(this is a continuation of yesterday's review of Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen's 1997 book Figments of Reality -- Part One can be found here)
I concluded the first part of this essay by saying that:
- I
find very compelling the authors' argument that our minds (as processes
producing figments -- simplified models -- of reality) co-evolve with
everything that influences them (external events and the extelligence
-- collective intelligence -- that manifests itself in language and
culture), but
- I prefer Gould's assertion that all evolutionary
innovations are accidental, trial-and-error, unlikely to recur in any
other evolution of life anywhere anytime, to the authors' assertion of
the inevitability of some qualities of life, including flight,
consciousness and intelligence wherever and whenever life emerges and
evolves (which is wherever and whenever it can emerge and evolve).
I
know many people find Gould's arguments for the improbability and
non-repeatability of the evolution of intelligence and consciousness
too brutal and cold; I find Stewart and Cohen's arguments for their
inevitability too romantic. I see nothing inherently 'incredible' about
a world of mind-boggling, heart-pounding beauty that has no minds or
hearts present to appreciate it.
In the latter part of Figments,
the authors move on from their arguments about complicitous [i.e.
involving interaction among complex systems] evolution to arguments
about the nature and 'reason' for intelligence (capacity for induction
and deduction), awareness (of external phenomena), consciousness
(self-awareness), and free will (capacity for making choices). They say
that our senses, our motility, and our brains (intelligence, awareness
and consciousness) co-evolved because each serves the other to the
organism's evolutionary advantage. (Though their insistence on the
correlation between these attributes raises and does not answer the
question of why animals with the most acute senses are not necessarily
the most intelligent or 'most conscious'). They also explain how the
non-algorithmic brain, with its co-evolving neurons and sensors,
differs utterly from the most sophisticated, and even conceivable,
man-made machines. It's nice to hear scientists refuting the ignorant
nonsense of the post-humanists.
The evolution of the womb, and
then the nest, and then the society protecting its young in community,
all examples of 'privilege' of the young, can all be explained by the
evolutionary advantage of trial-and-error protected 'on-the-job'
learning ('software') over genetically encoded knowledge ('hardware'),
whenever environmental contexts are in rapid flux. Learning (a social
adaptation) required co-evolution of a brain that could aggregate
patterns to recognize features (qualities of objects and actions that pose risk, or offer reward), and, say the authors, recognizing features
is the brain's main function, which is why languages are so rich in
feature descriptors and so poor at everything else. They even speculate
that our concept of beauty, of attractiveness (a face and body with the
least irregular features) stems from this feature recognition
imperative of the brain.
These features perceived/conceived by the limited-capacity brain are, of necessity, simplified
representations (figments) of reality. Our brains "project the inner
world of figments back onto our conception of the outer world of
reality so our inner, virtual world appears to be out there".
So the real 'version' of the world (e.g. the light-waves of frequencies
we perceive as 'red'), and the virtual figment of it (e.g. our
perception of 'red') are superimposed on each other, a little, perhaps,
like Google Maps' combined aerial photos and maps.
Now the
authors, after a much-deserved refutation of several popular
psychological and physical theories of consciousness and awareness,
come to the most critical part of their theory: Cells, they assert, are
complex, more like cities than "lumps of jelly", and it is foolish to
believe that the elements of even more complex organisms, right down to
molecules, are single-function creatures in the service of
consciousness, the 'humulculus' that is the 'conscious' person.
Rather, they argue, living species, including humans, are emergent properties of (what Daniel Dennett has labeled) the 'pandemonium' of the body's semi-autonomous processes -- We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their
mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our
intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more
than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to
advise these creatures' actions for their
mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our
neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
If
that's humbling, or outrageous, it is also illuminating, their argument
is persuasive. And, although the authors do not mention and do not
appear to support Gaia theory (in fact, they rarely use the term
'organism'), the analogy of this argument to Gaia theory is striking:
Just as the creatures in our bodies have formed themselves into an
organism for mutual protection and benefit, and evolved a collective
central processing unit to help them coordinate their actions, so have
all those organisms formed themselves into a super-organism, Gaia,
'all-life-on-Earth', for mutual protection and benefit, with a
collective regulatory system (the thin membranes that are our
atmosphere, our soil and our ocean) that also gives them (including us)
feedback and instruction on the delicate balancing act needed to
sustain all of Gaia's elements on our often-hostile naked Earth.
This feedback is what we feel when
we see a clear-cut forest or read about millions of oil-soaked birds or
see pictures of a tsunami's death-toll. The meta-organism Gaia is
telling us, its members, that our fellow creatures are suffering, and
urging us to action to compensate for the damage, to heal the wound.
This is, perhaps, too, what we feel when we see the devastation wrought
by 9/11, or what bees feel when a bear tears apart their hive, or what
the body's organs feel when the HIV virus invades the blood-stream.
'Grief' propels the 'observers' of the injury to action -- attack the
cause and heal the damage.
So now you see yourself as a
collective of creatures, all banded together, complicit for mutual
benefit, with 'your' brain their humble servant. Only 18 bits of the 16
million bits of information your body processes every second are
conscious, processed by those parts of your brain that constitute what
we call conscious perception and thought. John Gray says:
The
belief that we as individuals and as a species have control of
ourselves and our world is a deception... We labour under an error. We
act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope
with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves,
and yet we know we are not... We are ruled not by our own intermittent
moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment.
