Archival Minds

Archival Minds

Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024) advances the thesis that an organism’s body is like a book describing ancestral environments. The genes encode facts about how the world was when the organism containing them evolved. We can thus infer the past state of things from the current state of an organism. The first chapter “Reading the Animal” gives the example of the horned lizard of the Mojave: its skin can be read as “a vivid description of the sand and stones of the desert environment in which its ancestors lived” (4). Then Dawkins states his “central message”: “the whole body through and through, its very warp and woof, every organ, every cell and biological process, every smidgen of any animal, including its genome, can be read as describing ancestral worlds” (4). We can call this conception “the textual body” (syntactically like “the selfish gene” and “the extended phenotype”), though Dawkins himself does not employ that phrase. Natural selection sees to this, because an animal must be adapted to the environment in which it evolves—not to anyenvironment. In particular, we cannot deduce the organism’s present environment from its present body, since things may have changed (nor its future environment). The textual body is an essentially historical text—ancient history, in fact. We can expect to have a chapter or two on life in the sea, even in organisms long living on land, because their ancestors lived in the sea. The human body will contain a description of life at sea, overlaid by more recent chronicles. I will extend this idea to the mind of an organism, if it has one: the mind too is saturated with talk (text) of how things used to be in our ancestors’ worlds.[1] The mind is a book of ancient lore, of distant pre-history, of bygone formations. Sherlock Holmes could deduce from it all manner of facts about how things used to be. It might even tell us things about the past that we wouldn’t otherwise know. The mental text might be esoteric.

What kinds of facts might it disclose? Facts about the geological environment, the predatory environment, the social environment, the climate environment, the cosmological environment. And what aspects of the mind might do this? All (inherited) aspects, if Dawkins is right (and I don’t doubt he is): perceptual, sensational, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, structural, qualitative, etc. The mind could be as historically informative as the body, except now we are inferring the physical from the mental not the physical from the physical (skin to desert). But we are going to need to be bold, because this stuff is shrouded in mystery, in the mists of time (“mistery”). Even if our best guesses are wide of the mark, they can provide a taste of what this kind of hermeneutics will involve—giant leaps of imagination (it isn’t all as easy as the lizard in the desert). We are trying to read the distant past of the physical world from its traces in the contemporary mind: from inner to outer across enormous stretches of time. So, hold onto your hats, cut loose, never fear! Let me begin with pain: what can present pain tell us about past environments? I think it is clear that the present sensitivity to pain in mammals is surplus to requirements: we just don’t need to be as stuffed with pain receptors as we are, and with things as painful as they tend to be. We are over-pained. Why? First, observe that fish do not appear as pain-rich as we are (we mammals); sure, they feel pain, but it is not at the mammalian level. We might well suppose that this is because their environment is not as full of pain-inducing stimuli as ours: they float comfortably in water, not in contact with rocks and pointy objects. They don’t fall down on hard rock or get hit by flying objects or regularly cut themselves, as we do. Now consider the transition from sea to land—fish-like creatures stumbling across rocky terrain, falling, getting cut. They need to develop better pain receptors, pronto, or else death will pay them a visit. So, they become exquisitely sensitive to injury of all kinds; their soft bodies become equipped with pain generators (not hard insensate shells). Once installed these adaptive mechanisms remain, even when the environment becomes kinder to their bodies. Thus, we can infer from mammalian pain surplus that life came from the sea. If the seas had vanished from the earth in the interim, we could deduce that seas once existed, in which life flourished: for that is the best explanation of our current talent for feeling too much pain. Our painful minds entail past seas in which our ancestors (fish) lived. That was once our environment, so that environment had to exist back in the day. A watery past follows from a surfeit of pain. The existence of H2O can be inferred from the existence of pain; not present H2O, mark you, but past H2O. There is (excessive) pain on earth now, therefore there was water in the shape of seas then. Of course, we already knew that, but what is interesting is that it can be deduced from facts about the mind, if we allow ourselves some imaginative leaps. As the existence of the self follows from the fact of thinking, so the existence of past watery expanses follows from the fact of hyper-painfulness (there should be a Latin term for this type of inference). Suppose sea-dwelling creatures felt no pain at all, while landlubbers did, and that the latter evolved from the former. That would tell us there had to be an adaptation to pain during the transition to land, so we can infer an oceanic lifestyle from our present over-sensitivity to pain (imagine if mammals were more armor-plated now yet still pointlessly felt intense pain).

