The absurdity of modern economics

Any rational economics would be about how economic activity plays a part in the wider social system. Modern economics is doubly divorced from that. Firstly, it treats economics as an abstraction from social life, as though it could be judged solely on its own terms. And within that, economic activity is presented as revolving around money, rather than money being kept in its proper place as a means to our real social (or even economic) ends. Even if we accept the former abstraction, within economics itself one would expect the making, distribution, exchange and consumption of goods and services to predominate - that is after all how people actually live - but we have succeeded in making all that secondary to the circulation and augmentation of money itself.

This peculiar displacement and inversion that places money first and last - the perspective of the miser, that most wretched of human beings, who is, as someone-or-other once said, as much in need of what he has as of what he has not - is not the fault of economists, of course. Or at least they are no more than ghost-writers to the real culprit. This is after all a perfectly valid description of an advanced capitalist society, in which finance capital (and its unacknowledged bastard-and-then-master, fictional capital) has deposed real goods and services from the pinnacle of profitability to such as extent that the classic model of capitalist economic activity in which money is augmented through the creation and sale of goods and services - summarised by that nice Dr Marx as M-C-M1 - has started to run an increasingly poor second to the more direct creation of money through speculation, the creation of fictional capital and all the rest - M-M1.

It’s a distasteful state of affairs and creates the impression that economics has fallen into a sort of fantastic black hole, from which the introversion into which it has fallen ensures that it cannot escape. But even from the most radical point of view we can't just switch economics off. The economy is after all where we create all the means to our various ends, our economy is a capitalist economy, and so we must at least try to understand capitalism's view of itself. On the other hand, surely we are capable of constructing an economics that starts and ends with people, and so with goods and services. (Even this ignores the deeper significance of economic activity, of course - the way the very process of participating in economic activity shapes the way we experience existence, and the way we define what is real and what is not, what is normal and natural, what is right, wrong and indifferent. But at least it would wrench us away from this hypnotic fantasy that money must rule.)

An example of what I mean. In economic theory money is rightly assigned many functions. It is a store of value: people can use it to hold their savings. It is a medium of exchange, enabling us to buy and sell without having to wait for someone possessing exactly what we want and wanting exactly what we have. As an instrument for expressing the value (or at least the price) of goods and services, it’s a unit of account. Finally (as the list usually goes), money provides a standard of deferred payment (which is one important reason why we are always so concerned about inflation).

So far so ordinary. But since the creation of money by means of speculation, manipulation and downright fraud has come more to the fore (and nothing in recent economic policy has reversed this), this has made another, perhaps previously too obvious function of money more visible. For money is also a claim on goods and services. In a market that responds only to money, anyone with money has a right (or at least an access that will only be challenged in exceptional circumstances) to the goods and services created by society as a whole. As a result, those who specialise in creating money can corner a correspondingly volume goods and services (i.e., get rich) even though they create none themselves. Of course, financial activity does have its value - not only managing the supply and circulation of money and directing investment (though still conceived of in narrowly financial rather than social terms) but also rationalising and smoothing various aspects of markets themselves. But once financialisation gets out of hand and the generation of money through bubbles, absurd risk and outright crime starts to predominate over real economic activity - the creation of goods and services -then the financial sector starts to achieve stupid levels of wealth (i.e., a huge proportion of the money in circulation) even though it is adding very little of social value. On the other hand, as I have argued elsewhere, once finance capital starts to predominate, bubbles, speculation, crashes and monopolisation are inevitable - yet 'investment' banks, hedge funds and the rest are left in greater control over the real economy than ever.

Hence the significance of money's function as a claim to goods and service. It allows an otherwise parasitical class of financial specialists to distort and undermine the socially valuable part of the economy, not only making them richer and richer even though they produce very little of value themselves, but by this very process strengthening their position in the economy - and so society and politics - as a whole.

For want of a nail...

... the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost’. Or in the words of Benjamin Franklin’s own synopsis (in his Maxims Prefaced to Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1758), ‘A little neglect breeds mischief’. It is a simple truth, concisely and graphically put; however, one risks plunging wildly overboard as soon as one extends the chain of reasoning to more than a handful of terms. How far can one take it?- to a message, a battle, a kingdom, planet Earth, Milky Way South East, universal heat death?

