Why Do We Think?

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Why Do We Think?

Intelligent thought (cleverness, creativity, insight) is not common in the animal world. Intelligence without thought, and thought without intelligence, are more common, but the combination is rare. That may seem odd, given that intelligent thought is such a dandy adaptation (it can get you to the moon and back)—why isn’t it as common as the eye? But this must be an anthropocentric prejudice, especially given the high metabolic price of thinking intelligently; it is evidently not a popular way to equip an organism for the battle for survival. More likely, it arose in a peculiar and possibly unrepeatable manner in our not-too-distant ancestors; before Homo sapiens probably but not at the time of the dinosaurs. There must have been a pressing need for it, and intense natural selection for the trait, so the question is what occasioned such a need. What could have catapulted this rare and eccentric trait into existence?

I am going to make a speculative but informed proposal: it was our ancestors’ descent from the trees that was the triggering event, along with its resultant challenges.[1] That’s when intelligent thought began (for us anyway, maybe not for all intelligent thinkers). To be specific, it was the loss of our arboreal home that necessitated a certain cognitive enhancement. The trees made a good home for us (i.e., our ancestors): they afforded shelter from the elements (sun, rain) and protection from predators, and they had a built-in larder (nuts, berries, insects). Many animals make their home in trees, and with good reason: trees are nature’s natural place of residence, a fine place to raise a family. We hominids liked them too and lived in them for millennia, but there came a time when they were no longer habitable by us, for reasons unknown (probably climate change). We were driven down to the ground, stripped of our natural home—our castle, our luxurious penthouse. It was then that we needed to build a new home. Instead of living in a pre-made home provided by mother nature we had to construct our own home, equally comfortable and safe, and with an attached larder. We had to become builders, not just lucky squatters. We had to find suitable raw materials and construct a workable residence that a family could live in (those feline predators were a priority). Or else we would be homeless and not long for this world. The stage was thus set for a momentous evolutionary saltation: the jump from unskilled tree dwellers to skilled terrestrial house builders. The hypothesis, then, is that intelligent thought as we know it evolved because of the survival demands placed on these newly arrived and ill-equipped ground dwellers. To build a house capable of providing what a tree provides in the way of living accommodation requires mastery of intelligent thought. The OED defines “build” as “construct by putting parts or materials together”; and this requires means-end reasoning and the idea of an artifact with functional parts (floor, roof, door, etc.). We are now extremely familiar with houses and house building, but our arboreal forebears had no idea about such things (though some primitive construction may have been attempted up there among the branches). It took a considerable degree of ingenuity to come up with the idea of an abode put together down there; heaven knows what those first houses looked like—fallen trees maybe. No wonder many took to living in caves, those cold dank dark inhospitable places. Anyone who could build a decent dwelling near the source of food would have a distinct evolutionary advantage in the fight for survival. Consequently, intelligent thought came to be prized and selected for, no matter the metabolic downside. Sexual selection would ensure that male house builders had the reproductive edge over clumsy layabouts and daydreamers. The ability to construct a functioning home from the available raw materials was thus the first manifestation of what would later be known as intelligent thought (smarts, knowhow). Once established this ability could give rise to other forms of thought, but initially it was construction workers and primitive architects who ruled the roost (quite literally).

Home construction in those early days would have involved simple tools and the dexterous use of the hands, both closely implicated in the development of large-brained intelligence.[2] Those animals that stayed in the trees were spared this upheaval in mode of living, as were ground dwellers whose homestead had never been taken away from them. But humans had to engage in a new form of behavior that required suitable cognitive machinery—what we call intelligent thought (not knowing much about what this is exactly). The adaptation supervened on a unique set of circumstances and happened quite by chance; intelligent thought was by no means inevitable. Once it was in place, however, further artifacts could be conceived and constructed: furniture, weapons, boats, bridges, villages, churches, etc. Thus it was that men became workmen, manual laborers, artisans, carpenters, masons, roofers, etc. By contrast, life in the trees was work-free, because you didn’t need to build anything—nature supplied it ready-made. Now a lot of time had to be spent in patient and painstaking construction with a long-term goal in mind. Once we had learned to think intelligently (not just daydream and hang lazily around) we were off and running, deploying our newfound cognitive skill. We became a different type of species, a creature of Reason, a Thinker, a Cartesian prototype. But it all went back to the need to build our own homes now that the trees had become uninhabitable. We think because we needed to build; our first thoughts were builder’s thoughts. Other animals don’t have the same kind of motivation, because their housing arrangements are relatively stable; we had to strike out in a completely new direction. It was either think or perish, reason or be homeless. Thinking became a biological imperative, a condition of survival.

