Save the saddest dolphins

Some creepy hotel chain is trapping dolphins. As Avaaz put it:

The pod was swimming peacefully in Samoa when nets closed in from behind -- trapping 25 wild dolphins for a luxury resort's latest exhibit. They are now locked in tiny pens, starved of food -- but we can free them.

For wild dolphins captivity is torture, their powerful sonar bounces off the walls back at them -- as if they are trapped in an endless house of mirrors. Most die young from stress induced illness, but some even commit suicide. If the wealthy Resorts World Sentosa succeeds in keeping them captive then half the dolphins will die in the first 2 years -- and it will legitimise the widely banned practice of capturing dolphins in the wild. We can’t let that happen -- let's use our voices to set them free.

This is the equivalent of locking up small children to amuse the ghouls. Go to http://www.avaaz.org/en/saddest_dolphins and sign up to their petition, then pass it on.

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One of my many unpublished manuscripts is a book-length treatment of the origins, evolution and individual development of intelligence, entitled The Birth of Reason.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.

Alternative histories

One of my minor enthusiasms is alternative histories. You know the sort of thing – what-ifs about the wrong side winning wars, Jesus not being crucified, and so on.

My personal favourite is what would have happened if Napoleon had not sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803. In those days, Louisiana was rather more than the present-day state – it included all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, plus much of Minnesota west of the Mississippi, most of both Dakotas, north-east New Mexico, all of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, plus all of the modern state of Louisiana that lies to the west of the Mississippi River, including New Orleans. It’s more than 800,000 square miles or 2 million square kilometres. That’s about a quarter of the modern USA, and completely divides the east and west coasts. As Napoleon rightly said of the Purchase that ‘This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.’

So what would have happened had the Louisiana Purchase not happened as it did in 1803 (at 3 cents an acre!)? Assuming that the USA had no later opportunity to buy this land, plainly the USA would have been a much lesser country – locked to the east coast, cut off from the Great Plains, Texas and California, with no interest in the Pacific, Hawaii or Alaska, and extremely unlikely to emerge as the Great Power sans pareil at the end of the 20th century.

And what about Napoleon? Assuming that he was still defeated in 1814, what if he had fled to a still-French New Orleans and been welcomed (or at least forced his acceptance) as ruler? It is not hard to envisage his subsequent career, with two basic themes: keeping Americans to the east of the Mississippi, and establishing a new French empire to the west. Imagine the results: all the familiar additions to the USA – Oregon, Texas, California, maybe even Hawaii and Alaska now go to a new French-speaking power. Mexico defeated and perhaps absorbed. New French conquests in central America and the Caribbean, perhaps. A great French naval power in the Pacific. Conflict with Britain over western Canada. All of the oil wealth in the hands of a new power.

But whenever I think about alternative histories, I never get very far before a quite different train of thought sets out. For how long would even such a great change have made a difference? A century later - certainly. A millennium? Well, less so, at least as far as the general shape of the world is concerned. And the longer you wait, the smaller the likely impact. Or at least so I would have thought. I really don’t know. There are countervailing arguments. Chaos theory, for example, seems to suggest that, for some phenomena at least a small perturbation in 1803 would change the future irreversibly.

But I am not convinced. I do not doubt that, at the level of, say, who is born and who dies, a great funnel of causality spreads out indefinitely, within which nothing is the same again. But in terms of the larger structures of society and history, two things occur to me. Firstly, are social systems sensitive like the weather? A butterfly may change the weather halfway around the world (though I have never seen a convincing proof of that idea!) but great systems such as capitalism or feudalism do not look quite so touchy. And secondly, what of all the things – the infinitely many more things - that do not change? Is their effect erased? Presumably not. For human (and intelligent) systems have two features that make this unlikely.

Firstly, like living systems, intelligent life does not react to things like a billiard ball- just bashed about willy-nilly. A living system assimilates the things it encounters (i.e., adjusts them to it own patterns of activity), or if it cannot, it accommodates to them in ways that are as specific to its own nature as they are to the thing to which it accommodates.

As for any intelligent system (e.g., a human being or society), not only do they (like all living things) respond only in ways that reflect their own structure, but they also - and in this they transcend non-intelligent organisms completely - include within themselves knowledge of the principles through which they do this. That is, they include within themselves their own values, goals, methods - any number of other more or less explicit, more or less deliberate structures that ensure that the randomness of the chaotic system is replaced by its very opposite.

