Philosophy as Biology

 

 

In the 1960s linguistics took a biological turn with the work of Lenneberg and Chomsky.  [1] Language was held to be genetically fixed, a species universal, just like the anatomy of the body. It is a biological aspect of human beings, not something cultural or learned, more like digestion than chess. Language evolved, became encoded in the genes, and is present in the brain at birth. Since linguistics is properly viewed as a branch of psychology, according to these theorists, this means that part of psychology is also biological, not something separate from and additional to biology. But then it is reasonable to ask whether more of psychology might fall under biological categories; and succeeding years saw psychology as a whole taking a biological turn. Many of our mental faculties turn out to have biological origins and forms of realization in the organism. Indeed, learning itself must be genetically based and qualifies as a biological phenomenon: what an animal learns is part of its biological nature, not something set apart from biology. True, what is learned is not innate, but many things are not innate that are part of the natural life of the organism (e.g. a bee’s knowledge of the whereabouts of nectar). Dying by predation is not innate but it is certainly biological. Biology is the science of living things, and living things learn as part of their natural way of life. In any case, psychology turned from cultural conditioning to biological naturalism; it became evolutionary. How could it not given that minds evolved along with bodies? The mind of an organism is part of its nature as a living thing; it doesn’t exist outside the sphere of biology (as the soul was supposed to). The organism is a psychophysical package.

            The basic architecture of language is thus a biological architecture. Syntax is an organic structure; the lexicon is a biological system too. When we study these things we are studying the properties of an organism, just like its other biological properties. They had an evolutionary origin in mutation and natural selection, and they have a biological function (probably to enhance thought, as well as serve in communication). One of the organs of the body, the brain, serves as the organic basis for language, as the heart serves as the basis for blood circulation. So linguistics (descriptive grammar) is not discontinuous with biology but part of biology.  [2] It had conceived itself differently, perhaps out of a feeling that language raises us above the level of the beasts, but in these post-Darwinian times it should be relegated to biological science. Freud had made similar moves in affective psychology; the biological school in linguistics was moving in the same general direction. This broke down the old dualism and established the study of language as a department of biology, even when it came to the fine structure of grammar.

            This is an oft-told tale (though still not without its detractors), but it has not yet colonized the entire intellectual landscape. Recently there has been a movement to classify consciousness as a biological phenomenon: it too is innately determined and biologically functional. Organisms have consciousness the way they have blood and bile—as a result of biological evolution and bodily mechanisms. It is not something supernatural, an immaterial infusion. That certainly seems of a piece with the biological naturalism that has dominated psychology in recent decades, but does it go far enough? Can’t we also announce that phenomenology is a branch of biology? That is, the systematic phenomenology of Husserl is really a form of biology: the very structures of consciousness are biological facts. Husserl doesn’t suspend the natural sciences (the epoche); he promotes one of them. Phenomenology is the study of a biological aspect of the human mind (and bats have their phenomenology too), just as linguistics is the study of a biological aspect of the human mind (and bees have their language too). When Sartre characterizes consciousness as nothingness and explores its modalities he is doing biology, because consciousness is a biological phenomenon—evolved, innately programmed, functional, and rooted in tissues of the body. To be sure, it is not reducible to other biological facts (such as brain structures); it is a biological fact in its own right. But it is a biological fact nevertheless—part of the life of a living thing. Its essence is nothingness, as the essence of the heart is pumping and the essence of the kidneys is filtering. It has a certain natural architecture, established by the genes, in both humans and animals. We certainly don’t choose its essence. In so far as consciousness exhibits universals (intentionality, qualia, transparency), those are biological universals, like the universals of human grammar. Phenomenology thus belongs with psychology as a branch of biology. Biology deals with living things–as opposed to physics, which deals with non-living things—and the mind is an aspect of life. Husserl could have cited Darwin (correctly understood): The Origin of Species of Consciousness. This is not biological reductionism, simply the acknowledgment that biology extends beyond the body. It is not that religion takes up where biology leaves off.

            I take it I am not shocking the reader unduly. Isn’t this all part of our current secular scientific worldview? Biology by definition encompasses the life sciences, and linguistics, psychology, and phenomenology are all parts of the life sciences. Speaking, thinking, and experiencing are all modes of living—what living things do (some of them). They are, as Wittgenstein would say, aspects of our “form of life”, part of our “natural history”. Maybe we need to expand our conception of biology beyond the typical curriculum, but it is not difficult to see that these aspects of our nature properly belong to biology, broadly conceived (certainly not to the physical sciences). However, I now wish to assert something that may strike readers as pushing it just a bit too far: philosophy too is a branch of biology. I don’t say this because I think philosophical questions reduce to biological questions; I say it because of the methodology of philosophy. We hear about the “linguistic turn” in philosophy—using the study of language as a means of arriving at philosophical conclusions about ground-floor questions. But given the biological turn in linguistics this implies that philosophy has already turned into a branch of biology. Language is a biological phenomenon and it is held to be the foundation of philosophy, so philosophy is based on a sub-discipline of biology. If the logical form of sentences is deemed central to philosophy, then it is the form of a biological entity that is in question. Logical form, like syntax, is an aspect of an evolved and biologically based entity—the architecture of a biological trait of humans. If speech acts are deemed central, then this aspect of living things will assume methodological importance—as opposed to acts of reproduction or respiration or excretion. The combinatorial power of language has rightly received considerable attention, but this too is an evolved biological trait. The biological turn in linguistics combined with the linguistic turn in philosophy together imply the biological turn in philosophy.