It is easy to see how deeply the notion of building is built into our conceptual scheme (this sentence is an example of it). We speak of the “building blocks” of reality; we “build arguments”; philosophers are “system builders”; a lawyer “builds a case”; a scientist “builds a theory”; a charlatan “builds a cult”; God “built the universe”; success “builds confidence”. We are said to “construct a defense” or “construct a narrative”. We think of molecules as “constructed out of atoms” and sentences as “constructed from words”. We “build” alliances and fires, families and followings. The concept of building a house thus generalizes to that of building less concrete and practical entities. We are now surrounded by things that have been built, engineered, erected; our world is a built world. All of this results from intelligent thinking, which originated (according to the hypothesis) in building primitive dwelling structures (lean-tos, wigwams, huts, shacks, tents, igloos). Many animals build nothing (horses, tigers) simply because they have no need to; we did. This ability to build dwellings enabled us to travel to many different kinds of habitat, since we had no need to rely on naturally formed homes; we could use thought to build something from the available materials. We have covered the planet with our buildings, thus implementing the results of our distinctive form of intelligence. So, the building gene has remained in our genome, because constructive thought is a useful adaptation, despite its metabolic costs. Thought didn’t come from nowhere for no reason; it is a response to a specific evolutionary challenge, a survival problem. Just as we speak because we travel, so we think because we build; at any rate, that’s how these traits got started. If the hypothesis is correct, what set human thought in motion was our departure (or ejection) from the arboreal life-style, with all that that entailed. We had to learn to live without the comfort of trees.[3]

[1] I discuss arboreal descent in Prehension (2015). This paper is intended to complement that work.

[2] See Prehension. The co-evolution of the human hand and brain is a commonplace of physical anthropology. House building is surely part of this story.

[3] Whenever I watch nature documentaries about tree-dwelling animals (e.g., bonobos) I am always struck by how happy they look, up there on their lofty perches, climbing, brachiating, generally having a good time. In the garden of Eden, we surely lived in trees not just among them. Trees have deep psychic resonance for us: we view them with reverence and affection; they provide shelter and solace.

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Why Do We Speak?

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Why Do We Speak?

As has often been remarked, language is a rare biological accomplishment. It is not spread widely across the animal world and took billions of years to evolve. I am referring here to communicative speech not the cognitive machinery that underlies human linguistic competence (which may be directed more towards the use of language as an aid to thought). I want to know why we spend so much time and energy chatting, speechifying, conversing, and asserting—that avalanche of speech acts. The question is pressing because most animals get by without speech, or only rudimentary forms of speech (signaling, directing, expressing). Why do we humans talk so much? After all, speech is costly: the brain has to use up energy in order to speak, which imposes metabolic demands. So, our question might better be put as why most animals don’t speak—why do they get on perfectly well without the incessant communicating. The first thing to say is that speaking supplies information: it gives the hearer knowledge, remedies his ignorance, enables his learning. That is the purpose of speech, its function and rationale. It presupposes relevant ignorance—that the hearer doesn’t know what he or she needs to know. Evidently, animals don’t experience this problem: they don’t need assertions by others (teaching, instructing) in order to function biologically (survive, reproduce). They know by instinct or individual learning (sometimes with a bit of parental nudging) what to do when. Plants need no verbal instruction on how to live their lives, and neither do bacteria, worms, reptiles, and most mammals. So, why do we? If we knew the answer to that, we would know why we speak—speaking being a means of instruction. What is the cause of our relevant ignorance?

Suppose you live in a small social group in an environment that is pretty uniform and predictable—as it might be, the corner of some jungle or other. You never go anywhere far from home and you never meet anyone new. Everything you need to know can be picked up by direct experience plus a dose of instinct. You don’t use sophisticated tools or cooperate much with other people on large construction projects. Then, you really don’t have much use for language, because you know what you need to know. If anyone were to offer to tell you something, you would say (or think) “Yes, I know that”. You would regard it as a waste of your valuable time to be listening to the verbal reports of others about where such-and-such is or what to do about a so-and-so. Nor would you feel any desire to tell other people things—you know that they know already. In such circumstances, speech would not evolve—what would be the point? You would be like a mollusk or a marmot—literally speechless. But imagine that you had cause to move, to travel, to migrate—to go far away, to distant lands, where things are different. You and your group relocate to somewhere completely new, requiring quite different practical knowledge, where your old knowledge will not cut it survival-wise. Suppose, indeed, that you become rootless, nomadic, forever changing your environment. Then speech would become an asset: you can learn a lot from your fellow man by listening to what he or she has to say. Each person in the group may possess information not possessed by everyone, and this would be a valuable characteristic—he who knows most and can communicate it becomes a valued member of society. It might be a matter of life and death: where the food and water are to be found, what trees make the best huts, where the predators lurk, etc. Language solves (or helps to solve) the relevant ignorance problem. Natural selection then begins its patient work; and before you know it, human speech has achieved its mature form, to be exploited for less practical ends too. So, the reason humans speak and other animals don’t is that humans have traveled all over the globe for many thousands of years, occupying new habitats, learning local facts, and communicating these facts to each other. And, of course, we know that this happened: from Africa to the Arctic, from Norway to England, from Manchester to Liverpool—always encountering new conditions and challenges. The gypsy is the original speaker. Stay-at-homes tend to stay mum. Language is all about geographical education, originally and primitively.[1]

