sites. The key brain structures in charge of implementing the requisite functional steps include specific sectors of the upper brain stem [particularly the nucleus tractus solitarius, the parabrachial nucleus, the periaqueductal gray, the superior colliculus, and the hypothalamus], a set of nuclei in a region known as the thalamus, and specific but widespread regions of the cerebral cortex."
What the brain is able to do --- connected as it is to the electrochemical network of the central nervous system --- is "map" sensations, both internal to the body itself, and externally received from the environment around us. "Networks of neurons eventually come to mimic the structure of parts of the body, literally mapping the body for which they work and constituting a sort of virtual surrogate for it, a neural double," says Damasio. The components of the upper brain stem mentioned above are capable of providing whole-body maps to the central nervous system. Mapping of the environment around us occurs in the cerebral cortex. The concept of "mapping" (including what Damasio refers to as "somatic marking"), is not new to neuroscience. It is the subject of Damasio's earlier work, The Feeling of What Happens, and in Self Comes to Mind, Damasio reinforces many of his prior hypotheses on this subject with more recent research.
Damasio believes that the regulation of the internal organism occurs in the upper brain stem of a given specie, which creates an "image" of a "protoself." This "protoself" is neither an objective "me" nor a subjective "I," but what he calls "primordial feelings" --- "a direct experience of one's own body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence." These are body events, including pain and pleasure. We cannot yet call this consciousness, but primordial feelings are essential building blocks of consciousness. Damasio describes the neural networks that manage the internal organism "dispositional networks": almost formulaic "predisposed" responses of the body to an environmental condition designed to maintain homeostasis --- i.e., when 'X' occurs inside the body, there is a response 'Z.' And for a long-time, these dispositional networks worked perfectly well, evolving themselves to become even more precise and more customized. As the brain evolved, the thalamus and the cerebral cortex evolved on top of the brain stem. The mapping networks mentioned above, Damasio argues, evolved with these additions to the brain and joined forces with the dispositional networks.
Consciousness emerges with what Damasio calls the "core self," which is about action --- specifically, about a relationship between the organism and an object. The core self emerges because the thalamus and the cerebral cortex map to create images of external objects derived from sensory perceptions, and one of those external objects can be organism itself --- this is the "self as object," a conscious recognition of "me." He refers to this as "core consciousness." Beyond core consciousness, emerging from the more complex cerebral cortex in primates, humans, and perhaps whales and dolphins, is the autobiographical self, and what Damasio calls "extended consciousness." The autobiographical self recognizes "I," and memory is a key part of the architecture of the brain that enables the autobiographical self -- the "self as knower."
Nobelist Eric Kandel's research on memory and the brain explained how memories are chemically developed through the strengthening of synaptic connections, modified through learning. Damasio introduces a new view on the "architecture of memory" that has considerable explanatory power for how memory is retrieved. Ironically, it smacks of David Hume's associationism. By Damasio's account of how the brain retains memories, larger human brains lack the storage capacity for "large files of recorded images of prior events." To solve this problem, human brains "borrowed the dispositional strategy" from early evolution that allows us to be able to retrieve those memories without, figuratively speaking, having to film and store those images. Here is how Damasio says this works. The ancient dispositional networks and the more recent, evolutionarily speaking, mapping networks in the brain are now connected. A current perception triggers the dispositional network that directs the brain to reassemble aspects of past perceptions from the part of the cerebral cortex that had been previously activated when an original perception of an object occurred and where the representation or image was mapped. This occurs in what Damasio refers to as convergence-divergence zones that record "the coincidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been made active by the mapping of a certain object." A part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to image space where images of all sensory types occurs and map-making occurs; a separate part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to dispositional space where the tools exist to reactivate and generate images previously experienced. The contents of dispositions, Damasio says, are always unconscious --- he says they are "encrypted" and "implicit" --- in contrast to the explicit images in the image space created by current perceptions. The "encrypted" dispositions are not themselves images, but merely implicit formulas for how to reconstruct maps in image space. Our "knowledge base" is, by this hypothesis, part of our unconscious brain, stored in code, waiting to be retrieved from what Damasio refers to as "association cortices" (and hence the analogy to Hume's associationism). The tools for language are maintained here as well.
Damasio's account of short-term and long-term memory is not Damasio's own conclusions, but his model of convergence divergence zones is. Kandel, in his autobiography In Search of Memory, describes the work of Brenda Milner and others that showed that short-term (conscious, explicit) and long-term (unconscious, implicit) memory required different anatomical systems. In the words of Kandel: "Implicit memory is not a single memory system but a collection of processes involving several different brain systems that lie deep within the cerebral cortex. For example, the association of feelings (such as fear or happiness) with events involves a structure called the amygdala. The formation of new motor (and perhaps cognitive) habits requires the striatum, while learning new motor skills or coordinated activities depends on the cerebellum. . . Implicit memory often has an automatic quality. It is recalled directly through performance, without any conscious effort or even awareness that we are drawing on memory. Although experiences change perceptual and motor abilities, those experiences are virtually inaccessible to conscious recollection." Damasio suggests that "neurons in anterior medial temporal cortices can indeed respond to unique objects [e.g., one's grandmother], in perception or recall, with high specificity suggesting that they receive convergent signals [where one neuron is influenced by many others, resulting in a convergence of input]. But the mere activation of those neurons, without retroactivation that would follow it, would not allow us to remember our grandmother or remember her. To recognize or remember our grandmother, we must reinstate a substantial part of the collection of explicit maps that, in their entirety, represent her meaning." Damasio believes that this neural experience associated with the recall of past events is not unlike the mechanism by which mirror neurons (see Sept. 18, 2009 post) are involved with feeling the movement of others.
From memory, humans and a few other species, are able to recall their own biographical experiences and this gives rise to the autobiographical self -- not the object "me," but the subjective "I" --- "memory made conscious." This is what Damasio calls extended consciousness.
One cannot leave Damasio without acknowledging his views on feelings and emotions. This is not new to Self Comes to Mind, but is at the core of his earlier books and articles. The subject of feelings and emotions is integral the discussion of the protoself and the core self. "Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are complemented by a cognitive program that includes certain ideas and modes of cognition, but the world of emotions is largely one of actions carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to change in viscera and internal milieu. Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves; the world of feelings is one of perceptions executed in brain maps. But there is a qualification to be made here: the perceptions we call feelings of emotion contain a special ingredient that corresponds to the primordial feelings discussed earlier. Those feelings are based on the unique relations between body and brain that privileges interoception." The experience of feelings and emotions, while generated largely by brain-stem neural systems, are critical to the core self: we feel our perceptions, and "once a protagonist (me, I) is added to the process, the experience is claimed by its newly minted owner, the self." For Damasio, like Hume, our conscious, "rational" decision-making is tied feelings and emotions and the unconscious, automated aspect of our brain and body.
Recall the structure of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature: Part I (On the Understanding) articulates that our knowledge begins with an immediate perception of our memory or senses, or by an inference from some other cause, which we must ascertain either by a present impression or by another inference. When we rely on inferences, our knowledge of something is believed to be more likely because of repetitive experience that strengthens our memory of the object or experience. So far, Hume is in sync with the 21st century, although we are less skeptical today of treating sensory impressions as something distinct from reality --- today we have considerably more objective knowledge about causal relations. On the question of "personal identity" (the self), Hume states that "the identity to which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one": Hume suggests we cannot know ourselves, but only our perceptions. On this point, Damasio would say that Hume "pulverized the self to the extent of doing away with it." In Damasio's nomenclature, Hume is only willing to recognize a protoself and cannot find his way to acknowledge the core self or even the autobiographical self. This is surprising, because in Part II (Of the Passions) Hume exhibits considerable understanding and command of human emotions. In discussing pride and humility, Hume states that although they are contrary to one another, "they have the same object: This object is self, or that successions of related ideas and impressions, of which we have intimate memory and consciousness."
Hume's treatment of emotions is not radically different than Damasio's, because Hume's catalog of emotions largely fall under the label of what Damasio refers to as the "social emotions," which Damasio believes are of recent evolutionary vintage, some of which may be exclusively human. For both Hume and Damasio, emotions shape our reasoning: "rational" choice, if you will, is not independent of or from emotions and feelings. Compassion (empathy/sympathy) is one of those social emotions, and compassion, along with admiration, is critical in building a social construct in Damasio's view. And so it is with Hume, as Part III (On The Morals) states that sympathy with public interest is the source of moral approbation, and ultimately reciprocal promise-making behavior and principles of justice: "sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature, that it has great influence on our taste of beauty, and that it produces our sentiment of morals in all the artificial virtues."
Just as Damasio acknowledges the role of mirror neurons in allowing us to understand the action of others, Hume seems to anticipate the same as well as Dacher Keltner's observations about emotions in Born to be Good (see July 16, 2010 post). Hume writes, "As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget the corresponding movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is conveyed to the effects, and is actuated with like emotion."
By the end of Self Comes to Mind, Damasio extends his to discussion of consciousness to the origins and development of culture. He returns to the concept of homeostasis (detecting imbalance in life process and correcting it within the constraints of human biology and of the physical and social environment): with an autobiographical self capable of reflection, and new forms of memory enhanced by forms of communication including gestures and language, and the invention of external memory systems (e.g., drawings on caves, tablets, books, film, computers), humans begin to invent ways to govern social behavior, including morality, justice systems, economics, science and technology. Hume ends up here as well, but with Damasio we have those objective facts and hypotheses in need of further research that Hume did not have at his fingertips. And we have the research of others such as Michael Gazzaniga (see September 27, 2009 post), Marco Iacoboni (see September 18, 2009 post), Dacher Keltner (see July 16, 2010 post), and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds that adds to the accumulated, objective knowledge, which John Searle recognized represents a critical difference between epistemology today and Enlightenment-era skepticism.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
Even for those of us who are not professional scholars, there is value in reading the original words of someone like David Hume rather than reading only what others have said about him. Part of that value is found simply in the exercise of mentally transporting yourself back in time to better understand the 18th century period in which he lived and how new ideas were being debated at that time. Another part of that value will be retrieved the next time I read about David Hume, and a greater appreciation of the point the author is making. Among Enlightenment philosophers, I chose Hume because he is too frequently cited in the books I read to not pay attention to him.
Hume, I have surmised, is regrettably overlooked by Americans in their surveys of philosophy. Other Enlightenment philosophers --- notably John Locke --- garner more attention because they were sources of inspiration for the development of American political and legal traditions. Locke is associated with the idea of "natural rights" and declared truths "we hold to be self-evident." In the field of epistemology, Locke probably receives more attention than Hume in surveys of philosophy because he was an earlier proponent of empiricism, which emphasizes the role of experience and the senses in our understanding of objects in the world over the view that knowledge is innate. Within the community of contemporary philosophers of the mind as well as psychologists and neuroscientists, Hume has received his credit for his contribution to our understanding of how the mind works --- even more so than Locke --- and that would suggest that survey courses in philosophy might reorient their Enlightenment-era discussions of knowledge and the mind to pay more attention to Hume to better appreciate how our understanding of the mind has evolved since the 18th century.