            But what if we reject the linguistic turn? What was it a turn from? Mainly it was a turn from a more direct investigation of concepts. But investigating concepts is also investigating a biological phenomenon. Let me put it bluntly: a concept is a living thing. A concept is like a cell of the mind (and note that biological cells were so called because of their resemblance to the living quarters occupied by monks). Concepts are the units that make up thoughts and other mental states, as words make up sentences. Concepts have functions, they evolved, and they are rooted in organic structures of the brain. So when we study concepts philosophically we are studying entities as biological as blood cells or enzymes. We scrutinize these things for their philosophical yield, not for their contributions to biology as such, but they are still biological entities. To be sure, we are interested in their content not their physiology, but having content is just another biologically fixed fact about them. Even if you think concepts are acquired by abstraction, they are still entities that exist in the context of a living organism (like big muscles or manicured nails). Conceptual analysis is the dissection of a biological entity; it is not the examination of a disembodied abstract form. There might be such forms, but they must be reflected in the natural traits of organisms at some level. We have no trouble recognizing that an animal’s concepts are biological forms; human concepts are not different in kind. Bee philosophers can reflect on their bee concepts (or turn their attention to bee language), and human philosophers are in the same case—reflecting on their biologically given traits.  [3] How they do that must also be rooted in biology, but the important point is that thinking is a biological fact; and in so far as philosophy concerns itself with “the structure of thought” it is a biological enterprise. The results don’t concernbiological matters, as opposed to matters in the world at large, but the method involves surveying a certain class of biological entities. Analyzing a concept is analyzing a living thing—as much a living thing as any organ of the body. Our intellectual faculties are indisputably aspects of our life as organic beings, and concepts are just their basic components—as cells are the basic components of bodily organs. It follows that philosophy is (a branch of) biology. Philosophy could be called conceptual biology.

            I want to emphasize how biological concepts are. First, they arise through the evolutionary process (though we have little understanding of how this happened). Second, they are manufactured during embryonic development as a result of genetic realization (or if you think they are acquired later, it is by biological means, e.g. abstraction). Third, they have a biological function—to enable thought, which enables rational action. Fourth and crucially, they must be realized in some neural mechanism that enables them to have their characteristic features, chief among which is their combinatorial powers. The neurons must be able to hook up with other neurons so as to produce complex thoughts; and this hooking up must respect the logical relations inherent in thought (it’s not just a matter of brute aggregation). There must be a physiology of thinking, and specific to thinking. So concepts cannot somehow float above the biological substructure; they depend upon it. Presumably this implies some sort of hidden structure to concepts analogous to the hidden structure of the cell (nucleus, mitochondria, etc.) Concepts are biological through and through. So if they are what philosophy investigates philosophy is up to its ears in biology. It would be different if philosophy could pursue its interests without recourse to concepts, say by simply looking at the extra-conceptual world, but that idea is hopelessly wide of the mark. And even if you think that someparts of philosophy require no reference to concepts, much of it clearly does (the parts that expressly analyze concepts, in particular). Philosophy is thus one of the life sciences and should be understood as such. There are the sciences of the inorganic world—physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology—and there are the sciences of the organic world—zoology, biology, genetics, biochemistry: and within this broad grouping linguistics, psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy fall into the latter category. As I say, this is no form of biological reductionism or determinism, simply a taxonomic observation. It is making explicit what has been implicit since the time of Darwin.  [4]

            I want to end with a point about mathematics. The kinship between mathematics and philosophy has long been recognized; in particular, the status of mathematics as a non-empirical conceptual inquiry makes it similar to philosophy. So is mathematics also a department of biology? Well, if we view it as investigating the implications of basic mathematical concepts it presumably is, for the same reasons philosophy is. Mathematical concepts are products of evolution too, and they must have an underlying physiology. They too are living things. To the extent that mathematical concepts are part of the subject matter or method of mathematics, that subject is also fundamentally biological. Suppose mathematical ideas are innate, just as the classical rationalists supposed; then they must have evolved by mutation and natural selection, become genetically encoded, and matured in the individual organism’s brain to become the conscious entities we now know. Investigating these concepts is thus an exercise in biological exploration—discovering what these evolved traits have hidden in them. How they evolved we don’t know, but if they did evolve then mathematics is another kind of life science, mathematics being part of human life. The concept of number, say, is part of our evolved form of life (quite literally). Counting is like speaking—a human universal. Mathematical theory is the spelling out of the mathematical concepts we inherited from out ancestors.

 

  [1] See Eric Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (1967) and Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (1968), and many other works.

  [2] The work of Ruth Millikan is also an instance of the biological turn in linguistics and psychology, to be set beside Lenneberg and Chomsky. The biological concept she emphasizes is function as distinct from innateness. 

  [3] No one would doubt that the study of bee language belongs to biology (zoology to be precise), but it took some persuasion to get people to accept that human language is part of human biology (zoology). If bees had philosophers it would be clear enough that these philosophers are studying a biological phenomenon—bee language or bee thought. Is it that there is resistance to the very idea of human biology?

  [4] In retrospect we can see the work of Locke and Hume (among others) as a form of human biology: they undertook a naturalistic study of the human mind, turning away from scholastic essences and the like. If they had known about Darwin, they might have welcomed the biological naturalism inherent in his work.

                                   

 

 

Phenomenological Ignorance

 

 

We can’t know what it’s like to be a bat. This is an instance of a more general truth: no one can grasp the nature of experiences that are radically different from their own. We can grasp the nature of experiences similar to our own, but we can’t grasp experiences that are qualitatively different from ours. We are ignorant of phenomenological facts that diverge from our own. Bats can know what it’s like to be a bat, and so presumably can dolphins, which employ a similar echolocation sense; but beings that have no such sense are in the dark about the experiences involved. It is the same story for the congenitally blind: they can’t know what it’s like to see—as the deaf can’t know what it’s like to hear, or the pain-free to understand what pain is, or the nasally challenged to appreciate smells, or the emotionless to know what anger is. In the realm of the phenomenological there are sharp constraints on what is knowable and by whom. You can’t even know what it’s like to experience red if you have only experienced blue. This is an epistemic limitation—a limitation on what can be known, understood, or grasped. It is not an absolute limitation—a reflection of the intrinsic nature of the fact in question—since it can be overcome by creatures that happen to participate in that fact; it is a relative limitation—X can’t be known by Y (though it can be known by Z). It isn’t universal ignorance but creature-relative ignorance.