So is the result an ever-widening funnel? Or a lens-shaped hole in history that widens and widens and widens – and then narrows and narrows and narrows again, until the point is reached where you can no longer tell whether or not the original trigger actually occurred? At that point, the effects of the initial cause have been so dissipated and diluted by the effects of all the events that were not changed that everything – or at least things of a more structural and functional level – are as they would have been anyway?

I suspect that the answer depends on the relative breadth of this causal ‘funnel’ at its widest and the historical ‘space’ into which it irrupts. Where the former exceeds the latter, it would seem that irreversible change is unavoidable. Even if it is smaller, there is presumably a kind of ‘critical mass’ of effects that set history on a radically new course. Hitler dies in the First World War? Climate change devastates civilisation? Nuclear winter kills every large animal and literally every bird and mammal (i.e., every potentially intelligent organism) on the planet? And planet Earth would otherwise have founded of a galaxy-wide society?

Or are there rules to the structure of human history that either are not affected by empirical events, or at least can force themselves back into control? As I have argued (implicitly) in my History of Human Reason, there are. If there is life, there will be intelligence. And if there is intelligence, there will be history and consciousness. And if there is history and consciousness, there will be something very like feudalism and capitalism and their successors - the still more advanced social systems we did not quite get up to.

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.

Intellectual capital

My son tells me about a recent TED Talk, which includes, among much else, the idea that it would be wise to go beyond ‘procedure’ in our social dealings, Quite right, and who would disagree that justice and propriety don’t always follow from following the rules? That is after all why we have a concept of equity.

There is a much unappreciated aspect of this problem, I feel, that is almost the reverse of needing to go beyond ‘the system’. This is the ways in which the way we create and manage the system in fact disempower us from even understanding it, lest alone going ‘beyond’ it. This is even a subject of much enthusiasm, and in certain respects should be too. But at the same time it is rapidly creating a situation in which people who have neither legal nor moral right nevertheless find themselves with more and more of the hi-hand over the rest of us.

The issue I am referring to here goes under the name of ‘intellectual capital’. The significance of intellectual capital is not merely that it creates legal titles on knowledge, experience, and so on – that is intellectual property. ‘Intellectual capital’ goes beyond mere ownership (although there is nothing ‘mere’ about ownership, even in its barest forms), to actually place that knowledge within the system itself. This may take the form of documented procedures, databases of information, the structure of a patented process, the workflow engine that controls a great factory, the books of ‘due process’ through which society’s highest courts and most powerful administrations proceed.

So what is the problem with these systems? In principle, absolutely nothing. Indeed, they become the basis for future developments that take these building blocks and synthesise them into yet higher structures, through which human beings come to still more profound insights and exercise yet greater powers. But it was not only systems I started from – it was ‘intellectual capital’. And capital, of course, is owned, and ownership means not only that somebody owns it but also that everyone else is excluded. Now, under recent patent laws, it can even mean that if discover something for myself, that knowledge can still belong to someone else. I am not even legally entitled to use some of the knowledge I acquire while working for company A when I go to work for company B.

But even beyond that, there is a still more profound issue. For by embedding the knowledge (skill, etc.) in a system, the users of that system no longer need to understand that system or have any insight into its purpose, goals or even mechanisms to operate it. I just have to follow the instructions. Indeed, once this is possible, people who are smart enough to understand the system as well as simply use will probably be too expensive ‘resources’ to be employed using it. So for more and more aspects of human life, ‘the system’ will come to dominate over mere human beings.

And who will now control human life? Who but those whose capital intellectual capital is – the owners. And I should not be afraid of this?

Re-enter The Singularity – and its déjà vu all over again

I see that Google and NASA are financing a school for futurists in Silicon Valley ‘to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people’, as the Financial Times puts it. This ‘Singularity University’ will teach its students about nanotechnology, AI and that sort of thing. It also involves Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, enthusiast for AI and inventor of the term ‘singularity’, which he uses to describe the moment when the world will change because machines are suddenly smarter than people. At that point, the machines will solve all our problems, including climate chaos, peak oil and world hunger. And no doubt cancer and the common cold too.

