Human intelligence and the Birth of Reason

One of my many unpublished manuscripts is a book-length treatment of the origins, evolution and individual development of intelligence, entitled The Birth of Reason. It treats the concept of 'intelligence' in the same way a biologist might treat 'life' – i.e., as a general term for everything human beings and other natural intelligences are and do, rather than (by analogy with for example, ‘the organism’) a narrowly cognitive process. That is, it is designed to explain the full span of intelligent activity, including not only the usual cognitive powers associated with that term but also the possibility of history, consciousness, global social and economic systems and so on. It includes a comprehensive account of the relationship between human and other natural forms of intelligence, such as primates. I have never tried to have this book published. I don’t really know why not – it is complete, the few people who have read it have spoken very well of it, and there are no other treatments of intelligence in this extremely broad sense of which I am aware. If you would like to know more about it, I have created a new website from which the full text can be accessed.

Unfortunately Richard Dawkins barely exists either

A belated reaction to the splendid ‘Don’t worry, God probably doesn’t exist, so stop worrying and get on with life’ bus adverts going around London a while back. Excellent – I’m only sorry that there aren’t more.

How about ‘God was just Jesus’ imaginary friend’, or perhaps ‘God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist’ over a picture of a small child in Auschwitz? I’ve always wondered what excuse God will come up with over that one. If I had stood by and done nothing when I could have ended all that suffering in an instant, can you imagine what the world would have thought of me? So why think otherwise of God?

But despite the rightness of the sentiment, Richard Dawkins (who I believe a hand in these advertisements) is far from having a credible answer to the problem religion is trying to solve. His response to religion seems to be, in brief, that it is scientifically incorrect, and so should be disregarded. The first part is right enough, although I doubt that the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury would consider it much of a criticism. But I am sure that they would respond – equally correctly, I’m afraid - that religion isn’t about empirical truth anyway. And when they start getting onto what religion is about, their solutions may be completely fanciful but they are also solutions to perfectly real problems before which science (at least in the guise Dawkins favours) is as helpless as a baby.

Religion is about meaning – about what life means, about where we come from and where we are going to, about our relationship with one another, with ourselves, and with the world. The religious response to all these questions is God, which is where I, like Dawkins, get off. But they are all perfectly valid questions: without a sense that life has any meaning, not much is left but boredom, horror and ashes. Yet this is precisely what Dawkins is committed to. Not only is his general (very conventional) account of science absolutely incapable of posing, let alone answering, questions of meaning, but the specific theories to which he is committed – above all natural selection – is completely opposed to the idea that life has any meaning at all. In this he finds himself in good, if uncongenial company, for Stephen Jay Gould, who seems to have disagreed mightily with Dawkins about the very Darwinism to which they were jointly committed, once wrote a sad little book about the place of the individual in evolution, and could only conclude that individuals were empty, futile, accidental things.

In both Gould and Dawkins’ versions of Darwinism, there is no way out: not only does life have no intrinsic significance (true) but it is quite unthinkable that we should have the capacity to construct a meaningful reality (profoundly false). In their conventional forms, random variation and natural selection allow no space for meaning over and above being programmed to seek out and respond to things that enhance our reproductive fitness. Above that level there may be all manner of meaning-like things, but that is where they all lead. But if meaning is really just code for reproductive fitness (or making a lot of money, or any other contemporary cultural shibboleth) then it is resting on its own antithesis. Like existentialism and a dozen other philosophies, the only advice it can offer is to look the other way, and then die. Meaning is essential if the scientific view of life is not to be turned into a tragedy, but if the best we can hope for is Dawkins/Gould/Dennett’s narrow reading of Darwinism and scientistic undermining of meaning, the only possible outcome is the mutually assured destruction of science and happiness.

It is clear from their writings that not that either Dawkins or Gould is comfortable in this position. Who would be? This is their lives we are talking about too – according to their own theories, meaningless accidents. Yet when they try to get out of this bind – as when Dawkins appeals to our big brains to fight back against the worst excesses of our genes or Daniel Dennett (another member of this charmless circle) asserts that real freedom just ‘evolved’ because it was selectively advantageous that it should - they just sound stupid. Were they – and we – not so blinded by the authority of this rather trite interpretation of natural selection, we would all be shouting that the emperor has no clothes. Or rather, that he may be fully dressed, but he is not emperor.

