Neuropolis

* Headline of Sunday Times interview with Thomas Meeks and Dilip Jeste, 5 April 2009.

One day medical interventions might make us wiser. Thomas W. Meeks and Dilip V. Jeste, professors of psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, made this astounding claim in their paper ‘Neurobiology of Wisdom’:

Understanding the neurobiology of wisdom may have considerable clinical significance. For example, knowledge of the underlying mechanisms could potentially lead to development of preventive, therapeutic and rehabilitative interventions for enhancing wisdom.*

* Thomas Meeks and Dilip Jeste, ‘Neurobiology of Wisdom’, Archive of General Psychiatry, 2009.

Wisdom is not a biochemical property that you can isolate from a more complex compound. It is not the name of the residue you have left when you boil away silliness. You may learn wisdom after spending £30,000 on a surgical wisdom implant only to come out speaking a bit like Yoda – ‘much wiser now am I’ – but that’s not what Meeks and Jeste mean by developing interventions to enhance wisdom. The idea that wisdom is a substance, that it exists inside us like enzymes or platelets, is a category error. Meeks and Jeste talk about wisdom like it’s Sanatogen multivitamins or an effective underarm deodorant: ‘Wisdom is considered an important contributor to successful personal and social functioning.’

The wisdom that guided Martin Luther King Jr’s campaign of civil disobedience also got him assassinated in Memphis. Being shot dead is considered a major obstacle to successful personal and social functioning. Hermits and dervishes live in the rocks because their path to wisdom demands renouncing successful personal and social functioning altogether. So if wisdom is not like a grooming product or jar of vitamins, how else might it be defined? Meeks and Jeste have a stab at a definition:

A standard philosophical (in Greek, philos-sophia = lover of wisdom) definition of wisdom pertains to the judicious application of knowledge, and most religions have considered it a virtue.

This is a standard dictionary definition (Webster’s) so I don’t know why they call it a philosophical one. And while I like Jeste and Meeks’ judicious qualifier ‘most’ in the phrase ‘most religions have considered it a virtue,’ I do wish they’d tell us, which religions have considered wisdom not worth bothering with. The Apocryphon of John comes nearest:

On that day, the disciples spake unto Him:

‘Master, teach us the path that leadeth to the unveiling of sacred truths and profound wisdom.’

And lo! the Master did say, ‘Wisdom? It’s not worth the agro. You should get out more. Have a laugh. Do something stupid for a change.’

But Master,’ sayeth the disciples, ‘it is written that by wisdom come we unto profound acceptance of life as it really is.’

Whereupon the Master did command his disciples to cease with their bunny rabbit as it was doing his head in.’

What would a wisdom intervention look like? Let’s suppose
we discover into which precise synaptic cleft to inject the inhibitory neurotransmitter glutamate, and it makes us less prone to rush headlong into situations we do not fully understand, better able to compromise and temporise, to watch and wait – how will that help us in those situations when those urging compromise simply haven’t understood what’s going on? Who was wisest in May 1940, Halifax or Churchill? If, instead of drinking Prunier brandy Churchill had been receiving nasal inhalations of inhibitory glutamate, we’d all be speaking German.

We teach children the virtue of compromise, but we also teach them that there are things about which there can be no compromise. Compromise is by no means always wise, especially not when a point of principle is at stake. For decades, Aung San Su-Kyi rightly knew that until she had secured Burmese democracy, she could not budge an inch from implacable non-cooperation with the Myanmar junta. Fatal to all hope of democracy would be to accept a job in the junta’s agriculture and fisheries ministry, say, in the hope of rising to a cabinet position, and by patient compromise and careful behind-the-scenes diplomacy, influencing the direction of policy towards a more democratic orientation. She knew that that sort of trimming would be the end of everything she was trying to do.

You cannot distil wisdom. What is wise one instant is foolish the next. Both before and after the American Civil War, and for large chunks during it, Ulysses Grant is dim-witted and confused, drinks too much, fails at one business venture after another, slides into despair and despondency. But by 1863 he is almost alone in being able to see one simple truth that escapes more savvy, sophisticated military and political minds. Unconditional surrender. Now, the shape of Grant’s brain hasn’t changed to fit the times. The times have changed to fit his mind.

‘Remember always that a wise man walks with head bowed, humble like the dust’, Shaolin priest Master Kan tells Kwai Chang Caine in the TV series Kung Fu. The reason why it’s wise to walk with your head bowed in nineteenth-century China is a question of power. In a feudal autocracy you’d best not meet the glare of the Emperor’s guards who will kill you as soon as look at you. It is wise for Kwai Chang Caine, and all those without power in the world, to learn tolerance, self-regulation, and every other self-abnegation going, but when we look at the successful and powerful people in the world do we find they walk with their head bowed, humble like dust? If not, then how did they achieve such ‘successful personal and social functioning’ without being wise? This has to do with power. A failure to factor in power relations can make discussion of wisdom in the abstract a bit waffly:

Tolerance of other persons’ or cultures’ value systems is often considered an important subcomponent of wisdom.

A perk of power is that you no longer have to be tolerant of persons’ or cultures’ value systems. A servant is wise to learn what Jeste and Meeks call ‘emotional homeostasis’ (not blowing your stack) but the Lord of the Manor can take it or leave it.