            The question I am concerned with is why such ignorance exists: what is its explanation? We have a kind of extrapolation problem: how do I move from knowledge of my own phenomenology to knowledge of the phenomenology of others? It appears that I can do this when there is similarity, but not when there is (radical) difference. My ability to extrapolate is blocked by dissimilarity. The question is why such extrapolation limitations exist. To see the problem let us review some cases in which there are no such extrapolation restrictions. Consider geometry: are we limited only to knowledge of shapes we have encountered? Are alien geometries incomprehensible to us? We have certainly not experienced all possible polygons, so what about those that lie beyond our geometrical experience? Here the answer is obvious: we are not so limited. To simplify, suppose a person never to have experienced rectilinear figures but only curvilinear ones, so that he has never seen a triangle (say). Does that mean he can’t understand what a triangle is? No, it can be explained to him perfectly well and he will thereby understand the word “triangle”. So while we can’t grasp a type of experience we have never encountered in ourselves, we can grasp a type of geometrical figure we have never encountered in the perceptible world. We can extrapolate in the latter case but not in the former. We don’t have acquaintance-restricted knowledge in geometry, but we do in phenomenology. There are gaps in our understanding where experience is concerned, but not where shapes are concerned. It is the same for animal species: you don’t need to have seen an elephant to know what an elephant is (or a bat). Elephants can be described to you, pictured, and imagined; and they don’t need to be similar to animals you have seen with your own eyes. You know what an animal is and you understand what kind of animal an elephant is by description. But you don’t know what kind of experience a bat has even though it has been described to you (based on echoes, having such and such brain correlates, etc.). Also: suppose you had never heard of odd numbers, having been brought up only to deal with even numbers. That would not prevent you grasping the concept of an odd number once someone explained it to you. There are no irremediable gaps in our grasp of numbers analogous to the gaps in our grasp of phenomenology. Likewise, our knowledge of astronomy is not limited by the extent of our acquaintance: we grasp the concept of remote and alien galaxies without ever experiencing them. But our general concept of experience doesn’t enable us to fill in the gaps in our acquaintance with experience: we can’t say, “Oh, bat experience is simply this” and feel that we know what we are talking about. Our knowledge of phenomenology is thus gappy in a way our knowledge of other things is not. We can’t use a form of induction to extrapolate to types of experience that we have not ourselves directly (introspectively) encountered. The question is why. And the question should seem pressing, because the epistemic limitation is so anomalous and local—in general, there are no such limitations on knowledge.  [1] It is surprising that we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.

            We must canvas some putative explanations. One possible explanation is that experiences concern the mind, while the other cases I mentioned concern the non-mental world. But this explanation is inadequate because (a) some facts about the mind are not so limited and (b) there are facts about physical objects that are subject to the same limitation. I can understand what beliefs you have even though they are quite alien to me—their odd content isn’t an obstacle to my knowledge; and I can’t grasp a color that I have not seen if it is different from any I have seen. Color blindness will result in color ignorance, even though colors are perceptible properties of physical objects; but my unfamiliarity with crazy conspiracy theories isn’t an impediment to my knowing what weird belief is in question. So the epistemic limitation we are interested in isn’t just a reflection of a general truth about knowledge of the mind versus knowledge of non-mental things. But even if it were such an instance that would not answer our question, because that question would now shift to the more general question: how come we can extrapolate about things outside the mind but not things inside the mind? What is the source of that difference?

            A more promising suggestion is that the realm of experience is simply less homogeneous than the realm of the physical (to speak loosely), so that it would involve greater cognitive leaps to extrapolate across this realm. Geometry is about essentially similar things while phenomenology includes very diverse things. But by what criterion is bat experience so different from (say) visual experience while circles and squares are deemed essentially similar? The concept of similarity will not bear this kind of weight. Some people have urged that bat experience is not really all that different from ours: it is a type of auditory experience for one thing, and for another it has many of the properties of visual experience (a distance sense used to navigate and locate objects in space). These points may be conceded while still insisting on the alien character of such experience: but then how are triangles and circles to be supposed more similar? One loses one’s grip on what notion of similarity is at issue here. There is really no objective basis for distinguishing the cases; the difference arises rather from our mode of knowledge in the two cases. The phenomenological realm is not objectively more diverse than the geometrical realm (or the mathematical realm or the zoological realm); it is rather that our method of knowing somehow differs—we find it easier to extrapolate in the one case than the other. But why is that?

            Along the same lines it might be said that we are actually just as limited in geometry as we are in phenomenology, because geometry also includes extreme knowledge-blocking diversity. Thus non-Euclidian geometry might be said to differ dramatically from Euclidian geometry—as radically as bat experience differs from human experience—so that it is impossible to extrapolate from one to the other. Accordingly, we don’t really grasp non-Euclidian geometry, just as we don’t grasp non-human phenomenology. Since there is then no epistemological asymmetry between the cases, there is nothing to explain—no epistemological anomaly to account for. Alien geometry is as incomprehensible as alien phenomenology (and the same might be said for such things as irrational numbers or alien types of animal). The weakness of this position is that it is by no means clear that there is any epistemic limitation attending the allegedly alien types of fact. We do grasp non-Euclidian geometry (and irrational numbers and the platypus). So the epistemic asymmetry still exists in undiluted form. The puzzle thus persists as to what the basis of the asymmetry might be: why is it harder to know one thing than the other? What makes alien phenomenology peculiarly recalcitrant to understanding?