And it is all so unnecessary. Natural selection is completely compatible with the idea that intelligent beings are capable of constructing a meaningful reality, and we don’t have to be constantly undermining ourselves by sneaking back and claiming that it’s all really about reproductive fitness after all. The crucial thing to understand is that, just as there are things that precede evolution and cannot be sensibly explained in such terms – the whole of physics and chemistry, for example – so there may be things that are every bit a material as bodies and genes and nervous systems, but which are also post-biological. That is, they rely entirely on the existence of a functional biological ‘platform’, but once that platform is assured, their interests are as far removed from those of life in general as life in general is from a chemical reaction. The differences are qualitative, fundamental, and include a huge range of novelties – consciousness, history, culture, technology, and so on.

This layer is intelligence. And I cannot emphasise too strongly that this is not simply as intelligence considered as just another faculty of the brain. Rather, the relationship between intelligence and life in general is much the same as that between life in general and chemistry or chemistry and physics – a radical reorganisation leading to both the resolution of key problems biology by itself finds insuperable and the introduction of new problems that our biology finds unintelligible.

The former includes the objectivity (as expressed in science, technology, industry, and the possibilities of radical environmental management) that allows intelligence to ‘see’ random variation and natural selection in a completely different (i.e., objective) light from any non-intelligent creature, and so to grasp its logic and the solutions it requires in ways that completely circumvent evolution itself. The second is this very problem of meaning, which spins form the very same source – the objectivity that tells us not only our place in evolution but also questions our place in the universe and in our own existences. Sometimes intelligence comes up with blindingly incorrect answers of which religion is only the longest running. But that does not mean that it cannot come up with something better. Darwinism, for example.

So if Richard Dawkins - and the late Stephen Jay Gould and all the other biologists – cannot even imagine this possibility, it is not because Darwinism precludes it (see my Birth of Reason) but because they are unable to grasp that Darwinism describes only one step, and by no means the last, in existence. And intelligence is the next.

Does intelligence evolve?

Human beings and human intelligence are indisputably the products of evolution. But that does not mean that human intelligence will itself evolve further. In fact it won’t.

Well, if that doesn’t sound like special pleading, I don’t know what does. But then human intelligence is special. Or rather natural intelligence as a whole is special. Not magical or blessed or the product of a special creation, but rather so placed by evolution itself that it can undo the knots and straighten out the hidden connections that driven evolution itself, and so take charge of the process.

Yet if natural intelligence is special on every level, it is only in the same sense that organic structures and processes are ‘special’ from the point of view of physical of chemical systems. Just as life introduces a whole raft of new structures such as ecosystems, reproduction and natural selection, and yet is the product of prior physical, chemical and generally material process, so natural intelligence introduces a whole new range of elements – not least history, consciousness and individuality – that have analogues, but not equals, among organisms.

The consequence of all this is that although intelligence assumes a biological substrate and platform and could neither have evolved nor developed without the pre-existence of life, once it exists it does so on terms that are very different from those of evolution. So if evolution continues to be a factor intelligence must continue to deal with – which it certainly does – that does not mean that it is determined by evolution. After all, a cat has to deal with gravity, but you would be hard pressed to explain a cat’s startling acrobatics through the equations of physics.

So in what sense is intelligence immune to evolution? As I have argued elsewhere, it is a long story, perhaps stretching back to eh origins of life, but the basic case is quite easily explained. It is a story in three chapters, to be told in no particular order, about the most basic structures of human existence: objects, subjects and the world.

What are you doing?

Let me start with a very abstract claim (don’t worry, it only lasts a paragraph). Everything human beings do consists of constructing objects. You know something when you can grasp it on its own terms – which is to say, objectively. You know you have succeeded in doing something when the reality you were trying to achieve endures without you continually having to shore it up - which is to say, as an object in its own right. You know you are acting rationally when you can say what goal you are trying to achieve or what value you are trying to realise, plus explain how you are going to get there without introducing prejudices and assumptions you cannot defend – which is to say, as objects on their own terms. And so on.

Leaving out the philosophical problem of whether objectivity can ever be complete – personally I have no doubt that it can, but the present argument doesn’t rely on this fact – how does this make intelligence any different from any other kind of organic structure, and what difference does it make to evolution?