Isaac Asimov once suggested (I forget where) an interesting analogy for how history really works, as a kind of 'bow wave' in time. At first there is immense tumult as the immediate effects of a cause (an event, a great personality, and so on) spread and proliferate; but then a phase of sublimation supervenes, assimilating those effects to the broader, deeper currents of Universal history. The same applies for Great Men. What if Hitler had won World War II? It would certainly still have mattered in 2000 and even 2100, but what difference would it have made by 20,000 AD? Or 200,000 AD or 2,000,000? Indeed, looking at the history of Europe since the end of the Cold War, it is striking that, at least in terms of international politics, things look remarkably as they might have in 1925, had the First World War not intervened.

The whole logic of 'For want of a nail' rests on two false assumptions: that the world is basically atomistic, and that what changes is more vital than whatever remains the same. They are equally curious opinions, although entirely compatible with a world of fragmentation and distraction we inhabit now. But the universe is not just a concatenation of atoms but is on the contrary deeply and universally structured, local quantitative variations may be rapidly countered and any potential qualitative effects generally suppressed. And although we may not be interested in the same old same old, the universe and its human expression, history, takes it all into account.

Popular (mis)interpretations of chaos theory make a similar error. Contrary to the way in which it is sometimes alluded to, chaos theory does not say that chaos is fundamental. On the contrary, it says that apparent chaos is often actually the expression of profound (if also somewhat obscure) order and simplicity. That is why the old saw about a butterfly in Rio de Janeiro causing a thunderstorm in Peking is so misleading: not because the effects of its wing beats could not trigger a storm on another continent, but because they are only one of a massive number of other more or less profound effective causes. Especially on the global scale, weather consists, by and large, of immense and highly stable systems controlled by forces and laws operating on an incomparably vaster scale than all the life forms on the planet put together. Of course, a single butterfly may tip a system that is either exceptionally sensitive or already in extremis into a new mode or phase, but that is hardly the same thing. Having the trigger does not mean you don’t need the rest of the howitzer.

So what is this really about? My own view is almost equally simple: it is about a popular ideology designed to accept the unintelligibility and uncontrollability of the world, be it through popular wisdom or pseudo-scientific explanation or (in a previous age) the Will of God, or indeed by any other means. The reasons why the world is fragmented and full of distraction are beyond both the understanding and the control of individuals, and there are vast forces ranged against anyone trying to create either a popular understanding of exactly what those forces are or a political organisation capable of combatting them.

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.

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.

Strings, relations and dialectics

As I understand it (ha ha), one of the fundamentals of string theory is that it replaces the default assumption of pre-string models of matter. That view is that matter is composed of things. that is, in the classic image, billiard balls, or, in quantum terms, the zoo of structural particles - electrons, protons, and so on. Relationships between these particles are then created by the exchange of 'messenger' particles - gluons, gravitons, etc., and so on.

Instead, string theory assumes the reverse - that matter is undifferentiated, but that the highly differentiated structure is created by relationships between the basic components, which is to say, strings themselves. The 'zoo' is an illusion created by looking at the same things from different points of view or in different syntheses.

If this (or anything like it) is correct, can a true relational theory of matter be far behind, that allows a unified theory of complex matter to arise on the basis of relationships and relationships between relationships, up to and including not only physical but also chemical, biological and intelligent structures? And that, because it is based on a relationships rather than things, defines each new layer of matter (chemical, biological and intelligent) in terms of their abstraction from their predecessors rather than by the accumulation of forces and factors, and so permits the higher levels (not least intelligent structures such as logic and mathematics) to have an inherent relationship to the lowest, and so explains their otherwise quite unintelligible validity?

Or, beyond even that, a true dialectics of matter?

Theory of Everything? No, actually...

So on September 10 CERN switch on the Large Hadron Collider – the biggest scientific experiment of all time. Will it simply create a black hole that will suck the Earth into oblivion? I think I can say with absolute certainty that, No, it won’t. Of course, the only reason I am so confident is that if I am right then I can crow about it afterwards, but if I am wrong, exactly who is going to tell me so?

