Mind
Darwin Rejected
The writer Thomas Hardy was raised a good Christian, a member of the established church. Then he read The Origin of Species and it all came crashing down. His poem “Hap,” written in 1866, tells it all. It is not just that God does not exist but that with his going, we lose all meaning to life. There is no purpose.
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan.…
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
As we move now to crucial issues about mind and meaning, about knowledge and morality, let us ask first about how the philosophers handled all of this. Not just the nonexistence of God—agnosticism or atheism pretty much became the norm in the profession (as is true today)—but the lack of meaning. The American pragmatists rode with things pretty well. Whether this was part of the general, late-nineteenth-century American vigor and rise to prominence and power—perhaps the technological search for what works rather than the disinterested scientific search for absolute truth—they found the challenge of Darwinism stimulating and thought provoking.1 For someone like William James, the struggle for existence and natural selection translated readily into a theory of knowledge—ideas fight it out just as organisms fight it out.2 No more, but certainly no less.
The British had a lot more trouble. Virtually to a person, they turned against Darwinism, thinking it bad science and irrelevant to philosophy.3 The Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick set the tone. In a very early issue of what was to become (and still is) the distinguished journal Mind, he launched a strong attack on Darwin and Spencer on ethics.4 His influence left its mark on his students, notably G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Moore, in his famous Principia Ethica (1903), made Spencer a prime example of those who commit what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy,” a violation of proper thinking akin to a breaking of Hume’s law of is/ought, that you are not to move from statements of fact to statements of obligation. Little wonder then that “evolution could hardly have been supposed to have any important bearing upon philosophy.”5 Russell, even more so, was hostile to Darwinism, belittling pragmatism as a “power” philosophy and narrowly defining the true scope of inquiry so that an empirical science like Darwinism almost by definition could have no role.6 “What biology has rendered probable is that the diverse species arose by adaptation from a less differentiated ancestry. This fact is in itself exceedingly interesting, but it is not the kind of fact from which philosophical consequences follow.”7 The Austrian import Ludwig Wittgenstein outdid them all. Even in midcentury he was saying, “I have often thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity.”8 Not that this matters too much, because, in his all-influential Tractatus some thirty years earlier, Wittgenstein had given Darwinism a firm heaveho. “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.”9
One asks why there was this opposition. It is true that at the beginning of the twentieth century, Darwinian theory as a functioning professional science was hardly well established, although already there was some very good work by people like the Oxford insect specialist E. B. Poulton and the London-based theoretician and experimentalist W.R.F. Weldon.10 One senses, however, an almost willful ignorance of, a determination not to seek out, quality science. One looks for deeper reasons. For some, perhaps, the answers are obvious. As a member of the Germanled armed forces in the Great War, Wittgenstein would surely have been exposed to some of the horrific Social Darwinian thinking of the German generals.11 In the case of the British, casting things in terms of our trichotomy and giving the philosophers credit for being swayed by philosophical ideas, one senses that the Kantian/Darwinian option—naturalistic and deeply developmental—was simply a nonstarter. Even if there is no god—perhaps because there is no god—these British philosophers sought stability and eternal truths. In short, they looked for the philosophy that imbued British middle- and upper-class education at the end of the Victorian era, as indeed it did for me even in the middle of the twentieth century. I speak of Platonism. This philosophy fit Moore with his belief that goodness resides in some ethereal world of nonnatural properties. He did not conceal this, writing to an acquaintance, “I am pleased to believe that this is the most Platonic system of modern times.”12 Russell, first and foremost a mathematician, was even more explicit in his search for absolute truths. Autobiographically, he wrote:
I came to think of mathematics, not primarily as a tool for understanding and manipulating the sensible world, but as an abstract edifice subsisting in a Platonic heaven and only reaching the world of sense in an impure and degraded form. My general outlook, in the early years of this century, was profoundly ascetic. I disliked the real world and sought refuge in a timeless world, without change or decay or the will-o’-the-wisp of progress.13
Russell himself later in life repudiated much of this way of thinking, although (unlike his coauthor Whitehead) he seems not to have given up on his distaste for evolutionary thinking, especially as applied to the philosophical world. The die was set. This way of doing philosophy, “analytic” philosophy, swamped—as it still swamps—most of the universities of the English-speaking world. There is probably no one answer to why this should have been and continues to be so. As much as anything, the lack of interest in Darwinism until well into the second half of the century was a function of the intense interest in the physical sciences, something reinforced by the influx of Continental thinkers fleeing the Third Reich. There was occasional acknowledgment of the relevance of Darwin—the influential midcentury American philosopher W.V.O. Quine, who, incidentally, wrote his doctoral dissertation under Whitehead, noted the place of evolution in our thinking about the world, as did his Harvard colleague John Rawls in his massive Theory of Justice—but generally bringing Darwinism into the discussion was the philosophical equivalent of making a bad smell at the vicarage tea party.14 The pragmatists, apart from some interest in Peirce on semiotics, were conspicuous by their absence from curricula. It is true that Dewey was interested in education, something with an academic status below even sociology, but still. Can you imagine a department of philosophy in France without Descartes, or Germany without Kant, or Britain without Locke, Berkeley, and Hume?
