Neuropolitics

I quite like the idea of neuropolitics, despite its air of science fiction. I don’t like the idea of neuroethics or neurophilosophy or even neuropsychology, but I see a point to couching political discourse in neurological language. What is the unit (the ontology) of political discourse? It goes by various names: men, people, human beings, sentient creatures, individuals, souls, persons, selves. These are not always co-referential or analytically pellucid, but one catches the drift. We are talking about you, me, him, her, they, etc. Can we be more exact, more scientific? Well, a very decent suggestion is that all these, in so far as they impinge on politics, ultimately go back to the brain: for the brain is the organ of the mind, selfhood, character, the psyche—and that is what has ultimate value. We could have a polity composed wholly of disembodied brains, so long as personhood is preserved, but a politics of bodies sans brains is pointless—psychologically null zombies. Political issues concern, in the end, functioning brains (living, feeling brains). So what, you may say, what difference does it make?  What political problems would be solved or mitigated by adopting a neurological perspective? How would our politics be improved by going neuropolitical?

The answer is that brains are detached from the outer shell in which they are housed: they don’t reflect the body or the position of that body in the world. You can’t read off a person’s size, shape, race, nationality, wealth, education, etc. just by perusing their brain. All brains look alike (all human brains). There are no black brains or white brains, no fat brains or thin brains, no beautiful brains or ugly brains—unlike with bodies. The brain is a great equalizer (I am talking about its physical appearance). Thus, no discrimination based on brain appearances is possible: the brain of Marilyn Monroe looks much the same as the brain of Louis Armstrong—nor do they sound any different. It would be hard to be prejudiced in favor of one of them and against the other, based on optical appearances. There would be no color prejudice in a society of brains in vats, or pulchritude prejudice, or weight prejudice. Everyone would be treated equally based on physical appearance; discriminations would have to reflect less palpable features, such as quality of character or mathematical ability. Brains don’t invite irrational groundless discrimination. Behind every face there is a brain just like yours, constituting the essence of the person. We don’t normally think of this in our personal interactions, but it is salutary to remind ourselves of it. Politically, it is the objective truth. Brains are what politics is ultimately all about—the things with rights, obligations, citizenship, equality, authority, moral status. The body politic is a body of brains.

In a way this is unfortunate, because our image of a person is shaped much more by the face than the brain. We don’t even see the brain in the ordinary course of events. Nor is the brain deemed attractive or expressive or relatable. It has no name, no social identity. It would be different if brains were visible and revealing; then their centrality would be evident. Neuropolitics would be the order of the day. Laws would be about them, policies geared to them; they would be the primary units of political discourse. As it is, they don’t even have the benefit of verbal cache—the word brain is not an attractive word. It doesn’t do justice to what it describes. In Latin we have cerebrum, in Greek encephalo (“in-head”), in French le cerveau, in Italian ingegno, in Finnish aivot. There is nothing warm and cuddly about these. We could try calling it the self-hub or the person-crux, but these don’t really cut it; we are stuck with a distinct lack of linguistic glamor. Brains are just not aesthetically pleasing to us. The heart has a much better public image. Perhaps an artist could undertake a series of brain works designed to lift brains to a new plane of visual appeal—introducing us to the brain afresh (“The Brain of Mona Lisa”). We need celebrity brains on magazine covers—brain paparazzi, PR campaigns.

How do animals fare under neuropolitics? I think it is clear that speciesism is fueled by the animal body: their bodies are not like ours (to the naked eye). They are hairy, scaly, feathered, quadrupedal, slimy. But their brains are not that different: when you look at a picture of an animal brain its affinity to the human brain is evident, startlingly so. All brains have much the same basic architecture (not surprising given the facts of evolution). We would not be so inclined to speciesism if we had animal brains constantly in our thoughts: never mind the body, look at the brain! The brain is the seat of the soul, and their brains closely resemble ours. They also differ among themselves to a degree, correlated with their psychological powers; these anatomical differences can be used to justify differential treatment. Apes and lizards are not identical mentally. I think, then, that a brain-centered animal politics will help animals in their quest for political freedom. The brain is always the best measure of a creature’s natural rights, because it is closely correlated with the animal’s mental faculties. The mind is not visible and is hard to detect, but the brain is the concrete symbol of the mind—you can get your teeth into the brain. A politics arranged according to brain structure will be an improvement over our current body-centered approach. Here is my political slogan: Make the World Brainier![1]

[1] To what extent is this essay tongue-in-cheek? Less than you might think. The culture can change. Words matter. Ideology is conceptualization.