A Treatise of Human Nature is an 18th century version of How The Mind Works. It advances the concept of associationism, a concept which dominated psychology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in greater detail than anyone had previously discussed. What Hume did not have at his disposal in the 1730s was a body of empirical research from the fields of psychology, biology, and neuroscience to inform his inquiry into human nature. He had the works of philosophers who preceded him, which he had digested prior to embarking on his Treatise, and his own series of what he called "experiments" --- introspective thinking about how his own mind and body worked and thinking about others to assess whether he could generalize from his own experience. For this reason, the Treatise carries the subtitle "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects."
Hume is an example of John Searle's Enlightenment-era philosopher trying "to cope with the problem of skepticism." (See previous January 21, 2011 post). "As to those impressions," Hume writes, "which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and 'twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object or a produced by the creative power of the mind, or are derived from the author of our being." In other words, the representations of things in our mind come from our sense experiences and we can never know with certainty that the object of our mind's attention produces that impression or whether it is a priori in our minds because of the act of a deity ("the author of our being."). The Treatise represents Hume's effort to "cope" with this inability to know anything directly with certainty, and he determines that the mind's ability to associate ideas enables it to make inferences that form the basis of our knowledge about external objects to which our senses are exposed. The three principle qualities that enable the mind to associate or connect various ideas are resemblance, contiguity (in time and space), and cause and effect.
In his book Mind, John Searle writes that "most philosophers will agree [that Hume's account of causation] is one of the most impressive pieces of philosophical prose ever written in the English language." Why does he say this? Because Hume reasoned a way in which we can generalize about reality from specific sense experiences. Hume describes a principle of causation and a principle of causality, which are not the same. The first says every effect has a cause; the second says that like effects have like causes. We experience something through sensation, but the only quality from that single experience is one of contiguity (before and after, or next to), but we do not necessarily make a connection between that that single experience and what caused it without a constant repetition of similar experiences (resemblances). The greater the regularity of those similar experiences produces a "felt determination of the mind" on which a generality is based. Hume notes that probability plays a role here in creating Belief. "Should it be demanded why men form general rules, and allow them to influence their judgment, even contrary to present observation and experience, I should reply, that in my opinion it proceeds from those very principles, on which all judgments concerning causes and effects depend. Our judgments concerning cause and effect are derived from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection [that is before we even seriously think about what we just experienced] and which cannot be prevented by it." It is what Searle calls "Hume's regularity theory of causation" that has been influential in the philosophy of the mind.
One can be critical of Hume, because he does not believe that we actually experience necessary connections between things (causation), or that we actually experience our conscious selves and are forced to rely on frequently repeating, resembling events that strengthen the force of our perceptions before we can form "beliefs" about external objects or our identity, without having to disparage his analysis of how the mind works. Hume's account of human nature integrates sensation, feelings, emotions, and memory --- what today we recognize as the neurobiological network of the human body, including the brain, that constitutes a conscious human agent. "Belief," says Hume, "is more properly an act of the sensitive, than the cogitative part of our natures."
This book is intended to be a treatise on the nature of humans, but Hume consciously ducks discussing human biology: "The examination of our sensations belongs more to the anatomists and natural philosophers [scientists] than to moral; and therefore shall not at present be entered upon." And even if he had not avoided the biology of what makes us human, today's reader would have learned little in light of the fact that Hume did not enjoy what John Searle notes that we enjoy in the 21st century: "a huge accumulation of knowledge [about biological systems, biological evolution, DNA and reproduction, embryology, etc.], which is certain, objective, and universal." (See previous post of January 21, 2011). But the absence of that knowledge from Hume's treatise should not cause one not to marvel at the depth of his introspection on human nature.
It is important to give Hume credit for recognizing the role of feelings and, what he calls "passions" in human nature and human decision-making. Sensations (experience) give rise to passions (reflective impressions). Sensations are either pleasurable (good) or painful (evil,bad), with varying degrees of each known to us. Certain passions are associated with pleasure (e.g., pride, love, benevolence, compassion, hope, joy), other passions are associated with pain (e.g., humility, hate, anger, malice, envy, fear, grief). The different passions vary by degree, which Hume labels "violent" or "calm." Like knowledge, passions are stronger or weaker because of repetition in our experience and the extent to which those experience become embraced by custom [culture]. Reason, says Hume, is not some objective, fully-informed distinct mental state separate from the passions; it is nothing more than a popular term for the "calm" passions, reflecting Hume's view that reason is never isolated from our emotions that are derived from our experience (sensations). Understood in this light, Hume foreshadows the tradition of Williams James that continues today in the works of Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), which recognizes that emotions and feelings are caused by physiological changes attributable to electro-chemical stimuli in the neurobiological system.
The modern reader of the philosophy of mind, psychology, biology, and neuroscience will recognize that Hume identified and seized on human attributes and behavior that are now more completely understood in biological terms. For example, Hume's statement that "The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations" reminds one of Damasio's reference to consciousness as a 'movie within a movie.' The difference between Hume and contemporaries such as Damasio is revealed in Hume's statement: "The comparison to the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed." For Damasio and his peers, while we may not have a full account of the mind and brain, we no longer have a "distant notion" of the place where and how images are represented in the brain and we have a very good of the physical attributes of which the brain is composed.
Hume even foreshadows our modern discussion of mirror neurons when he writes that "the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other's emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees," and he connects this observation to human empathy and sympathy for fellow humans. Later, in Book 3, Hume writes, "When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is conveyed to the effects, and it is actuated with a like emotion." In statements like this one senses a primitive Enlightenment precursor to the research of Marco Iacoboni and others as described in Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect. (See September 18, 2009 post).
The Treatise does not end with Hume's conclusion about the nature of the human mind and how sensory perceptions connect to feelings and emotions that become experiences, memories, and ultimately beliefs about the external world and free-will, but the Treatise expands to include the construction of a cultural reality and social institutions for the regulation of human behavior (customs, rules, and law). Hume is not a social contractarian in the tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau (and later, Rawls). Morality and social structure do not evolve from human reason: "morality is more properly felt than judged," indicating that justice is derived from our impressions, not from reason. The passion sympathy [empathy] is the chief source of our moral distinctions, says Hume. Consistent with Hume's "system" of the human understanding that is described in Book 1, our sensory experiences of pleasure and pain give rise to positive and negative passions, which in turns leads to a propensity toward something that is favored (in the case of positive passions) or an aversion from something that is disfavored (in the case of negative passions). In either case, we are talking about self-interest and self-interest includes a recognition that reciprocal relations with other humans (including promise-making behavior) leads to a moral sense of virtue (favored) and vice (disfavored). After awhile, humans develop a general "sense" of common interest. This leads to the development of social rules, laws, and institutions to enforce them. This process is not the outcome of a rational bargain and a signed contract, but it is a process that reflects an evolving tendency toward stasis, much as the human body pits the positive and negative passions that tend toward homeostasis.
We can also recognize in the Treatise a primitive discussion of whether altruistic acts are confined to biological relations (kin) or are capable of being expanded to wider societal relations and nations. Hume writes, "When experience has once given us a competent knowledge of human affairs and has taught us the proportion they bear to human passion, we perceive that the generosity of men is very limited, and that it seldom extends beyond their friends and family, or, at most, beyond their native country." This same sentiment is debated today in Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (see November 4, 2009), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (see October 13, 2010 post), and Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy (see November 9, 2010 post).
Hume clearly disputes Bernard Mandeville's view that man is driven by egotistical impulses, seeking self-preservation and advancement. (See January 30, 2010 post). Hume does not deny egotistical impulses and the pursuit of self-preservation, but for every passion that Hume identifies there is a counter-passion: in the case of self-interest, there is sympathy and empathy for others. In Mandeville's view, it is societal institutions that regulate and restrain man's self-seeking drives; in Hume's vision, sympathy, empathy, generosity, and reciprocal behavior are part of human nature. Hume's assessment of human nature has clearly prevailed from the modern view of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. In this regard, Hume is closer to his fellow Scotsman, Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments is at the core of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (see January 11, 2011 post).
Nearly four centuries after Hume wrote his Treatise, we recognize that his observations on human nature are not all that far from those which science and experiment confirm for us today. Associationism may no longer hold sway in our view of how the mind works, but the linkage between sensations, feelings, emotions, reflection, and reasoning, which Hume describes in the Treatise, is the same linkage that neuroscientists describe today. The limitation of the treatise, which I think we will appreciate from the next book off The Bookshelf by Antonio Damasio, is that Hume did not fully appreciate how we construct a personal identity for ourselves. Hume says, "The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects." In other words, Hume says that we come to know our self in the same way we come to know external objects. Presumably this means Hume is coping with his skepticism over his own identity just as much he is coping with his skepticism toward the broccoli he ate for dinner. Let's see what Damasio has to say.
Hume, I have surmised, is regrettably overlooked by Americans in their surveys of philosophy. Other Enlightenment philosophers --- notably John Locke --- garner more attention because they were sources of inspiration for the development of American political and legal traditions. Locke is associated with the idea of "natural rights" and declared truths "we hold to be self-evident." In the field of epistemology, Locke probably receives more attention than Hume in surveys of philosophy because he was an earlier proponent of empiricism, which emphasizes the role of experience and the senses in our understanding of objects in the world over the view that knowledge is innate. Within the community of contemporary philosophers of the mind as well as psychologists and neuroscientists, Hume has received his credit for his contribution to our understanding of how the mind works --- even more so than Locke --- and that would suggest that survey courses in philosophy might reorient their Enlightenment-era discussions of knowledge and the mind to pay more attention to Hume to better appreciate how our understanding of the mind has evolved since the 18th century.
A Treatise of Human Nature is an 18th century version of How The Mind Works. It advances the concept of associationism, a concept which dominated psychology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in greater detail than anyone had previously discussed. What Hume did not have at his disposal in the 1730s was a body of empirical research from the fields of psychology, biology, and neuroscience to inform his inquiry into human nature. He had the works of philosophers who preceded him, which he had digested prior to embarking on his Treatise, and his own series of what he called "experiments" --- introspective thinking about how his own mind and body worked and thinking about others to assess whether he could generalize from his own experience. For this reason, the Treatise carries the subtitle "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects."
Hume is an example of John Searle's Enlightenment-era philosopher trying "to cope with the problem of skepticism." (See previous January 21, 2011 post). "As to those impressions," Hume writes, "which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and 'twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object or a produced by the creative power of the mind, or are derived from the author of our being." In other words, the representations of things in our mind come from our sense experiences and we can never know with certainty that the object of our mind's attention produces that impression or whether it is a priori in our minds because of the act of a deity ("the author of our being."). The Treatise represents Hume's effort to "cope" with this inability to know anything directly with certainty, and he determines that the mind's ability to associate ideas enables it to make inferences that form the basis of our knowledge about external objects to which our senses are exposed. The three principle qualities that enable the mind to associate or connect various ideas are resemblance, contiguity (in time and space), and cause and effect.