According to the LA Times (on February 2 2009):

The goal of the Singularity school, which will be located at an Ames facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., is to bring together the world’s top graduate and postgraduate students in 10 diverse disciplines, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, medicine and law. They will spend nine weeks together learning about each others' disciplines and then focus on... finding ways to overcome pressing challenges such as poverty, hunger and pandemics.

Let’s get some basic facts straight.

Firstly, there is not one machine in the world that comes close to passing the Turing test for artificial intelligence. Now bearing in mind that the Turing test is singularly undemanding – basically the ability to fake intelligence for five minutes – you would have thought that if ‘the singularity is near’ (one of Kurzweil’s book titles) it would be pathetically easy to pass. After all, it was invented in the 1940’s, when the sum total of the world’s computing power was less than what is sitting on my desk right now. Yet so subtle is intelligence that no one has yet come close to claiming the prize.

Secondly, although it is the case that the total processing power of all the computers on the planet is truly vast, all the computers on the planet have exactly as much intelligence as a gatepost. They may be fantastically useful for all the purposes noted above, but they will perform this invaluable service without showing a spark of intelligence. The emergent properties effect of technologies such as the internet and nanotechnology may be very surprising indeed, but there seems to be no specific reason to believe that any of them will constitute intelligence proper, and more than piling up rocks, though it may result in something as wonderful as Chartres cathedral, will ever result in an organism.

In summary, I think a more archaic response to this Singularity University is called for here, and that is to say, quite simply, ‘bollocks’.

As I have argued in detail elsewhere in this blog, it is intrinsically impossible for any account of intelligence that is inspired by AI or ‘cognitive science’ (was ever a discipline worse named?) to analyse the basic facts of real intelligence. Concepts such as computation and information processing are logically incapable of grasping what it means to be intelligent. So constantly harping on about artificial intelligence in this particular vein is a fool’s errand.

Of course, we’ve been here before – apparently inspired/possibly mad inventor proclaims the dawning of the Age of machine Intelligence, and in the absence of a decent analysis of what intelligence actually means, we all bow down. But then it turns out to be just another remake of a much older story – the Emperor’s New Clothes.

A biology of human nature?

Human beings are not like other organisms, and intelligence cannot be explained in biological terms. That is why the biology of human nature has so far remained at the most general level, without any biological account of, say, the specifics of history or consciousness: biology is incapable of going any further without exposing its own irrelevance.

This may seem to be an odd attitude: after all, what scientific alternative is there? There can be no doubt that our ancestry is exclusively biological, that everything we do relies on definite kinds of biological structure and function that are plainly the products of ordinary evolutionary and developmental processes, that human beings have to be successfully adapted to quite routinely biological demands and a comprehensive biological environment, that human beings reside on the same biological continua as other organisms, and so on. To take only some of the most widely cited examples of our animal nature, if we share so much of our nervous systems and the vast majority of our genes with other primates, not to mention many other features (much of the structure of our haemo¬globin, for example), how can I argue that human beings demand a fundamentally different kind of explanation from other organisms?

But if I may reverse this conventional argument, even if human beings had developed out of, yet were now qualitatively different from, the general run of organisms, we would still share a good deal with them. After all, life is not a chemical reaction, but it does rely on chemical structures and their activity. So how much would have to be different for such a change to be considered qualitative? Plainly, if we limit the question to strictly quantitative terms, we do not know. In fact, it is intrinsically unlikely that any question about qualitative differences could ever be answered sensibly in quantitative terms – so many per cent difference in this factor or that, so much growth in our encephalisation index, and so on.

So why should we assume that sharing 50 per cent of our genes, our nervous system or any other biological attribute with another species – or even or 90 per cent or 99.999 per cent – means that there are no qualitative differences between us? A pile of rocks might easily share practically all of its physical content with a Gothic cathedral, but one would surely question whether they were in any important sense the same! There may be some quantifiable sense in which more is better or worse, but even that would not tell me when it became qualitatively other. Conversely, were our encephalisation index twice – or a hundred times – that of our nearest relative, would that mean that we were qualitatively different? Why not conclude that we would still be essentially the same, only more so? In fact, on what grounds would either conclusion be justified? Such an argument would only make sense if one assumed that potential qualitative differences could be meaningfully investigated in quantitative terms. Yet it is precisely the validity of this approach that is in question here. To insist on a biological explanation of human nature solely on the grounds that human beings share many overt features with other organisms is quite empty, since it is not the things we share with sheep or artichokes that make human beings interesting (or indeed human) but rather the things that are different.