Can We Solve the No-Mind-Body Problem?

We usually ask what gives rise to the mind in the body—what the secret ingredient is. This is the positive mind-body problem. But there is also the negative mind-body problem: what explains the lack of mind. Some things have a mind (consciousness) and some things lack it—what is the difference? In particular, what disqualifies an object from having a mind: in virtue of what do some objects lack minds? A behaviorist will say it is the lack of behavior (of a certain kind, say goal-directed movement); but that is not plausible, because of organisms that behave but don’t (we think) have sentience—jellyfish, flies, worms. Also, there are artifacts like robots. The same is true of brains and neurons: it isn’t the lack of these that explains the absence of mind, since they can be present without a hint of consciousness. And it obviously isn’t the lack of fur or legs, because an animal can be conscious without these. Evidently, it is a rather elusive property. The panpsychist will say it is the lack of proto-mental properties at the atomic level, but then everything will be conscious to some degree. There will be nothing stopping even simple organisms from being conscious; being conscious will be the norm, the natural state of nature. But at least these are attempts to explain why mind is absent in certain cases: it is the lack of factor X. According to idealist theories, the problem is not so much to explain the presence of consciousness as its absence—for consciousness is everywhere. There is no material body to present a mind-body problem.

And the absence problem isn’t purely theoretical: we really do need to explain why consciousness is absent when it is. For we don’t really know that consciousness is not more widespread than we tend to suppose (in our Western mind-set). We don’t really know insects are not conscious; we just presume so (on the basis of reasonable but inconclusive evidence). Many people feel convinced that trees have feelings, and we have no definitive way to rebut them. What about the soul of planet Earth? Where do we draw the line in the biological world? It would be nice to have a clear marker with which we could rule out the cases that strike us intuitively as not exhibiting consciousness. We have an other non-minds problem as well as an other minds problem: we don’t know what things have them, and we don’t know what things don’t have them. We know what the absence of heat (coldness) results from, i.e., lack of molecular motion; and we know what signals the absence of life, i.e., lack of a pulse. But we don’t know what causes, or marks, a lack of consciousness. In dreamless sleep and coma, consciousness is lacking, presumably as a result of brain activity of some sort: but what sort? Could it be that nature is naturally and spontaneously conscious (as panpsychists suppose) and that it takes a suppressive agent to inhibit its expression? Then we really would need an explanation of its absence in lower organisms. It looks as if both presence and absence need an explanation. In the case of bodily movement, we can explain presence and absence: it is nerve innervation and muscular contraction, or nerve damage and muscular unresponsiveness (or just the lack of nerves and muscles). Why are some parts of the brain notconscious—what do they lack that other parts possess? Why are some neurons mentally dead, given that some are alive?

It is a mystery why brains are conscious, but also a mystery why other things are not (they look basically the same as conscious things); indeed, these are really aspects of the same mystery. We can call it the mystery of non-consciousness. The problem of other minds is the same: why are these things said to be conscious and those things said not to be? How can we refute the skeptic about other minds and the skeptic about other non-minds (this skeptic says we have no right to assume that rocks and tables are not conscious). A prehistoric animist might be more exercised about the negative problem than the former: he wants to know why we don’t ascribe minds more widely. After all, people have been wrong in the past in declaring certain animals devoid of mind—might we expand our attributions even more widely? There are really two sides to the other minds problem: positive and negative. Maybe if we focused on the negative problem, we would make more progress: why are some organisms not conscious? If we knew that, we would know why some are. Mysterians would find both problems equally difficult. It is an interesting fact that we tend to think of consciousness as requiring some sort of superhuman effort on the part of the body, instead of supposing that its absence is what requires positive action—inhibition not excitation, to borrow physiological terminology. Certainly, for the panpsychist, it is a problem to explain how it is that everything is not conscious, given that everything has the seeds of consciousness in it. It is as if God decided to block the efflorescence of the underlying consciousness of the cosmos from occurring more visibly. It is the same with behaviorism and materialism: what prevents behavior and the brain from indicating consciousness? If the mind is behavior or neural activity, then it exists wherever they do—it requires an explanation to understand why we don’t see it that way. Once the body is endowed with attributes that (allegedly) constitute consciousness, we have a problem explaining why everything with those attributes isn’t conscious. This is the (non-mind)-body problem[1].