In his book Mind, John Searle writes that "most philosophers will agree [that Hume's account of causation] is one of the most impressive pieces of philosophical prose ever written in the English language." Why does he say this? Because Hume reasoned a way in which we can generalize about reality from specific sense experiences. Hume describes a principle of causation and a principle of causality, which are not the same. The first says every effect has a cause; the second says that like effects have like causes. We experience something through sensation, but the only quality from that single experience is one of contiguity (before and after, or next to), but we do not necessarily make a connection between that that single experience and what caused it without a constant repetition of similar experiences (resemblances). The greater the regularity of those similar experiences produces a "felt determination of the mind" on which a generality is based. Hume notes that probability plays a role here in creating Belief. "Should it be demanded why men form general rules, and allow them to influence their judgment, even contrary to present observation and experience, I should reply, that in my opinion it proceeds from those very principles, on which all judgments concerning causes and effects depend. Our judgments concerning cause and effect are derived from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection [that is before we even seriously think about what we just experienced] and which cannot be prevented by it." It is what Searle calls "Hume's regularity theory of causation" that has been influential in the philosophy of the mind.
One can be critical of Hume, because he does not believe that we actually experience necessary connections between things (causation), or that we actually experience our conscious selves and are forced to rely on frequently repeating, resembling events that strengthen the force of our perceptions before we can form "beliefs" about external objects or our identity, without having to disparage his analysis of how the mind works. Hume's account of human nature integrates sensation, feelings, emotions, and memory --- what today we recognize as the neurobiological network of the human body, including the brain, that constitutes a conscious human agent. "Belief," says Hume, "is more properly an act of the sensitive, than the cogitative part of our natures."
This book is intended to be a treatise on the nature of humans, but Hume consciously ducks discussing human biology: "The examination of our sensations belongs more to the anatomists and natural philosophers [scientists] than to moral; and therefore shall not at present be entered upon." And even if he had not avoided the biology of what makes us human, today's reader would have learned little in light of the fact that Hume did not enjoy what John Searle notes that we enjoy in the 21st century: "a huge accumulation of knowledge [about biological systems, biological evolution, DNA and reproduction, embryology, etc.], which is certain, objective, and universal." (See previous post of January 21, 2011). But the absence of that knowledge from Hume's treatise should not cause one not to marvel at the depth of his introspection on human nature.
It is important to give Hume credit for recognizing the role of feelings and, what he calls "passions" in human nature and human decision-making. Sensations (experience) give rise to passions (reflective impressions). Sensations are either pleasurable (good) or painful (evil,bad), with varying degrees of each known to us. Certain passions are associated with pleasure (e.g., pride, love, benevolence, compassion, hope, joy), other passions are associated with pain (e.g., humility, hate, anger, malice, envy, fear, grief). The different passions vary by degree, which Hume labels "violent" or "calm." Like knowledge, passions are stronger or weaker because of repetition in our experience and the extent to which those experience become embraced by custom [culture]. Reason, says Hume, is not some objective, fully-informed distinct mental state separate from the passions; it is nothing more than a popular term for the "calm" passions, reflecting Hume's view that reason is never isolated from our emotions that are derived from our experience (sensations). Understood in this light, Hume foreshadows the tradition of Williams James that continues today in the works of Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), which recognizes that emotions and feelings are caused by physiological changes attributable to electro-chemical stimuli in the neurobiological system.
The modern reader of the philosophy of mind, psychology, biology, and neuroscience will recognize that Hume identified and seized on human attributes and behavior that are now more completely understood in biological terms. For example, Hume's statement that "The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations" reminds one of Damasio's reference to consciousness as a 'movie within a movie.' The difference between Hume and contemporaries such as Damasio is revealed in Hume's statement: "The comparison to the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed." For Damasio and his peers, while we may not have a full account of the mind and brain, we no longer have a "distant notion" of the place where and how images are represented in the brain and we have a very good of the physical attributes of which the brain is composed.
Hume even foreshadows our modern discussion of mirror neurons when he writes that "the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other's emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees," and he connects this observation to human empathy and sympathy for fellow humans. Later, in Book 3, Hume writes, "When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is conveyed to the effects, and it is actuated with a like emotion." In statements like this one senses a primitive Enlightenment precursor to the research of Marco Iacoboni and others as described in Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect. (See September 18, 2009 post).
The Treatise does not end with Hume's conclusion about the nature of the human mind and how sensory perceptions connect to feelings and emotions that become experiences, memories, and ultimately beliefs about the external world and free-will, but the Treatise expands to include the construction of a cultural reality and social institutions for the regulation of human behavior (customs, rules, and law). Hume is not a social contractarian in the tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau (and later, Rawls). Morality and social structure do not evolve from human reason: "morality is more properly felt than judged," indicating that justice is derived from our impressions, not from reason. The passion sympathy [empathy] is the chief source of our moral distinctions, says Hume. Consistent with Hume's "system" of the human understanding that is described in Book 1, our sensory experiences of pleasure and pain give rise to positive and negative passions, which in turns leads to a propensity toward something that is favored (in the case of positive passions) or an aversion from something that is disfavored (in the case of negative passions). In either case, we are talking about self-interest and self-interest includes a recognition that reciprocal relations with other humans (including promise-making behavior) leads to a moral sense of virtue (favored) and vice (disfavored). After awhile, humans develop a general "sense" of common interest. This leads to the development of social rules, laws, and institutions to enforce them. This process is not the outcome of a rational bargain and a signed contract, but it is a process that reflects an evolving tendency toward stasis, much as the human body pits the positive and negative passions that tend toward homeostasis.
We can also recognize in the Treatise a primitive discussion of whether altruistic acts are confined to biological relations (kin) or are capable of being expanded to wider societal relations and nations. Hume writes, "When experience has once given us a competent knowledge of human affairs and has taught us the proportion they bear to human passion, we perceive that the generosity of men is very limited, and that it seldom extends beyond their friends and family, or, at most, beyond their native country." This same sentiment is debated today in Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (see November 4, 2009), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (see October 13, 2010 post), and Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy (see November 9, 2010 post).
Hume clearly disputes Bernard Mandeville's view that man is driven by egotistical impulses, seeking self-preservation and advancement. (See January 30, 2010 post). Hume does not deny egotistical impulses and the pursuit of self-preservation, but for every passion that Hume identifies there is a counter-passion: in the case of self-interest, there is sympathy and empathy for others. In Mandeville's view, it is societal institutions that regulate and restrain man's self-seeking drives; in Hume's vision, sympathy, empathy, generosity, and reciprocal behavior are part of human nature. Hume's assessment of human nature has clearly prevailed from the modern view of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. In this regard, Hume is closer to his fellow Scotsman, Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments is at the core of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (see January 11, 2011 post).
Nearly four centuries after Hume wrote his Treatise, we recognize that his observations on human nature are not all that far from those which science and experiment confirm for us today. Associationism may no longer hold sway in our view of how the mind works, but the linkage between sensations, feelings, emotions, reflection, and reasoning, which Hume describes in the Treatise, is the same linkage that neuroscientists describe today. The limitation of the treatise, which I think we will appreciate from the next book off The Bookshelf by Antonio Damasio, is that Hume did not fully appreciate how we construct a personal identity for ourselves. Hume says, "The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects." In other words, Hume says that we come to know our self in the same way we come to know external objects. Presumably this means Hume is coping with his skepticism over his own identity just as much he is coping with his skepticism toward the broccoli he ate for dinner. Let's see what Damasio has to say.
Friday, January 21, 2011
John Searle, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)
For the second consecutive post, I connect with issues I first encountered nearly forty years ago in college. I took two undergraduate philosophy classes with Professor Searle in the early 1970s: ethics and logic. He was an engaging lecturer, someone you wanted to listen to. Surprisingly the assigned texts for ethics were not authored by the usual sages from Greek antiquity or the Enlightenment; instead novels by John Barth --- The Floating Opera and The End of the Road --- and Searle's own Speech Acts, which includes his argument on deriving "ought" from "is."
This compilation of selected essays assembles several articles that Searle has written since the 1990s with some updating. This is not the first time I have mentioned Professor Searle in this blog (see September 27, 2009 and August 17, 2009 post) where I mentioned his willingness to recognize that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, which seems "remarkable" coming from an esteemed member of the philosophical community, "where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality." I mention this again because I want to focus on the title article from the selected essays, Philosophy in a New Century.
Searle's article, first published at the end of 1999, begins, "A number of important overall changes in the subject [of philosophy] have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future [of philosophy . . . The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do. We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge, which is certain, objective, and universal . . . This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy." There are two ways one can approach this acknowledgment: as a struggle, in the sense of Henry Adams who, in his autobiography just a century earlier, felt that the accelerating accumulation of knowledge was always just beyond his grasp, or, in the case of Searle, with a sense of optimism that mysteries are on the verge of being solved while some new mysteries will be discovered.
The "modern era of philosophy" that began with the Enlightenment was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." This premise, says Searle, is on the verge of becoming obsolete. At the core of philosophy in the modern era was epistemology: how do we know what we know and how do we know what is real? Can there truly be objective knowledge? The era of skepticism is over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." And we should not conclude otherwise, just because science has not solved every mystery, or what we know today is capable of being corrected or revised tomorrow, and new mysteries are discovered regularly. Nor should we think that knowledge is not objective just because "all knowledge of reality is, from a point of view, from a perspective."
"A very curious thing has happened in the past two or three decades -- the philosophy of mind has moved to the center of philosophy. Several other important branches of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and even the philosophy of language must be treated as dependent upon, and in some cases, even as branches of the philosophy of mind. Whereas fifty years ago [when Searle first began teaching] the philosophy of language was considered "first philosophy," now it is the philosophy of mind." John Searle moved with this trend. Nearly forty years ago, when I had the opportunity to attend his lectures, he was one of the premier teachers on the philosophy of language. In more recent years, as I came to reacquaint myself with his work, such as The Mystery of Consciousness, Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Mind Language and Society, it was clear that Searle had a new focus: the mind and the social construction of reality.
The "mind-body problem" that was an obsession of philosophers for centuries --- the relation between consciousness and the brain, is "a straight neurobiological problem," says Searle. Philosophers need to forget about Cartesian dualism "and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as digestion and photosynthesis." Searle believes that the scientific inquiry into consciousness is not to ask 'How does the brain produce the conscious experience of red?' but 'How does the brain produce the unified, subjective conscious field.?' Recall what I quoted earlier, "[A]ll knowledge of reality, is from a point of view, from a perspective." In Searle's view, "We should think of perception, not as creating consciousness, but as modifying a preexisting conscious field." This is an important point, because it treats physically objective facts as existing reality that we present ourselves to rather than skeptically questioning whether that reality actually exists.