In summary, arguments from continuity, ancestry and empirical resemblance can tell us nothing decisive about the qualitative relationship between human beings and other organisms. On the contrary, they assume that there is no qualitative difference here – otherwise what would be the point of the comparison? Perhaps we are just like other organisms, perhaps there is a critical sense in which we are quite different, and perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between. But there is nothing in biology that can tell us which is the right answer.

One assumption made by many claims for biology’s precedence over any other approach is that, unlike the humanities, biology is scientific. It is a fair point – biology is indeed scientific (in general terms), whereas the alternatives by and large are not. But it does not follow that if we apply biological methods to human beings, we will get scientific answers. After all, we plainly would not get a scientific account of human existence if we restricted ourselves to the methods of physics or chemistry: as far as I am aware, there is no chemical formula for feudalism. We would merely get a reductionistic trivialisation. Similarly, if biological concepts and methods are not capable of grasping what it means to be a human being, then the results of any would-be human biology must be equally trivial.

If, by contrast, we start from the assumption that the purpose of science is to provide a solution that is adequate to the problem at hand, whatever that solution turns out to be and whatever the methods by which we must arrive at it, then the assumption that biology is the right starting point is much less compelling. In particular, if we share a great deal with other organisms – a proposition I would not dream of contesting – the reverse is not true. The things we share with or inherit from non-intelligent organisms seem to have very little to do with what it means to be human. It is very hard to look at any aspect of human nature that human beings themselves consider important and not suspect that trying to explain such a thing in biological terms is a fool’s errand.

To take only the most obvious way in which human beings differ from other organisms, any credible theory of human nature must explain why human beings have a history while other organisms – even our closest relatives – have none. It is after all only by virtue of the historical dimension of human nature that I can have the same biology as a Cro-Magnon hunter or a medieval Javan peasant yet live a profoundly different life. It is only by virtue of our capacity for history that human beings have moved from being a few thousand slow, weak scavengers to the single most important factor in the environment of practically every other large species on the planet. As I shall try to show in the main body of this book, all this follows from the specifically intelligent nature of human beings.

To repeat, other organisms have no history. It is true that all organisms change over time, that many are altered in substantial yet reversible ways by the actions of their predecessors and contemporaries, that these changes can have a collective effect that is more than the sum of its parts, and that these are all features of historical change. Nevertheless, all changes to all non-human organisms seem to be explicable in terms of changes to their biology, changes in the environment in which they live or (as in the case of social primates) completely localised, transient and contingent changes in relationships between particular organisms. In particular, there is no fundamental change to (and certainly no advance in) the social or practical conditions in which they collectively live and act (as there is in the case of human history), and as a result no changes of which the organisms in question could either take account or exploit in their own further development.

For example, for all their apparent capacity for mutual imitation, social facilitation and even intentional teaching, not even the perfectly real differences in social organisation between chimpanzee troops seem to reflect much more than the accretion of accidental and incidental changes. A given chimpanzee society may well be different from what it was a hundred years ago or from another chimpanzee society on the other side of Africa, but these changes could not be said to have come about by virtue of the self-development or re-structuring of chimpanzee society. Nor are they actively constitutive of the development or the self-organisation of the chimpanzees who live in such societies – there is no possibility of progress in the offing. Nor are they changes that the chimpanzees involved seem capable of noticing, let alone fathoming or taking into account in their subsequent actions. So they are not really historical changes at all.

Conversely, it seems unlikely that the changes that have taken place have systematically altered how chimpanzees inhabit and experience their environment, as historical changes in human societies have transformed not only the scope but also the nature of human activity, organisation and awareness. Finally, it certainly could not be said that chimpanzees are aware of their position in history – in relation to a cultural heritage or a family lineage, for example – or that they act as they do specifically in terms of that historical position. If they did, then chimpanzees would be historical beings too. But they don’t, so they aren’t. And even if there were hints of historicity among the primates, there is none at all elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

So, given the fundamental significance and consequences of human historicity, no explanation of human nature that could not also explain history could possibly be correct. Given both that human beings are above all else historical creatures and that biology has no concepts that are capable of dealing with history, then as soon as one accepts that human beings are historical beings, any appeal to biology is rendered futile.