Another thing I often hear about these experiments is that they will move us a little – or maybe a lot - towards the scientific grail – the Theory Of Everything – which, rather inelegantly for a holy object, is often referred to by lazy typists like me as just plain TOE.

This ‘Theory of Everything’ stuff impresses me though. A Theory of Everything, eh? So it will explain the weather? The nature of beauty? Why feudalism gave way to capitalism? Whether or not we will deal with climate change? Why I talk to my cat? The nature of consciousness? Why I think Eddie Izzard is funny? How about something a lot simpler, like the nature of life? Or are such things, as people who cannot handle complicated things (like reality) like to say, unreal, epiphenomena, or secondary (whatever that could possibly mean)?

I’m not sure that anyone is claiming that TOE will explain anything like this. So what is the problem? Qualitative change – which necessarily cannot be explained in mathematical terms – is perfectly real. Not in the sense that something magical suddenly appears, but in the sense that novel structure of the kind that the first consciousness, the first life and the first atom were all derived from not only stabilises existing patterns of activity but also reveals new patterns. That is after all why we have not only physical action but also chemical reactions, life and natural intelligence.

So why is it that scientists like to repeat that this really will lead to a genuine Theory of Everything? It may well tell us really important things about the physical world – though even that is likely to be limited to a certain level - but ’everything’? Absolutely not.

(Incidentally, the BBC’s webpage on the day poses the fascinating question ‘Is particle physics the new rock n’ roll?’ I think I can reply with some authority on this one: No. And please don’t say anything so silly again.)

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.

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.

A bad attack of physics envy

Physics is the easiest and least important of the sciences, and a very bad model for studying anything else.

I know, as a psychology/sociology graduate with a bias towards history, I’m probably just jealous. But there is still a case to answer. In particular:

1. Physics is easy. We only constructed physical laws first because they were obvious by comparison with the far more difficult laws of biology and intelligence.
2. Physics is unimportant. It would make no difference at all to anything that matters to human beings if some of the most basic facts of the physical universe were quite different.
3. Physics is a lousy model for any other science, and we have wasted long enough on physics-worship.

1. Physics is easy

Proposition No.1 is simple and obvious. Is it at all likely that we would have solved the most profound and difficult of scientific problems first, leaving only relatively superficial and easy problems for later? No. Is the study of physical structures and processes especially challenging by comparison with their chemical, biological or intelligent counterparts? No. You can do it in a lab, under nicely controlled conditions, and (at least by comparison with, say, organic systems) its findings are pretty easy to replicate and falsify.

Of course, the results have a pleasing universality. Everything I know about protons or light appears to be true of protons and light everywhere, and it seems pretty easy to identify and demarcate protons and light themselves, which can scarcely be said of higher level structures such as species or even organisms. How much harder then is it to comprehend language or consciousness?

2. Physics is unimportant

Proposition No.2 – that it would make little difference to anything that mattered to human beings if many basic physical facts were different – is pretty straightforward too. What if some prestigious lab announced tomorrow that quarks really were (as our German cousins have so presciently intuited) made of yogurt, and vice versa? Assuming that they continued to provide the necessary infrastructure of chemical and biological processes, what difference would it make? To anyone but physicists, none at all. So why should we regard our knowledge of physics as especially important?

In his masterpiece, Solaris, the great Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem speculated that the apparently intelligent planetary ocean that covered his eponymous planet was able to construct increasingly substantial human beings out of neutrinos, which the ocean was able to mould into atoms that would then generate the familiar chemical, biological and psychological structures needed to produce the creatures through which it communicated with its human visitors. In other words, the physical building blocks were different, but the architecture remained exactly the same. In that situation, what difference would it make if Lem were actually right, not just in fiction but in fact? Beats me.