But isn’t there an obvious objection to this story–what about migratory animals, like birds, bison, and whales? They don’t have anything like human language and yet they yearly find themselves in fresh and contrasting environments. So, the migration story can’t be sufficient for language (though it may be necessary). Here we run up against the complexities of evolution, its multi-factor nature. First, it is notable that birds and whales are more verbal than most animals: they have elaborate communication systems, some more than others. Second, the variations in their environment are relatively limited and fixed—nothing like human exploration and variety in modes of living. Third, there is another factor at work in addition to the multiple environment problem, namely the relatively long maturation period of human childhood. Human children require lengthy instruction over many years before they can survive independently, so they need more verbal coaching and guidance than other animal offspring. They need an education in a more or less formal sense. Without a verbal education they would be much slower to develop the skills and knowledge necessary for survival. The family accordingly becomes a linguistic unit—the source of educational speech. Human children have a lot to learn about both the physical and social environment, and this would be difficult without language as a means of learning. Transporting children to a new home (biological niche) poses a significant challenge to parents; they need language to meet that educational challenge. Whales face a similar problem, though not as severe as in the case of humans, and it is notable that they have a relatively sophisticated system of communication, thus confirming the migration theory. Mark, however, that language is rare in the animal kingdom—it doesn’t evolve simply because it is nice to have, or the reason for species dominance; for it imposes significant costs that have be borne by the animal’s brain and vocal organs. There has to be a clear reason for it to take root and grow—an adaptive demand that it meets. And the demand has to be specific and necessary—as the migration theory (the diaspora theory) recognizes. Humans are uniquely widespread and environmentally adaptable, and also uniquely linguistic: the two things go together. They go together because they are connected: the former explains the latter. The explanation has nothing to do with such facts as that humans have “big brains” or “enquiring minds” or “complicated thoughts”; it has to do with a basic fact of human physical evolution, viz. inter-continental travel. We are the globe-trotting species and therefore the speaking species, the exploring species and therefore the fact-stating species. We rely on each other’s speech in order to navigate the alien territories that we encounter on our travels. We wander; therefore, we communicate. If we stayed boringly at home, we would remain silent, except for the odd sigh or grunt, because there would be nothing worth talking about, nothing new and interesting to report. Meaningful speech requires novelty, presupposes ignorance, and aims for enlightenment. Knowledge is thus the enemy of language—that is, generally shared knowledge. Language requires asymmetries of knowledge, and they arise when novel things have to be learned. Travel, as they say, broadens the mind—and it gives you something important to talk about. Sitting around the same campfire every night with the same old people provides little in the way of lively topics of conversation: “I saw a new rat today” will only get you so far in the conversation game. And remember that a trait like language will only be selected by evolution if it serves some vital purpose; otherwise, it is an energy suck. Humans could only survive in new environments if they acquired the ability to talk about them, the better to tame them. The basic speech act is: “You’ll never guess what I saw today”.

Language is like clothing. Back there in old Africa there was little need for clothing, given the temperatures, but colder climates call for heavier garments. As humans spread out across the globe, clothes became a necessary tool of survival; so, they were invented. Other animals don’t bother, though a change of habitat can prove lethal. Humans dress because they travel—because they have come from somewhere far away with a different climate. They are the only species to do so. Clothing didn’t evolve because of a taste for fashion but because changes of geographical location necessitated it. We dress because we live in environments that differ from the environment in which the human race initially evolved (a tropical climate). Of course, clothes take on new functions and meanings once they have been adopted, but their initial biological rationale arises from survival requirements under conditions of diaspora. Novelty of environment, occasioned by travel, is the trigger and shaper of the new adaptation. No doubt these acquisitions (speech and dress) were gradual and halting; people didn’t start dressing and speaking overnight. They are still being refined and perfected. But they didn’t happen in a vacuum; they were driven by the need to adapt to the variegated planet on which we live and move. Clothing arose because people were too cold without it; speech arose because people were too ignorant without it. Cold new worlds led to dressing and speaking; to put it simply, it was Europe that did it. Did our distant ancestors (say, Homo erectus) speak in Africa before they spread to other continents? The migration hypothesis suggests they did not, or not much, but it is hard to say. Maybe our prehistoric ancestors were contentedly taciturn, secure in their familiar world, locally omniscient, not in need of updates and news reports. That is how apes seem to us today (not that we evolved from any of these species)—quietly going about their business with only the most rudimentary linguistic skills. But perhaps our ancestors were actually quite chatty, if they had arrived from somewhere else in Africa, or were still adjusting to life on the ground after their descent from trees. I see the human race as accelerating their pace of language development as they reached new destinations with different wildlife, different predators, different weather patterns, different land elevations—then they became really loquacious. They excitedly report what they have seen that day to their curious neighbors. That was when human nature, as we know it today, was forged—clothes, speech, endless learning, perpetual restlessness. We are deracinated creatures in our essence. We talk because we are of no fixed abode.[2]