That was a primer in textual-mind reasoning, intended to dip you into the deep end (pun intended). We won’t need to get quite so speculative as we go along. Consider, then, visual sensations: they require the existence of light—they are as of things bathed in light (the world doesn’t look dark all the time). These sensations evolved many millions of years ago and were adapted to the then-environment. The world might have gone dark between then and now, yet the sensations would still be as of light. We might be living in total darkness but our visual sensations would still be suffused with appearances of light; the Sun might have gone out of existence centuries ago. We can’t infer the real existence of light now from our sensations of light now, but we can infer the past existence of light from our present sensations of it. That is, we can infer the existence of the Sun at the time that sensations of light evolved—say, 400 million years ago. We know that the Sun existed back then because visual sensations were adapted to light and that is where light on earth comes from. We can deduce astronomy from biology! Visual psychology implies a star radiating light energy to earth: we can read this in our psychological book of the dead. There had to be a sun 400 million years ago whose light reached earth or else light-filled visual sensations would never have evolved. Visual phenomenology implies stellar astrophysics. If we encounter aliens with a similar visual phenomenology, we can infer that they evolved within striking distance of a sun. If the universe contains sensations of light, then it must contain suns, given reasonable assumptions. This is fundamentally because of the way natural selection works to produce animals. The same argument can be given with respect to sensations of space and time: sensations of these dimensions can only exist because of the real existence of space and time, given the Darwinian theory of evolution. The sensations had to have originated in space and time in order to be of space and time, because they are adaptations to space and time. Space and time could go out of existence and sensations of them remain, but they had to exist in order for the sensations to arise naturally. Of course, we already know that space and time existed during the evolution of minds, but the textual mind theory allows us to infer this from the way minds now are. The evolved mind is a repository of historical (cosmological) information.

Emotion works the same way. Present emotions betoken past realities. The point is familiar enough: fear of heights implies a past life in the trees; fear of snakes implies an abundance of dangerous snakes way back when; disgust at insects indicates a plethora of annoying insects in olden times; fear of wild animals (especially big cats) suggests a history of predation by same in the unprotected past. Then too, we have the things we like: floating in water, climbing trees, relaxing in the sun, a taste for certain kinds of food. These conjure up an aquatic past, an arboreal homestead, outdoor living, available past nourishment. The book of the mind describes the bad, the good, and the ugly—what life on earth was like long ago. It describes the way the world was when our ancestors first set foot (or fin) in it. We know from our present mental attributes that the world contained depths of water, habitable trees, warm sun, and strawberries (or other fruit). The world had to be a certain way then for animals to have the sorts of mind they have now. And it is possible for the world to change and yet the mind plods on in its old ways; environments on earth do not always remain constant. For example, the human environment has become far less dangerous than it used to be with respect to wild predatory animals; we don’t die from cat attacks that often these days. Yet we seem remarkably fearful of not very much—hence phobias, groundless anxiety, exaggerated fears. Is it that we are suffering from a holdover from the bad old days? If so, we can reasonably infer that the past contained more frightening things than the present does—that it was objectively more dangerous then. Our emotional minds haven’t caught up with the new realities. We can deduce from our excessive fears that in the past things were a lot nastier than now—that we humans had it worse then. Emotions are actually a rich source of historical information, because they speak of what most concerns us—our wellbeing, life and death. Our present overdone emotions tell us that people died earlier in the old days, and probably in nastier ways.