In short, one of the most striking yet unregarded facts about human beings is that we know what we are doing. There is, unless we deliberately adopt the method of trial and error, no place for random variation or natural selection in intelligent activity. But neither are we limited to executing pre-programmed instructions, even if we allow for the qualifications of learning, memory, facultative adaptations, and so on. Unlike any non-intelligent organism, human beings are capable of saying and justifying in advance what they are trying to do, devising and justifying a plan for doing it, executing and justifying that plan in an orderly manner, and continually monitoring and justifying whether we are fulfilling our purpose.

Piaget had a useful term for this ability – he called it 'object permanence'. By this he meant that our intelligence lets us recognise that things exist independently of our consciousness of them. Even from consciousness’s own point of view, object permanence means that we can look at things in a detached manner, and see not only objects themselves but also the relationships between them, the relationships between these relationships, and so on. As a result, the simple ability to recognise that things exist in themselves soon allows us also to recognise the rules, systems and laws that determine how they exist and the kinds of things our objects can, must and will – or will not - do.

Nor is this talent limited to consciousness as such. Because of our insight into what makes our objects what they are, we not only know that a house we build still exists when we are not aware of it (which is radical enough) but we made it that way precisely so that it would exist – and act - as it does, independently of our own actions. We made it with walls and roof and doors and windows and rooms and systems and furniture and all the rest so that these things would do things for us without us continually having to do them for ourselves.

In short, the object permanence that intelligence gives us also gives us technology. Of course, many organisms use small parts of their environment in an analogous manner, especially (for example) nesting creatures. But nest-building does not seem to be based on any genuine insight into the nature of the situation its maker is in, the nature of the materials they are using or the purpose for which they are used. In human beings not only is this insight there but this talent seems to be generalisable to absolutely any situation, from architecture to global communications systems to evolutionary theory.

So what difference does all this make to evolution? In a nutshell, if we can grasp that things exist independently of our consciousness of them, this is as true of the biological forces by which we are surrounded as of anything else. In other words, we can recognise evolution itself, how it works and what it is doing – and might do – to us. We can recognise, anticipate and deal with sources of variation and selection and decide for ourselves whether we want to allow, evade, forestall or reverse them. Unlike any non-intelligent organism, we can understand what is happening to us and take action if it is not what we want. Of course, we don’t always succeed, but that is a different matter. Meanwhile, through our objective grasp of the structures whereby life operates, we can invent our own selective forces, or intervene still more directly. At the moment we are just beginning to discover genetic engineering; who knows what we will know a century from now.

Who are you?

One of the most basic rules of evolution is that organisms in different lineages never throw up quite the same structure. The bodies of shark, ichthyosaur and dolphin may be streamlined in broadly similar ways, and the eye may have evolved over and over again, but never did this process result in the same structure showing up in more than one place. The possible ways of solving the same functional problem are so many and starting points and conditions so varied that the odds are simply too long.

Except, it turns out, in the case of intelligence. The evidence is thin on the ground, but at present it looks like, when organisms as diverse as human beings, chimpanzees, birds and dolphins start to develop intelligence, what they produce is not just a set of functionally equivalent structures – the equivalent of the fish and whale body-shapes – but exactly the same intelligence, over and over again.

It’s very hard to prove, especially as non-human intelligence is generally so limited and so hard to interpret, but there are at least two features of all natural forms of intelligence that strongly suggest that the same structure has popped up repeatedly. Firstly, the developmental process seems to be the same for all forms of natural intelligence. Intelligence develops through the same sequence of stages no matter what the starting point. If human and bird intelligence were not structurally the same, this would be quite absurd. Secondly, when human beings and dolphins of equivalent levels of intelligence make mistakes because of their lack of maturity, the mistakes they make are of the same kind. Again, if the underlying structure were not the same this would be impossible to explain.

From an evolutionary point of view, this is just about as odd as can be. Just consider the evolutionary distance and biological differences between human beings, birds and dolphins. It is more than two hundred million years since we last shared a common ancestor with African grey parrots. None of our brains are very similar either, especially not in the areas human intelligence relies on.

Why does all this matter to evolution? Because the internal structure of natural intelligence – which is what the above was all about – is what is also known as the subject. As an intelligent being, it is the framework that defines your every experience, shapes your every desire, allows you to make sense of the world and organises how you act. It is, at the most abstract level, who you are.