            Here is a completely different approach: alien phenomenology is like alien language. Humans are born with a specifically structured language capacity that prepares them for the particular languages they will encounter, but it is not suitable for the acquisition of languages with a different kind of structure. The human language faculty will not work to produce knowledge of alien grammars—as it might be, non-discrete elements that combine according to quite different grammatical principles from those of natural human languages (no recursion, for example); or don’t combine at all. It is dedicated and differentially structured, not an all-purpose learning device. If you place a human infant in a linguistic environment that is radically alien, she will not end up with knowledge of the language in question. Suppose bats were to speak such a language: the human child would not come to know its grammar and speak it like a native upon exposure to that language. Linguistic knowledge is thus subject to epistemic limitation as part of its innate character. At best a person might laboriously decipher the grammar of a radically alien language and speak it awkwardly and unnaturally—rather as someone might develop an abstract and unintuitive conception of bat experience. So the suggestion is that the reason we don’t grasp bat phenomenology is that our innate phenomenology module isn’t designed to extend to types of phenomenology that are alien to our own. That is, our innate knowledge of phenomenology is restricted to types of mind whose phenomenological “grammar” matches our own. It is not that alien grammars are objectively more difficult or complex than human grammar; it is just that there is a bias built into the human language module that favors one type of grammar over others. From an evolutionary point of view, it is important for us to have a solid grasp of our own minds (“theory of mind”), so we are genetically equipped with such knowledge; but there is no biological reason to have a solid grasp of bat minds, so lacunae there are acceptable. It is not as if there has been natural selection operating on humans to improve their grasp of bat psychology! Human phenomenological knowledge is domain-specific and geared to our environmental niche, so it is simply not designed to cover bats and their ilk.

            This theory of phenomenological ignorance has the look of what we are seeking, but it might be wondered whether it is strong enough to deliver the epistemic limitation that apparently exists. In the language case, as noted, it is possible in principle for us to overcome our innate bias and acquire knowledge of the grammar of an alien language, albeit laboriously; but is it possible in principle to come to know what it’s like to be a bat? Isn’t that limitation a lot harder to overcome? I don’t know the answer to this: I don’t know whether intensive training, especially during the sensitive periods of child learning, could yield intuitive knowledge of bat phenomenology. Certainly, given that the experiential modality is auditory, the building blocks are there, and maybe training in echo-navigation in the first few years of life could produce a sense of the structure and operations of bat experience (hearing aids would help). So the obstacle may not be insurmountable. Also, we can surely imagine beings that can’t overcome their linguistic bias and so can’t learn an alien language even in principle. So the cases might not be as all-or-nothing as they seem at first sight. The idea of an innate phenomenology module certainly seems intelligible enough, and it delivers an explanation of the puzzling asymmetry I have noted. Just as we have an innate module for our belief-desire theory of mind, so we have an innate module for our phenomenological theory of mind. We could have been born knowing what bat experience is like, as we are born knowing what human experience is like; but actually we aren’t and that produces the epistemic gaps in question. Our knowledge of geometry, arithmetic, and zoology is different, not being based on a selective module like the language faculty (or not as selective); but our knowledge of phenomenology is sharply constrained and not easily overcome (if at all). We are not, as they say, plastic when it comes to phenomenology.

            Notice that according to this theory it is not really correct to suppose that our knowledge of phenomenology is based on our acquaintance with our own experience. That is an empiricist theory of such knowledge analogous to empiricist theories of knowledge of the external world (we possess concepts by abstraction of properties from perceived particulars). But the nativist theory of phenomenological knowledge holds instead that we have such knowledge independently of acquaintance with our experiences. We know what experiential types are without any such operation of acquaintance and associated abstraction, but innately. So the problem isn’t that what we abstract from own experience doesn’t fit the experience of bats, but rather that we are not innately equipped with a faculty of knowledge that includes the knowledge in question. In short, we don’t know bat psychology innately. No doubt acquaintance plays a triggering role in the production of phenomenological knowledge, but it doesn’t play an originative role (as with other innate knowledge systems). Maybe even producing actual bat experience in us wouldn’t itself be sufficient to acquire knowledge of the nature of bat experience, because that requires the cooperation of an innate faculty of phenomenological knowledge geared to bat experiences, which is absent in humans. In any case, an empiricist theory of phenomenological knowledge is by no means to be assumed (if it’s false generally, why should it be true here?).  [2]

            I want to emphasize not so much the proposed solution as the problem it is designed to solve. We know there are phenomenological facts in the world with a nature we can’t grasp, though other beings can; this poses a problem of explanation. The case looks very different from other types of knowledge. It is a non-trivial question why this is so, raising some deep issues. It challenges conceptions of knowledge that have been long entrenched, notably how we know the nature of our own experiences. How exactly do I know what pain is, or experiences of red, or anger?

 

  [1] I don’t meant there are no other limits to knowledge, just that there are no limits of the kind we find with respect to phenomenology, i.e. extrapolation problems across a single domain.

  [2] It is an interesting fact that an empiricist theory of phenomenological knowledge is attractive even to people who are skeptical of an empiricist theory of knowledge of physical objects. I’m not sure why this is—is it because it is easy to conflate experience with knowledge of experience? In fact, actual bats may not know what it’s like to be a bat simply because they lack this kind of introspective knowledge, despite possessing the corresponding experiences.