[1] A consequence of this emphasis on travel and geography is that space and time will have a central place in language (a Kant-Strawson theme): what we primarily talk about will be places, what is at them, and how long it takes to get from A to B (not sense data and the like). Our linguistic scheme will be fundamentally spatiotemporal. Call this naturalized (biologized) linguistics.

[2] Some say that we are essentially rational, some that we are essentially free, some that we are essentially warlike, some that we are essentially sinful; I say that we are essentially homeless. This is our great anxiety, but also our great strength, the reason for our species dominance. It makes us able to boldly go where no other animal has been before. Without language that would not be possible. Language is the adaptation that permitted unlimited geographical dispersal.

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Skepticism and Time

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Skepticism and Time

We can’t be certain the ordinary world of material objects exists: we might be brains in a vat or perpetually dreaming. We can’t be certain that space exists, at least in the form we think of it, for the same reasons. But what about time? We are familiar with skepticism with respect to the contents of time: the world might have been created ten minutes ago and have a very different history from the one we suppose. But might the past not exist at all? Might the future be a figment? What about the present—does it too fall to the skeptic? In the case of the present things look more hopeful: we can know for certain that it exists. How? By a version of the Cogito: if I am thinking now, then there must be a now for me to think in. Every occurrence needs a time in which to exist. Nothing happens without a time in which it happens. Even if I am only dreaming, my dream needs a time to occur in. Thus, we can confidently assert: “I think, therefore the present time exists”. There is no epistemically possible world in which I am thinking but there is no time. What the nature of this time is we may not know, but we know at least that the present moment is real: an existent thing falls under the concept the present, viz. a certain temporal moment. But the Cogito by itself doesn’t take us any further into time: maybe the present time exists but not past or future times. These are distinct existences, after all.

However, on reflection we can deduce the past and the future from the present: for what is present will soon be past and was once future. There can be no present without a past and future. It is a necessary a priori truth that a present moment exists within a series of moments some of which are in the past and some in the future. This follows from the fact that time flows, i.e., moments pass from future to present to past. No moment can be stuck in the present, incapable of becoming past and never having existed in the future. Every moment of your life was once a future moment and will become a past moment—as sure as eggs are eggs (a plain tautology). So, the present contains the seeds of the past and the future: at the moment you think “I think” that moment quickly moves into the past and was once a future moment. Thus, if we combine the temporal Cogito with this logico-metaphysical fact about time, we can deduce the result that past times and future times indubitably exist. What happens in or at these times is not certain, but that they exist (those times) is certain. Time might itself be relative or absolute, a matter of mechanical clocks or of God’s eternal mind, discrete or continuous, infinite or finite—but at least we know that it exists. Time logically follows from consciousness: the one kind of existence leads inexorably to the other. This is something. Matter doesn’t follow, space doesn’t follow, numbers don’t follow: but time does.[1] Time is one of life’s great certainties. Odd that Descartes didn’t make more use of this truth. We don’t need God’s assistance to know that time exists; it is built into the very nature of experience. I can never say, “For all I know, time doesn’t exist”.

[1] We might be able to get from consciousness to matter, space, and even numbers by constructing clever philosophical arguments, but in the case of time we don’t need such ingenuity—time is written right into consciousness as a surface feature. Not the impression of time, mark, but time itself.