Our consciousness also seems to set us apart from other organisms. Again, it does not seem to distinguish us absolutely from other primates and perhaps a few other species, but there seems to be very little reason to think that it is at all pervasive, even among the more sophisticated echelons of the animal kingdom. Yet the consequences of our consciousness are so vast that they leave even the most sophisticated primates lagging behind quite small children. As human beings, we have ways of structuring our consciousness of things and events, such as symbolism, metaphor, logic and mathematics, rules, science, ideology, imagination, values and even bureaucratic procedure, that are literally infinitely more powerful than anything other organisms have produced. Again, if other organisms showed any sign of such abilities it might be appropriate to compare them with human beings. But they don’t, and given the radical importance of consciousness to human activity, and the lack of any explanation of consciousness in biological terms, it is again hard to see why one would even begin looking to biology for an explanation of human activity.

It is tempting for biologists to reply to this argument that consciousness is plainly highly adaptive. But then so is having a history, and so would being lucky or being able to perform miracles or having all your wishes come true, but that does not mean that, if an organism possessed such abilities, they would be open to biological explanation. Being adaptive is at best an explanation for why things that already exist persist. It is never an explanation for why they come into existence in the first place (that would be teleological), for their structure (adaptation is a wholly functional criterion) or for the processes and mechanisms through which they operate (which are all wholly transparent to the notion of adaptiveness). Since, as I shall argue in detail below, what is peculiar to intelligent activity is the special character that is conferred by its unique structures, processes and mechanisms, and indeed its ability to act in terms of, among other things, its expectations and plans for the future, plainly biology will have little to offer by way of an explanation.

This difference goes to the very heart of biology, even to the point where the mechanisms of evolution itself are overthrown. For what is the process of ‘random variation and natural selection’ but a process whereby the functioning of an organism is changed in some way that is not directed by any sense of that functioning’s functionality; and the functionality of that functioning is determined by external factors (the forces of selection)? This is precisely the opposite of an intelligent action. For what could be more typical of intelligence than deciding in advance what it was trying to accomplish (reaching a goal, sustaining a value, realising a design, and so on), then defining the process, mechanisms and steps whereby this outcome can best be achieved (a plan, a tool kit, a resource list, a work environment, etc.), and then proceeding to work towards that outcome, all the while adjusting and re-adjusting one’s actual actions to suit changes in effectiveness, circumstance, and so on? And even when we fail, is there any obstacle to learning directly from our mistakes, as there so obviously is for strictly biological adaptations?

Indeed, isn’t all this indispensable to that most hallowed of intelligent actions – science itself? How, for example, would it be possible to ‘do’ evolutionary theory if one relied of the indirect methods of evolution itself? How does one construct and perform an experiment, if not by constructing a hypothesis, defining procedures for arriving at an outcome, and then evaluating what the outcome means in relation to the original hypothesis? Or does each new idea emerge at random, emitted into an external environment with which it has no intrinsic connection, where it is then subjected to ‘selection’ by equally extraneous forces that deal solely in terms of reproductive efficiency and effectiveness, as opposed to truth or even empirical correctness? Do the scientists who initiated this process remain oblivious to the entire process and its outcome, as a non-intelligent animal is of the evolutionary origins, significance and consequences of its actions? Such would be the case if scientific knowledge were the product of natural selection.

And so on, through every arena of human activity. Other organisms hunt and forage; we have a global economy. A few other organisms make elementary tools; we hunt quarks and quasars, create new elements, build complete artificial environments and write equations for the end of the universe. A few social insects apart, other organisms have relationships with a modest local group; we operate a global society with billions of members. The most advanced non-human organisms are capable of a level of representation broadly equal to that possessed by a small child; adult human beings have full-blown natural language, art, religion, philosophy, programming languages, logic and mathematics, science, law… And they all appeared in the twinkling of an eye, evolutionarily speaking – far too fast and far too precisely, in fact, for random variation and natural selection to have created them, or for them to have emerged from any known biological precursor, or for any organic structure or process to have directed their construction. Once one adds to this how extremely difficult it is to describe the formation, operation and change of human individuals and societies in biological terms – the one-sided, circular and self-serving arguments of the adaptationist lobby notwithstanding – it becomes difficult to draw any conclusion other than that, the frenetic attention biologists pay to human beings notwithstanding, seeking a biological account of the specifically human aspects of human nature is a futile quest.