It continues today. A year or two back, the distinguished philosopher of mind, Jerry Fodor, coauthored with cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini a book with the title What Darwin Got Wrong,15 which just about tells you everything. Again, one looks for deeper meanings—a yearning for the now-lost comfort and security of the maternal breast—since it is clear that no one is being swayed by knowledge of professional Darwinian studies. One searches in vain for analysis of the earlier-mentioned results found and interpretations made by Peter and Rosemary Grant after their near-half-century study of the finches of the Galapagos, or the studies of Jerry Coyne about speciation, David Reznick’s work on guppies, or detailed and informed thinking about the findings of paleoanthropology, Donald Johanson’s discovery of Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, for instance.16 When mention is made of recent work, for example, Sean Carroll’s stunning evolutionary development (“evo-devo”) findings about homologies at the molecular level showing that the processes of growth are shared by fruit flies and humans, it is egregiously misinterpreted as replacing Darwinism rather than complementing it—“the huge variety of extant and fossil life forms … is not only fully compatible with the high conservation of genes, but explained by it.”17 Oh, and when it comes to Darwinism and philosophy, “Quine was too subtle a philosopher to be fully satisfied by this explanation. He recognized that there was a circularity it in.”18
What is interesting and pertinent in the context of our discussion is that, as the twentieth century ended, in the philosophical world—due in major fact to a renewed interest in his approach to ethics—it was Aristotle’s beacon that was shining most brightly. Today, so-called virtue ethics, owing much to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics—as opposed to the deontological ethics of Kant and the consequentialist ethics of the utilitarians like John Stuart Mill—is virtually the standard position against which all others are to be judged.19 In tandem, the critiques of Darwinism are often set in an Aristotelian context. In a celebrated recent book, Mind and Cosmos, the New York philosopher Thomas Nagel divides his attentions equally between belittling Darwinism and promoting an Aristotelian perspective. He writes that “as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.”20 Continuing: “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” Asking rhetorically: “In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?”21
Nagel himself, although he cozies up to people like Behe, favors some kind of strong, secular Aristotelian position. He tells us that we are presented with two options: blind law (which presumably means Darwinism) or “there are natural teleological laws governing the development of organization over time, in addition to laws of the familiar kind governing the behavior of the elements.” Nagel continues:
This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science. But I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the intentions of a purposive being who produces the means to his ends by choice. In spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it certainly shouldn’t be ruled out a priori.22
As you will see, there is much in Nagel’s thinking with which I sympathize. Yet overall, as you must now realize, I am just not sure that a secular Aristotelianism has staying power. Without some powerful central force—an unmoved mover or some such thing—I doubt you can get the end direction that is supposed. I don’t want to belabor this point here. I am more interested in making the positive case for the third option, one that really is entirely secular and mechanistic, the kind of option to which Kant aspired and that Darwin made a reality. The main reason for introducing this background discussion is to point out that, as we move forward into more overt philosophical territory, do not presume that we are among friends. This is not to ask for mercy or an easy ride—I welcome the challenge—but it is to put things in context.
Sentience
Now let’s take up the $64,000 question. What about the mind? What about sentience? One line of thought urges us to ignore it, or at least to put it on one side. Thomas Henry Huxley claimed we are all just automata,23 with consciousness simply sitting on top of the brain, which latter is working in a purely mechanical method doing everything that is necessary. This is a version of “epiphenomenalism,” more informally characterized as the “whistle on the locomotive” position. We have to remember that Huxley had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward natural selection, so that consciousness having no adaptive function would be no great loss or worry to him. Most people don’t find this line of thought very convincing. In the words of William James, “It is to my mind quite inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends. And the question, ‘What has it to do?’ is one which psychology has no right to ‘surmount,’ for it is her plain duty to consider it.”24
Considered in this light, we shouldn’t be too scared of sentience. It really doesn’t seem to be something that is going to wreck evolutionary theorizing.25 Let us agree that Hume and the British had things right and Descartes and the French had things wrong. Animals not only have feelings but they have sentience, from rudiments to fairly well-developed levels. At least, they give evidence of this, for instance, when dealing with causal situations. “It seems evident, that animals as well as men learn many things from experience, and infer, that the same events will always follow from the same causes.”26 Hence, “they become acquainted with the more obvious properties of external objects, and gradually, from their birth, treasure up a knowledge of the nature of fire, water, earth, stones, heights, depths, &c., and of the effects which result from their operation.”27 Going a good way down this path makes good sense. Obviously, sentience in its broadest sense is a very powerful adaptation, but it isn’t something peculiar, in the sense of demanding totally new principles of understanding. Modes of selection, K-selection and r-selection, for example, are applicable. More than that, looking at things from outside in a broad sense, the rise of sentience does make good biological sense, for all that the bigger the brain, the greater the need of protein.
Let us agree also that the ability to use tools is a good indicator of the rise of intelligence and ever greater use of the mind. In looking at human evolution, there are no big surprises. As the brain got bigger, so tool use started and became ever-more sophisticated. Our genus, Homo—bigger brained (650cc initially compared to Lucy’s 450cc)—emerged rather less than two million years ago.28 They made ever-better tools and began using fire, although there is discussion about the exact date when the latter was truly brought under our control as opposed to used on fortuitous occasions. Simultaneously, the ability to talk was starting to emerge in a big way. Although there is still controversy, no one today wants to deny that biology plays a big part in language acquisition and use. In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky showed convincingly that language is not just something purely cultural but that all languages, from Japanese to English, share certain innate deep structures—a kind of biological ground plan on which everything is based.29 As it happens, Chomsky is not particularly keen on Darwinian selection, but his students and followers, like Steven Pinker, have shown in detail how the innate hypothesis does lend itself to Darwinian understanding.30 The great adaptive significance of language goes without saying.