It is not even as if physicists have a compelling track record regarding non-physical problems. True, many of the suggestions physicists have made to their neighbours have been very penetrating (most famously, perhaps, Schrödinger’s What is Life?). But equally eminent physicists have got it completely wrong. For example, Lord Kelvin, author of the second law of thermodynamics and the absolute temperature scale later named after him, notoriously condemned evolution because the timescales it required exceeded anything that could be supported by known physical processes. The Sun simply could not stay warm enough long enough for life on Earth to have evolved to its present level. ('On the age of the sun’s heat', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 5, March 5, 1862, pp. 288-293, part 1, reprinted here.)

For Kelvin, who believed that 'overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all round us', this may not have seemed a fundamental difficulty, but physics's superior status to biology meant that is intervention was disastrous. Even ‘Darwin was so shaken by the power of Kelvin's analysis and by the authority of his theoretical expertise that in the last editions of On The Origin of the Species he eliminated all mention of specific time scales’ [source]. So science was put back several decades by the presumption that if it was impossible for something to happen according to current physical knowledge, that should be good enough for everyone else. The utterly compelling logic of evolution, driven by the thorough observation of the simplest biological facts and the simplest deduction, were not enough: the authority of physics was sufficient to stymie one of the few contributions to science that exceeded Kelvin’s own.

In short, not only would it not matter much if physics were quite wrong about basic physical realities, but sometimes science as a whole would be a lot better off if it trusted a little less to the alleged pre-eminence of physics and a bit more to the evidence and logic of each individual discipline. The adoration of quantum mechanics' doctrine of uncertainty is constantly casting its baleful shadow far and wide – such a great excuse for sloppy thinking, such an irresistible enticement to intellectual self-censorship, and such a pall of comfortable pessimism. Regardless of whether this is a valid interpretation of quantum theory (and my personal impression is that it is not),the root cause often seems to be an unthinking acceptance of the authority of whatever physicists say. The recent dominance of evolutionary and genetic research is having a similarly destructive effect on our thinking about human beings, and for essentially the same reason - the predominance of authority over findings and argument.

3. Physics is a bad model for science

Finally, physics is a lousy model for other sciences. Its very simplicity makes it susceptible to all manner of techniques and empirical superficialities it would be quite absurd to demand of other sciences. How could one possibly conduct ethology or ethnology in the laboratory or by experimental methods or the logic of ceteris paribus? What has the great mass of psychological experimentation that has striven to mimic physics contributed to our understanding of human nature? As one must expect of methods that trivialise the subtleties of human experience and action, only trivia.

Of course, I simplify, perhaps even trivialise a little too. But then when was there a time when physics was not aggrandised? Ernest Rutherford (a wonderful experimentalist) was not alone in believing that ‘In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting’. But then he also followed in the Kelvin tradition of opinionated prognosis, saying ‘The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine’. With that kind of track record in physics, what on earth would compel me to listen to his opinions on anything else?

What is wrong with physics, then? Well nothing really. As far as it goes. But it only goes to the limits of physical structures and processes, beyond which it has no more to say than sociology has to say about steroid chemistry. Apart from (perfectly valid) generalities of the kind offered by Schrödinger et al., physics makes no useful predictions about higher sciences. What is more, it lacks the ability to do so not because they are no better than stamp-collecting or because the structures and processes of life or intelligence are too complex to be manageable but because they are qualitatively different. A quite different logic is at work in tulips and sperm whales and human beings.

Not that supra-physical entities are not also physical; but physics-worship tends inevitably to the invariably false ‘nothing-but-ism’. A living thing can be broken into its physical constituents, but then it is both literally and metaphorically dead, and there is nothing at the physical level that explains just what it is that makes something alive. This is not a plea for mysticism: one can’t deduce architecture from the physics of bricks either.

A far more appropriate definition would be to say that any method is scientific that delivers knowledge that is adequate to its object. On that basis, the methods of science are defined more rationally, which is to say, by a careful consideration of the goals it seeks to achieve (i.e., objective knowledge of a specific domain of reality), and not a priori by what happens to have been a useful approach in some of the easier areas of reality. Grovelling before the altar of physics really is the worst kind of anti-scientific argument from authority.

So let’s hear it for the higher sciences: chemistry, biology and whatever we end up calling the science of intelligence.