GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

On one hand, nothing is more familiar to us that our own consciousness, which can we safely assume is essentially similar to that of other humans. It seems equally obvious that we have free will. I make decisions constantly, and I change my mind just as frequently. And I can see that others are not able to predict, reliably, what I will do or say next; nor can I predict what others will do. Furthermore, we can observe very clearly that animals share many if not all of the same characteristics of human consciousness. We may never know what it’s like to be a bat, but more familiar animals like deer or cats are obviously aware of their environment in basically the same way that I am aware of my environment. Humans are aware of different things than other animals (notably, right and wrong), but animals may be aware of things that I can’t perceive, like the cat who refused to board the ship destined to sink (as I learned about at the Victoria Maritime museum).

In any case, we are surrounded by living organisms capable of more or less degrees of consciousness. Life is almost omnipresent on this earth, even in places that might seem very inhospitable. So consciousness is the plainest empirical fact in the world, perhaps, as Descartes observed, the only indubitable fact, the one thing we can’t doubt. There is nothing we know better. And we see conscious beings being born, growing, developing, reproducing, and eventually dying all around us. From this perspective, there is no mystery of consciousness, nor of freewill. Consciousness is simply the nature of my existence. Arguably, then, “the burden of proof,” so to speak, should be on those who wish to question the possibility of consciousness. It’s an artificial question without any pragmatic consequences. If the sciences can’t explain the physical basis of consciousness, then so much the worse for them. They either aren’t posing the right question, or their methodology is inadequate.

On the other hand, consciousness and free will are completely anomalous in our universe. The physical sciences tell us beyond any reasonable doubt that our planet is 4.5 billion years old, while humans have only been around for about 2.5 million. And for at least a billion years, earth harbored no forms of life at all. Multicellular forms appeared only in the last billion years. Furthermore, there is no evidence of life on other planets, within or without our solar system. Given the vast size and age of our universe, it is more economical to assume that we are not unique; but the fact remains that as far as we can see or recover, life on earth is anomalous, and human life even more so. From this perspective, the existence of life on earth appears nothing less than miraculous. That, by some completely random process, some mud should get up and start walking around appears highly unlikely, even impossible. We can only wonder, with Blake,

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

The basic problem addressed by Tallis, it seems to me, is how matter becomes subjectively conscious. I say “subjectively” because we can’t directly observe the consciousness of another living being, and as Tallis points out, even the most advanced brain scans do not help us to understand human consciousness.

There are two basic approaches to the problem of consciousness. First is to say that consciousness is only possible for soul or spirit. This approach may or may not rely on a creator God, and it may or may not insist on a sharp dualism between matter and spirit. They can also be understood as two aspects of one living being.

The second is evolutionary. Once life develops, organisms evolve nerve responses that allow them to find food and mates and avoid predators. These responses are programmed into the DNA and are comparable to computer programs. In the case of extremely simple organisms, the nerve responses involved are also simple. The responses of more advanced animals are more complicated but directed to the same goals.

For some animals, notably the hominid line, flexibility in behavior, presumably involving some choice between alternative ways of responding to events, is an adaptive strategy. Consciousness can be understood, in Darwinian terms, as the ability to evaluate alternatives and adapt one’s behavior to different circumstances. While the neuro-biological basis of ape and chimp consciousness is still not well understood, this is arguably a problem of complexity. The principles are well-known; and their behavior, while more flexible than other species, is still, arguably, wholly the product of their instincts, conditioning, and learning (by imitation); and as a result is very predictable. Some chimps are presumably smarter than others, and thus better able to evaluate alternatives or invent solutions to problems, but intelligence is a genetic variable within the scope of an evolutionary paradigm.

It’s not clear that chimps have what we call free will. Significantly, everyone, even animal rights activists, recognizes that we can’t hold animals morally responsible for their behavior.

Human consciousness is in many ways comparable to chimps’—subject to instinct, conditioning, and learning—but in addition we have the subjective experience of free will. And objectively, humans are much more unpredictable than any other species. So in addition to consciousness, we have the philosophical problem of how a material organism, whose atoms and molecules individually are subject to all the laws of physics, is capable of free will, acts which seemingly cannot be explained in terms of physical causation, even given the vast complexity of the human body.

Tallis and others observe that humans are conscious of other humans in ways that other animals are not of their fellows. Human consciousness is somehow tied up with our relations with other humans—relations which by definition are not contained within the brain. They are relations, not physical objects or neural events. This approach fits in well with Generative Anthropology and the Originary Hypothesis. But the question still remains: is the resistance of human consciousness to scientific explanation basically a problem of complexity? If so, then the mystery of human consciousness and free will are in principle capable of scientific explanation, and existing studies of human evolution and neuro-phenomena are at least on the right track, even if still largely unfruitful, as Tallis argues.