The flip side to our greater grasp of what we might call the software of language ability is the hardware of language ability, something else where knowledge has grown greatly.31 There is some fossil evidence of the actual physical apparatus needed to speak. The dropping of the larynx, for instance, is something that distinguishes us from the apes. Also, there is evidence of parts of the brain that are used in speech developing about two million years ago, specifically, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Relatedly, we are now starting to identify some key genes involved in language acquisition and use, and showing that they are under the force of natural selection. Again, there is discussion and controversy. For a while, a popular hypothesis was that the Neanderthals, like the great apes, seem to lack the ability to talk properly.32 This suggestion has now come crashing down with the discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid, a bone that is found in the throat and has essentially the function of enabling speech.33 No one is suggesting that there was a Neanderthal Shakespeare—in fact, general opinion (based on the rise and development of culture) is that it was not until about 50,000 years ago that true speech emerged, and that it was probably some kind of primitive click language, found almost exclusively in Africa. But the Neanderthals were not dumb brutes. So this rather gives the lie to the underlying presuppositions of the novel The Inheritors (1955), by William Golding (better known for his Lord of the Flies), who saw the Neanderthals as innocent, inarticulate folk, who were wiped out by the brutal humans. It may indeed be that, when they were not copulating with them, humans did their bit in killing Neanderthals. Overall, however, what we seem to have had is in many respects a very familiar evolutionary selection-driven pattern, with branching, competition, relative improvements, and other similar occurrences and phenomena.
My position about the evolution and use of mind is deeply rooted in Darwinism—I see mind as another adaptation, like hadrosaur honking tubes. It is also deeply Aristotelian in running together the purely organic and the mental. “Things that are done for the sake of something include whatever may be done as a result of thought or of nature.”34 I don’t see that acknowledging this threatens the Darwinian stance at all; although, expectedly, in the light of what was said at the beginning of the chapter, a lot of people don’t much care for (or are indifferent to) that elision. Nagel uses the special status of mind, one major arrow in his quiver, as part of his all-out attack on the theory. “Biology may tell us about perceptual and motivational starting points, but in its present state has little bearing on the thinking process by which these starting points are transcended.”35 He argues that the problem of mind shows that mechanism, meaning—especially meaning—evolution through natural selection is not only unsupported and implausible but also wrongheaded. Or at the least, gravely deficient. “An account of their biological evolution must explain the appearance of conscious organisms as such.”36 Continuing: “Since a purely materialistic explanation cannot do this, the materialist version of evolutionary theory cannot be the whole truth.”
Nagel calls himself a “neutral monist,”37 presumably seeing mind and body as emanating from the same stuff (whatever that might be), writing that “the failure of psychophysical reductionism”—explanations of mind in terms of the material—suggests that “principles of a different kind” are “at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.”38 He keeps going in high gear, speaking warmly of Aristotle and (later) of Bergson, telling us that from life’s first appearance to the arrival of humans “the process seems to be one of the universe waking up.”39 And concludes by chiding mechanists for ignoring values: “Value enters the world with life, and the capacity to recognize and be influenced by value in its larger extension appears with higher forms of life. Therefore, the historical explanation of life must include an explanation of value, just as it must include an explanation of consciousness.”40
As it haunts Nagel, the problem of mind has always haunted me. Yet is it a problem here, for the evolutionist, in quite the sense Nagel implies? He runs the mind-body problem together with the as-yet-incomplete search for a naturalistic explanation of life itself and of its origination, but that is a mistake. No working biologist today feels the need to suppose a kind of special neo-Aristotelian life force, something along the lines of the élan vital—thinking that a live cow has it and a dead cow does not. While the origination problem is as yet unsolved, major work has been done in that direction, and no one thinks it needs the kind of conceptual or ontological jump that the move from body to mind seems to demand.41 The origin-of-life problem is a red herring. We know what a solution would look like. With respect to the mind-body problem, I am with Nagel in that I am not sure we know what a solution would look like.
That said, I suspect the most popular position today about what has been labeled the “hard problem”42—the arrival and nature of mind—is some form of “emergentism,” thinking (with people like Samuel Alexander) that, so long as you have got things organized in the right way, mind somehow rises up from the material, like Brigadoon appearing out of the mist. The trouble here is really that of freeing yourself from Cartesian dualism, with its problems. The mind is essentially different from matter, and that means that you still have the powerful objection of Leibniz (in the Monadology of 1714) that if you have a machine, a brain that is a (mini) factory or a computer or some such thing, it is hard to see where consciousness comes into it all, or why if it is not there in the physical brain, it nevertheless emerges up from it. Very trendy recently has been the notion of “supervenience,” where a change in one domain is always associated with a change in another domain. You get the brain buzzing in a certain way. You get the mind buzzling in harmony. Somehow the mind supervenes on the brain. Unfortunately, there remains the nasty suspicion that this move is simply defining the problem away. What is the relationship? “Is it a matter of causal dependence?” Or is it something nonnatural? “Perhaps, a matter of divine intervention or plan as Malebranche and Leibniz thought? Or a brute and in principle unexplainable relationship which we must accept ‘with natural piety,’ as some emergentists used to insist?”43
Possibly emergentists have got the problem backward. Instead of starting with the material, the brain, and working to the mind, we should start with the mind and work back to the brain, to the material.44 This starts to edge up to a form of monism, and I am certainly not going to turn from it because it is Nagel’s position in some sense. The problem (a concern, that to be fair, is shared by Nagel) is that, too often, simple monism (meaning mind and matter are one substance) gives rise to crude panpsychism, where mind is functioning everywhere and (using the term in a strong sense) one has pervasive consciousness. Before long one has loonies like the Prince of Wales who talks to his plants—apparently they are his “friends.” Actually, for once, the prince is in good company. The nineteenth-century experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner had similar views. I suspect most people react as I do. No one denies that plants have very sophisticated adaptations for sensing their environment and even changing it to their own ends.45 But don’t overdo it, else one will be wondering why they can’t get into Harvard. Perhaps there are quotas.