This still leaves one tenuous link between biology and intelligence: the primates, dolphins and perhaps other species that can also make a realistic claim to at least some of the tell-tale features of intelligence, such as language, self-awareness, and so on. Their claims are by no means universally accepted, but I have no doubt that human beings and chimpanzees have a good deal more in common than chimpanzees and ants. But in what way does that fact contradict the view that there is a qualitative difference between biology and intelligence? If there were such a difference and it was not brought about by fairy dust or a divine spark, then surely one would expect intermediate forms? After all, is a virus alive or is it, as Peter Medawar put it, ‘simply a piece of bad news wrapped in protein’? Clearly, it depends what you mean by ‘alive’. In some circumstances, yes, a virus qualifies as alive, or at least as the kernel of a living thing; in others, certainly not. And likewise, whether a chimpanzee, a whale or a parrot is intelligent depends on what you mean by intelligent. By the criterion of consciousness, then yes, they probably are, to a limited extent, especially when provided with the right ‘scaffolding’; but by the criterion of historicity or clear intelligence in the absence of any external support, then perhaps they aren’t. But that does not mean that the concept of intelligence is incoherent, that history and consciousness are not characteristic of intelligence or that a fully developed intelligence would not have both to the full. It means only that the different aspects of intelligence, like the different aspects of life, come into existence in a somewhat disorderly way.

And what if we were to discover that chimpanzee societies have a history after all, replete with highly structured social systems and major phases comparable to feudalism and the like? What should one infer from this fact? That human beings are just organisms after all? Or that chimpanzees have joined human beings on this side of the (empirically broad and indistinct) divide that separates biology from intelligence? It is after all not the purpose of the present account to argue that human beings are different; rather, it is intelligent beings that stand apart, and if chimpanzees (or whales or African grey parrots or even nematode worms) stand with us, then so be it.

One last point about the relationship between biology and intelligence. At present, the main non-human candidates for intelligence proper are the chimpanzee, the parrot and the dolphin. Note how unexpected this would be from a strictly evolutionary point of view. Primates are quite closely related to the one definitely intelligent species of which we know – ourselves – and it seems that the most intelligent primates are (with some notable exceptions) those closest to human beings. But primates, dolphins and parrots share no common ancestor that could possibly have been intelligent, so how do we explain the fact that such distantly related species share this common (yet most uncommon) feature? As far as we can tell, insofar as they are intelligent at all, dolphins, parrots, primates and human beings are all intelligent in the same sense, and their respective intelligences embody a case not of evolutionary convergence but of evolutionary identity. The resemblance between chimpanzee intelligence and dolphin intelligence is not like the similar streamlining of dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs: they are not merely structurally similar but structurally identical. For example, they all seem to develop through the same stages and they all seem to make much the same characteristic unforced errors while immature – clear indicators that the underlying structures are identical. Given that, from a biological point of view, such identities are completely inexplicable, plainly routine biology is not the answer. On the other hand, if intelligence is indeed a novel structure rather than the cumulative effect of strictly biological changes, then it is just as plausible that it could have arisen in parallel from many different biological ancestries as it is that life itself could have arisen from many different pre-biotic chemistries.

In short, there may be other organisms that have also started to break away from the constraints of a strictly biological existence, but to argue that human beings have not done so would be preposterous in the extreme.

Free will and determinism

A rather long theoretical speculation.

Free will and determinism are generally treated as polar opposites. Here is a hypothesis that starts from that position and concludes with them being identical.

Human free will is difficult to establish. The concept itself is extremely evasive and analysing consciousness and decision-making (which I take to be among the more intractable issues for free will) is fraught with contradictions and infinite regressions. In addition, many of the material determinants of human action and experience are clearly external to the human individual, either as social or as natural entities. As such most social and natural conditions would necessarily limit our material freedom, even if free will were in principle possible. Unlike writers for whom the conceptual analysis of free will and practical constraints on freedom are to be studied separately, I would argue that the reason why the concept of free will is too hard to pin down is the same as the reason we are not, in practice, free.