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Anthropocentric Physical Empiricism

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Anthropocentric Physical Empiricism

Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge derives from something called “experience”. Alternatively, all (non-trivial) knowledge comes from the senses. Knowledge is ultimately reducible to “impressions” or “sense data” originating in the human sense organs. In some forms it takes on a metaphysical cast: all of realityderives from experience and is reducible to it. Thus, phenomenalism is empiricism with respect to the external world. Both knowledge and reality come down to sense data—epistemological and metaphysical empiricism. But it is seldom observed that this doctrine can be pushed further: all knowledge (and possibly all reality) derives from, or reduces to, the activities of the sense organs. Impressions cause ideas, sense data cause beliefs, but activity in the eyes and ears (etc.) cause impressions and sense data—the latter are “copies” of the former. The physical sense organs are the conduits through which information flows. Let’s be more specific: it is retinal stimulation and eardrum vibration that cause experiences—the activation of the rods and cones in the eye, the quivering of the tympanic membrane in the ear. These connect with deeper structures, such as the optic nerve and the cochlear, but they are where the body and the world make initial contact. So, really, the empiricist should be saying that all knowledge traces back to the retina and the eardrum (also the skin, nose, and mouth, but these are less important to knowledge than the other two senses, especially vision). Clearly, the retina and the eardrum are physical (bodily) and anthropocentric (species-specific): so, knowledge is held to reduce to bits of human anatomy and physiology, these being the causal origins of experience (whatever quite that is). There is no human knowledge but that these bodily structures are involved—that does not go through these structures. Likewise for metaphysical empiricism.

Already we are wondering if that can be right, given that knowledge is mental and the retina and ear drum are physical (biological). But putting that aside, there is this worry: how can such small and localized entities constitute all of human knowledge (and possibly all the world)? Does our knowledge of reality really reduce to irritations in the small patch of tissue known as the retina? You might reply that visual experience is a good deal more than the retina: it has representational content, is conscious, and figures in reasoning. That is what true empiricism takes to be the foundation and form of all knowledge—full-blooded human experience. Then does experience add something to the retinal stimulations? Of course, you retort—we can’t reduce experience to physical processes in the retina! You are quite right, but notice that you have helped yourself to the inner resources of the mind by insisting on the transcendence of experiences over retinas. And that isn’t true empiricism, since the mind is now not a blank tablet on this way of looking at things: it contributes to, enriches, the retinal input—not everything derives from the senses alone. Thus, we have diluted empiricism with rationalism or nativism by crediting the mind with properties not derivable from bare sensory input. The mind is not remotely a blank tablet under the current dispensation; it is a seething, amply furnished, hothouse. So, the determined empiricist might dig in his heels at this point and assert that it is retinal input that is the source of all knowledge (Quine held such a view). The claim might seem preposterous given our customary conception of human knowledge, but the physical empiricist might junk this mentalistic conception and replace it with some scaled-back notion of cortical configurations. Would that be the end of his troubles?

No, because of the implied anthropocentrism. There won’t be anything universal about human knowledge as so viewed. The human eye and ear are quite species-specific (or genus-specific), much more so than our system of knowledge purports to be, which we take to be more universal—objective, absolute. We don’t think our scientific knowledge, say, is relative to us, like our anatomy in general; that would undermine its claim to be knowledge. Rods and cones are hardly epistemological universals, woven into everything we know. Nor is our knowledge of reality confined to objects of a size that can stimulate the retina differentially, thus giving rise to perceptions of particular types of objects (medium sized dry goods); for we know about other things too (e.g., atoms). Consider the following (admittedly extreme) thought experiment: there are microscopic men that are no bigger than atoms, and they have a thirst for knowledge. But their eyes respond only to objects at their scale, seeing only atoms and their parts (electrons, protons). They have no perception of macroscopic objects (as we understand that term), yet they wonder whether the particles they see might compose such large objects. The empiricist philosophers among them insist that all their knowledge is derived from, and reduces to, the evidence of their senses, anything else being problematic at best. It would clearly be wrong for them to claim that reality reduces to what they can see with their eyes, just as it is wrong for us to claim that reality reduces to what we can see with ours—the microscopic and the macroscopic, respectively. Their visual set-up is biased in its picture of the world, just as ours is (very low resolution). Similarly, a giant intelligence that sees only whole galaxies, never their constituent stars and planets, has a biased view of the universe—is, in fact, blind to huge swathes of it. The senses are highly selective and species-relative, providing biased pictures of reality. If knowledge seeks to correct this bias, as it clearly does, sense-based empiricism must be false: our knowledge attains a level of universality, and hence objectivity and absoluteness, that cannot be accommodated by what might be called “retinal empiricism”. We can only satisfy the demands of knowledge by moving away from the senses considered as items of human anatomy. Just so, reality itself possesses a degree of universality that is inconsistent with retinal empiricism. The human senses simply don’t have the scope and generality required to constitute human knowledge or reality as a whole. They are too circumscribed, species-specific, idiosyncratic, and variable to fix any knowledge worthy of the name, still less any reality worthy of the name. True, we can learn things by deploying our eyes, but that is a far cry from constituting the entire nature of human knowledge. We certainly cannot hope to define anything by means of language referring to the excitations of the retina, or the vibrations of the tympanic membrane. Such sensory activities cannot create human knowledge by themselves, nor can they suffice to construct an external world. When empiricism is pushed to the limit its limitations become apparent. The sense organs are not the sole organs of knowledge.[1]