I have noted that Sewall Wright, incidentally, brilliant scientist though he was, to the great embarrassment of his graduate students had yearnings in the direction of panpsychism. White-head inevitably went one step further. That mysterious word “prehensive” is about the way in which physical objects like electrons, no less than living beings, actually incorporate perceptions into themselves, so physical things are not material things but perceptions and the relations to other things. But, Wright or Whitehead notwithstanding, one doesn’t have to agree that everything material is actively conscious—we humans are not a lot of the time—rather that in some sense the material is not just brute matter but a lot more than that. It is not that molecules are thinking. Rather that there is something about the individual molecule that gives rise to thinking. It is there in the individual molecule. You don’t have to wait, as emergentism suggests, to get molecules put together before you get the whole new dimension that leads to thinking—although as a matter of fact, you are not going to get full-blooded thinking until you do get a lot of molecules put together. Like red paint getting redder and redder as you add more pigment, so consciousness becomes more and more aware as it is added to. It is a matter of increment, not innovation. Panpsychism in this more modified sense is another thing and nothing like as stupid as tradition has. Is this still “monism”? William James claimed to be a “panpsychic pluralist,” meaning that he favored something along the lines of Leibniz’s Monadology, with lots of separate mind-atoms; although later he claimed to be a “pluralistic monist,” which rather confirms my feeling about James—contrary to Russell’s characterization of the pragmatists, he is an incredibly lovable and sympathetic thinker, at times rather inclined to bafflingly foggy metaphysics.46 Pluralism on one side—anything close to Monadology is nigh self-refuting (in a transcendentally magnificent way)—I don’t see why one shouldn’t speak of monism, in the sense that one is trying very hard not to rip apart mind and matter. It certainly was for Ernst Haeckel: “One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be, that I regard all matter as ensouled, that is to say as endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain) and with motion, or, better, with the power of motion.”47 This is getting a bit close to royal family–type thinking, for my taste, but I take his point.
Thanks to modern physics, we know already that old materialist positions cannot be true, with the paradoxes about ultimate units being in some sense both particles and waves. Care is needed here. Lots of silly things have been said about modern physics and the mind, for instance, that quantum phenomena prove free will. That is nonsense. As Hume realized, if something happens randomly, that is not freedom but craziness. The point rather is that we now know that physical reality simply is not Cartesian res extensa and nothing more. Add to this positively spooky claims (Einstein’s language) about such things as quantum entanglement where what happens in one part of the universe apparently is linked intimately with what happens in another part of the universe. Even if there is not a causal connection, there is an information connection.48 While we certainly do not have a solution to the body-mind problem—and frankly talking about “panpsychism” may be little more than a fancy confession of ignorance—equally certainly we know that there is more there than meets the eye, and in the next century or two we might learn things that will surprise us a great deal.49 Talk of “information connection” does start to push you to the view that sentience really is an aspect of the material. We have monism and, if not full-blooded panpsychic monism, some weaker form. Perhaps, ultimately, the Leibnizian objection about machines not thinking will prevail, but we might learn something significant and pertinent. Perhaps we shall be pointed to another all-powerful metaphor that will replace the machine metaphor without thrusting us back to the organic metaphor. We—or rather our descendants—shall see.
The all-important point to grasp is that, despite Nagel’s nay-saying, in many respects, the coming of consciousness, of sentience, has been handled remarkably well by the Darwinian evolutionist. It seems to have appeared and to have developed gradually, which is what one might expect. So long as you are not an epiphenomenalist, which applies to neither Nagel nor me, it seems to have obvious adaptive functions—information from without is received, it is processed, and then action is taken—again, what one might expect.50 No one is taking value out of the equation. It seems amenable to more refined analysis, for instance, about the feedback between the needs of large brains (supporting sophisticated minds) and the availability of fuel to feed those brains and how the brains themselves (or minds) might contribute to the finding of such fuel. And so on and so forth. No one—no Darwinian—is going around tearing out hair because sentience is such an anomaly that it simply doesn’t fit into the Darwinian scenario at all. The scientific theory takes the mind as a given, as it takes the brain as a given. The functioning, interpreted software—not just the written program, which seems to me more physical than mental—and the functioning hardware. With the monistic approach—and I am just introducing it in a friendly way without fully endorsing it—the issues seem less.
