Mindless Science
Barr, Stephen M.
Mindless Science The Brain and Edward O. Wilson By Stephen M. Barr Edward O. Wilson, research professor of biology and honorary curator of entomology at Harvard University, is a man who knows...
...and in innate play during childhood...
...Without the mind beyond the brain, there is no possibility of truth— much less the consilience of truth for which Wilson is on the hunt...
...This profound unity of nature is, indeed, one of the greatest and most beautiful discoveries of science...
...In such books as The Diversity of Life in 1993, he helped popularize the environmental concept of "biodiversity...
...In Wilson's Consilience, Penrose is dismissed in a two-sentence endnote...
...No one...
...The consilience of which Wilson writes is real...
...But it is a far greater consilience than is dreamt of in Edward O. Wilson's philosophy...
...Is the Navy...
...There is of course a real consilience to knowledge...
...It consists, he says, of the parallel processing of vast numbers of . . . coding networks...
...Gender differences," Wilson writes, "are already richly described in the psychological and anthropological literature...
...Zoology, for example, has roots in cell biology, cell biology in molecular biology, molecular biology in chemistry, and chemistry in particle physics...
...And we will never discover what it is until we recognize once again that the large gap in the puzzle of the brain can only be filled by the piece we call the mind...
...The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain...
...But how it would reflect that is, at present, beyond useful speculation, let alone experimental test...
...Astronomy and geology are similarly derived from the basic laws of physics...
...He asked, in essence, what becomes of abstract truth, or of the objectivity of truth, in the materialist's picture of the mind...
...Wilson's explanation of consciousness fails, at last, to explain...
...In what sense do all of these neuronal discharges, happening at odd times in odd crania, widely dispersed throughout the world, coalesce to form a consilient structure of truth...
...And as for why they are right to deny mind-body dualism, Wilson declares, "The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a non-physical mind...
...in patterns of brain activity...
...A biologist attempting in Consilience an enormous philosophical project, he is like the man who proudly shows us a large jigsaw puzzle he has assembled in record time, only to have us point out that he's Stephen M. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware...
...Sociobiology has received praise from some conservative critics precisely for this sort of willingness to dismiss as stupid and ill-informed the denial of gender differences (although in the January 12 issue of The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson launched an extended attack on the sociobiological "evolutionary psychology" of Steven Pinker's bestselling How the Mind Works...
...But those many things that he knows never seemed to fit together particularly well, or at least there never seemed to be a theory of knowing that expressed the philosophical unity he could feel them to have...
...One argument, derived from the philosopher Frank Jackson, is developed at length by David Chalmers in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind...
...But it doesn't, for blind Mary—how-ever much she knows about physics—knows nothing of what red actually looks like...
...They just are...
...He faces a first explanatory problem in just how much he has to ignore in the way of arguments and pieces of evidence that point toward a mind somehow distinct from the brain...
...Nothing...
...And he faces a second problem in the fact that his materialism leads not just to a moral relativism, as he admits, but to an absolute rela-tivism—a relativism about all truth that he himself very much deplores when he sees it in deconstruction and postmodernism...
...The materialist approach leads ultimately either to saying that everything is conscious, or to saying that nothing is—as when John McCarthy, a founder of the field of Artificial Intelligence, claims that even thermostats are conscious, or the eminent American philosopher W. V O. Quine claims that human consciousness is an illusion...
...As Wilson says, "The evidence accumulated to date leaves little room for doubt...
...So, in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, America's most famous biologist has attempted to put it all together and show how the pieces fit...
...Human nature exists, and it is both deep and highly structured...
...Jackson and Chalmers maintain that there is something about subjective conscious experience that cannot be explained simply by the laws of physics...
...Lucas is a dualist, as was Godel himself, who called the idea that the mind is purely physical "a prejudice of our time...
...And so it goes, for the zoologist in Massachusetts, the brain scientist in California, and the anthropologist in New Guinea...
...And he explains how there has emerged from these fields a rich harvest of insights into the human mind—from color perception to incest avoidance, gender differences to non-verbal communication, fear of snakes to standards of female beauty...
...This problem arises in a particularly acute form for the believer in "consilience...
...the question is why the rest of us do have that experience—which is a question about consciousness, about what "it is like" to see red...
...There are deconstruction and postmodernism, which claim that there are no fixed reference points that would allow one to mark out standards in any field, from art and literature to morality...
...This is on a par with Nikita Khrushchev's announcement that Yuri Gagarin, the first human visitor to space, had failed to locate God...
...it's whether that is all we are...
...While Pen-rose is a materialist of sorts, the arguments he makes undercut the orthodoxy, espoused by Wilson, that explains the human mind as mere neurons firing...
...The question is not why Mary does not have the subjective experience of redness...
...Is the General Motors Corporation...
...And when at last he holds it up for us to see, his jigsaw puzzle falls to pieces and clatters to the floor...
...Does Wilson really suppose that if there were an immaterial component to the mind it would show up in a brain scan...
...One need not accept all or any of these arguments to recognize in them a formidable case for some kind of dualism...
...Another line of argument relies upon a theorem of the great mathematical logician Kurt Godel that asserts certain limitations on what can be achieved by any system that uses a fixed set of computational rules...