The philosophy of mind, Searle asserts, is now at the center of philosophy, and he believes cognitive science will be the most fruitful contributor to this branch of philosophy. "The basic subject matter of cognitive science is intentionality in all its forms." Too much time, Searle asserts, has been wasted on pursuing the thought that the brain is a digital computer and the mind is a computer program. Minds contain more than symbolic or syntactic components, they contain actual mental states with semantic content in the form of thoughts, feelings and the like, which are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain. He concludes that neuroscience is moving away from a computational approach to the brain, and this is likely to introduce new philosophical questions including a shift in our concept of memory. While I believe Searle is correct in questioning the purely computational approach to the brain, I note my comment in the August 17, 2009 post that Searle should reconsider the extent that information is physical and that information contained in energy is exchanged in a computational manner. This has to have some significance for neuronal electro-chemical activity.
The philosophy of language, a branch of philosophy to which Searle devoted a significant part of his intellectual life, is going nowhere, he concludes. Searle does believe that in the 21st century, the profession needs to develop a philosophy of society. And in a nod to Amartya Sen (see previous post dated January 11, 2011) he believes that an "expanded social philosophy would give us the tools for analyzing social institutions as they exist in real societies in ways that would enable us to make comparative judgments between different countries and larger societies without rising to the level of abstraction that we cannot make specific value judgments about specific institutional structures." This is a tall order, and I would like to know who Searle has in mind to serve as the 'impartial spectator.' Also with an implicit nod to Sen, Searle encourages ethics to steer from its obsession with epistemic objectivity, and approach ethics as a problem of "practical reason and rationality." But I will say here, as I did in the previous post, human evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive science can inform this subject as well. Finally, the philosophy of science in the 21st century needs to get in touch with the questions that physicists are trying to solve about the nature of the reality and causation.
Each of the remaining nine articles in this volume addresses these subjects in one way or another, and I want to specifically call out only one, titled Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles. In this article, Searle explains there are phenomena that are social facts (the piece of paper I have in my hand is a ten dollar bill), social objects (money), and social processes (the determination of rates of exchange). How is it, he asks, that we create a "social reality" --- of social facts, social objects, and social processes --- that exist only by virtue of collective acceptance and acknowledgement of them? Searle proposes that we need to distinguish between features of reality that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative (dependent). Physical features such as gravity is observer-independent, for example; the United States of America is observer-dependent. The existence of an observer-relative fact depends upon the existence of a conscious agent agent for its existence. Social facts, social objects, and social processes are observer-relative. The important point that Searle wants to make is that "observer-relativity implies ontological subjectivity, but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity." In other words, just because something is known subjectively does not deny its objective existence. This is his response to the skeptic and why he believes modern philosophy has reached the post-skeptical era. His example: the fact that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States, and the fact that a piece of paper in my hand is a $20 bill are epistemically objective facts even though observer-dependent "human attitudes" are part of their mode of existence. We should not let subjectivity or apparent dualism getting in the way of saying these facts are certain, objective, and universal.
Second, humans (and some animals), Searle asserts, have the ability to assign functions to certain objects. The assigned function is not intrinsic to its physical character, but the function exists only because of a collective assignment (e.g., the function of money as a means of exchange) --- they are observer-relative. "Function" has a normative component --- they are causes that serve a purpose. Functionality that exists as a result of a collective assignment is deemed, by Searle, to be a "status function." Human institutions --- government, marriage, religion, and the like --- are status functions. "Status functions are vehicles of power in a society." They are deontic powers because they deal with obligations, permissions, rights and responsibilities, duties, entitlements, and the like. Within society, we have a set of deontic power relations, which gives rise to reasons for action: to recognize something as an obligations, a right, duty or requirement is to recognize a reasons for action that are essential in human society. The deontic relations that evolve make possible observer-independent reasons for action. Thus, if others recognize the fact that the $20 bill in my hand belongs to me, they have desire-independent reasons for not stealing the $20 bill from me. What makes this possible, Searle believes, is language, a faculty that distinguishes humans from other animals.
Status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for acting give rise to specific human forms of socialization. What makes this possible in humans is their ability to represent observer-relative institutional facts to be the case, and representation depends on language. So we have a language that relates to obligations, commitments, rights, duties and the like that other species do not. "All status functions and thus all human institutional reality, are created by a single type of linguistic operation, the Status Function Declaration. These create and maintain a reality in existence by representing that reality as existing." Here we see what Searle means when he says that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of the mind and how it all may become a branch of the philosophy of society.
The final note I want to make in this post is to acknowledge what I think drives Searle: "there is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy: given that we must rule out Cartesian or any other type of dualism, how do we give an account of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, speech-act performing, ethical, free-will possessing, political and social animals in a world that consists entirely [his emphasis] of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles?" How can there be an ethical right or wrong in a world of meaningless physical particles? How can unconscious bits of matter in the skull [the brain] create consciousness? The answer lies in the fact that neurobiological systems are the foundation of our mental life, and language that enables human to create a social reality. Many of the posts in this blog from books that come off the bookshelf touch on some aspect of Searle's questions and the answers to those questions.
I was going to turn next to some fiction, but I changed my mind. I want to explore next the work of a skeptic, David Hume, which I have had on the bookshelf for some time, and then the recent work of a neurobiologist and see if I can discern the trends of which Professor Searle writes.
This compilation of selected essays assembles several articles that Searle has written since the 1990s with some updating. This is not the first time I have mentioned Professor Searle in this blog (see September 27, 2009 and August 17, 2009 post) where I mentioned his willingness to recognize that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, which seems "remarkable" coming from an esteemed member of the philosophical community, "where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality." I mention this again because I want to focus on the title article from the selected essays, Philosophy in a New Century.
Searle's article, first published at the end of 1999, begins, "A number of important overall changes in the subject [of philosophy] have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future [of philosophy . . . The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do. We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge, which is certain, objective, and universal . . . This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy." There are two ways one can approach this acknowledgment: as a struggle, in the sense of Henry Adams who, in his autobiography just a century earlier, felt that the accelerating accumulation of knowledge was always just beyond his grasp, or, in the case of Searle, with a sense of optimism that mysteries are on the verge of being solved while some new mysteries will be discovered.
The "modern era of philosophy" that began with the Enlightenment was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." This premise, says Searle, is on the verge of becoming obsolete. At the core of philosophy in the modern era was epistemology: how do we know what we know and how do we know what is real? Can there truly be objective knowledge? The era of skepticism is over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." And we should not conclude otherwise, just because science has not solved every mystery, or what we know today is capable of being corrected or revised tomorrow, and new mysteries are discovered regularly. Nor should we think that knowledge is not objective just because "all knowledge of reality is, from a point of view, from a perspective."
"A very curious thing has happened in the past two or three decades -- the philosophy of mind has moved to the center of philosophy. Several other important branches of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and even the philosophy of language must be treated as dependent upon, and in some cases, even as branches of the philosophy of mind. Whereas fifty years ago [when Searle first began teaching] the philosophy of language was considered "first philosophy," now it is the philosophy of mind." John Searle moved with this trend. Nearly forty years ago, when I had the opportunity to attend his lectures, he was one of the premier teachers on the philosophy of language. In more recent years, as I came to reacquaint myself with his work, such as The Mystery of Consciousness, Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Mind Language and Society, it was clear that Searle had a new focus: the mind and the social construction of reality.
The "mind-body problem" that was an obsession of philosophers for centuries --- the relation between consciousness and the brain, is "a straight neurobiological problem," says Searle. Philosophers need to forget about Cartesian dualism "and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as digestion and photosynthesis." Searle believes that the scientific inquiry into consciousness is not to ask 'How does the brain produce the conscious experience of red?' but 'How does the brain produce the unified, subjective conscious field.?' Recall what I quoted earlier, "[A]ll knowledge of reality, is from a point of view, from a perspective." In Searle's view, "We should think of perception, not as creating consciousness, but as modifying a preexisting conscious field." This is an important point, because it treats physically objective facts as existing reality that we present ourselves to rather than skeptically questioning whether that reality actually exists.
The philosophy of mind, Searle asserts, is now at the center of philosophy, and he believes cognitive science will be the most fruitful contributor to this branch of philosophy. "The basic subject matter of cognitive science is intentionality in all its forms." Too much time, Searle asserts, has been wasted on pursuing the thought that the brain is a digital computer and the mind is a computer program. Minds contain more than symbolic or syntactic components, they contain actual mental states with semantic content in the form of thoughts, feelings and the like, which are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain. He concludes that neuroscience is moving away from a computational approach to the brain, and this is likely to introduce new philosophical questions including a shift in our concept of memory. While I believe Searle is correct in questioning the purely computational approach to the brain, I note my comment in the August 17, 2009 post that Searle should reconsider the extent that information is physical and that information contained in energy is exchanged in a computational manner. This has to have some significance for neuronal electro-chemical activity.
The philosophy of language, a branch of philosophy to which Searle devoted a significant part of his intellectual life, is going nowhere, he concludes. Searle does believe that in the 21st century, the profession needs to develop a philosophy of society. And in a nod to Amartya Sen (see previous post dated January 11, 2011) he believes that an "expanded social philosophy would give us the tools for analyzing social institutions as they exist in real societies in ways that would enable us to make comparative judgments between different countries and larger societies without rising to the level of abstraction that we cannot make specific value judgments about specific institutional structures." This is a tall order, and I would like to know who Searle has in mind to serve as the 'impartial spectator.' Also with an implicit nod to Sen, Searle encourages ethics to steer from its obsession with epistemic objectivity, and approach ethics as a problem of "practical reason and rationality." But I will say here, as I did in the previous post, human evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive science can inform this subject as well. Finally, the philosophy of science in the 21st century needs to get in touch with the questions that physicists are trying to solve about the nature of the reality and causation.
Each of the remaining nine articles in this volume addresses these subjects in one way or another, and I want to specifically call out only one, titled Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles. In this article, Searle explains there are phenomena that are social facts (the piece of paper I have in my hand is a ten dollar bill), social objects (money), and social processes (the determination of rates of exchange). How is it, he asks, that we create a "social reality" --- of social facts, social objects, and social processes --- that exist only by virtue of collective acceptance and acknowledgement of them? Searle proposes that we need to distinguish between features of reality that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative (dependent). Physical features such as gravity is observer-independent, for example; the United States of America is observer-dependent. The existence of an observer-relative fact depends upon the existence of a conscious agent agent for its existence. Social facts, social objects, and social processes are observer-relative. The important point that Searle wants to make is that "observer-relativity implies ontological subjectivity, but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity." In other words, just because something is known subjectively does not deny its objective existence. This is his response to the skeptic and why he believes modern philosophy has reached the post-skeptical era. His example: the fact that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States, and the fact that a piece of paper in my hand is a $20 bill are epistemically objective facts even though observer-dependent "human attitudes" are part of their mode of existence. We should not let subjectivity or apparent dualism getting in the way of saying these facts are certain, objective, and universal.
