First, from Raymond Tallis, author of Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity
The World Health Organisation seems to have been sleeping on the job. It has failed to report two serious intellectual illnesses that have now reached pandemic proportions: neuromania and Darwinitis. After a long incubation period and a phase of gradual dissemination, they raced through academe and, after spreading into the wider republic of letters, now have a firm hold on the popular imagination.
Neuromania is the belief that you and your mind are neural activity — you are your brain. Brain activity is not only (to use a distinction familiar to philosophers) a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness and the regulation of behaviour (which is true), but also a sufficient one that requires no more explanation.
Darwinitis, a pathological variant of Darwinism, is the belief that the theory of evolution not only explains the origin of the organism Homo sapiens (true) but also what humans are now (not true); that it accounts for our cultural leaves as well as our cultural roots. It follows from this that, to understand people, you should peer into their brains; and to understand why their brains function as they do, you should reflect on the circumstances in the distant past that shaped them in the Darwinian struggle for survival.
Countless bestsellers expound various aspects of the doctrine that, as humans are essentially animals, the biological sciences are the key to self-knowledge. Brain scans are as difficult to avoid in serious newspapers as scantily clad bodies are in the tabloids. Dozens of new disciplines, prefixed by “neuro” or “evolutionary” or “neuro-evolutionary”, testify that humanities aspire to become “animalities” and humanist scholars dream of lab coats.
Neuro-aesthetics, neuroevolutionary economics, neuro-politics, neuro-law and neuro-theology (to name but a few) all preach the doctrine that all of us — artists and their audiences, consumers, voters and legislators, felons, religious worshippers — are acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces.
According to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, in The Social Animal, neuroscience helps to “fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy”.
Do neuromania and Darwinitis matter? Yes they do, first of all, because they are wrong. Contrary to what is generally assumed , neuroscientists have not discovered that we boil down merely to cerebral activity. Yes, they have demonstrated with increasing precision and breath-taking ingenuity that there is a correlation between activity in bits of the brain and aspects of experience, emotion, memory and so on. But these correlations are not as tight as has been suggested and, in the case of things such as the experience of beauty, wisdom and love (the cause of much excitement in the popular press) they have been established on the basis of experiments crude enough to make a Martian laugh.
Neuromania should not survive a simple comparison of nerve impulses and ordinary experiences. Those correlations notwithstanding, there is nothing in the activity in my cortex to support the belief that it is identical to the sights, sounds, smells — the phenomenal world — that I am currently experiencing. Tellingly, the vast majority of nerve impulses, even in the more upmarket arrondissements of the brain, such as the cortex, are not associated with consciousness, something that has prompted increasingly desperate but unavailing attempts to specify the special features of neural activity that are.
If basic stuff such as perception eludes neural explanation, it is not surprising that there are no signs that the profound mystery of the simultaneous unity and multiplicity of the conscious moment — how such things as the sound of the birds, the feeling of pressure on the feet, a thought, a memory are both separate and belong together— as well as our explicit sense of a past and future and the feeling that we are in the centre of a world that is our personal space are capable of being translated into events in the material, impersonal brain.
The case against Darwinitis is even more obvious — just look at the difference between an hour of ordinary human life and an hour of ordinary animal life. To see that difference, however, you must first remove the linguistic spectacles that make it almost impossible to shake off the habit of humanising animals and animalising humans. We should hesitate before using the same words to describe utterly different capacities in humans and beasts; for example, using “memory” to refer both to my painful recollection of a past humiliation and to a sea slug’s altered behaviour in response to a series of electric shocks. Darwinitis uses terminology, not empirical observation, to close the huge gap between the lives of organisms and our lives, which are actively led, shaped by explicit norms, institutions and abstract frames of reference, and informed by individual and shared narratives.
Neuromania and Darwinitis also matter because they get in the way of trying to make post-religious sense of ourselves. They offer a false naturalistic account of what we are, as if it were the only alternative to a supernatural account. Darwin’s demonstration that it is not necessary to assign a separate day for the creation of humans as the Creator’s pièce de résistance does not disprove that we are truly exceptional. Defining, explaining and celebrating our exceptional nature is one of the great intellectual tasks that faces secular humanity. It will not be advanced by denying that we are profoundly different.
When policymakers take their cue from biologists, we really should worry. Brooks’s The Social Animal is, we are told, on every politician’s reading list and we are getting used to well-meaning characters such as Iain Duncan Smith defending early intervention policies on the ground that early childhood abuse might result in antisocial behaviour being “hard-wired”. At least this is progressive and one might settle for the right deed done for the wrong reason, but there is something chilling about the politician-as-neuroshepherd knowing what is best for the nervous systems of his flock.
But there are worse consequences. John Gray — a political philosopher turned celebrity misanthrope — argued in Straw Dogs that Darwin has proved that we are incorrigibly bloodthirsty, and that neuroscience has shown our free will to be a fantasy. We are therefore powerless to make the world a better place. What is more, he thinks that our inevitable doom is no bad thing as human life is not obviously worth preserving, since Darwinism shows that it has “no more meaning than that of a slime mould”.
and this riposte from Richard Lines
In his article “Mankind is more than just a bundle of nerves” (Opinion, June 4) Raymond Tallis would have us believe that scientific explanation is to be regarded as some kind of “disease”. Tallis seems to be one of a dying breed of “Mysterians” — people who retain a strange belief that certain phenomena must remain forever supernatural (beyond any naturalistic explanation) if they are to be regarded as special.
When we were children, we might see a rainbow in the sky, and wonder at its beauty and its magic. We could not explain where it came from, how it was created, why it had the spectacular shape and colours that it did. All of this was a mystery to us, the rainbow seemed supernatural. Believing the rainbow is supernatural of course opens the door to additional superstitions such as the fabled crock of gold. Nothing seems impossible once we accept supernaturalism and our imagination takes flight.
But now we have put our childish ignorance behind us, and we know that there is a perfectly naturalistic explanation for the wondrous rainbow. Does the simple fact that we can explain the rainbow detract from its wonder or its beauty, or make it any less special? According to Tallis’s philosophy, yes it does. In his excellent bestseller Unweaving the
Rainbow, Richard Dawkins describes how Keats similarly accused Newton of destroying the poetry of the rainbow by explaining the origin of its colours. Keats was undoubtedly another Mysterian.
To a scientist, the wonder and the beauty of nature lie not in the fact that certain phenomena originate from any kind of supernatural and mysterious realm, forever beyond human understanding. Rather, they lie in the fact that apparently complex phenomena can and do emerge quite naturally from the simplest of building blocks, and can be explained. Explaining consciousness on the basis of neurochemistry takes away much of the mystery of how the human mind works, but does not make it any less special. Human beings are indeed very special, not by virtue of any supernaturalism peculiar to that species, but simply by virtue of the fact that humans have evolved brains which allow them to be the only creatures in the known universe able to question their own existence. We do not need to cling to a belief in the supernatural as the source of all wonder and beauty in the world. Rather, we need to grow up, rise above our childish ignorance and appreciate that nature is still very special even when we can explain how she works. dr alex christie East Grinstead, West Sussex Sir, One person not guilty of “Darwinitis” was Charles Darwin himself.
In the concluding pages of his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), a passage that was quoted in his obituary in this newspaper (April 21, 1882), Darwin wrote:
“Important as the struggle for existence has been, and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of man’s nature is concerned, there are other agencies more important.
“For the moral qualities are advanced either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, &., than through natural selection; though to this latter agency may be safely attributed the social instincts which afforded the development of the moral sense.”
No comments:
Post a Comment