...For Wilson, the case is closed: "Virtually all contemporary scientists and philosophers expert on the subject agree that the mind, which comprises consciousness and rational process, is the brain at work...
...His solution is to say that, just as we, not actually being honeybees, cannot know what it is like to see as honeybees do, so Mary cannot know what it is like to have sight...
...Wilson is unimpressed...
...in smell, taste, and other senses...
...Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity...
...Was the chess-playing program that beat Gary Kasparov conscious...
...There is a great deal to admire in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge...
...Many scientists, such as Erwin Schrodinger, have puzzled over the same question...
...The thesis of Consilience is that all the branches of human knowledge are "consilient" with one another, forming a coherent whole in the same hierarchical or architectonic way in which the various branches of the physical sciences do...
...Some of these discoveries are bound to have great cultural impact...
...All together they create scenarios that flow realistically back and forth through time...
...Their biological foundations are partly known, having been documented in the corpus callosum and other brain structures...
...But there's also a great deal not to admire, for Wilson is missing the biggest piece of the picture...
...Many philosophers have argued from the freedom of the will, the unity of the intellect, or the unity of conscious experience...
...There are the recent radical ideologies that try to hold that all meanings and relationships, and even gender itself, are "socially constructed...
...He describes how much mischievous nonsense has resulted from a failure of thinkers in many disciplines to attend to the foundations and "deep origins" of human nature...
...It well might be that the structure of the brain reflects, in some way, the fact that it is open to the influence of the non-material...
...Many are linked by the synchronized firing of the nerve cells at forty cycles per second, allowing the simultaneous internal mapping of multiple sensory impressions...
...He describes the work going on in many scientific fields, particularly those studying the brain, human behavior in various cultures, and animals (especially primates...
...Some humility is very much in order, for the danger of consilience is that it may lead one to disregard facts when one does not see how they fit...
...Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios...
...A physicist in Princeton grasps some truth about elementary particles, and neurons start firing away like mad in his brain...
...And fit they do, after a fashion—but that fashion turns out to be quite strange...
...Based on Godel's "incompleteness theorem," the philosopher John Lucas and the physicist Sir Roger Penrose have argued that the human mind—particularly in its ratiocina-tive powers—cannot be understood as a computer...
...Mindless Science The Brain and Edward O. Wilson By Stephen M. Barr Edward O. Wilson, research professor of biology and honorary curator of entomology at Harvard University, is a man who knows many things...
...And there are facts that seem, to both philosophers and scientists of note, to imply a dualist picture...
...Edward O. Wilson is perhaps best described as someone who is right about many things, but wrong about one very big thing...
...In Paris, perhaps a week later, a molecular biologist understands something about the synthesis of an enzyme in a cell, and his neurons start firing in some different pattern...
...In the 1978 Pulitzer prize-winning On Human Nature, he helped father the sociobiology that now seems to dominate a great deal of the public imagination of human origins...
...In his grand synthesis, everything from morality and art to economics and politics can be traced down to the neural circuitry of the brain...
...missing half the pieces...
...Our ability to agree with all this breaks down when we consider other complicated systems that engage in the massive parallel processing of data, use that data to construct scenarios, and use those scenarios to guide their actions...
...These facts may not satisfy everyone's ideological yearning, but they illustrate in yet another way that, whether we like it or not, Homo sapiens is a biological species...
...Some great scientists—Sir Rudolf Peierls and Eugene Wigner, in particular— have argued from physics...
...A third kind of argument in favor of dualism has been made in a variety of forms by many philosophers, and in recent times very cogently by Karl Popper (perhaps the one modern philosopher generally respected in the scientific community...
...Although it is the nature of philosophers to imagine impasses and expatiate upon them at book length with schoolmas-terish dedication, [this] problem is conceptually easy to solve...
...Suppose, they say, that someday there is a scientist, Mary, who understands all of the physics and all of the brain circuitry that give rise to color vision in humans, but who is herself blind from birth...
...We understand why Mary does not know what it is like to see red: She is blind...
...It is no accident that materialist philosophers have lately tried to claim (as the science section of the New York Times reported on February 10) that even mathematical truth is a mere construct of our brains, and that space aliens with differently constructed brains would have a different mathematical truth...
...in spatial and verbal ability...
...Unfortunately, Wilson's answer misses the point...
...Wilson argues that consilience extends upwards as well, from cell biology to brain science, from brain science to psychology, from psychology to anthropology, and from anthropology to all the social sciences and humanities...
...There is the cultural relativism that has long dominated the social sciences...
...Is it "like something" to be a computer program, or General Motors, or the Navy...
...This is not merely a philosopher's quibble...
...Indeed, without accepting some concept of mind distinct from the brain, Wilson's project falls apart...
...But Wilson has what he thinks is a simple explanation of consciousness...
...In particular, it can help us to recover the idea of human nature...
...If every aspect of perception follows in some way from the physics of perceivers and the things that they perceive, then so, in particular, should the experience of "redness...
...Up to a point, he's obviously right: There is much to be gained by seeking the consilience of the humanities with biology...
...There are quite a few other arguments in favor of dualism...
...But the big question is not whether we are a biological species...
...He has authored much-admired books on ants, evolution, the birds of the Antarctic, the social life of insects, and the social life of naturalists...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 29