Second, humans (and some animals), Searle asserts, have the ability to assign functions to certain objects. The assigned function is not intrinsic to its physical character, but the function exists only because of a collective assignment (e.g., the function of money as a means of exchange) --- they are observer-relative. "Function" has a normative component --- they are causes that serve a purpose. Functionality that exists as a result of a collective assignment is deemed, by Searle, to be a "status function." Human institutions --- government, marriage, religion, and the like --- are status functions. "Status functions are vehicles of power in a society." They are deontic powers because they deal with obligations, permissions, rights and responsibilities, duties, entitlements, and the like. Within society, we have a set of deontic power relations, which gives rise to reasons for action: to recognize something as an obligations, a right, duty or requirement is to recognize a reasons for action that are essential in human society. The deontic relations that evolve make possible observer-independent reasons for action. Thus, if others recognize the fact that the $20 bill in my hand belongs to me, they have desire-independent reasons for not stealing the $20 bill from me. What makes this possible, Searle believes, is language, a faculty that distinguishes humans from other animals.
Status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for acting give rise to specific human forms of socialization. What makes this possible in humans is their ability to represent observer-relative institutional facts to be the case, and representation depends on language. So we have a language that relates to obligations, commitments, rights, duties and the like that other species do not. "All status functions and thus all human institutional reality, are created by a single type of linguistic operation, the Status Function Declaration. These create and maintain a reality in existence by representing that reality as existing." Here we see what Searle means when he says that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of the mind and how it all may become a branch of the philosophy of society.
The final note I want to make in this post is to acknowledge what I think drives Searle: "there is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy: given that we must rule out Cartesian or any other type of dualism, how do we give an account of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, speech-act performing, ethical, free-will possessing, political and social animals in a world that consists entirely [his emphasis] of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles?" How can there be an ethical right or wrong in a world of meaningless physical particles? How can unconscious bits of matter in the skull [the brain] create consciousness? The answer lies in the fact that neurobiological systems are the foundation of our mental life, and language that enables human to create a social reality. Many of the posts in this blog from books that come off the bookshelf touch on some aspect of Searle's questions and the answers to those questions.
I was going to turn next to some fiction, but I changed my mind. I want to explore next the work of a skeptic, David Hume, which I have had on the bookshelf for some time, and then the recent work of a neurobiologist and see if I can discern the trends of which Professor Searle writes.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009)
When I was in college in the early 1970s, anyone interested in reading, studying, and discussing philosophical ideas was likely to read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which was published in 1971. I approached Rawls at that time as an economics student and found his adaptation of that branch of economics known as welfare economics, which considers distributive impacts on societal economic welfare, to his views on distributive justice, of great interest. One did not have to agree with everything Rawls postulated or concluded, but the incorporation of aspects of 20th century economic analysis in a philosophical discussion of ethics and justice was illuminating. My particular interest in Rawls' approach was to tax policy, and how it informed a fair tax policy that simultaneously considered the societal benefits of economic growth. Despite Rawls' conclusion that a properly conceived theory of justice contemplates maximizing the welfare of those who are worst off economically (maximin), Rawls recognized that economic differences among individuals were a tolerable consequence of the need to develop incentives to do things that would maximize the welfare of the worst off (the difference principle).
Among the footnotes in A Theory of Justice were references to the work of a young Indian economist, Amartya Sen, who was just making a name for himself in the field of development economics and for his contributions to theory of "social choice." Social choice theory blends both welfare economics and voting theory. It is not surprising then that Rawls' and Sen's professional lives would intersect. Sen's The Idea of Justice is dedicated to the memory of John Rawls, but though The Idea of Justice is an appreciation of Rawls' oeuvre, it is not an endorsement of his Theory of Justice.
Rawls follows the social contract approach to political philosophy, building upon the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, which embraces a thought experiment in which the individuals in a society are imagined to agree unanimously on a set of principles that determines their processes and institutions for governing themselves. The imaginary social contract relies heavily on the assumption that individuals will cast aside their cultural, historical, economic, and personal biases in favor of impartiality --- and either agree to cede some of their individual interests in favor of the collective interest, or in Rawls' case, agree to maximize the economic welfare of those who are worst off --- subject to the difference principle. In Rawls' imagination, this agreement is made under the "veil of ignorance," which secures impartiality, perhaps even more impartiality than Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau contemplated. Also central to Rawls' contract is that the individuals who make this agreement will agree that liberty and political equality are values that are central to building just institutions and processes.
Impartiality, liberty, and equality figure in Sen's approach to justice as well, but Sen departs from Rawls' "transcendental" thought experiment and social contract approach which leads to the development of just institutions, and he focuses on how, through what he calls "public reasoning," we identify injustices and make incremental adjustments to more just outcomes in the relationships among people. The story told by Mark Currides in Contempt of Court, which was the subject of the previous December 16, 2010 post, is a type of example of the idea of justice that Sen is talking about. "The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live," Sen writes. "The importance of human lives, experiences, and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate. Institutions and rules are, of course, very important in influencing what happens, and they are part and parcel of the actual world as well, but the realized actuality goes well beyond the organization picture, and includes the lives that people manage --- or do not manage --- to live." Sen explains that we can understand the differences between these two approaches in two different words for justice found in Sanskrit literature --- niti and nyaya --- the former focuses on organizational and behavioral correctness, while the latter is tied to the world that emerges, not just the organizations and rules that society happens to have. Rawls' "theory of justice" fits with niti, Sen's "idea of justice" is an example of nyaya.
Important to Sen's public reasoning approach to justice is the role of the "impartial spectator," a role-player first conceived by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There are really two ideas here: self-scrutiny of our individual selves and self-scrutiny of our collective self. And for Sen, this scrutiny also contemplates that other voices --- even outsiders --- who are not part of the dominant culture, economic class, and political structure will be heard and listened to when there are opportunities to identify instances of injustice and take corrective action.
The public reasoning approach to justice leads to another departure from Rawls: it can be expected that it will not lead to unanimous consent for a single overarching principle or set of principles by which to identify injustice --- such as Rawls' "justice as fairness;" it is quite likely that the public reasoning approach will address injustice on many different grounds -- "a plurality of competing principles" such as utilitarianism, economic, political, racial, and religious egalitarianism, or radical libertarianism. And a society faced with competing principles that seeks to find the just solution to a given claim of injustice may only be able to achieve a partial resolution --- just as the United States Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp, discussed in the December 16, 2010 post, represented only a partial resolution of racial injustice in 1906. The current public debate over universal health care access in the United States presents precisely this scenario. "We have good reasons for recognizing that the pursuit of justice is partly a matter of the gradual formation of behavior patterns -- there is no immediate jump from the acceptance of some principles of justice and a total redesign of every one's actual behavior in line with that political conception of justice. In general, the institutions have to be chose not only in line with the nature of the society in question, but also co-dependently on the actual behavior patterns that might be expected even if -- and even after -- a political conception of justice is accepted by all." If only Lenin had considered this approach to justice, he might have spared Russians from a half a century of misery.
Sen makes room for some occasional "agitation" in the pursuit of justice, but it is that kind of agitation that is familiar to democracy: "outrage can be used to motivate, rather than to replace, reasoning." Later, he adds, "The role and reach of reason are not undermined by the indignation that leads us to an investigation of the ideas underlying the nature and basis of the persistent inequities . . ." When we "try to determine how justice can be advanced, there is a basic need for public reasoning, involving arguments coming from different quarters and divergent perspectives that we must expect to be able to settle the conflicting reasons in all cases and arrived at agreed positions on every issue. Complete resolution is neither a requirement of a person's own rationality, nor is it a condition of reasonable social choice, including a reason-based theory of justice."
What I would like to see in another book on this subject whose landscape is as broad as that reviewed and covered by Sen is a discussion of what we are learning from neuroscience, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural anthropology about what makes us human, and what makes us particularly social animals. This blog has mentioned a number of recent works from these fields including Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, Michael Gazzaniga's Human, Marco Iaccoboni's Mirroring People, and Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy, just to cite a few. Sen's approach to justice could be further informed and enriched by this literature. For humans, our reasoning capabilities are not the only characteristic of the human mind (brain) that causes us to make the choices (both personal and social) that we make. The human brain still carries with it all the evolutionary features that formed the neurological system of preceding species, particularly those that relate to feelings and emotions. Sen, I believe, would be open to this inquiry, because how else do we enrich our knowledge of the kind of "moral sentiments" that were identified by Adam Smith, David Hume, and others whom Sen admires.
Among the footnotes in A Theory of Justice were references to the work of a young Indian economist, Amartya Sen, who was just making a name for himself in the field of development economics and for his contributions to theory of "social choice." Social choice theory blends both welfare economics and voting theory. It is not surprising then that Rawls' and Sen's professional lives would intersect. Sen's The Idea of Justice is dedicated to the memory of John Rawls, but though The Idea of Justice is an appreciation of Rawls' oeuvre, it is not an endorsement of his Theory of Justice.
Rawls follows the social contract approach to political philosophy, building upon the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, which embraces a thought experiment in which the individuals in a society are imagined to agree unanimously on a set of principles that determines their processes and institutions for governing themselves. The imaginary social contract relies heavily on the assumption that individuals will cast aside their cultural, historical, economic, and personal biases in favor of impartiality --- and either agree to cede some of their individual interests in favor of the collective interest, or in Rawls' case, agree to maximize the economic welfare of those who are worst off --- subject to the difference principle. In Rawls' imagination, this agreement is made under the "veil of ignorance," which secures impartiality, perhaps even more impartiality than Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau contemplated. Also central to Rawls' contract is that the individuals who make this agreement will agree that liberty and political equality are values that are central to building just institutions and processes.
Impartiality, liberty, and equality figure in Sen's approach to justice as well, but Sen departs from Rawls' "transcendental" thought experiment and social contract approach which leads to the development of just institutions, and he focuses on how, through what he calls "public reasoning," we identify injustices and make incremental adjustments to more just outcomes in the relationships among people. The story told by Mark Currides in Contempt of Court, which was the subject of the previous December 16, 2010 post, is a type of example of the idea of justice that Sen is talking about. "The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live," Sen writes. "The importance of human lives, experiences, and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate. Institutions and rules are, of course, very important in influencing what happens, and they are part and parcel of the actual world as well, but the realized actuality goes well beyond the organization picture, and includes the lives that people manage --- or do not manage --- to live." Sen explains that we can understand the differences between these two approaches in two different words for justice found in Sanskrit literature --- niti and nyaya --- the former focuses on organizational and behavioral correctness, while the latter is tied to the world that emerges, not just the organizations and rules that society happens to have. Rawls' "theory of justice" fits with niti, Sen's "idea of justice" is an example of nyaya.