[1] The original empiricists knew little about the workings of the sense organs and tended to adopt a first-person perspective on the nature of perception.  Once we learn more and take an objective perspective on the senses their inadequacy as a source of knowledge become apparent. They are just physical transducers of impinging energy; they are not mirrors held up to reality. All the talk of “impressions” and “sense data” is scientifically naive; a complex multi-stage process leads up to their formation. At what point does the empiricist want to fix his epistemic origins? Aren’t there many things that could qualify as the foundations of the whole enterprise? The lesson is that human knowledge is an active corrective to the senses not a passive reflection (mirroring) of them.

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Knife Throwing

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Knife Throwing

I have been working on my knife throwing recently. It’s not a mainstream sport perhaps, but it has its own charm. I heard someone the other day describe it as “like darts but more macho”; indeed, but it is more than that. It is technically more difficult to stick the knife in the target than it is to stick the dart in the board, because the knife rotates; so, the skill element is more demanding. Plus, it is more dangerous, potentially lethal. To me it has three characteristics that appeal: aesthetic, athletic, and scientific. The knife flies through the air, spinning beautifully, then it pierces the target with a satisfying thud, as if by magic. Knives are quite beautiful in themselves but their ability to stick in a target when thrown from a distance is a sight to see. The action of throwing a knife so as to achieve this end is athletically demanding and takes a good deal of practice (plus innate talent). There are a lot of clanging misses, rebounding blades, frustrating failures, but when you have the skill down it is like a well-executed tennis stroke. Scientifically, the trajectory of the knife follows strict laws that have to be respected, especially when gauging distance from the target: it rotates at its own pace. The sport is mathematically precise. It isn’t just macho but also artistic, skilled, and scientific. I recommend it.

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2024 Resolutions

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2024 Resolutions

I don’t have any, except one I can’t implement. I would like to ban all teaching of my work in American philosophy departments. Why should I let the products of my labor be used for free by people who refuse to employ me? Shouldn’t there be a law against this? Shouldn’t I have the right to prohibit this kind of exploitation? But it isn’t so: people can use my work in their teaching completely against my wishes, and be paid to do so! Why should people who have been cancelled have to accept that other people can use their work for profit? Suppose someone uses my writing on the mind-body problem in a couple of classes but would refuse to invite me to give a talk, or even have me on campus: is that morally acceptable? It is not acceptable to me—I don’t want someone like that teaching my work. So, please desist. Moreover, I don’t want philosophers in America to use my work for research purposes—discussing me in print, citing me, or otherwise benefitting from my labors. I wish they would stop, because I have no desire to be part of the conversation in this country. Read me if you must, but don’t take my name in vain. There may be exceptions to this rule, where I would be willing to relax my ban—I may grant special permission to teach and cite me—but in general I forbid people to make use of my work, all fifty years of it. I must be the first academic in history who doesn’t want his work discussed by a large section of the academic community (sic). It’s a pity I can’t bring the weight of the law upon violators.[1]

[1] I have no objection to the rest of the world making use of my work. I particularly resent being taught at the University of Miami, where I am banned from the campus, though there is probably no danger of that.

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Does the Mind Age?

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Does the Mind Age?

The mind has an age, but does it age? The body also has an age, and it does age. The person has an age, and that thing too ages. How old are these things? The body is probably the oldest, because its existence pre-dates the existence of both mind and person (these two are connected): the fetal body in the womb exists before the mind or person does. Clearly, all three are older than they are customarily taken to be, since someone’s age is conventionally reckoned from the date of birth—and our body, mind, and selfhood pre-date that (to the best of our knowledge). We really have three ages, none of them coinciding with our conventionally defined age. But that is not my question: my question is whether the mind can be said to age (verb), as the body and person can be said to age. The OED gives the following definition for “age” (verb): “Grow old, mature, show the effects of the passage of time; begin to appear older”. What are the usual effects of the passage of time on the human being (also animals generally)? They are very familiar: sagging and wrinkled skin, grey hair, muscular atrophy, stooped posture, slowness of movement, joint stiffness, bone fragility, proneness to fatigue, and the like. These are generally expressed in appearances—the person looks old. Ageing is the process of coming to appear old as thus understood. They are the defining symptoms of age. The person is declared old in virtue of these bodily changes; ageing is the accumulation of such changes over time.