[1] Suppose we accept Descartes’s theory of mind: how do we explain why primitive organisms and even physical objects are not conscious? For all that is necessary is the contingent conjoining of an immaterial mind with some sort of physical object. Yet we never come across such cases. Descartes can’t explain why non-conscious things exist, given his metaphysics. Why doesn’t every physical object have its attached mental substance? A complex brain isn’t a necessary condition, according to his metaphysics.

This is a reply I wrote to an email from Tom Nagel. It may be helpful even without his prompting email.

A Reply

My OED gives as the primary meaning of “world” “the earth with all its countries and peoples”, immediately followed by “one’s life and activities”. The first is not philosophically relevant except as indicating that the word has a very narrow denotation reflecting human interests. The second makes this explicit. I’m not focusing on the individual but on the reference to some sort of life or consciousness. It is surely clear that using the word to refer to the whole shebang is an extension of this use (arguably illicit). It’s not necessarily human but can refer to an animal’s world.

I don’t think “the world” means “everything”, which anyway raises similar difficulties. First, it’s a quantifier word not a singular term, and applying Russell’s theory to “the world” does not give us “everything”. Second, what is meant by “thing”—does it mean objects or facts or something else? Third, quantification is generally restricted and sortal-relative; this isn’t. Fourth, how does it apply to such uses as “possible world” or “many worlds”? Fifth, “everything” is non-descriptive and non-specific, unlike “the world” (this uses “world” in the sense derived from the primary meaning of the term). Sixth, can we say “for all everythings”? Seventh, does everything include non-existent entities? You can quantify over these (“All fictional characters…”) but they are not part of the world, which must exist. Lewis thought a possible world was a big concrete particular like the actual world—how does this fit with the “everything” interpretation? Eighth, the whole point of the philosophical locution is to strip away any reference to humans or other living beings, but “everything” carries no such connotation. The philosophical use is just not the same as the use of “everything”. In fact, the context-independent use of “everything” is clearly a (possibly illicit) extension of restricted uses of the universal quantifier and is not primitive (this is why Geach deplored it).

It may be that there is some inchoate concept (and entity) that is ineptly expressed by “the world”—we do seem to have a need for some such idea. But this concept is highly problematic and cannot be invoked uncritically or without scare-quotes. We don’t really have any good word for it, and possibly can’t invent one. It is just an empty designator that has a reference we can’t properly grasp. It isn’t just an easy familiar concept like “every dog”. It’s not part of ordinary language but a philosophical contraption that sounds familiar.

Future Trump

Trump’s law is this: it is always much worse than you think it will be. I am constantly surprised at how bad it keeps getting. With this in mind let’s contemplate the likely future unless things radically change. First, Trump withdraws support to Ukraine and the Russians take over the country. Unimaginable horrors ensue. Europe is destabilized. This happens soon. Second, Trump loses the trade war with China, which escalates tensions with military overtones. China decides to take Taiwan. Asia is destabilized. Third, millions of deportations occur causing great suffering and injustice, as well as enormous damage to the US economy, which is already reeling under tariffs. Fourth, the legal system is undermined, especially the Supreme Court; dictatorship is thereby hastened. Fifth, the universities are gutted, destroying science and intellectual life in general (more destruction to the economy). Sixth, media owners capitulate to Trump’s demands, thereby muzzling the press. Seventh, a worldwide recession occurs, with much social unrest. The possibility of nuclear war looms in the chaos and despair; Iran is the first country attacked. Eighth, television becomes bland and supine; comedians are not allowed. Ninth, there is an exodus of the most mobile people from the country, leaving it bereft of talent. Tenth, America becomes a police state. This nightmare scenario is already much more probable than it was 100 days ago—indeed, it seems inevitable unless something drastic happens and soon.