Important to Sen's public reasoning approach to justice is the role of the "impartial spectator," a role-player first conceived by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There are really two ideas here: self-scrutiny of our individual selves and self-scrutiny of our collective self. And for Sen, this scrutiny also contemplates that other voices --- even outsiders --- who are not part of the dominant culture, economic class, and political structure will be heard and listened to when there are opportunities to identify instances of injustice and take corrective action.
The public reasoning approach to justice leads to another departure from Rawls: it can be expected that it will not lead to unanimous consent for a single overarching principle or set of principles by which to identify injustice --- such as Rawls' "justice as fairness;" it is quite likely that the public reasoning approach will address injustice on many different grounds -- "a plurality of competing principles" such as utilitarianism, economic, political, racial, and religious egalitarianism, or radical libertarianism. And a society faced with competing principles that seeks to find the just solution to a given claim of injustice may only be able to achieve a partial resolution --- just as the United States Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp, discussed in the December 16, 2010 post, represented only a partial resolution of racial injustice in 1906. The current public debate over universal health care access in the United States presents precisely this scenario. "We have good reasons for recognizing that the pursuit of justice is partly a matter of the gradual formation of behavior patterns -- there is no immediate jump from the acceptance of some principles of justice and a total redesign of every one's actual behavior in line with that political conception of justice. In general, the institutions have to be chose not only in line with the nature of the society in question, but also co-dependently on the actual behavior patterns that might be expected even if -- and even after -- a political conception of justice is accepted by all." If only Lenin had considered this approach to justice, he might have spared Russians from a half a century of misery.
Sen makes room for some occasional "agitation" in the pursuit of justice, but it is that kind of agitation that is familiar to democracy: "outrage can be used to motivate, rather than to replace, reasoning." Later, he adds, "The role and reach of reason are not undermined by the indignation that leads us to an investigation of the ideas underlying the nature and basis of the persistent inequities . . ." When we "try to determine how justice can be advanced, there is a basic need for public reasoning, involving arguments coming from different quarters and divergent perspectives that we must expect to be able to settle the conflicting reasons in all cases and arrived at agreed positions on every issue. Complete resolution is neither a requirement of a person's own rationality, nor is it a condition of reasonable social choice, including a reason-based theory of justice."
What I would like to see in another book on this subject whose landscape is as broad as that reviewed and covered by Sen is a discussion of what we are learning from neuroscience, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural anthropology about what makes us human, and what makes us particularly social animals. This blog has mentioned a number of recent works from these fields including Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, Michael Gazzaniga's Human, Marco Iaccoboni's Mirroring People, and Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy, just to cite a few. Sen's approach to justice could be further informed and enriched by this literature. For humans, our reasoning capabilities are not the only characteristic of the human mind (brain) that causes us to make the choices (both personal and social) that we make. The human brain still carries with it all the evolutionary features that formed the neurological system of preceding species, particularly those that relate to feelings and emotions. Sen, I believe, would be open to this inquiry, because how else do we enrich our knowledge of the kind of "moral sentiments" that were identified by Adam Smith, David Hume, and others whom Sen admires.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Mark Currides and Leroy Phillips, Jr., Contempt of Court (1999)
This is a story about injustice. A true story. And if there was ever a story that seems to support Richard Wrangham's vision of male-dominated societal violence in Demonic Males (see July 1, 2010 post), this could be it. But human violence in this story --- here, a racially-motivated lynching at the beginning of the 20th century --- is not explained by competition for scarce food resources, nor does it appear to be explained by territorial expansion of a group. This is a type of violence that is arguably unique to humans ---the ugly side of our humanity.
This is a story about a crime --- an assault and the rape of a white woman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No one disputed that nor did anyone assert a justification for this crime. This is also the story of another crime: the unproven accusation that a black man committed the crime and the emotions of a community that would allow any black man, regardless whether he could have committed the crime, to pay the penalty for the first crime. When the accused tried to seek justice through the legal system to the full extent allowed by law, and to which any white man would have been entitled, the criminal justice system conspired to thwart his realization of justice. Before a court --- in this case, the United States Supreme Court --- had its final say, a mob of racial bigots, with the acquiescence of those assigned to protect the accused's rights, grabbed him from his jail, hung him from a bridge over the Tennessee River, and riddled his body with bullets.
I first heard this story last year at a legal ethics program of the Virginia Bar, where the author, Mark Currides, presented the story in order to illustrate a nestful of questions about judicial and attorney ethics issues. The American Bar Association had recently published an article about Currides' book, as it was the 100-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp , the only case involving an actual trial at the Supreme Court. The story of the accused's lawyers is a phenomenal one in the history of American jurisprudence --- both those who were assigned to represent the accused at his criminal trial, and those who took over to pursue his appeals, when the accused was persuaded by his own trial attorneys (and the judge) not to pursue an appeal after a jury had rendererd a guilty verdict at the trial that would surely result in his execution.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan persuaded five fellow justices of the Supreme Court to allow the accused an appeal under the Habeas Court Act --- something virtually unheard of in 1906, because it involved federal oversight of a State court proceeding. Harlan was almost unique in his sensitivity to racial justice at that time in history; he dissented in the case of Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld the concept of separate but equal facilities for the different races, in which he penned the statement, "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." But cases like this, which fortunately are exceptional and now, few, render the artistic depiction of Lady Justice, with blindfold, a wounded representation. Injustice is certainly blind too. It took decades before Justice Harlan's view of "our constitution" was accepted. But the Shipp case was a turning point. Racial lynchings began to decline dramatically after Shipp, when state judicial officers and law enforcement began to realize that the federal government could second-guess their actions and the local community could no longer protect them. And by the time of the school desegregation cases of the 1950s, the federal government was no longer relying on state and local police to protect those who were pursuing their federal rights (as happened in Chattanooga in 1906), but federal troops were sent to protect them.
There is a final contemplative thought to be considered after a reading a book like this: justice often moves at an incremental pace, often too slow in hindsight. Phrases like "with all deliberate speed," which Chief Justice Warren penned in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education remedy opinion, seem to recognize this fact. Contempt of Court is a story sandwiched in between many other stories that document the slow pace of securing racial justice over two centuries in time: for example, covering the period preceding Shipp, Judge Leon Higginbotham's history of the colonial origins of slavery in the United States, In the Matter of Color, Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (1978) and John Quincy Adams' decade-long, yet failed effort from 1835-1845 to get Congress to reconsider the slavery issue before the civil war as reported in William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and The Great Battle in the United States Congress (1998), and after Shipp, Richard Kluger's reporting on the judicial battles over racial desegregation in Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Racial Equality (1976). While one of the virtues of a democracy is that its incremental decision-making process makes it possible to gather the consent of the governed and reaffirm the legitimacy of the governing body so that violent conflict is not necessary to resolve critical and disputed issues. But at this stage in our democracy, we should recongize that there are some issues in need of resolution that can't wait as long as democracy may take to respond. Racial inequality and its attendant injustice is one of them, and conflict, including physical conflict, has been resorted to resolve the conflict. It is here that some fundamental principles of justice can help us identify those issues that cry out for impartial resolution at a faster pace, which is the subject of the next book to come of the bookshelf.
This is a story about a crime --- an assault and the rape of a white woman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No one disputed that nor did anyone assert a justification for this crime. This is also the story of another crime: the unproven accusation that a black man committed the crime and the emotions of a community that would allow any black man, regardless whether he could have committed the crime, to pay the penalty for the first crime. When the accused tried to seek justice through the legal system to the full extent allowed by law, and to which any white man would have been entitled, the criminal justice system conspired to thwart his realization of justice. Before a court --- in this case, the United States Supreme Court --- had its final say, a mob of racial bigots, with the acquiescence of those assigned to protect the accused's rights, grabbed him from his jail, hung him from a bridge over the Tennessee River, and riddled his body with bullets.
I first heard this story last year at a legal ethics program of the Virginia Bar, where the author, Mark Currides, presented the story in order to illustrate a nestful of questions about judicial and attorney ethics issues. The American Bar Association had recently published an article about Currides' book, as it was the 100-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp , the only case involving an actual trial at the Supreme Court. The story of the accused's lawyers is a phenomenal one in the history of American jurisprudence --- both those who were assigned to represent the accused at his criminal trial, and those who took over to pursue his appeals, when the accused was persuaded by his own trial attorneys (and the judge) not to pursue an appeal after a jury had rendererd a guilty verdict at the trial that would surely result in his execution.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan persuaded five fellow justices of the Supreme Court to allow the accused an appeal under the Habeas Court Act --- something virtually unheard of in 1906, because it involved federal oversight of a State court proceeding. Harlan was almost unique in his sensitivity to racial justice at that time in history; he dissented in the case of Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld the concept of separate but equal facilities for the different races, in which he penned the statement, "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." But cases like this, which fortunately are exceptional and now, few, render the artistic depiction of Lady Justice, with blindfold, a wounded representation. Injustice is certainly blind too. It took decades before Justice Harlan's view of "our constitution" was accepted. But the Shipp case was a turning point. Racial lynchings began to decline dramatically after Shipp, when state judicial officers and law enforcement began to realize that the federal government could second-guess their actions and the local community could no longer protect them. And by the time of the school desegregation cases of the 1950s, the federal government was no longer relying on state and local police to protect those who were pursuing their federal rights (as happened in Chattanooga in 1906), but federal troops were sent to protect them.
There is a final contemplative thought to be considered after a reading a book like this: justice often moves at an incremental pace, often too slow in hindsight. Phrases like "with all deliberate speed," which Chief Justice Warren penned in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education remedy opinion, seem to recognize this fact. Contempt of Court is a story sandwiched in between many other stories that document the slow pace of securing racial justice over two centuries in time: for example, covering the period preceding Shipp, Judge Leon Higginbotham's history of the colonial origins of slavery in the United States, In the Matter of Color, Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (1978) and John Quincy Adams' decade-long, yet failed effort from 1835-1845 to get Congress to reconsider the slavery issue before the civil war as reported in William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and The Great Battle in the United States Congress (1998), and after Shipp, Richard Kluger's reporting on the judicial battles over racial desegregation in Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Racial Equality (1976). While one of the virtues of a democracy is that its incremental decision-making process makes it possible to gather the consent of the governed and reaffirm the legitimacy of the governing body so that violent conflict is not necessary to resolve critical and disputed issues. But at this stage in our democracy, we should recongize that there are some issues in need of resolution that can't wait as long as democracy may take to respond. Racial inequality and its attendant injustice is one of them, and conflict, including physical conflict, has been resorted to resolve the conflict. It is here that some fundamental principles of justice can help us identify those issues that cry out for impartial resolution at a faster pace, which is the subject of the next book to come of the bookshelf.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest (2006)
This is a wonderful book to read following Genome (November 27, 2010 post). It tells another set of stories derived from sets of three-letter words utilizing combinations of the letters of A, C, G, and T. Published just seven years after the publication of Genome, and written just as the human genome was in its final stages of being decoded, The Making of the Fittest reveals just how much more we have learned about our DNA in such a short period of time.