One’s frustration with someone like Nagel comes because, in some ways, he seems sympathetic to the approach, even—despite some earlier disavowals51—to the point of panpsychism: “My guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature.”52 Yet he flatly refuses to see that Darwinism is offering him pieces of philosophical candy! Others have been more grateful. One who did express his appreciation was the mathematician-philosopher William Kingdom Clifford:
[W]e cannot suppose that so enormous a jump from one creature to another should have occurred at any point in the process of evolution as the introduction of a fact entirely different and absolutely separate from the physical fact. It is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent where that event can be supposed to have taken place. The only thing that we can come to, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, is that even in the very lowest organism, even in the Amoeba which swims about in our own blood, there is something or other, inconceivably simple to us, which is of the same nature with our own consciousness, although not of the same complexity.53
There is something really important being said here. The trouble with dualism or varieties of emergentism—theories that somehow make sentience separate from matter—is that when sentience comes on the scene, it is almost miraculous: “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”54 Now you have one thing, matter, and now you have something completely different, mind. How could something as strange as mind suddenly appear on the scene? I am not really surprised that someone like Robert Wright,55 who calls himself an epiphenomenalist but who when mind turns up starts to sound much like an old-fashioned dualist, has problems to the extent that he starts talking again cryptically about “purpose”—meaning Purpose, something out of the normal course of nature. But pseudo-problems and untenable hypotheses like these are issues raised by the metaphysics of dualism/emergentism—supporters make mind different and then complain they cannot explain it—rather than by Darwinism. To the evolutionist, mind from nowhere just doesn’t make sense, either as a question of general principle or empirical fact—oysters, ants, alligators, shrews, dogs and chimps, humans, philosophers. This is not a phylogeny, actual line of descent, but shows that sentience is not an absolute out or in sort of phenomenon. Never lose sight of this.
You might still ask for more. What really is mind and its relationship to the brain? Perhaps in the end it is legitimate to respond that, much as we might like an answer, it is not the job of the evolutionist to supply one. Take gravity. Gravity is very important to the evolutionist—the Darwinian evolutionist, that is. Why are there no cats as large as elephants? Because body-weight goes up by volume and no elephant-sized cats could have the slender, supple legs of felines. The legs have to be tree-trunksized like those of elephants to carry the weight.56 Gravity is the underlying principle here, but no one expects the Darwinian to explain the nature of gravity. Like the cookbook says, “First take your hare.” Why then should the evolutionist be expected to explain the nature of consciousness? Surely it can be taken as a given, and the evolutionist can move on? It would be nice to explain consciousness as it would be nice to explain gravity. Perhaps explaining consciousness would give us new evolutionary understanding, as perhaps explaining gravity would give us new evolutionary understanding. But in science you never get everything you want, at least not at first. Leave the discussion at that.
Reasons and Causes
So we come to the heart of the matter. Nagel is absolutely right—mind does make things deeply, irreducibly teleological. Mind is the apotheosis of final cause, drenched in purpose.57 It’s all about values. Presumably, if one is someone like Nagel, inclined to some kind of monism, one runs with this, seeing mind and hence principles of teleological ordering pervasive in everything. Thus, metaphors like “waking up” make good sense. Although this is a little too Aristotelian for my taste—especially if you think in terms of the universe or the world itself waking up—I am not now going to raise a hard-line, epistemological objection. As we have seen, the move to the machine metaphor from the organic metaphor was not so much one of logic as of being able to do better and stronger science—more predictions and so forth. If the facts so dictate, as perhaps in optics, you can certainly go back to the earlier metaphor and take something of an instrumentalist attitude about prime movers and so forth. However, I am not sure that monism necessarily forces you toward an all-pervasive mind, a kind of world soul (which, at least in principle, could wake up), and at the present state of knowledge—remember, unlike Nagel I think Darwinism is a friend and not something that makes one eager to jettison the machine metaphor—one might still opt for a more cautious Kantian/Darwinian approach to things. Perhaps by talking of instrumentalism, you have already embraced this option.
Even going cautiously, purpose has a major role to play. Take, as an example, my daughter Emily—named after the poet (they share birthdays)—just turned thirty. She is a lawyer, a very junior public defender in Jacksonville in Florida. Her parents are inordinately proud, not just that she is a lawyer but that she is in a job serving others, society’s truly down and out. Her parents are also very relieved that she is now making money to support herself! Ask now about how she came to be a lawyer. It was about as far from chance as it was possible for something to be. As she grew up, it was apparent to all that Emily was very vocal; she likes to talk. She is very social and bright in that sort of way. When it was a matter of putting together study groups, Emily was always a leader. She will not give up on something when she thinks it right and important. She has a concern for others in need and a rather brutal way of satisfying this. All through college she mentored a very handicapped student, and others were ordered to join in and help. In short, she had all of the qualities designed to drive her parents crazy and to make her what biologists call “preadapted” to be a lawyer. So she took the LSAT exam, went to law school, passed the finals and the Florida Bar Exam, and qualified. After several months of parentally supported volunteer work, she landed her job.
Now, let’s have a look at what is going on here. Three major points stand out. First, qua evolution, something strange and unusual is happening. We don’t just have nails being hammered into blocks of wood, or pheromones telling ants in a nest which direction they should go to find food. A lot of reasoning is going on here. As an undergraduate, Emily started to think about what she might do. She talked to friends and understanding adults. She may even have talked to her parents. She realized that there were some things she just wasn’t able to do, like become a professional tennis player. She realized also that there were some things that she simply didn’t want to do. She was never really attracted to being a teacher or a doctor. She saw that law was an option, and the more she thought about it, the more attractive it became. It’s a worthwhile job; it can be very interesting; it pays reasonably well, notwithstanding that one incurs horrendous student debt; it has a reasonable status in society, for all that her father kept quoting Shakespeare (“First, we’ll kill all the lawyers”). And, most important of all, it means you have to wear nice clothes. So these thoughts, desires, and intentions kicked in, and several years later the weekends found Emily at the mall looking for something to wear on Monday morning.