Less familiar is the question of more general and abstract features of the mind in relation to our evolutionary past. This question is of special interest to philosophers. First, what can our reasoning abilities tell us about the past, in particular our inductive reasoning? They tell us that in the past the world was regular and predictable—that nature was uniform. For, if it were not, we would never have evolved the habit of predicting the future from the past; it would have done us no good. If the world were chaotic, induction would be useless; but it is not useless, so the world is not chaotic. Or rather, in the past nature was uniform because we evolved the habit of assuming as much; it wasn’t non-uniform then. It might become non-uniform, but we know it was once uniform—or else induction would never have got a foothold in the animal mind. Again, we have good reason to believe this on other grounds, but the textual mind delivers the same result from a fresh angle. The archives of the mind keep a record of how things were, and things used to be reassuringly uniform (and presumably always were, given that nature would not suddenly turn uniform when intelligent inductive animals began to evolve). Inductive reason is a snapshot of nature’s inherent uniformity. What about intentionality? Can we deduce anything about past reality from intentionality? Intentionality is what permits the mind to take distinct and distinguishable objects as objects: I am thinking of this thing and not some other thing. This capacity must have evolved at some point, probably at the very birth of mind; and it must reflect some general truth about the world in which it evolved. What is that general truth? Simple: that the world consists of discrete objects distinguishable from one another—pebbles, people, points of light. If that were not so—if the world was a formless mass—then intentionality would never have evolved (not the kind that animals on earth actually have). Intentionality implies objective discreteness. This is an interesting result, because it shows that intentionality has objective preconditions; it isn’t just a brute inexplicable fact about the mind. It evolved in order to exploit the granular structure of the world. The two things go together, the one implying the other. This quality of mind speaks of the pluralism of reality, of its separation into parts. Finally, consciousness: what does its existence tell us about reality in the past? It is hard to say, but here is a speculation: it tells us that the past was complex. Consciousness as it now exists seems tied to complex information processing, requiring a complex brain. Let’s suppose this is so; then we can say that it evolved under environmental conditions of complexity (say, in the context of predation). If the ancestral world was never complex, never a problem, consciousness would never have evolved—reflexive behavior would suffice. So, consciousness tells us that the world was challenging and complex at the time it evolved. We can read this off consciousness, projecting backwards in time. The unconscious, by contrast, could be less complex, more reflexive. At least this gives us something to say about the significance of consciousness in the book of the dead. Every trait must have somemessage about the early environment and this gives us an idea to work with. It’s like memory: memory tells us that the passage of time existed in our evolutionary past and that the lifespan of our ancestors made it a useful trait to possess. There were facts to be stored and that’s why memory evolved; we can infer the former from the latter. There were complex problems to be solved, so consciousness came to exist; there were facts to be stored, so memory came to exist. The world presents certain kinds of phenomena and natural selection acts accordingly; we can infer these phenomena from the present contents of the mind. The mental archives are full of interesting bits of information, relics of a bygone age, or universal facts of terrestrial existence. The body and mind together yield a rich history; they mirror the past of planet earth. The lizard’s skin reflects the desert it lived in; the mind’s attributes likewise reflect the wider world in which they came to exist. There is a kind of holism at work here linking the organism to its (original) environment. The life of the world is recapitulated in the life of the organism. Phenotype implies geophysics; the earth is written into the organism, its body and mind. The self is a semantic self—it represents what lies (or lay) outside of it. It makes a statement (in the past tense).

Actually, the organism is doubly or triply semantic. First, and basically, we have the book of the dead (in Dawkins’ phrase): what the organism’s make-up tells us about ancestral worlds. Second, we have the genetic code with its information inherited from the past: textual DNA, the genetic archives. Third, and more limited, we have actual human language: its grammar and meaning. That too is a mental trait that should yield information about the past, specifically the time in which it originally evolved. One thing we can immediately infer is that human groups existed at this time (I am speaking of overt speech not a language of thought). Human speech evolved to aid communication, so there were people to communicate with. Speech implies groups. The presence of nouns and verbs surely implies that there were things to talk about and actions these things performed—scarcely a surprising result. Various ontological assumptions are built into language, so we can assume that the world satisfied these assumptions at the time language evolved (why would language make these assumptions unless they were true, or approximately true?). I need not spell these out. The human animal is multiply semantic (in a suitably broad sense) at different biological levels: body, mind, genes, spoken language. There is symbolism everywhere—worlds within worlds, text upon text.[2] We can use our language to talk about these other “languages”, which pre-date spoken language. Symbolism is nothing new, “books” are rampant. We “spoke” before we ever spoke. Animals are full of information, if we only know where and how to look. The selfish gene is a symbolic gene; the surviving (and reproducing) body is a symbolic body; the communicating human is a high-level symbolic operative. We (and other animals) are veritable libraries, stack upon stack of esoteric volumes, or commonplace announcements. We accordingly need to be interpreted, deciphered, translated. We are not semantically transparent. Our mind can be as obscure as our body (or our genes). Still, it is possible to read its hidden messages.[3]

[1] Interestingly enough, Dawkins doesn’t apply his theory to the mind, except for some stray remarks about fear of heights. I don’t know why; maybe it has to do with the “incorporeality” of the mind.

[2] These are not the only symbolic structures crowded into living organisms: there are also mental images, perceptual primitives, contents of desires and emotions, unconscious computations, mental models, signaling systems, and (according to some) immune systems. Each of these differs from the others. Really, living organisms are hives of symbolic activity, none more so than the human; the book of the dead is just one more to add to the list. The model of a physical machine does not do justice to this symbolic plethora.

[3] Some may say it is mere metaphor to call the body, mind, and genes repositories of language. We need not dissent from that, but it is purely verbal: true, other symbolic systems are not symbolic in the way human spoken language is, but then neither is human language like them. There are “languages of art” and “whale language” and “computer language” in that these comprise symbolic systems. There is no good reason to suppose that human language is somehow the measure of all types of symbolism. And what parts of human language—nouns, verbs, intonation, stress, pitch, pauses? There is a family resemblance between all these coexisting symbolic systems.