So
what are 'you' supposed to do about global warming, about world
poverty, about your neighbour who abuses his family? Most of what is
'you' couldn't care less about any of these things -- these problems
have no immediate impact on the creatures who are 'you'. At what point
will the damage to the air, soil and water be sufficient that the
creatures who are 'you' get the message from Gaia that the
'all-life-on-Earth' organism is imperiled? Probably when it meets their
'needs of the moment' to do so. Why, just because 'you' have a big
brain, should 'you' expect to get the message any sooner than any of
the other creatures on the planet, especially those that are living in
the immediate proximity of the consequences of this destruction --
poisoned, desertified, polluted, razed, imprisoned, tortured? And even
if we do get this message, do we have the will to do anything about it?
John Gray again:
For much of
their history and all of prehistory, humans did not see themselves as
being any different from the other animals among which they lived.
Hunter-gatherers saw their prey as equals, if not superiors, and
animals were worshiped as divinities in many traditional cultures. The
humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an
aberration. Feeble as it is today, the feeling of sharing a common
destiny with other living things is embedded in the human psyche. Those
who struggle to conserve what is left of the natural environment are
moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth.
Stewart
and Cohen turn their attention next to precisely this issue -- free
will, which might offer an answer to the question whether we, the only
species which can stop the global extinction event we are now
precipitating, have the biophilia necessary to want to
save the world, and if so if we actually have the will to do so. In a
nutshell, their answer is that free will is largely an illusion --
there is substantial evidence that we are what we are and we will do
what we will do, and 'we' have no say in it, but (big but) we are also conditioned ('educated') by our culture and that culture can have an effect on what we do, and don't do.
Culture
is substantially local -- the pressure to conform, to do what we would
otherwise not do, decreases substantially with distance, as we move
from family, peers and community to nation and world. Western culture
is also highly 'individualistic' -- with some notable exceptions,
Western culture attempts to interfere minimally in the actions of the
'individual' organism; other modern human civilization cultures exert
much more social pressure to conform to behavioural and belief norms.
But these individual freedoms are substantially impotent: Our culture
offers us little opportunity to exercise 'individual freedom' -- the
knowledge, wealth and power to actually exercise significant personal
choice, to a degree that would dramatically affect other people or the
world, has been restricted to an elite few since the dawn of
civilization culture. The purpose of culture, after all, is to make
'you' just like everyone else -- your parents, your teachers. your
employers, your preachers, your political representatives -- because
they have succeeded in the gene pool, and therefore must be a model
worth emulating and continuing.
So your free will is an illusion
thrice-over: The creatures who are 'you' have already made up 'your'
mind what 'you' are going to do, though they might sometimes grit their
teeth (if they had teeth) and constrain what they do by what 'your'
culture considers tolerable behaviour. And even if you did have
the free will to overcome what the creatures who are 'you' had already
decided to do (or not do), and even if 'your' individuality hadn't
already been culturally crushed by the suffocating pressure to conform,
it is doubtful you would have the resources and opportunity to do what
'you' really wanted to do anyway -- your culture has already removed that temptation, that possibility.
The
authors wryly refer to the acculturation process, including language,
education, myth and ritual, as the Make-a-Human Kit, and the fictitious
alien teacher in the book's sci-fi excerpts is named Liar-to-Children.
The Kit, and the system that employs it, has enormous inertia -- it is
'recursive' and inherently change-resistant just as it is evolutionary,
probably because we realize that a society based on software (culture)
is much more fragile and prone to crash if the software 'fails' than
one based on hardware, where the program is, at least in the short run,
tamper-proof. The Hitlers and Stalins and Maos of the last century
alone show the consequences of such software failures.
In the final chapter of Figments,
before the whimsical and imaginative alien prologue, the authors wander
into the domain of anthropology in an attempt to predict our future,
and unfortunately do so badly. By a kind of gene/meme analogy, they
attempt to argue for the inevitability of a global 'multiculture' and
the need for that culture to embrace complexity and appreciate the
potential of its extelligence (collective intelligence) to resolve the
conflicts and problems that have accompanied this evolution. The
argument appears to be based on the myth of selfish competition among
species and the denial of Gaia theory and biophilia. Since the authors
don't deal with these topics it is impossible to understand why
they are making this argument, but it detracts from a book that would
have been fine without it. This chapter is full of 'ifs' and 'hopes',
long on ideology and almost a desperate need for optimism, and short on
science and credibility. Like some otherwise great movies, this book
runs a few minutes too long and loses its way.
I would instead
have ended it on a promising note that the authors sound in the
penultimate chapter -- that human society, being built on a foundation
of culture (software) rather than just genetics (hardware), has evolved
at an accelerating rate as a result: Grandchildren acclimatize easily
to a culture that would be utterly foreign and unacceptable to their
grandparents. No other species on Earth, to our knowledge, can change
its behaviour that quickly. We therefore have the capacity
to change our culture from one that is inexorably destroying all life
on Earth -- and even the ability to support life -- to one that could
revere and protect the diversity of life on our planet and the
environment of which we are all a part -- a Meta-Culture
that is inclusive -- in just two generations. Indeed, at the current
rate of human population growth, resource consumption and environmental
destruction, that is just about all the time we have. Our grandchildren
are the light, not yet visible but fraught with promise, at the end of
civilization's dark tunnel.
(Part Three of this essay, coming soon, will discuss Theatre of the Mind, a new book on consciousness, and integrate its theories with those in Figments)
Painting
above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in
1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