What’s wrong with ‘Neurobiology of Wisdom’ is not a question of whether it is premature to claim that neuroscience can locate wisdom. No matter how sophisticated brain-imaging technology becomes in the future, the type of explanation that Jeste and Meeks offer here will never do. It will never do because their concept of wisdom is every bit as innocent of real, lived human experience as the claim we examined in the AI chapter that logic is how we come up with our ethical choices. What is wrong here is the same as what was wrong there, as the next quote makes clear (or as clear as such turgid prose can be):

The lateral prefrontal cortex facilitates calculated, reason-based decision making, whereas the medial prefrontal cortex is implicated in emotional valence and prosocial attitudes/behaviours.

Calculated, reason-based decision-making is not calculated to be wise. No giddy whim compels oil executives to drill for oil in the Arctic. Psychotherapists grow tired of reminding clients how our self-destructive ideas tend to come disguised as friends. ‘No, you’re wrong’, we reply. ‘This time it’s different. This time I’m making my decision after careful consideration. I’m going in with my eyes open. I’ve chosen a sane and thoughtful partner, and her ACAB forehead tattoo is neither here nor there.’

In A Treatise of Human Nature David Hume (1711–1776) argues that we all have our reasons for the most unreasonable things you can possibly imagine doing:

‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’ Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me.

I never understood what Hume meant by preferring the destruction of the world to a finger scratch until I listened to the brilliant Josh Ritter song ‘The Temptation of Adam’.

Alone together in a nuclear missile silo ‘three hundred feet under the ground’, co-workers Adam and Marie, fall deeply in love. As their tour of duty comes to an end Adam fears their love won’t work out on the surface. The dark thought comes that if World War III broke out they could stay just as they are, together forever, snug in their bunker with a lifetime’s supply of rations. Then Adam has an even darker thought. Nuclear weapons operator that he is, in possession of the nuclear codes, he has to hand an excellent way of starting WWIII unilaterally. The song ends with the line:

‘The Temptation of Adam’ reminds us that you can reason and calculate yourself into the world’s worst decisions.
We methodically ponder and strategize our way to the everlasting bonfire, while nodding approvingly to ourselves at each judicious link in our chain of reasoning. In sharp contrast, at the very moment we take a decision that will turn out excellently, we are often beset by voices in our head warning that we have surrendered to our worst self-destructive urges. There are sound reasons for this internal heckler to pop up at moments when we are about to go our own way. We have evolved to care a lot what others think. The internal heckler is a repository of all the loving and sound advice we have absorbed over many years and which we are about to ignore for reasons we can’t quite put into words just yet. We are going our own way, but because we set so much stock by their counsel, it leaves us feeling out on a limb.

An interesting case in point is direct action. When people take direct action, they sometimes have to surmount all kinds of internal hecklers. You have always been careful crossing roads. But now, all of a sudden, you and affinity group are sitting down in the middle of five lanes of traffic.

This is why part of direct action training is designed to help you get over the voice in your head telling you that what you are doing is wrong. Before civil rights activist Rosa Parks sat in the whites-only section of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and before Ploughshares women broke into a British Aerospace hangar in Lancashire to disarm a Hawk attack aircraft, it was necessary for them to undertake a course of intensive direct action training, in part designed to help them silence these internalised voices, which Jeste and Meeks would like to call ‘the medial prefrontal cortex’.

[T]he prefrontal cortex figures prominently in several wisdom sub-components (eg. emotional regulation, decision making, value relativism) primarily via top-down regulation of the limbic and striatal regions.

The civil service is big on ‘top-down regulation’ but why should the pre-frontal cortex prefer this management approach? You could argue that this is just a metaphor – that Jeste and Meekes are merely trying to convey how a ‘higher’ part of the brain damps down urges from a ‘lower’ part. But a metaphor is never just a metaphor, and this one allows them to personify a part of the brain, and so have it do things in the same way that we would do them. This is, I think, an example of what philosopher Ray Tallis calls the ‘smuggling in of consciousness by way of anthropomorphism’. Ray Tallis has been a customs and excise vigilante kicking down the door of one consciousness-smuggler after another. The smugglers pretend to have a physical explanation for everything, but they simply don’t. Explanations that pretend to be purely material, have actually smuggled in some sort of conscious agent, and the way they do this is by anthropomorphising the brain. We are all supposed to look down on mind–body dualism, but this is less impressive if we are dressed in the furry onesie of anthropomorphism.

While appearing only to be describing neurochemical reactions, Jeste and Meeks also imply that these brain regions know what they are doing, as if a little homunculus was at work. Since the pre-frontal cortex is all but synonymous with consciousness anyway, then Jeste and Meeks can imply that it sort of is consciousness, which makes it seem not very far-fetched for it to be in favour of a top-down regulation.

My point is not that noble faculties of wisdom and love are sacred temples to which we must never admit the cold light of science. I am saying that Meeks and Jeste make a category error in assuming that wisdom can be reduced to particles or atoms. This fallacy is widespread, and understandable. People are anxious that if they cannot account for everything in the language of microphysics then they have surrendered to metaphysics. Bertrand Russell, that least mystical of men, made the wise point that just as there are laws of physics, so there are laws of psychology. Laws that apply to one domain, do not apply to the other. This has been forgotten. But perhaps that most mystical of men William Blake can help us remember a plain and simple matter of fact of life which is that concepts, such as wisdom, aren’t material things:

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house his wife his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.’