It’s also another thing that takes you out of evolution. Because if all intelligence shares the same structure internally, then the evolution of intelligence can only conclude in one result. There is no variation around it, and no possibility of selection between variants, because there aren’t any. The structure of intelligence seems to be completely invariable. So unless evolution is able to take intelligence away as well as give it – and I think that the other sections of this essay make it clear that that is not likely – once you have intelligence, evolution has lost its power. Once you are a subject, you have escaped from evolution.

Where are you?

You live in the world. Which is odd, because no non-intelligent creature does. It may – must – inhabit a niche, to which it responds and which it may even change in various ways. But in the absence of a stable subjectivity and a capacity for grasp things objectively, a niche is a pretty unstable, fragmented place. After all, if the organism has no idea that things exist objectively then it can have no sense of the niche itself – which is to say, of whole within which it lives. Still less can it have any idea how it works. On the other hand, if the organism itself has no consistent or stable internal structure then there is no one there for whom the niche could exist.

Hence the oddity of living in a world. It is a single whole, which no niche is. But that is only the first oddity about the world. For a world can’t even be properly compared with an entire environment. Hence its second oddity. For while the organism’s niche includes (one might say) only that subset of its environment that directly affects or supports its activity, even its environment includes only that subset of the universe that might impinge on its niche.

For example, the tulips in my back garden already inhabit quite a large niche, given that they are directly affected not only by the soil they grow in, the garden fences that protect them from the wind and the occasional watering they get from us but also the entire UK weather system. As for its environment, current global warming means that their effective environment also includes Chinese factories, the machinations of New York stock market investors and the land management policies of the Brazilian government. But leaving aside the possibility of a rematch with the meteorite that put paid to the dinosaurs, I think it’s safe to say that their environment does not include much outside the Earth and nothing at all from outside the solar system.

Which cannot be said of the world of intelligent beings. That doesn’t seem to have any limitations at all - its ultimate universe is the universe. Quanta, quasars – they’re all there. How is that possible? Back to objects. For if we recognise objects exist independently of our consciousness of them, then we can’t help also recognising that they themselves exist in relationships with one another (and quite possibly with things we are not even aware of), whose existence is immediately implied by our recognising that the objects we are directly interested in exist. But if that is the case, then our limits in things is not limited to the parts and aspects of the universe that might us in more practical (e.g., adaptive) reasons. In fact we have a name for the study of things, regardless of whether we have any practical interest in them. It is called science.

Hence our ability – again - to transcend evolution. We inhabit a world that itself transcends any adaptive interest. Object permanence also gives us a practical grasp of that world that allows us to change it – make it more in our own image, perhaps. As a result, from generation to generation we have created a world that is increasingly defined by human concerns, human purposes, human desires, and human systems. This has now reached the point where, for better or (as now seems likely) for worse, human beings are now the biggest factor in the lives of many of the world’s species. It is likely that we will have killed off a third of the world’s species some time soon, and if the research Mark Lynas cites in his terrifying Six Degrees is anything like correct, we will soon have wrought so much damage that no species – and certainly no ecosystem – can be considered safe. But from a purely evolutionary point of view, this complete reversal of the relationship between organism and evolution means that the essential question is now whether evolution is controlled by intelligence rather than the reverse. Plainly, I would say, the answer is Yes.

How is this possible?

Finally, how is all this possible from an evolutionary point of view? How can evolution throw up a structure that breaks all the rules of evolution? It has nothing to do with the usual villains, such as ‘Intelligent Design’ (was any theory ever more absurdly named?), some of whose more blatant absurdities are catalogued here. The truth is a long but really quite simple story, which I have tried to piece together in my Birth of Reason, of which you can download a free copy here. And if you would like to read a more detailed version of the present argument, try here.

Intelligent Design – So what?

I remain as bemused as ever by Intelligent Design (ID). My problem with it is not in sifting through the empirical pros and cons but in understanding why anyone would offer such extraordinarily weak arguments for what they surely regard as an extraordinarily important issue.

To start with, I am not an atheist. I don't have enough religious feeling to qualify as an atheist. I don't believe in god in the same sense that I don't believe in fairies, but no one would call me an 'adaemonist'.

Yet I don’t find ID completely nonsensical. In fact many years ago it suddenly occurred to me that the universe is not the finished product, but only a succession of prototypes, with each successive tick of the cosmic clock adding a new version, each improving slightly on its predecessor. The final design, which would show the universe in its ultimate, perfect form, will emerge only at the end of time. The universe isn’t the design, it’s the designing.