So we do have something strange, but is it that odd? Going back to Plato and the Phaedo, we find that, as a matter of course, quite naturally he brings us humans into the picture as entities who are going to be part and parcel of the purpose story. Take Socrates himself. At one level, he is sitting in prison awaiting the hemlock because of his physical nature—his bones and flesh and so forth. But that is hardly the reason why he is there. The bones and flesh would have had him out of prison and far away long ago “if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts.” Continuing: “There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking.”58
We are giving things a Darwinian interpretation, but we have seen that somehow the mind game seems to fit into the evolutionary picture, so we know already that it cannot be that odd. It is really not like the way that Rudolf Otto described God, as “numinous,” as unknowable, as the “Wholly Other.”59 For instance, just as if a nail is driven into the wood by a hammer, it cannot have been driven in by a staple gun, so if Emily was motivated by the idea that law would be interesting and fun, she cannot have been totally motivated by status and money. The usual laws of logic and so forth seem to apply. For me, a good analogy is with the square root of minus one: i2 = –1. We all learned at school that although minus numbers can be square roots, they cannot themselves have square roots, because when you multiply a number—positive or negative—by itself, you get a positive number. And yet then, you find out that mathematicians do want to talk about the square roots of minus numbers, most famously i the square root of -1. At least they have the good grace to call them “imaginary numbers.” What you also start to learn is that although imaginary numbers are very peculiar things with apparently no real-world referent, they are not that peculiar. You can add them and multiply them and so forth. Moreover, you can include them in equations where they seem to function perfectly normally. For instance, in the Euler identity: eiπ + 1 = 0. One goes on to learn that i has huge numbers of practical applications. In electrical engineering you can work out all sorts of complex problems using the square root of minus one.60 I suggest that reasons function in much the same way as the square root of minus one. They are strange, but they follow logic and mathematics and so forth. It is better to have two good reasons rather than one, and one rather than none at all. And they are obviously very useful. Hominins, protohumans, our ancestors, used reasons very effectively to find food in quantities and of a quality that it would have been nigh impossible to get without thought and reasoning.
The second point is that, when I started out as a philosopher more than fifty years ago, many denied strongly that reasons (that is, reasons with outcomes we desire) can function unambiguously as causes—efficient causes, that is. It was argued that reasons get us into a whole new, noncausal ball game.61 The classic text was Elizabeth Anscombe’s Wittgenstein-influenced little book Intention (1957). (As a Roman Catholic convert, there was also expectedly a lot of Aristotle—end-directed values, natural rather than imposed.) It is true that intentions are (or can be) about the future, but they are not causal, like predictions. “What distinguishes actions which are intentional from those which are not? The answer that I shall suggest is that they are the actions to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting.”62 This means that we are not so much into the business of empirical justification, as we would be with causes, but more into evaluation. Likening intentions to commands, Anscombe writes that “there is a difference between the types of ground which we call an order, and an estimate of the future, sound. The reasons justifying an order are not ones suggesting what is probable, or likely to happen, but e.g. ones suggesting what it would be good to make happen with a view to an objective, or with a view to a sound objective. In this regard, commands and expressions of intention are similar.”63
What does this all mean? There is a strong, implicit message that intentional beings escape the forces of nature. We may be in the world of final causes. We are outside the world of efficient causes. But we can’t so easily escape the forces of nature and we don’t.64 Of course, when we first start into discussion about reasons, Anscombe is right that we are usually less concerned with efficient causation and more with some kind of understanding and evaluation.65 Final-cause thinking. Barbarossa. Why on earth did Hitler invade Russia on June 22, 1941? Did he learn nothing from what happened to Napoleon? Clearly not, for he left things so late in the season that, thanks to the autumn weather and oncoming cold, his troops were bound to get bogged down. Rather, Hitler was encouraged by his success against France in the previous year and even more by his sense of destiny, that Fate or the Immanent Will had picked him to lead his nation. All else paled in comparison. So we can understand why Hitler reasoned as he did.66 Then, obviously, we who are looking at episodes like this start to move on. Often people have very good reasons for doing things but just don’t do them. It is here that reasons, along with general temperament and external forces and so forth, get kicked into causes (or not), and we do things (or not). “We cannot explain why someone did what he did simply by saying the particular action appealed to him; we must indicate what it was about the action that appealed. Whenever someone does something for a reason, therefore, he can be characterized as (a) having some sort of pro attitude toward actions of a certain kind, and (b) believing (or knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering) that his action is of that kind.”67 Why did Hitler follow his instincts rather than listen to history? Because at some level, his reasons convinced and drove him to action. He thought (a) he was guided by destiny and he believed (b) that marching into Russia was a specific instance of being so guided.
Take Anscombe’s own discussion and use it against her in a standard natural selection situation. She admits that animals can have intentions. “Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention.”68 Consider lions. Apparently, the females do the hunting. The males wait for the catch and, using their superior strength to help themselves, move in. A female lion goes (intentionally) to the top of the gully, hides in a thicket, waiting to jump out when the buck gets close. A second lion goes (intentionally) down the gully and waits, and then when the frightened buck comes racing down, grabs it and kills it. Intentions, reasons or “reasons,” if you like—Why did the lion hide in the thicket? To scare the buck—but overall about as causal as you could possibly imagine. It is not a question of causes or reasons but causes and reasons. Efficient and final causes. “The origin of action—its efficient not its final cause—is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end.”69 The lions’ behavior was causally adaptive—they did what they did in order to survive and reproduce—as does the totally unconscious Venus flytrap when it snaps shut on some unfortunate insect that has wandered within its orb. The fact that the lion scenario is all about values—the lions want to catch the buck, because for them this is a good thing—is far from being a problem and taking us from a causal analysis, precisely what we expect and demand. After all, the plant wants to trap the fly—from the plant’s viewpoint, it is a very good thing.