 

 

 

Pain and Unintelligent Design

 

 

Pain is a very widespread biological adaptation. Pain receptors are everywhere in the animal world. Evidently pain serves the purposes of the genes—it enables survival. It is not just a by-product or holdover; it is specifically functional. To a first approximation we can say that pain serves the purpose of avoiding danger: it signals danger and it shapes behavior so as to avoid it. It hurts of course, and hurting is not good for the organism’s feeling of wellbeing: but that hurt is beneficial to the organism because it serves to keep it from injury and death. So the story goes: evolution equips us with the necessary evil of pain the better to enable our survival. We hurt in order to live.  If we didn’t hurt, we would die. People born without pain receptors are exceptionally prone to injury. So nature is not so cruel after all. Animals feel pain for their own good.

            But why is pain quite so bad? Why does it hurt so much? Is the degree of pain we observe really necessary for pain to perform its function? Suppose we [encountered alien creatures much like ourselves except that their pain threshold is much lower and their degree of pain much higher. If they stub their toe even slightly the pain is excruciating (equivalent to us having our toe hit hard with a hammer); their headaches are epic bouts of suffering; a mere graze has them screaming in agony. True, all this pain encourages them to be especially careful not to be injured, and it certainly aids their survival, but it all seems a bit excessive. Wouldn’t a lesser amount of pain serve the purpose just as well? And note that their extremes of pain are quite debilitating: they can’t go about their daily business with so much pain all the time.  If one of them stubs her toe she is laid off work for a week and confined to bed. Moreover, the pain tends to persist when the painful stimulus is removed: it hurts just as much after the graze has occurred. If these creatures were designed by some conscious being, we would say that the designer was an unintelligent designer. If the genes are the ones responsible, we would wonder what selective pressure could have allowed such extremes of pain. Their pain level is clearly surplus to requirements. But isn’t it much the same with us? I would be careful not to stub my toe even if I felt half the pain I feel now. The pain of a burn would make me avoid the flame even if it was much less fierce than it is now. And what precisely is the point of digestive pain or muscle pain? What do these things enable me to avoid? We get along quite well without pain receptors in the brain (or the hair, nails, and teeth enamel), so why not dispense with it for other organs too? Why does cancer cause so much pain? What good does that do? Why are we built to be susceptible to torture? Torture makes us do things against our wishes—it can be used coercively—so why build us to be susceptible to it? A warrior who can’t be tortured is a better warrior, surely. Why allow chronic pain that serves no discernible biological function? A more rational pain perception system would limit pain to those occasions on which it can serve its purpose of informing and avoiding, without overdoing it in the way it seems to. In a perfect world there would be no pain at all, just a perceptual system that alerts us non-painfully to danger; but granted that pain is a more effective deterrent, why not limit it to the real necessities? The negative side effects of severe pain surely outweigh its benefits. It seems like a case of unintelligent design.

            Yet pain evidently has a long and distinguished evolutionary history. It has been tried and tested over countless generations in millions of species. There is every reason to believe that pain receptors are as precisely calibrated as visual receptors. Just as the eye independently evolved in several lineages, so we can suppose that pain did (“convergent evolution”). It isn’t that pain only recently evolved in a single species and hasn’t yet worked out the kinks in its design (cf. bipedalism); pain is as old as flesh and bone. Plants don’t feel pain, but almost everything else does, above a certain level of biological complexity. There are no pain-free mammals. Can it be that mammalian pain is a kind of colossal biological blunder entailing much more suffering than is necessary for it to perform its function? So we have a puzzle—the puzzle of pain. On the one hand, the general level of pain seems excessive, with non-functional side effects; on the other hand, it is hard to believe that evolution would tolerate something so pointless. After all, pain uses energy, and evolution is miserly about energy. We can suppose that some organisms experience less pain than others (humans seem especially prone to it)—invertebrates less than vertebrates, say—so why not make all organisms function with a lower propensity for pain? Obviously, organisms can survive quite well without being quite so exquisitely sensitive to pain, so why not raise the threshold and reduce the intensity?

            Compare pleasure. Pleasure, like pain, is motivational, prompting organisms to engage not avoid. Food and sex are the obvious examples (defecation too, according to Freud). But the extremes of pleasure are never so intense as the extremes of pain: pain is really motivational, while pleasure can be taken or left. No one would rather die than forfeit an orgasm, but pain can make you want to die. Why the asymmetry? Pleasure motivates effectively enough without going sky-high, while excruciating pain is always moments away. Why not regulate pain to match pleasure? There is no need to make eating berries sheer ecstasy in order to get animals to eat berries, so why make being burnt sheer agony in order to get animals to avoid being burnt? Our pleasure system seems designed sensibly, moderately, non-hyperbolically, while our pain system goes way over the top. And yet that would make it biologically anomalous, a kind of freak accident. It’s like having grotesquely enlarged eyes when smaller eyes will do. Pleasure is a good thing biologically, but there is no need to overdo it; pain is also a good thing biologically (not otherwise), but there is no need to overdo it.