It gave me quite a shiver. Such a model would explain the somewhat unsatisfactory nature of the universe as we human beings currently experience it, for example. Satisfyingly Hegelian too, which suited my temper in those days. However, almost immediately I realised that it didn’t really help, because there was no way to telling the difference between this and what nature seems to be doing under its own steam.

Unfortunately, ID doesn’t strike me as being half as plausible as my personal fantasy. In fact I could not initially think of any reason even to consider it as an alternative. But just to jump-start the argument, I have tried to identify a sequence of assumptions that would make it more plausible.

Firstly, let me assume there are certain key problems science really is unable to solve, such as the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of consciousness. I know no reason at all to believe that science can't solve these problems (though in the case of consciousness I am quite certain that contemporary science is going about it the wrong way), but without this assumption there doesn’t seem to be very much reason to turn to any non-scientific alternative.

Secondly, let me go beyond my first assumption and assume that we can prove that science can't solve these problems. This is a much stronger assumption, since it puts explicit limits on the powers of our single most powerful mode of explanation even in areas to which it seems proper to apply it. This assumption makes a mockery of science’s performance to date - how often has someone (often an eminent scientist) pronounced the limits of science, only for them to be rolled back yet again within a few years? - but it seems essential to the ID case. Certainly ID's own arguments for limiting science’s domain make little sense. But again just to get the ball rolling, I will make this assumption too.

So what follows from science being inherently unable to solve these central problems? That ID is correct? That ID is at least worth considering? No. Nothing follows from this. One might just as reasonably infer (as scientists and philosophers often do) that there are simply inherent limits to our ability to grasp the universe – that we are victims of ‘cognitive closure’.

Again I disagree with both the idea of cognitive closure and the usual grounds for asserting it, which is that there is no reason for evolution to have bestowed on us the ability to understand everything, so it didn’t. I think this argument is both logically fallacious, based on factually incorrect premises and fundamentally misunderstands the origins and nature of intelligence, but as an explanaiton for any limits to science it is at least as good an alternative as Intelligent Design.

Better, in fact. After all, neither pragmatic nor inherent limits to science make any other alternative explanation any more likely than before. As a positive explanation of the kind, both science and ID offer must stand on its own merits. Neither is made one jot more credible by the failure of other explanations. Given the possibility of cognitive closure, ID would not even be justified by the demonstrable failure of every possible alternative.

But let’s assume that the failure of science does imply that ID is correct. At this point in the argument, most proponents of Intelligent Design seem pretty keen (at the moment) to deny that they are using this idea to smuggle the concept of God into the argument (or, more precisely, into science lessons in schools), so let’s see if we can help them.

OK, so we assume that there must be an Intelligent Designer. Does that mean that this designer is God? No. It only suggests that it he/she is a designer. Even sticking within the limits of conventional Western thought, this entity could just as easily be thought of as a sort of cosmic engineer, for even an entity that is capable of operating on a literally universal scale isn’t necessarily divine. In his sci-fi novel Contact, Carl Sagan included a nice detail – that if you worked out the value of pi to millions and millions of places, you would eventually arrive at a string of 1’s and 0’s that, if printed out out in a rectangular matrix, displayed a perfect circle. Thus proving that the universe was indeed designed, and even that the designer could tinker with the laws of mathematics, which is a lot more profound than merely fixing the laws of physics. But it says nothing about the divine status of the universe's maker. Certainly not that they are Our Maker.

But how about if we concede that our cosmic engineer is indeed divine? What does that get us? From the point of view of the usual ID enthusiast, not much. Let's leave aside the problem of knowing the nature of an entity that inhabits a universe within which the whole of our universe is only a detail, and whose nature is, purely by virtue of its divinity, unknowable in any meaningful sense. Assuming we could penetrate such mysteries, which God is it? I’m damned if I know. As it were. It certainly does not follow from anything about the concept of divinity (especially not a deity of whose existence we know solely through their creation of the universe) that he, she or it is Christian, Jewish or of any other denomination, why they created the universe or what it all means. For all we know, it was Spargliqot, the Niddli God of Alpha Centauri, who did it for a lark.

On the other hand, unless you want to treat the whole of Genesis as a metaphor (and therefore just another inadequate pointer to the nature of our Intelligent Designer), I can’t for the life of me see how any of this process connects to the process of Creation described in the Old Testament.