All of this is precisely what we would expect. Overall, whether dictator or lion, we are animals and part of the real world. On the one hand, James was right and Huxley was wrong. Evolution through natural selection simply doesn’t produce and cherish expensive items like functioning brains if they are not going to make a difference in the real world, the world of efficient causation. On the other hand, if our minds (using our brains) didn’t function as superb causal machines, we would have gone extinct long ago. The nail is deeply embedded in the block of wood. Why? Because I hammered it in. Emily is a lawyer. Why? Because several years ago she got the idea of being a lawyer and, having researched things, set herself on a track that has just ended in the public defender’s office in Jacksonville. If you say the nail is in the wood because Lizzie my wife took a stick of butter to it, you would be wrong. If you said Emily is a lawyer because she had a vision and Jesus told her to be a lawyer, you would be wrong. Jesus was with Shakespeare on this one. “And he said, ‘Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers’” (Luke 11:46). Of course, reasons are not causes exactly, like hammering in nails, but we know that already. Equally, of course, one reason is probably not the only cause. Emily is a lawyer because there was a loan system that helped her to pay the fees at law school. None of this is at all that odd. Have you ever tried hammering a nail into a piece of wood with the hammer in the one hand and the wood in the other? You need a bench or a support to do the job, and this is surely part of the relevant causal network.
I appreciate that someone like Anscombe in a neo-Aristotelian world could never find adequate the stripped-down Kantian-Darwinian analysis I seek. So, let me note that, while critical, I accept entirely positive aspects of her thinking, such as the recognition of value—in a way, we are in complete harmony in seeing that forward-looking thinking demands more than simple reference to efficient causes. You need final-cause thinking. My aim is to deny the nigh-paradoxical claims for reasons, and to get away from a kind of up-on-a-pedestal view of them. I see purpose (or, rather, purposes) right through the living world; I argue that humans (and other sentient beings) are not different in being uniquely purposeful, and I argue that such beings are (like with the square root of minus one) in possession of a new tool that gives a way more powerful way of having and satisfying purposes. That means reasons and values, but it does not push out efficient causation. Emily took the LSAT exam in order to become a lawyer. She had her reasons! The point is that the reasons refer to the fact of becoming a lawyer. It turned out—by the time she had thought things through, taken a year off to travel, and so forth—this was an event some six or so years in the future. But if we know anything by now, we know that there is absolutely nothing tense-making here. It is not an either/or but not both situation. We are surely sufficiently with Aristotle to know that final causes pretty much demand efficient causes. The purpose of taking the exam (around 2008) was to become a lawyer (in 2014). There is nothing odd in the sense of little men in the future manipulating the strings of the present or anything like that. (Spinoza in the appendix to the first part of his Ethics made that point, in the context of an argument strongly criticizing Aristotelian final causes.) The missing-goal-object problem still applies. In the year she took off to travel between undergraduate college and law school, she went to Australia. It is quite plausible that she might have stayed there and ended up doing something entirely different, like becoming a sheep farmer. You get to ride horses. It is just that, because Emily’s reasons included thoughts about the future, and that is what motivated her, we are dealing here with a purpose-oriented situation. We are talking about values. We are also talking about causes.
The third and final point is that, of course, things are not exactly the same as in the straight physical example. To give an example where there is a clear (temporal) gap between efficient cause and final cause, the child’s testicles exist in order to reproduce in the future. The testicles are around because of a long line of testicle-possessing reproducers. Kant pointed that out and Darwin confirmed it. Emily is not the end point of a long line of successful lawyers. Although she would not have set out to become a lawyer if everyone she knew who had taken the LSAT exam had failed to become a lawyer. So what happened in the past is not irrelevant. Nevertheless, it is somewhat different. What about the big question raised by Nagel’s attack on Darwinism? Plato, Aristotle, or Kant—what Nagel calls “intentional,” “teleological,” and “causal,” respectively? What is the right overall analysis here? Obviously, within the system, as it were, one has conscious design, as demanded by Plato. One might also say that one has the kind of forward-looking plan or system that characterizes Aristotle’s approach to final causes. Emily did think about things and plan ahead. However, with respect, we know all of that already, and unless you simply by fiat take things out of the natural order, you have to push a little further. You cannot simply be an Aristotelian like Nagel. Looking at those testicles, a cautious thinker (like myself) feels a Kantian analysis—heuristic, completely mechanical—is most appropriate because we think the testicles are just testicles, if we might so describe them, and the purpose thinking is imposed on the situation by us.
The concept of a thing as in itself a natural end is therefore not a constitutive concept of the understanding or of reason, but it can still be a regulative concept for the reflecting power of judgment, for guiding research into objects of this kind and thinking over their highest ground in accordance with a remote analogy with our own causality in accordance with ends; not, of course, for the sake of knowledge of nature or of its original ground, but rather for the sake of the very same practical faculty of reason in us in analogy with which we consider the cause of that purposiveness.70
Although, in the case of genitalia, as I have conceded, there is something out there to which we are responding. Believe me, I am somewhat of an expert on these matters.