            I think this is a genuine puzzle with no obvious solution. How do we reconcile the efficiency and parsimony of evolution with the apparent extravagance of pain, as it currently exists? However, I can think of a possible resolution of the puzzle, which finds in pain a unique biological function, or one that is uniquely imperative. By way of analogy consider the following imaginary scenario. The local children have a predilection for playing over by the railway tracks, which feature a live electrical line guaranteed to cause death in anyone who touches it. There have been a number of fatalities recently and the parents are up in arms. There seems no way to prevent the children from straying over there—being grounded or conventionally punished is not enough of a deterrent. The no-nonsense headmaster of the local school comes up with an extreme idea: any child caught in the vicinity of the railway tracks will be given twenty lashes! This is certainly cruel and unusual punishment, but the dangers it is meant to deter are so extreme that the community decides it is the only way to save the children’s lives. In fact, several children, perhaps skeptical of the headmaster’s threats, have already received this extreme punishment, and as a result they sure as hell aren’t going over to the railway tracks any time soon. An outsider unfamiliar with the situation might suspect a sadistic headmaster and hysterical parents, but in fact this is the only way to prevent fatalities, as experience has shown. Someone might object: “Surely twenty lashes is too much! What about reducing it to ten or even five?” The answer given is that this is just too risky, given the very real dangers faced by the children; in fact, twenty lashes is the minimum that will ensure the desired result (child psychologists have studied it, etc.). Here we might reasonably conclude that the apparently excessive punishment is justified given the facts of the case—death by electrocution versus twenty lashes. The attractions of the railway tracks are simply that strong! We might compare it to talking out an insurance policy: if the results of a catastrophic storm are severe enough we may be willing to part with a lot of money to purchase an insurance policy. It may seem irrational to purchase the policy given its steep price and the improbability of a severe storm, but actually it makes sense because of the seriousness of the storm if it happens. Now suppose that the consequences of injury for an organism are severe indeed—maiming followed by certain death. There are no doctors to patch you up, just brutal nature to bring you down. A broken forelimb can and will result in certain death. It is then imperative to avoid breaking that forelimb, so if you feel it under dangerous stress you had better relieve that stress immediately. Just in case the animal doesn’t get the message the genes have taken out an insurance policy: make the pain so severe that the animal will always avoid the threatening stimulus. Strictly speaking, the severe pain is unnecessary to ensure the desired outcome, but just in case the genes ramp it up to excruciating levels. This is like the home insurer who thinks he should buy the policy just in case there is a storm; otherwise he might be ruined. Similarly, the genes take no chances and deliver a jolt of pain guaranteed to get the animal’s attention. It isn’t like the case of pleasure because not getting some particular pleasure will not automatically result in death, but being wounded generally will. That is, if injury and death are tightly correlated it makes sense to install pain receptors that operate to the max. No lazily leaving your hand in the flame as you snooze and suffering only mild discomfort: rather, deliver a jolt of pain guaranteed to make you withdraw your hand ASAP. Call this the insurance policy theory of pain: don’t take any chances where bodily injury is concerned–insure you are covered in case of catastrophe.  [1] If it hurts like hell, so be it—better to groan than to die. So the underlying reason for the excessiveness of pain is that biological entities are very prone to death from injury, even slight injury. If you could die from a mere graze, your genes would see to it that a graze really stings, so that you avoid grazes at all costs. Death spells non-survival for the genes, so they had better do everything in their power to keep their host organism from dying on them. The result is organisms that feel pain easily and intensely. If it turned out that those alien organisms I mentioned that suffer extreme levels of pain were also very prone to death from minor injury, we would begin to understand why things hurt so bad for them. In our own case, according to the insurance policy theory, evolution has designed our pain perception system to carefully track our risks in a perilous world. It isn’t just poor design and mindless stupidity that have made us so susceptible to pain in extreme forms; this is just the optimum way to keep as alive as bearers of those precious genes (in their eyes anyway). We inherit our pain receptors from our ancestors, and they lived in a far more dangerous world, in which even minor injuries can have fatal consequences. Those catastrophic storms came more often then.

            This puts the extremes of romantic suffering in a new light. It is understandable from a biological point of view why romantic rejection would feel bad, but why so bad? Why, in some cases, does it lead to suicide? Why is romantic suffering so uniquely awful?  [2] After all, there are other people out there who could serve as the vehicle of your genes—too many fish in the sea, etc. The reason is that we must be hyper-motivated in the case of romantic love because that’s the only way the genes can perpetuate themselves. Sexual attraction must be extreme, and that means that the pain of sexual rejection must be extreme too. Persistence is of the essence. If people felt pretty indifferent about it, it wouldn’t get done; and where would the genes be then? They would be stuck in a body without any means of escape into future generations. Therefore they ensure that the penalty for sexual and romantic rejection is lots of emotional pain; that way people will try to avoid it.  It is the same with separation: the reason lovers find separation so painful is that the genes have built them to stay together during the time of maximum reproductive potential. It may seem excessive—it is excessive—but it works as an insurance policy against reproductive failure. People don’t need to suffer that much from romantic rejection and separation, but making them suffer as they do is insurance against the catastrophe of non-reproduction. It is crucial biologically for reproduction to occur, so the genes make sure that whatever interferes with that causes a lot of suffering. This is why there is a great deal of pleasure in love, but also a great deal of pain–more than seems strictly necessary to get the job done. The pain involved in the loss of children is similar: it acts as a deterrent to neglecting one’s children and thus terminating the genetic line. Emotional excess functions as an insurance policy about a biologically crucial event. Extreme pain is thus not so much maladaptive as hyper-adaptive: it works to ensure that appropriate steps are taken when the going gets tough, no matter how awful for the sufferer. It may be, then, that the amount of pain an animal suffers is precisely the right amount all things considered, even though it seems surplus to requirements (and nasty in itself). So at least the insurance policy theory maintains, and it must be admitted that accusing evolution of gratuitous pain production would be uncharitable to evolution.   

            To the sufferer pain seems excessive, a gratuitous infliction, far beyond what is necessary to promote survival; but from the point of view of the genes it is simply an effective way to optimize performance in the game of survival. It may hurt us a lot, but it does them a favor. It keeps us on our toes. Still, it is puzzling that it hurts quiteas much as it does.  [3]

 

  [1] We can compare the insurance policy theory of excessive pain to the arms race theory of excessive biological weaponry: they may seem pointless and counterproductive but they result from the inner logic of evolution as a mindless process driven by gene wars. Biological exaggeration can occur when the genes are fighting for survival and are not too concerned about the welfare of their hosts.

  [2] Romeo and Juliet are the obvious example, but the case of Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is a study in romantic suffering—so extreme, so pointless.