Even when the dimensions of social relations and language are added in, we are still dealing with beings composed of molecules subject to the law of physics. While this adds a layer of complexity, it doesn’t refute the proposition that human behavior and the subjective experience of consciousness are ultimately reducible to physics, in the form of evolutionary processes and the neuro-phenomena of individuals in groups. It doesn’t make sense to say that consciousness is not a physical phenomenon, since the only place it’s found is with physical bodies. We should also remember that neuro-phenomena are already well-recognized as responsive to the environment, so the social nature of non-human consciousness is a given.

It’s also possible that the problem is somehow not ultimately reducible to physical processes. But if human consciousness is not so reducible, then the philosophical problem of explaining how material beings can experience consciousness and free will remains. Saying that human consciousness and free will are a function of our unique cultural/social “nature” may well be true, but it doesn’t seem to answer the philosophical problem of how exactly this is possible.

I understand that there is a spy movie in which one of the spies is codenamed “Hedgehog” and his fellow spies ask, “what does Hedgehog know?” If anyone knows the movie, please share the title with us.

I have a printed copy of the Anthropoetics motto webpage on my office door: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog, one big thing,” with a photo of a cute European hedgehog. http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/hogb.html

Visitors often ask about the motto: what does it mean? What is the “one big thing?” Depending on who is asking, and what mood I’m in, I might say something about the ancient Greek origin of the saying and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on it, or something about Generative Anthropology, or I might just try to say something funny. When people ask what the hedgehog knows, I’m tempted to say, “the deferral of violence through representation,” but that phrase doesn’t have any meaning for most people, so I usually say something about Generative Anthropology’s focus on the origin of the language. The importance of asking that question is, in one sense, what hedgehog knows.

In my view, the fox is superficial, obsessively collecting details without understanding the larger meaning. The hedgehog is not necessarily a “big picture” thinker, but he knows one thing for sure, he stays with that one thing, and he builds on it slowly to construct something more lasting.

The relationship between the fox and the hedgehog is an interesting issue. The hedgehog, of course, by simply curling up into a ball is able to defeat the fox in all his cunning. But many people don’t see that the hedgehog is really any better or smarter than the fox. And the hedgehog certainly can’t afford to ignore all the data that has been so cunningly collected by the fox. So I think the best answer to the question, “what does hedgehog know?” is “one thing more than the fox.” In other words, the hedgehog knows everything the fox knows, but he puts a foundation or cornerstone under it, so that it all coheres into a meaningful whole.

I read the comic pages every day because they contain the best writing and art in the newspaper, but I have to take issue with journalist Roland Hedley in Saturday’s Doonesbury, who, in his interview with Ron Paul, claims that the ideal of libertarian government is “pure utopianism.” Actually, libertarianism is the only form of government that isn’t utopian. The modern Western democracies, including America’s, try to create an ideal society. Libertarianism is content with maximizing individual freedom, protecting private property, and defending against foreign aggression. What’s utopian about Ron Paul’s proposals is not his libertarianism but his foreign policy isolationism, which is naïve regarding our enemies in the world.

In Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, he poses the serious question, whether modern society is capable of deferring the violence that it provokes. Describing a mob scene at a Hollywood movie premiere , he writes,

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

The ensuing riot scene in West’s novel, as well as the protagonist’s painting-in-progress titled “The Burning of Los Angeles” suggest that West is not optimistic about the fate of America, exemplified here by Hollywood. The anthropological insight of the passage above is first of all that their violence is provoked specifically by representation (as opposed to simply things, facts, or any particular state of events), and especially the mass media. He also points out that ” Nothing can ever be violent enough” to satisfy the desires of the mob. The expectations raised by consumer society are so grandiose that no satisfaction, within its own terms, is possible. West is an acute psychologist of group dynamics, and various scenes in his novel demonstrate a fine understanding of desire as mimetic, that is, competitive.

West’s novel provides us with one of the best models for understanding Occupy Wall Street and other leftist movements. First of all, their (admittedly inchoate) desires are created by the mass media, which is dedicated to finding “scandals” everywhere. Second, that no reform can possibly satisfy their demands. This becomes virtually conscious with OWS, whose members admit that their purpose is primarily “occupation” or protest itself, rather than any particular reform. Third, that political correctness is essentially a competition for the moral high ground. As we saw in Zuccotti Park, PC has a tendency to fragment, because any particular position is subject to a more radical critique, and one’s PC “credentials” are likewise vulnerable to attack. It’s not an overstatement to say that national and international politics have become largely a battle for the moral high ground. How and why this is so deserves further consideration.