Essentially, we lack freedom either because of the relative immaturity of the subjective intelligence through which we exist in the world or because of the limitations (gaps, mistakes, conflicts and contradictions) of the objective systems and relationships by which our worlds are actually composed. That is, we are prevented from achieving what we set out to achieve because the structures on which our actions and experience are based stop us from succeeding. It is not simply a matter of weakness: defeat of one kind or another (including subversion, diversion, distraction, disablement and frustration as well as outright defeat) is often built into the very systems and processes through which we act.

For example, even within our world of formal social freedoms (citizenship, equality before the law, and so on), the contradictions that beset our relationships with bureaucracy, representative democracy, economic activity and the law are too well known to need elaborating here. And once again, these are contradictions, not just misfortunes: the problems are built in. Others, created by inhabiting a world made up increasingly of money, commodities and roles, are less obvious, though they are often yet more fatal.

Furthermore, because these structures are contradictory, they prevent us from experiencing the world (or even our own experience) in a coherent manner. This in turn stops us coming up with any way of fully or accurately describing or analysing that experience without working through a huge range of social and historical systems, and so of formulating our goals and intentions adequately in the first place. Furthermore, the vast scale and complex yet ambiguous structure of our social systems makes it unlikely that many people will have the necessary knowledge, or any idea of how to acquire it, or any idea that it is needed.

For example, a capitalist society creates a basic individualism that prevents us from seeing straight away that our problems are social and historical rather than psychological. For most people, the response to bureaucracy, injustice and the general malaise of everyday life is personal frustration, resignation and depression, not social analysis, organisation and action. We divide our efforts between work and consumption, and even these supremely social activities are experienced in terms of a narrow individualism or, at best, instrumental social groupings (office, shopping mall, public transport) to which we commit little of ourselves. This perverse structuring of action and experience both creates innumerable illusions about how the world really works and effectively undermines every attempt to do something about it.

For example, in work we are typically isolated as individuals and functional groupings, and the knowledge we have of the larger systems and relationships we need to do our jobs is generally very narrow. There are timetables, duties, targets, techniques, but little meaning outside the group or the even the task. And in consumerism, we exist solely as isolated individuals, in families and other small, specialised and isolated groups.

So by and large, the only knowledge we need to operate within society is at the level of simple, formally prescribed facts (a great deal of which is anything but correct at any profound level). The massive social and economic processes whereby we ended up there at the supermarket are treated as a combination of the trivially obvious, too dull and difficult for non-specialists to bother with, and none of our business.

At the same time, we are constantly bombarded by complacent and unimaginative politicians, newspaper editors and pundits, and endless other spokespeople for the status quo telling us that we are all already free – or, with one of those small, resigned twists in which modern ideology excels – we are as free as we should try to be.

Even for professionals who specialise in such questions, social life is not exactly training for solving problems of free will and determinism! In fact, the disciplines of history, philosophy and the social sciences seem to be almost as confounded by these assumptions about how our lives work (if that is the word) as everyone else. I doubt that one sociologist in a hundred could explain the idea of alienation.

The basics of the real processes through which all this takes place should be all too familiar to need explaining, though they certainly are not, even for those with a background in the social sciences. Or perhaps they should be anything but familiar. After all, why would any social system regard a theory that that system does not make sense as a tool for making sense of itself? It would be a confession of failure and futility and an invitation to do something about it.

On the other hand, if the ways we understand our relationships to the world and to one another and the systems and structures through which we actually live are so closely interconnected, creating a world of freedom and conceiving of free will properly ought to be mutually fruitful enterprises. If we could do something about these endemic contradictions that constantly frustrate freedom we would be able to grasp the concept of free will, and the more thoroughly we work through the conceptual contradictions (including their social and historical aspects), we more clearly we will know how to go about creating a world in which genuine liberty is the norm.

So what is the general model of freedom I am arguing for? In brief, freedom is lacking whenever the structures that determine either our intentions or the means to realise them are outside our control. If everything that controlled both how we grasped the world and what we wanted, expected, needed (and so on) was (in some sense) a part of ourselves, then we could say that the ways we conceived of our existence in the world and the structures that through which that existence was enacted were one and the same, both with one another and with ourselves. In other words, the structures that determined and realised our will would all be part of ourselves. It would thus be free will, yet wholly determined, yet subject to no material constraints or limitations from beyond itself. Conversely, if we could internalise within ourselves over all the structures needed to materialise those intentions and desires in the external world of practical reality, there would be no constraints on the exercise of our free will either. In other words, our free will would be exercised in freedom.