  [3] In this paper I simply assume the gene-centered view of evolution and biology, with ample use of associated metaphor. I intend no biological reductionism, just biological realism.

                                   

 

 

 

Origins of the Free Will Problem

 

 

In its modern form the problem of free will is supposed to arise from the scientific discovery (or perhaps scientific presupposition) that determinism is true. It is a tenet of modern science (at least of the Newtonian kind) that every event in nature is the result of universal laws that allow of no exceptions, and this uniformity is supposed to rule out the existence of free acts. If so, the absence of free will is an empirical discovery, because it is an empirical discovery that determinism is true. If physics had turned out differently, we would not have had a reason to deny the existence of free will. In earlier times the threat to free will came from theology in the form of God’s omniscience: if God has complete foreknowledge, then he knows everything a human agent will do; but then there is no free will. Again, this reason to deny free will issues from considerations extrinsic to the concept of free will, in certain facts about God’s nature. If theology had been different, there would not have been a reason to deny free will. We can also imagine another sort of empirical argument for denying free will, viz. that the unconscious, as conceived by Freud, is seething with passions that compel us to act as we do, so that nothing we do is free from such internal coercion. According to this argument, we are forced to act as we do by an unconscious agency that intrudes on our conscious deliberations, robbing us of our freedom. We have the illusion that we are free, as we do under the scientific and theological arguments just mentioned, but in fact we are not—and this is a scientific discovery of psychoanalysis.

            Now I am not concerned here with whether these arguments are sound, or with whether their premises are true—universal determinism, divine foreknowledge, and the all-powerful unconscious. I mention them in order to distinguish them from another type of argument against the possibility of free will, namely that it is inherent in the concept of free will that we are not free. This is what might be called an intrinsic argument against free will, one that stems from the concept itself not from ancillary considerations of an empirical or factual nature. I think this is the more important argument philosophically, but again that is not my primary concern; I wish merely to distinguish the two sorts of argument, as well as to assess the cogency of the intrinsic argument. But first I want to articulate that argument so as to bring out its structure. I also want to note how extraordinary it would be if such an argument were successful.

            There are two components to the concept of free will as we have it, singly necessary and jointly sufficient. The first is that free actions are in some way responsive to desires and other psychological states: we act as we do because of our desires (etc.). There are many ways this responsiveness relation can be characterized but let me simply say that actions are determined by desires, where this does not imply the doctrine of determinism—given the desire (etc.) the action follows.  [1] This property is enshrined in the following proposition: if two individuals are exactly alike in their psychological states, they must act in the same way. An action is not free if it violates this principle, since then it would just be random in relation to desire—as when two psychologically identical individuals with a desire for ice cream act in the one case by buying an ice cream and in the other by tying their shoelaces (say as a result of a nervous spasm). This component of the concept captures the necessary condition that an act is free only if it is in accordance with the agent’s wishes. Thus we could say that the concept of freedom includes “desire-determination”. The second component is that a free action is one that has alternatives: the agent did a certain thing but he could have done otherwise. He had a genuine choice; his particular course of action was not forced on him. He did not act under duress, being given no alternative to what he did. I went to the movies but I could have stayed home and watched TV; no one made me go to the movies against my will. I wasn’t given an offer I couldn’t refuse, either by man or nature. This also is a necessary condition of freedom—that I had alternatives. Call this the “alternatives requirement”. Then we could plausibly claim that desire-determination and the alternatives requirement are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for free action.

            Now we know how the anti-freedom argument will go: these two components are said to be inconsistent with each other. The concept of freedom is contradictory because it combines an insistence on determination with an equally strong insistence that the agent could have acted otherwise. But if the act was determined (fixed, caused by, controlled by) a desire, then it did not admit of alternatives–contrary to the second component. Let us pause to take in how remarkable that conclusion is: we are familiar with philosophical arguments that purport to show that certain concepts harbor hidden contradictions (truth, vague concepts, the concept of a set), but it is another thing to contend that a familiar concept involves a direct contradiction in its very definition, as plain as the nose on your face. Somehow human beings have fashioned a concept that is manifestly contradictory, and yet they have failed to notice this fact. Such stupidity! Such insanity! I mean, what the…  The argument is telling us that our very conceptual scheme, not something arising from an extrinsic fact of physics or theology or psychology, contains a blatant, glaring, and embarrassing logical screw-up. It’s as if we had and used the concept of a “smountain”, where something is a smountain if and only if it is both a very large heap of rocks and also a very small heap of rocks. According to the standard argument, free actions (so-called) involve both determination and the absence of determination: but nothing could ever satisfy those contradictory conditions. Therefore the will is not free and no one ever acts freely.

            As I said, this is an extraordinary result: common sense is grievously contradictory. And on a very important matter too, since moral responsibility hinges on the possibility of free will—you would have thought we would be more careful about making our concepts coherent! We condemn people to severe punishment relying on a concept that is transparently contradictory. This is appalling: but it is good that philosophy exists to expose the conceptual bankruptcy of the whole thing. And the trouble does not stem, forgivably, from an empirical discovery that casts freedom into doubt, or from arcane theology, but from the very concepts we employ every day. This must surely be cause for human shame, wringing of hands, reparations, etc. Thousands of years of obvious conceptual confusion!

            Or perhaps the argument is wrong. Some have contended that one or the other component of the concept is dispensable: desires don’t in any way determine actions, or they do but there is no need for the existence of alternatives. Others have contended that both conditions are necessary but are really compatible upon deeper analysis. I am with these contenders, these reconcilers, but I won’t enter into a detailed defense of that position here. What I will do is offer some sketchy remarks about the notion of being able to act otherwise that I hope will ease the pressure to suppose inconsistency in the concept.