But notice that they are all bodily: nothing about the mind is mentioned. And with good reason—because none of these apply to the mind (you don’t have a wrinkled mental skin, because the mind doesn’t have a skin). It would be a kind of category mistake to attribute such changes to the mind. Based on these criteria, then, the mind doesn’t age. But aren’t they the only criteria of ageing that we have? If so, the mind doesn’t age. The mind changes with time, it grows and matures, it may even decline: but it doesn’t age. Clothes and shoes age, as do houses and cars, as do animal bodies, but minds don’t undergo standard ageing processes: they don’t bear the tell-tale marks of the passage of time (“wear and tear”). Many things have an age but don’t age: regions of space, atoms, oceans, planets, doctrines; and some things have neither an age nor do they age: numbers, universals (according to Plato), time itself, modus ponens, to name a few. So, the mind might belong to one of these groups: minds don’t undergo the ageing process, though they evidently have an age. They change with time, but they don’t grow old, or appear to grow old.

You might reply that minds have their own type of ageing process, their own way of growing old, admittedly not the same as the body’s ageing process: forgetfulness, mental slowness, concentration problems, confusion. But these are not the effects of time (the rub of the world), and they are not confined to the old (people whose bodies have been around for a comparatively lengthy period). Some young people are forgetful, mentally slow, can’t concentrate, and get confused—that doesn’t mean their minds have prematurely aged, or that they are mentally old. What is true is that brains age, like the body as a whole, and this can affect mental functioning; but it doesn’t follow the the mind ages. The mind doesn’t appear old—whatever that might be in the case of the mind. Alcohol and disease can cause these kinds of psychological conditions, but they have nothing intrinsically to do with age. They may be correlated with age, but they aren’t examples of ageing—any more than being unemployed is a type of ageing, or having right-wing opinions.

And isn’t it simply a fact that one’s consciousness does not change its nature as we (our bodies) grow old? It feels the same as it used to when we were young: my visual experience, say, has undergone no degradation due to ageing—it isn’t fainter or slower or more wrinkled. It is the same as it always was. This is why people say, as they grow older, that they don’t internally grow older, as the body indubitably does. Really, the mind is not the kind of thing that ages; to suppose otherwise is a category mistake, based on viewing the mind through the lens of the body. The brain may shrink with age, so that it is appropriate to speak of an ageing brain, but the mind doesn’t shrink—that is just a category mistake. The mind changes during the period known as old age, as it changes during the period known as adolescence, but in neither case is it appropriate to speak of mental ageing—all we have is age-related change.[1] Hence the feeling that I have not aged (my mind, my soul, my consciousness, my-self)—though my body palpably has. Ageing is what you can see in the mirror, but you can’t see your mind in a mirror. Nor can you introspect and notice that your mind appears a lot older than it was a few years ago—though you might notice that you forget more than you used to (as you tend to think about different things now). Change with age is not ipso facto ageing. If someone becomes forgetful at the age of twenty, that doesn’t imply that he or she has aged—they might just have suffered an accident to the head. The concept of ageing is really defined by the various symptoms of age that I listed earlier and has no life outside of these symptoms, but the mind doesn’t exemplify such symptoms—therefore, it doesn’t age. Not that anyone seriously denies this; we simply don’t talk that way in the normal course of things. We don’t suppose that the mind literally ages in the same sense in which the body ages (and hence the person). But the metaphor might prove irresistible, given our tendency to model the mind on the body; it is therefore salutary to inoculate ourselves against such a tendency—not least because of the dangers of ageism as a prejudice. The whole idea of eternal life in disembodied form is premised on the agelessness of the soul, and to that extent is not conceptually incoherent; as the same idea about the body arguably is (how could a material animal body not age?). The concept of mind is the concept of an un-aging thing; the self of the Cogito knows no ageing process. Thus, the negative connotations of ageing don’t apply to the mind (perhaps they shouldn’t apply to the body); the mind remains spanking new, never scuffed and worn, flabby and bent, wrinkled and discolored. Some regrettable mental changes might be caused by the ageing of the body, but they are not thereby instances of ageing. The mind remains forever young.[2]

[1] Would anyone say that a marked increase of intelligence that reliably occurs in one’s seventies is an example of ageing? I think not.

[2] This sharp contrast between the mind and the body–one ageless, the other inevitably afflicted with ageing—is surely part of the human condition, as the existentialists conceived it. We are conscious of ourselves not just as destined to die but also as ageing steadily in that direction, while consciousness itself is free of such degradation. Thus, we are mixed beings, confusingly so. We embody the “contradiction” of both ageing and not ageing, with each vying for supremacy in our self-conception. Am I old or am I young? I am both. Or neither.