But what are the structures that need to be created to freedom to be achieved? And, given that the structures that impinge on the exercise of our will might be found anywhere in the entire universe, in what sense could they possibly be internalised? I have tried to describe in detail the historical and phenomenal processes through which truth and freedom (for truth and freedom come down to the same thing) can be reconciled with determinism in my The History of Human Reason. But in the most general terms, this argument entails that a) such a reconciliation is possible, and b) it is susceptible to scientific investigation in all its aspects, with no sneaky corners of irreducible indeterminacy.

Isn’t philosophy fun?

Making sense of human nature

I have spent a great deal of my life studying psychology in various ways. Most of the time I have been looking for clues as to what it is that differentiates intelligent life from its non-intelligent cousins and precursors. I have written quite a lot about this (e.g., my History of Human Reason and yet-to-be-published Birth of Reason), but I often feel that I have missed the point.

Quite a lot of human existence is readily captured by the conventional notion of intelligence. We are almost uniquely conscious and historical beings. The only other species that exhibit consciousness are our primate cousins and a few very smart birds and dolphins, and none at all has a history. So far as we tell at the moment (animals are difficult to study in direct proportion to their evolutionary distance from Homo sapiens), these species are all characterised by essentially the same kinds of intelligence as ourselves. Or at least, they can be tested for the same aptitudes and abilities.

Yet I don’t spend my personal life dwelling on the sorts of things that are normally associated with testing intelligence. I don’t sit about doing mathematical puzzles or organising objects into classes and sequences. Right now, I am writing this blog, listening to Muddy Waters and feeling pretty pleased that I have finally coaxed my cat to want to sit on my lap after literally years of trying. Last night I watched Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona and thought about my life. What all that has to do with intelligence as conceived of by science I have no idea. Nor, I think, has science.

Yet I am quite sure that that is where the explanation lies. The problem is that, like everything else about the science of human nature, the study of intelligence seems to take in everything about human beings apart from what makes them so peculiarly human. As so often, science studies what it can readily comprehend and already knows how to research, and everything that does not fit that model is left by the wayside. Later, once it has established a massive body of empirical findings, it announces that this is what humanity is, and all the rest is illusion, epiphenomenal, trivia.

But then, isn’t that where we are now? With all those modules and genes-for and all that – where is anyone asking, ‘So what has all this got to do with human beings?’ The truth is, you can’t get there from here.

So let me suggest a list of things any would-be science of human nature should take as its central problems:

• Love
• Music
• Laughter
• Beauty

I know that there are some studies of some of these things, but precious little. Even when they are studied, there is something strangely mechanical about the way we go about it. How can a checklist or an ECG reading capture anything of significance? No, they aren’t a ‘starting point’ or ‘building blocks’ for a full theory, or anything else of any value, any more than a scientific study of the properties of bricks tells us anything about Westminster Cathedral – or, indeed, a multi-storey car park.

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.

What Turing actually said about intelligence

Some time ago I was thinking about writing a paper on how the AI community had thoroughly misunderstood what it meant to be intelligent, so their efforts were necessarily in vain. With characteristic restraint, I called it ‘AI is a lost cause’. I have yet to complete it, and I suspect that intelligent life on this planet will have evolved to a higher (and indisuputably non-computable) plane before I do.

However, one of the striking results of my background research was discovering what Turing had actually said about what he thought he was doing. For example, described his own model as dealing with ‘problems which can be solved by human clerical labour, working to fixed rules, and without understanding’ (quoted in Copeland 2002). He also described electronic computers as ‘intended to carry out any definite rule of thumb process which could have been done by a human operator working in a disciplined but unintelligent manner’ (in Copeland 2002, emphasis added. See Hodges 1992: 484 and passim for other examples).

So far is this from intelligence that it is almost a specification for Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ – the very antithesis of intelligent activity.

I leave the reader to ponder the question of whether Turing’s descriptions are even slightly compatible with pursuing human (or other kinds of natural) intelligence in computational terms. I think the answer is pretty clear. So is the value of Jerry Fodor's interesting/ludicrous claim that 'Pretty much everything about the cognitive mind that we have learned in the last fifty years or so was taught us either by Chomsky or Turing' (in the TLS on 13 September 2002).

If you would like to see the existing draft of 'AI is a lost cause' - which is perhaps 90% ready - please click here.

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.