            The first thing to understand is that “I could have done otherwise” does not mean that it is metaphysically possible for two agents to be exactly alike psychologically and yet act differently, still less that they could be exactly alike physically and yet act differently. I have no such thoughts when I reflect that I have alternatives. If I survey my options for what I will do this afternoon—go to the movies, stay home and watch TV, practice my golf swing—I am not contemplating all the ways I can go against my desires and other psychological states; I am enumerating my desires and wondering which one is the most important to me today. I am reviewing my possible choices. If someone forced me to select one of the options, then I would have no choice; but if no one does, then I do have a choice—I have alternatives. This is not a matter of some remarkable kind of metaphysical modality but merely an expression of the fact that it is my desires that count not something alien and inimical to them. The paradigm freedom-destroying agency is someone forcing you to do what you have no desire to do. Freedom is acting on your desires not on someone else’s desires under conditions of duress. But in addition there are many other kinds of freedom-destroyer: not just real threats but perceived threats, internal compulsions like phobias and obsessions, unconscious biases and motivations, motor dysfunctions, insanity, brain washing, hypnosis, epilepsy, cowardice, etc. All these can interfere with the agent’s considered judgment about what it would be best to do.

The concept of being able to do otherwise is a portmanteau concept, collecting together disparate conditions and causal factors. It is imprecise and context-dependent. To say that someone acted freely is to rule out any of an open-ended list of possible disruptive factors; and there will be questions of degree here—how much the agent’s freedom was compromised. But there is no suggestion that universal determinism excludes freedom or divine foreknowledge: when I think of myself as free to act in a certain way I don’t think of myself as unpredictable by God or as hovering above the web of causal laws that govern the universe. I have much humbler matters on my mind. The mistake is to interpret a practical portmanteau concept as a unitary metaphysical concept. To be free is not to escape the causal net or God’s all-seeing eye but to act as you see fit—to do what you want when you want. Neither God nor Newton can take that away from you.

            That is a familiar compatibilist line and I don’t propose to elaborate and defend it further. My main point is that the concept of freedom is not inherently contradictory because it does not imply anything contrary to desire-determination. So our conceptual scheme as it relates to human behavior is not riddled with logical error. The two components of the concept of freedom are not in tension with each other but complement each other. We misunderstood the “grammar” of “I could have done otherwise”, as Wittgenstein would say; and indeed it does have the appearance of a modal claim analogous to “the particle could have gone in a different direction”. But it occurs in its own “language game” and carries no metaphysical punch: that is, its actual meaning is given by the range of things that rule out freedom as ordinarily conceived. But this is consistent with allowing that some extrinsic considerations could rule freedom out: we might not be as free as we fondly suppose. Determinism and divine foreknowledge don’t do this, as compatibilists have long urged, but we can imagine other types of threat, as with the Freudian argument mentioned earlier. Suppose it turned out that human action is largely or wholly governed by unconscious passions that we have no control over; thus I am subject to compulsions of which I have no conscious knowledge. Then it would be plausible to maintain that my actions are not free, or not as free as I thought: I thought sending a birthday card to my father was a free act of kindness, but actually I had a hidden motive that made me select a card that would hurt him deeply; or I play tennis with him not in order to enjoy a game together but to relish (unconsciously) the opportunity of beating him. This really would undermine my freedom, because it would sharply limit the desires I can act on: in the end I am always compelled to act on patricidal desires stemming from my unresolved Oedipus complex, not from other desires I might have. It is as if my unconscious operates as an external agency bending me to its will—I am a puppet not a puppeteer. That would count as a scientific discovery that undermines free will, and it does so within the terms stipulated by the concept. Here incompatibilism would be indisputable. So it is not that the concept of freedom is necessarily immune from skeptical attack—despite being internally perfectly coherent. But the attack has to be of the right form; in particular, it must cast doubt on the idea of genuine alternatives that an attribution of freedom requires. I can undermine a specific attribution of freedom by pointing to external interference or to inner compulsion; well, I could also do this more globally, even to the point of contesting any attribution of freedom. We are not guaranteedto be free. And this is a matter of common sense not sophisticated science or theology or metaphysics. However, and fortunately, no such empirical threat actually exists, since the Freudian picture is not to be believed on empirical grounds—and even Freud didn’t contend that human acts are never free because of the malign effects of the unconscious. The same goes for the idea that we are all so massively brain-washed that none of our actions correspond to our own authentic desires: we really desire such and such, but because of propaganda we never do such and such, instead doing what we don’t really desire to do. In principle that could be so, in which case our freedom would be limited to non-existent, merely an illusion of freedom (but do we really never want to eat?). However, there is no good reason to suppose that this is the situation in which we find ourselves: we actually do have real desires that we act upon without impediment, external or internal. So we are free (maybe some people more than others).

            Potential threats to freedom can arise from various sources, some more persuasive than others. Philosophically the most interesting potential threat arises (supposedly) from the content of the concept itself, which does not depend on contingent facts of the universe. But (a) it is extremely unlikely that so deeply embedded and universal a concept could harbor the kind of contradiction some philosophers have suspected, and (b) it turns out that the alleged contradiction can be defused by paying careful attention to the actual way the concept of alternatives is employed. Still, it is somewhat surprising that the concept should be as problematic as it has proved to be—so prone to misunderstanding. It is not as if the anti-free will argument immediately strikes us as absurd; on the contrary, it is only too easy to be caught up in it and find it hard to escape its grip. The concept of free will is understandably misunderstood. The free will problem is a paradigm of philosophy because it can easily seem as if a part of common sense is riddled with confusion and error but on reflection is not—it is hard to see what lies before our eyes. Why should our concepts be so confusing, so liable to misunderstanding? What is wrong with us that we can’t gain a clear understanding of our own clear concepts?

 

  [1] This doesn’t imply the doctrine of determinism understood as the thesis that every event falls under strict laws.