Sean Carroll is the author of another book, previously published, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which documented the genetic source of both embryonic development as well as physical development outside the embryo after birth. I cited this book in the previous post.
The key words in this volume are chance, selection, and time. As someone who was intrigued and stimulated by French biologist Jacques Monod's book, Chance and Necessity, almost 40 years ago, these three words, and Carroll's interpretation of them in the context of what we now know about DNA and evolution, reaffirm what I have long-believed about randomness and causality: that events in the universe (biological, chemical, and physical) are both random and determined and there is no flawed incongruity in saying so. While randomness may appear to be a function of limited foresight --- cognitive uncertainty and unpredictability, as Ridley suggests in Genome, randomness is neither predestined or (intelligently) designed. Yet hindsight informs us that these same events are part of a causal sequence, many of which are quite orderly and repeatable.
Prior posts on this blog reveal that I am a skeptic of the intelligent designer thesis. (See May 24, 2010 and May 12, 2010 posts). The Making of the Fittest is probably the most devastating condemnation of intelligent design ever published. One cannot read and understand this book without coming to the conclusion that it is simply impossible for any type of intelligence to program life and contemplate mutation and evolution in the manner that it actually occurs. While those in the intelligent design community believe that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life without an intelligent designer (a code for God), Carroll demonstrates that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life as the output of a design. Theists will condemn this statement as the view of someone who believes that life has no purpose: but theists misunderstand and confuse purpose, which is a psychological event, with random mutation, which is a biological and informational event.
Both Carroll, Ridley and many others have reported that there is a universal common ancestor of all species dating back to billions of year ago, and the species alive today all share common DNA and RNA in their respective genomes that has been copied, translated, inherited, and preserved over the eons. What makes species differ is variety in the genome, and "[t]he source of all variety is mutation." Carroll notes that mutation has several connotations that have led to false impressions about mutation: first, that all mutation is bad and is not creative, and second, that if mutations are random (which he says they are), then a random process cannot account for all the complexity we find in living things today. "This misconception is based upon a failure to distinguish between mutation and selection. The mutational process is blind, natural selection is not. Mutation generates random variation, selection sorts out the winners and losers. Furthermore, natural selection acts cumulatively," says Carroll.
And there are a variety of mutations of the genetic code. The most common is the equivalent of a typographical error in the process of copying the genetic code --- a substitution of one of the four letters for another. But there are also mutations involving deletions of code and insertions of repeating code or duplications. Sometimes these mutations actually mean something --- changing something about the phenotype in which the genetic code resides, but many, many times these changes mean nothing --- they don't change a thing about how the gene works. Some genes simply lose their meaning over time because they are no longer used, and these are called fossil genes. And some mutations that do have meaning simply do not survive to live another generation because selection is neither accomodating nor forgiving. When mutations occur repeatedly and have meaning --- in the sense that it changes something about the phenotype in which it resides --- and selection favors the survival of that mutation, then given enough time (many generations, thousands of years) we can find new species evolving. Carroll has reduced his mantra of chance, selection and time to this expression: "i) given sufficient time, ii) identical or equivalent mutations will arise repeatedly by chance, and iii) their fate (preservation or elimination) will be determined by the conditions of selection upon the traits they affect."
The Making of the Fittest illustrates this proposition through several well-documented examples, but the star in this story are the genes that code for proteins that develop opsins found in photoreceptors in the eye. Opsins are involved in vision and in converting a photon of light into an electrochemical signal that is transmitted along neural pathways --- in humans to the areas of the brain responsible for vision. These genes and their predecessors are very old, and selection has operated on mutations of the genetic code that develop opsins to cause different species to have varying levels of visual acuity, color recognition, and other funcitonal properties.
Life can be described in terms of both variation (complexity) as well as order -- by which I mean that there is repetition and some level of stasis. For some, it is unfathomable that complexity and order can exist absent some intelligent designer. But biological science, chemistry, and even physics establishes that variation and order in living things exist quite well without a designer. Monod's "necessity" is a matter of selection, and for very long periods of time external conditions --- natural environment, predators, and even a given specie's social environment --- are relatively static leading to little or no change that gives rise to the appearance of order. Much in the process by which genetic code is copied over and over again: there are few mistakes and faithful copies of genes are repeatedly made preserving the existing order of things. But beneath the surface of appearances, mutations occur, and these mistakes are not planned, they are not purposeful, and they are random.
Sean Carroll is the author of another book, previously published, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which documented the genetic source of both embryonic development as well as physical development outside the embryo after birth. I cited this book in the previous post.
The key words in this volume are chance, selection, and time. As someone who was intrigued and stimulated by French biologist Jacques Monod's book, Chance and Necessity, almost 40 years ago, these three words, and Carroll's interpretation of them in the context of what we now know about DNA and evolution, reaffirm what I have long-believed about randomness and causality: that events in the universe (biological, chemical, and physical) are both random and determined and there is no flawed incongruity in saying so. While randomness may appear to be a function of limited foresight --- cognitive uncertainty and unpredictability, as Ridley suggests in Genome, randomness is neither predestined or (intelligently) designed. Yet hindsight informs us that these same events are part of a causal sequence, many of which are quite orderly and repeatable.
Prior posts on this blog reveal that I am a skeptic of the intelligent designer thesis. (See May 24, 2010 and May 12, 2010 posts). The Making of the Fittest is probably the most devastating condemnation of intelligent design ever published. One cannot read and understand this book without coming to the conclusion that it is simply impossible for any type of intelligence to program life and contemplate mutation and evolution in the manner that it actually occurs. While those in the intelligent design community believe that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life without an intelligent designer (a code for God), Carroll demonstrates that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life as the output of a design. Theists will condemn this statement as the view of someone who believes that life has no purpose: but theists misunderstand and confuse purpose, which is a psychological event, with random mutation, which is a biological and informational event.
Both Carroll, Ridley and many others have reported that there is a universal common ancestor of all species dating back to billions of year ago, and the species alive today all share common DNA and RNA in their respective genomes that has been copied, translated, inherited, and preserved over the eons. What makes species differ is variety in the genome, and "[t]he source of all variety is mutation." Carroll notes that mutation has several connotations that have led to false impressions about mutation: first, that all mutation is bad and is not creative, and second, that if mutations are random (which he says they are), then a random process cannot account for all the complexity we find in living things today. "This misconception is based upon a failure to distinguish between mutation and selection. The mutational process is blind, natural selection is not. Mutation generates random variation, selection sorts out the winners and losers. Furthermore, natural selection acts cumulatively," says Carroll.
And there are a variety of mutations of the genetic code. The most common is the equivalent of a typographical error in the process of copying the genetic code --- a substitution of one of the four letters for another. But there are also mutations involving deletions of code and insertions of repeating code or duplications. Sometimes these mutations actually mean something --- changing something about the phenotype in which the genetic code resides, but many, many times these changes mean nothing --- they don't change a thing about how the gene works. Some genes simply lose their meaning over time because they are no longer used, and these are called fossil genes. And some mutations that do have meaning simply do not survive to live another generation because selection is neither accomodating nor forgiving. When mutations occur repeatedly and have meaning --- in the sense that it changes something about the phenotype in which it resides --- and selection favors the survival of that mutation, then given enough time (many generations, thousands of years) we can find new species evolving. Carroll has reduced his mantra of chance, selection and time to this expression: "i) given sufficient time, ii) identical or equivalent mutations will arise repeatedly by chance, and iii) their fate (preservation or elimination) will be determined by the conditions of selection upon the traits they affect."
The Making of the Fittest illustrates this proposition through several well-documented examples, but the star in this story are the genes that code for proteins that develop opsins found in photoreceptors in the eye. Opsins are involved in vision and in converting a photon of light into an electrochemical signal that is transmitted along neural pathways --- in humans to the areas of the brain responsible for vision. These genes and their predecessors are very old, and selection has operated on mutations of the genetic code that develop opsins to cause different species to have varying levels of visual acuity, color recognition, and other funcitonal properties.
Life can be described in terms of both variation (complexity) as well as order -- by which I mean that there is repetition and some level of stasis. For some, it is unfathomable that complexity and order can exist absent some intelligent designer. But biological science, chemistry, and even physics establishes that variation and order in living things exist quite well without a designer. Monod's "necessity" is a matter of selection, and for very long periods of time external conditions --- natural environment, predators, and even a given specie's social environment --- are relatively static leading to little or no change that gives rise to the appearance of order. Much in the process by which genetic code is copied over and over again: there are few mistakes and faithful copies of genes are repeatedly made preserving the existing order of things. But beneath the surface of appearances, mutations occur, and these mistakes are not planned, they are not purposeful, and they are random.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Matt Ridley, Genome (1999)
A television show, Law and Order, opens each episode with a narrative line about the role of the police and prosecutors in the criminal justice system, which closes, "And these are their stories." Matt Ridley might have opened Genome by stating, "There are 23 chromosomes that make up the human genome, and each have special roles (plural) in determining or influencing our development, our physical attributes, our behavior, the kind of diseases we suffer or have immunity from, how long we might live, and when we might die. And these are their stories." Don't misunderstand me. Genome is not a complete encyclopedia of either genomics or the human genome. Just 23 interesting stories from one of the world's fine science writers, each story artfully tied to one of the 23 human chromosomes, from largest to smallest, covering topics such as life, species, history, fate, environment, intelligence, instinct, self-interest, sex, disease, stress, personality, development, life and death, memory, gene therapy, politics and ethics, eugenics, free will and determinism. The breadth of the subject-matter covered by this volume speaks to almost all of the topics covered by the books previously described in this blog, including a central theme: that units of information are the most fundamental units of life. (See September 28, 2010 post).
Ridley calls the genome a book, the chromosome a chapter, the gene a story, an exon a paragraph, a codon a word consisting of three letters, and a base is a letter, either (in the case of DNA) an A, C, G, or T (or U in the case of RNA), for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, each consisting of one or two aromatic rings and arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and/or oxygen atoms. These chemical units are the basic units of information that comprise life forms, but alone they do not give rise to life. What gives rise to life is (1) the pairing of these letters along a double helix that makes up DNA, and (2) their subsequent transcription into RNA to form three letter codons, which, (3) are subsequently "translated" into a specific amino acid depending on which three of the four letters are transcribed and their sequence. (4) The particular chain of amino acids creates a protein. By this process, it is said that "genes" code for "proteins." While the RNA amino acid chains may have been the earliest form of life, "life" as we know it received a boost with the creation of cellular membranes to form the first cells that carried the proteins containing genetic information central for the cell's organization. This development is still not fully understood.