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Experimental Atomic Psychology

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Experimental Atomic Psychology

Is there any evidence for the atomic hypothesis in psychology, however slender? It certainly doesn’t seem to us that our consciousness is composed of little psychic particles separated in space—the analogue of physical particles. But there is one area in which the hypothesis enjoys some phenomenological support—I mean, the experience we have when we close our eyes in the dark. Our visual field seems populated with tiny dots, light against a dark background, and these dots are visited by edges and blobs that move slowly around. The dots are shaped into primitive forms that seem to seek greater solidity and sharpness, like ghosts of the real world. In this experience, admittedly unusual, our visual field appears granular, corpuscular, pixelated, like a pointillist painting—an assembly of point-like particles. Might this be evidence of an underlying particulate structure operating at the level of the brain, one neuron per point perhaps? I want you to do an experiment: next time you are in bed at night close your eyes and focus on the tiny dots in your visual field, trying to get a sense of their sharpness and clarity. Now open your eyes and gaze into the gloom: vague forms will appear in the darkness, say the shape of an overhead fan. Can you still see the dots? If you are anything like me, you will still see them, but they are slightly less well-defined. The shapes perceived have somehow reduced their phenomenological salience without eliminating them altogether. If you close one eye, you find that the dots gain slightly in salience as the external shape is less clearly perceived. And if you close both eyes again, they come back in all their understated glory. The external form has co-opted what was only vestigially and virtually present in those edges and blobs. It would be possible to replicate this experiment more systematically: assemble a group of subjects and gather reports under varying conditions of illumination, beginning with pitch dark. At what point do the visual pixels disappear from consciousness completely? Is there much intersubjective variation? Can input from another sense interfere with the disappearance? I will venture a hypothesis: pixelation is inversely proportional to form—that is, the greater the perceived form the less the apparent pixelation, and vice versa. At the point of ordinary daytime illumination, pixelation is zero, except perhaps in abnormal conditions. When there is no form to see, as in the closed eyelid condition, the pixelation is at its height; but as forms enter the visual field, even in low illumination, they disappear from view. This is not to say they no longer exist, just that we have no awareness of them. Perhaps blind people have vivid pixelation and their pixels never disappear from view; perhaps hallucinogenic drugs can heighten their presence; perhaps certain diseases cause them to occur in normal vision—these are all empirical questions. We do know there is such a thing as visual snow syndrome, which sounds a lot like pathological pixelation. The idea, then, is that the brain employs two mechanisms in the production of visual percepts: one mechanism generates mental atoms or points; the other mechanism organizes these into visual forms, generally controlled by an external stimulus. The mental atoms are organized into wholes that represent shapes and other qualities. If psychological atomism is true, the same should hold of the other senses, though the atoms may be less accessible to introspection. Taste, for example, operates by way of innumerable receptors that work to create (in conjunction with the brain) gustatory points, the totality of which constitute (say) the taste of pineapple. The taste is not an ontological simple having neither parts nor structure; instead, it is a complex sensation made up of many elements (if you have ever partially lost your sense of taste, you will know what I mean). Then the general hypothesis is that all mental phenomena obey the same basic principles—atoms combining to produce complex mental states. Is there anything analogous to closed-eye vision for thought, i.e., unorganized dots of thought awaiting assembly into a coherent whole? Not that I know of, but it would be worth investigating whether certain kinds of degenerative brain disease produce such effects, e.g., Alzheimer’s disease. What about sleep and dreams in normal humans? Rational thought seems to fall to pieces there. Could drugs have this kind of effect? Surely it would be possible for the brain to cease to be able to put concepts together to form coherent thoughts. Couldn’t concepts themselves break down into parts that refuse to join with other concepts (neurons can clearly lose the ability to connect with other neurons)? Empirical, indeed experimental, work could be done to determine the answer to such questions. It need not be left up to philosophy. So, the atomic hypothesis could be subjected to empirical test, beginning with the bedroom experiment I suggested above. Returning to vision, we can confidently report that the retina and the brain have a pixelated structure–rods and cones in the retina, neurons in the brain—so it is on the cards that the mind itself duplicates this structure. We may not be conscious of it (what biological point would there be in that?) but it may yet be present inconsciousness, hovering just below the surface. Eyelid vision hints at these subterranean depths, and it may be that they exist elsewhere too. It is true that we can’t detect the mental particles by the use of particle accelerators that bombard the mind with supercharged particles and reveal the hidden gems, but we have other ways of determining the fine structure of mental phenomena (such as introspecting our closed-eye visual field). The brain is thus (we conjecture) a synthesizer of basic mental atoms that together form mental life as we experience it. First it manufactures the elementary particles, then it assembles them into mental complexes. What the most elementary particles are is, as they say, a matter for further research. We already know the mind is combinatorial at more coarse-grained levels; atomic psychology simply extends this basic idea down to smaller scales. The search for the elusive mental quark is now on.[1]

[1] I first discussed mental atomism in “Consciousness, Atomism, and the Ancient Greeks” in Consciousness and its Objects (2004). Research is proceeding slowly.

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