So where does that leave Intelligent Design? Nowhere. It is a complete non sequitur, not only with regard to any alleged shortcomings of science but also (at least as far as the apologists of any particular religion are concerned) at every other step along the way. In fact it seems to me that the only way to validate the theory of Intelligent Design is by assuming that it is true!

So why do fundamentalists bother? Because they are making the same mistake that Christians have made ever since Copernicus, which is the desire to have it both ways. They want to believe in a deity of such unimaginable nature, character and intentions that they would be able to create the universe, but they want to justify their belief in their unimaginable deity by imagining them anyway.

For a religion that is supposedly based on faith, it's an odd way to go about things.

On theories that don't matter

Many years ago I thought of writing an essay entitled ‘On theories that don’t matter’. The basic idea was that there are three kinds of scientific theory. Some are true (as far as we can tell), and so matter. Others are demonstrably false, and so don’t matter scientifically, although they may be fruitful in other ways or historically interesting. And then there is a third kind of theory, which claims that it is true that there is – and can be - no specific category of knowledge we can call ‘truth’ (or indeed ‘falsehood’).

If such a theory is false, then it goes the same way as any other false theory. But if it is true, and it succeeds in proving that there is no such as thing as truth or falsehood, then there is still no reason to think that they matter. After all, they deny the reality of the one criterion by which something can be thought to matter from a scientific point of view – its truth. If they are true then there is no such thing as truth, so they are not true.

But unfortunately, if a theory that undermines the very notion of truth and falsehood is found to be true (whatever that might mean) then there is no such thing as truth in general, so no possibility of ‘scientific’ knowledge at all.

So it is a serious problem for scientists everywhere. And yet many of the most important (or at least most prominent) theories of the last two centuries have been of this third, epistemologically nihilistic kind. Behaviourism, evolutionary psychology, meme theory – all of them render the very idea of truth meaningless. If they are false, they are taking up a lot of intellectual bandwidth; and if they are true then we are up the creek.

Nor is this just about science. Philosophically speaking too, many – I suspect most – of the major schools of western thought have implicitly taken a similarly self-contradictory perspective. Empiricism is obviously incapable of delivering anything like truth, since there is no reason to believe that any accumulation of particular experiences, no matter how assembled, would tell us the truth. On the contrary, it simply implies that experience is little more than an accumulation of prejudices. But rationalism equally self-contradictory. Although it argues that we don’t enter into experience naked, it never seems to explain why we should think that the structures we bring to experience represent anything better than systematic experience.

Philosophy has differed from most of science in that it generally admits to these problems. Kant and Hume, for example, were entirely explicit about the impossibility at arriving at the truth. Science has seldom been quite so consistent. Indeed, some of its main practitioners have adopted a positively Olympian position, and propagating the truth of theories that, if applied to themselves, would cause them to disappear into their own unintelligibility.

For example, had behaviourism been true, it would also be true that the only reason I believed behaviourism to be true was that it was ‘reinforcing’ to believe it. Or rather, I did not even ‘believe’ it; I simply said that I believed it. What is more, I said that I believed it for the same reason (or rather, the same cause) that I like strawberries or that I am afraid of giant spiders – because it is reinforcing to do so. At no point does any actual belief take place, and in no sense can any of my statements be thought of in terms of truth or falsehood. Likewise for B.F. Skinner and his supporters – whenever they made a statement in favour of behaviourism or offered evidence in favour of their hypotheses, they made them – and we said we believed them – solely because it was reinforcing to do so. Truth and falsehood never came into it. Or rather, I say that truth and falsehood never come into it, exactly as though that were a meaningful proposition, but in fact I’m just saying this particular sting of words because my personal reinforcement history makes me do it. Under different personal circumstances I might have said that truth and falsehood were absolutely essential. For all I know, that is just what people did say, when behaviourism was still in vogue. Or rather, I say ‘for al I know’, but…

And so on, down the dark tunnels of infinite regression. In the end, if behaviourism is true then behaviourism – and literally everything else you or I or any other human being has ever said - is utterly empty.

Likewise for evolutionary psychology. According to this account, we ‘know’ about the world as we do because evolution has found it adaptive to look at it one way rather than another – the way, say, a crocodile looks at the world. Not only does this offer us no particular epistemic access to the world but, according to evolutionary psychology, it is utterly improbable that we could ever have evolved any way of looking at the world that was any closer than the demands of reproductive fitness required. And even if our evolved worldview were absolutely spot-on, there is no way we could know that it was, and no way we could kept it that way if evolution decides to head off in some other direction.