Likewise in the human case, we are structuring the situation but doing so in some sense responding to what is out there. If we look at Emily from the outside, as it were, then—as I have been stressing again and again—it all seems rather familiar. It is the square root of minus one all over again. She chats with her friends, she reads a book or two, she listens (or not) to her parents, and then she takes certain actions—sitting for the LSAT exam—and in the end she walks through the doors of the public defender’s office in Jacksonville. Like any other healthy young animal, with obvious qualifications that will be raised in the next chapters about the dimensions of freedom brought on by culture and how we can hence, in some ways, escape from the brute, direct necessities of Darwinian existence, Emily is out there foraging for food and (undoubtedly before too long) reproduction. It is not as if Emily’s mind—and this is not in any sense to knock it—has suddenly joined up with other minds in a kind of Hegelian sense now guiding the course of history. I am not saying there is no social progress—more on this in chapter 11—but that my daughter is a sophisticated and thus far rather successful organism, just like other organisms. She is one of Richard Dawkins’s “survival machines.” It is proper to think of her in terms of purpose. Her decision to become a lawyer has exactly the same kind of relationship to the future as the testicles have to producing babies.
Adaptability
We draw to an end of this part of the discussion, but there is a final point to be raised. We need to draw the distinction between being “adapted” and being “adaptable.”71 All organisms are adapted. Most, if not all, are adaptable. The concepts are related but not the same. For obvious reasons, one tends to think of K-selection for adaptability and r-selection for adaptation. Leafcutter ants are highly adapted to their surroundings. If foragers find suitable leaves, then they make pheromone trails back to their nest so that cutters can come out and do their business and carry the parts home. But they are not very adaptable. If a rainstorm wipes out the trail, the cutters away from home are lost and probably die. The nest can bear this cost because literally millions of workers are being produced. Mammals are adaptable with respect to outside temperature. They need to maintain a constant body heat—for humans it is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius)—and if they get too hot they sweat, and if they get too cold they shiver, thus bringing them back to the original state. (Not always, obviously.) This is being adaptable, meaning that they can adjust things in order to keep the goal in view. Adaptability comes in many forms, and sometimes it is a one-off thing, where an animal might grow one way to adapt to conditions and might grow another way to adapt to different conditions. In all cases though, it is a matter of adjusting to stay adapted. This is often known, especially in philosophical circles, as being “goal directed” or “directively organized.” A lot of earlier work was much influenced by successes of homing devices invented for weapons (like torpedoes) in World War II.72
The obvious thing about humans as organisms is that thanks to our thought processes, we are highly adaptable. Reasoning makes us very good at going after goals, thinking strategies through, and when barriers are raised, then reflecting, reassessing, and taking different directions to achieve the goal—or a suitable substitute. For Emily, becoming a lawyer required these sorts of decisions and reassessments along the way. When she got her offers of admission to law school, one was from a school in New Orleans. As you might imagine for someone with a sociable nature, the idea of three years in New Orleans was very attractive. The problem is that Louisiana law is unique in the United States, as it is based in part on French law. This would be no help in passing the Florida Bar Exam. It is one thing to spend three years in New Orleans. It is another thing to spend the rest of your life in Louisiana. So strategy decisions had to be made there. Then, after she had been admitted to the Florida Bar, there was much discussion about the right job, especially given her student loan. One good thing about working in a public defender’s office is that, after a number of years, much of the loan is forgiven. And so forth, from beginning to end.
This matter of thought making us highly adaptable does not make us unique—it does not make other animals with levels of consciousness unique—but it does give us a powerful adaptation that we can and did use to advantage. It made us very efficient hunter-gatherers, for instance. It gave us the ability to be highly social. Developing sophisticated communication methods obviously helped here too. It led to tool use and then to tool improvement, as perhaps new prey in newly entered lands led to the need of different kinds of tools. One very much doubts, for instance, that the first bow and arrow sprang into existence fully formed and functioning. The same with making and using fire.
This discussion raises the ever-thorny question of free will. Adaptability means decisions, strategies—from within rather than from without. This is what freedom is all about. I am with the robust thinking of David Hume on its existence.73 He thought it was just silly to claim that humans always act out of self-interest, and for all that there are those today who claim we have no free will, it seems just silly to say this seriously. Emily clearly had a choice about whether to go to law school in New Orleans or not. She was not just a falling rock, powerless to make a decision. If you take evolutionary biology seriously, it is hard to see why you would deny some kind of Humean analysis of free will, seeing (in a “compatibilist” manner) that free will does not deny that we are subject to causal laws.74 Darwin himself saw this, if not entirely clearly. Sometimes (writing in private notebooks around the time in the late 1830s when he was discovering his theory), he denied that we can have free will because we are determined—“one doubts existence of free will every action determined by heredetary [sic] constitution, example of others or teaching of others.”75 But then common sense intervened and he admitted fully that animals can have free will. “With respect to free will, seeing a puppy playing cannot doubt that they have free will, if so all animals.”76 He even thought this might be true of oysters!
Certainly if the alternative (“libertarian”) view holds, it is hard to see how humans fit so nicely into the Darwinian picture. Not surprisingly, Nagel leans this alternative way somewhat. Like Hume, I think that if reasons do not in some sense determine our actions, then we don’t have freedom. As I have said, we have craziness. If reasons do determine our actions, then why not natural processes governed by law? A tide is pushing against the floodgates. Two forces, one prevails—the gates hold or the gates burst. Go to New Orleans or stay in Florida? Two forces, one prevails—she goes to New Orleans or she stays in Florida. Just as you can explain why the gates hold, so you can explain why she stayed in Florida. Given Emily’s purpose—to get a decent job as a lawyer in Florida—staying in Florida for law school was the stronger force for making her decision. Leave it at that.