This ability of the genes to copy themselves, read and transmit their story, under the right conditions, is the ability to create another life form. My son once asked asked me, "What is Life?" a question posed in his high school biology class, and I replied that at its most fundamental level it is carbon-based, with a mechanism to replicate itself. The only two things I would add, consistent with the very first book discussed in this blog, Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe (see August 17, 2009 post) is the ability of these units of information to communicate among themselves --- an electrochemical means --- to say "Let's stick together," or "Let's avoid each other," and then to store itself as if in memory. This is what we find in the genome, whatever the species.
This story never ceases to amaze me. Life began with RNA --- which by itself can replicate itself, and translate and transmit its meaning, as well as catalyze with --- break up or join with --- other chemicals, creating amino acids and proteins. The storage device for these words and paragraphs is DNA. An RNA gene found on chromosome 1 translates the information found in DNA to proteins, which become the primary agent for carrying out the direction specified by the information contained in the genes within a cell.
I cannot cover every "chapter" in Genome, but four topics that reappear throughout this blog --- so we can connect the dots --- are important in my mind: (1) is behavior found in our genes? (2) the role of our genes in our development after birth, (3) human memory and the mind; and (4) determinism vs. free will.
Is behavior found in our genes? This topic was first confronted in the post on Richard Powers' novel Generosity (November 30, 2009 post), Frans DeWaal's The Ape and The Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), and subsequently Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post). The answer then, as it is now, is no. There is no gene for spitting or laughing or speaking English or for believing in a god. What genes do code for enables or influences behavior, but they do not determine specific behavior. Just as it would be incorrect to say that behavior is entirely written in our genes, it would also be incorrect to state that behavior is entirely attributable to environment, including the nurturing, learning, social and cultural environments. Behavior is the outcome of the genome that defines us and the environment in which we develop and live.
Ridley notes the significance of instinct, something which was important to Darwin in The Origin of Species. Behavior that is instinctive to a species is arguably heavily enabled or influenced by genetic information. So we may refer to a language instinct, to borrow Steven Pinker's words, but a language instinct does not develop without some environmental influence. The genes that become proteins instruct the creation of the mouth, the tongue, and the air passages that enable human speech, and further instruct in the creation of the modules of the brain and the neuronal pathways between them that enable human speech and perhaps even language syntax. But at some point in the course of a life, learning takes over. The ability to learn --- social behavior --- is also something that is enabled or influenced by genetic information, but genes are not the end of the story.
The role of genes in development. This story was detailed in Sean Carroll's book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which accounted for the role of the Hox and hedgehog genes in providing a program for both embyonic development and development after birth. These genes regulate cell division, the timing at which genes are switched on to control development, and determine such things as symmetry in the body of an animal, where arms, legs, antennae, fins, fingers and the like appear. Ridley retells this story on Chromosome 12. This is one of the most fascinating stories in evolutionary genetics as these are among the oldest of genes.
Memory. One of the more important subjects in the study of the brain is its plasticity, the brain's ability to change by removing, adding or strengthening neural connections. "When you learn something," Ridley notes, "you alter the physical network of your brain so as to create new, tight connections where there were none or weaker ones before." Connections between never cells "not only provide the mechanism of memory, but are memory." Ridley is not clear on how specific genes are tied to learning and memory, but he suggests that proteins connected with certain genes "are probably needed for holding the synapse closely together." We know more about the process by which memories are created and stored in the brain: sensory information is received in the perirhinal cortex found in the medial temporal lobe and sent to the hippocampus and to the diencephalon for temporary storage. If the information is significant enough for more permanent storage, it is sent back to the neo-cortex as long-term memory. Eric Kandel's research, documented in his memoir, In Search of Memory, traces the electro-chemical process in the brain by which connections between the neuronal connections at the synapses of neurons are strengthened.
Learning "is the opposite of instinct," Ridley says. "Instinct is genetically-determined behavior; learning is behavior modified by experience. . . .Human beings achieve by instinct the same things that animals do. We crawl, stand, walk, cry and blink in just as instinctive a way as a chick. We employ learning only for the extra things we have grafted on to the animal instincts: things like reading, driving, banking and shopping." Consciousness, Ridley quotes another, "is to enable [the child] to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit." The brain is created by genes that designed the brain to be modified by experience.
Determinism vs free-will. The final chapter is almost whimsical --not truly a story about Chromosome 23, but an excuse to pontificate on whether free-will is possible given that a combination of genetics and the environment seems to determine everything about us. Free-will, in my view, if it exists, is enabled by the brain --- it is tied to the same type of issues that Ridley discusses in connection with learning and memory. Human behavior, says Ridley, is unpredictable in the short-term, but quite predictable in the long-term. As an example, he cites that at any given time during a day one can choose to eat or not to eat, but over the course of a day one will have to eat. When one eats is a function of genetic and external influences that makes behavior unpredictable, but not undetermined. "Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism:" being able to control voluntary movement in the gap between short-term when behavior is unpredictable and the long-term when it is predictably determined, It is in the brain of humans, and perhaps some other animals, that the ability to control voluntarily movement is found. And genes have enabled this ability in the design of the brain.
Ridley calls the genome a book, the chromosome a chapter, the gene a story, an exon a paragraph, a codon a word consisting of three letters, and a base is a letter, either (in the case of DNA) an A, C, G, or T (or U in the case of RNA), for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, each consisting of one or two aromatic rings and arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and/or oxygen atoms. These chemical units are the basic units of information that comprise life forms, but alone they do not give rise to life. What gives rise to life is (1) the pairing of these letters along a double helix that makes up DNA, and (2) their subsequent transcription into RNA to form three letter codons, which, (3) are subsequently "translated" into a specific amino acid depending on which three of the four letters are transcribed and their sequence. (4) The particular chain of amino acids creates a protein. By this process, it is said that "genes" code for "proteins." While the RNA amino acid chains may have been the earliest form of life, "life" as we know it received a boost with the creation of cellular membranes to form the first cells that carried the proteins containing genetic information central for the cell's organization. This development is still not fully understood.
This ability of the genes to copy themselves, read and transmit their story, under the right conditions, is the ability to create another life form. My son once asked asked me, "What is Life?" a question posed in his high school biology class, and I replied that at its most fundamental level it is carbon-based, with a mechanism to replicate itself. The only two things I would add, consistent with the very first book discussed in this blog, Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe (see August 17, 2009 post) is the ability of these units of information to communicate among themselves --- an electrochemical means --- to say "Let's stick together," or "Let's avoid each other," and then to store itself as if in memory. This is what we find in the genome, whatever the species.
This story never ceases to amaze me. Life began with RNA --- which by itself can replicate itself, and translate and transmit its meaning, as well as catalyze with --- break up or join with --- other chemicals, creating amino acids and proteins. The storage device for these words and paragraphs is DNA. An RNA gene found on chromosome 1 translates the information found in DNA to proteins, which become the primary agent for carrying out the direction specified by the information contained in the genes within a cell.
I cannot cover every "chapter" in Genome, but four topics that reappear throughout this blog --- so we can connect the dots --- are important in my mind: (1) is behavior found in our genes? (2) the role of our genes in our development after birth, (3) human memory and the mind; and (4) determinism vs. free will.
Is behavior found in our genes? This topic was first confronted in the post on Richard Powers' novel Generosity (November 30, 2009 post), Frans DeWaal's The Ape and The Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), and subsequently Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post). The answer then, as it is now, is no. There is no gene for spitting or laughing or speaking English or for believing in a god. What genes do code for enables or influences behavior, but they do not determine specific behavior. Just as it would be incorrect to say that behavior is entirely written in our genes, it would also be incorrect to state that behavior is entirely attributable to environment, including the nurturing, learning, social and cultural environments. Behavior is the outcome of the genome that defines us and the environment in which we develop and live.
Ridley notes the significance of instinct, something which was important to Darwin in The Origin of Species. Behavior that is instinctive to a species is arguably heavily enabled or influenced by genetic information. So we may refer to a language instinct, to borrow Steven Pinker's words, but a language instinct does not develop without some environmental influence. The genes that become proteins instruct the creation of the mouth, the tongue, and the air passages that enable human speech, and further instruct in the creation of the modules of the brain and the neuronal pathways between them that enable human speech and perhaps even language syntax. But at some point in the course of a life, learning takes over. The ability to learn --- social behavior --- is also something that is enabled or influenced by genetic information, but genes are not the end of the story.
The role of genes in development. This story was detailed in Sean Carroll's book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which accounted for the role of the Hox and hedgehog genes in providing a program for both embyonic development and development after birth. These genes regulate cell division, the timing at which genes are switched on to control development, and determine such things as symmetry in the body of an animal, where arms, legs, antennae, fins, fingers and the like appear. Ridley retells this story on Chromosome 12. This is one of the most fascinating stories in evolutionary genetics as these are among the oldest of genes.
Memory. One of the more important subjects in the study of the brain is its plasticity, the brain's ability to change by removing, adding or strengthening neural connections. "When you learn something," Ridley notes, "you alter the physical network of your brain so as to create new, tight connections where there were none or weaker ones before." Connections between never cells "not only provide the mechanism of memory, but are memory." Ridley is not clear on how specific genes are tied to learning and memory, but he suggests that proteins connected with certain genes "are probably needed for holding the synapse closely together." We know more about the process by which memories are created and stored in the brain: sensory information is received in the perirhinal cortex found in the medial temporal lobe and sent to the hippocampus and to the diencephalon for temporary storage. If the information is significant enough for more permanent storage, it is sent back to the neo-cortex as long-term memory. Eric Kandel's research, documented in his memoir, In Search of Memory, traces the electro-chemical process in the brain by which connections between the neuronal connections at the synapses of neurons are strengthened.
Learning "is the opposite of instinct," Ridley says. "Instinct is genetically-determined behavior; learning is behavior modified by experience. . . .Human beings achieve by instinct the same things that animals do. We crawl, stand, walk, cry and blink in just as instinctive a way as a chick. We employ learning only for the extra things we have grafted on to the animal instincts: things like reading, driving, banking and shopping." Consciousness, Ridley quotes another, "is to enable [the child] to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit." The brain is created by genes that designed the brain to be modified by experience.
Determinism vs free-will. The final chapter is almost whimsical --not truly a story about Chromosome 23, but an excuse to pontificate on whether free-will is possible given that a combination of genetics and the environment seems to determine everything about us. Free-will, in my view, if it exists, is enabled by the brain --- it is tied to the same type of issues that Ridley discusses in connection with learning and memory. Human behavior, says Ridley, is unpredictable in the short-term, but quite predictable in the long-term. As an example, he cites that at any given time during a day one can choose to eat or not to eat, but over the course of a day one will have to eat. When one eats is a function of genetic and external influences that makes behavior unpredictable, but not undetermined. "Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism:" being able to control voluntary movement in the gap between short-term when behavior is unpredictable and the long-term when it is predictably determined, It is in the brain of humans, and perhaps some other animals, that the ability to control voluntarily movement is found. And genes have enabled this ability in the design of the brain.
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