It is surprising just how many supposedly scientific theories of human knowledge are denying any strictly epistemic grounds (including evidence, argument, logic, mathematics, scientific method, and so on) for believing things. Of course, if they are true then it is not a self-contradiction, because nothing is a self-contradiction, because there are no criteria of logical coherence that make any sense any more. Even so, I find it quite worrying. Well, I say that I find it worrying, but…

All these theories – and many more - are undermined by the same problem, namely that they deny either the reality of or the relationship between the knowing structure we usually call the subject and the world of objects we may or may not be able to know. For a theory to matter doesn’t demand that we have any particular view about what subject and object are or exactly how they are linked together, but it does demand that you have some idea that knowledge is a relationship of this general kind. Eliminate either side and knowledge dissolves into dust.

Which is of course just what all the theories I referred to above do. They either deny that one side (usually the subjective side) exists or undermine its independent reality. Like a viral infection (a metaphor widely employed by meme theorists), a pattern of reinforcement or an advantageous adaptation invades your brain, takes command of its resources to replicate itself, and there’s nothing you can do about it. A meme or an adaptation or a reinforcement can only be displaced from our apparently quite brainless brains through another equally brainless process of selection or reinforcement.

There’s nothing you can do about it. But then, there’s not much ‘you’ left over to do anything. ‘You’ are little (and in some versions nothing) more than the sum of the adaptations or memes or reinforcements in your head – which is to say, the sum of your current prejudices. Can you simply criticise and reject a prejudice on the grounds that it violates your goals or values or that it simply doesn’t make sense? Richard Dawkins seems to think so. But then both your values and the criteria and mechanisms by which you make sense of things are themselves just more prejudices you had already been infected by.

So even if you could evict them, what difference would it make? Such prejudices play no special role in the workings of your mind, such as providing the higher order integrative function that is usually assigned to logic or mathematics or regulating activity and experience through values. There is no possibility of either verification or falsification. On the contrary, all of these theories are inherently trivialising. Nothing rises above the level of a catchy tune, a good feeling or a neat reproductive trick.

Rather oddly, something else all these theories share is a comprehensive disregard for what is already known about how our intelligence operates, which is anything but in the manner of reinforcement, meme and selection’s shared method of trial and error. Intelligence proceeds by a process of abstracting higher level principles, values and goals, from action in the world, which in turn provide it with a capacity for insight and criticism. Through these, intelligence studies the empirical surfaces and functional utility of things for both the underlying structure and the existential qualities that can only be reached through a process of systematic, active construction. Since reinforcement and selection and all the rest are completely anathema to any such process, plainly they cannot offer us any explanation of intelligent activity and experience.

Hence all these supposedly scientific theories’ fundamental self-contradiction. Once one lapses into the view that an idea or value or method colonises my mind through some process of exogenous variation and selection over which I exercise no subjective control, as opposed to the idea that I believe in certain values, symbols, methods and purposes because I have good reasons to do so, then it is hard to see why one should not apply the same logic not only to every aspect of science itself, such as the notion of objectivity or scientific method, but also to the particular theory that is making this claim. But of course, once the idea of objectivity is abandoned as possessing no more intrinsic value than a catchy tune, then that is the end of science. As with any reductionism, all such theories make science unthinkable, for they argue that what counts as ‘science’ depends solely on what notion of science is currently especially infectious. and what counts as ‘thinking’ is whatever happens to be in my head.

Or perhaps one should privilege certain players in this particular game (e.g., scientists). But that still leaves the problems of exactly why one should privilege any particular disciplines, concepts or values in this way, and where the line should be drawn between the privileged and the non-privileged. There seems to be no compelling answer to the former, and in the absence of such an answer, there is no hope of an answer to the latter. And even if there were compelling reasons for privileging certain critical components of human experience, that does nothing to explain how such privileged areas could have come into existence.

If, on the other hand, ‘subjective control’ and ‘good reasons’ are taken to include at least the objectively testable coherence, consistency, completeness and correctness of ideas, values, and so on, then plainly the dual reduction of intelligence to biology and culture that underlies so much contemporary thinking cannot be completed. There are no doubt very many undigested aspects of our biology and culture that prejudice and compromise science, but it is doubtful whether any such failing of reason could not be overcome by its further development.