NDIAS QUARTERLY
WHY THE FOUNDATIONAL
QUESTION ABOUT HUMAN
NATURE IS SCIENTIFIC AND
OPEN
by Carl Gillett
Philosophers have long debated what I term the ‘Foundational Question’ about human
nature. That is, what deeper kind of thing are we? Answers in philosophy have ranged
from an immaterial soul to the presently dominant opposing views that we are either an
animal or a psychological system. Recently, scientific and wider debates over human
nature have also flared into life, whether about “nature” versus “nurture,” which primate
species are our ancestors (Homo habilis etc.), and more. However, these debates rarely
engage philosophical discussions because they often implicitly assume that we have
now scientifically answered the Foundational Question. Thus anthropologists,
primatologists, evolutionary biologists, and many following them, all routinely assume
that we are identical to Homo sapiens animals and that evolution established this “fact.”
Dissenting voices on this issue are now emerging in the sciences because some
researchers are beginning to defend the view that we are identical to brains rather than
animals. During my year at NDIAS, I have been working on reconstructing and
assessing the arguments and positions of those who consequently think that the
received scientific wisdom on the Foundational Question is wrong. At the outset, I
should immediately note that the dissenters take it to be overwhelmingly plausible that
we are evolved, since brains are evolved. But if not through a challenge to evolution,
then where does the impetus for challenging the received wisdom that we are animals
come from? Given the focus on brains, it should come as no surprise that the so-called
“neuroscience revolution” is remaking the intellectual terrain. Though the resulting
issues are complex, my goal here is to provide a sense of why it is becoming
increasingly plausible that we have reopened the Foundational Question.
As the massive media coverage makes us all aware, the neurosciences are making
rapid advances at a number of neurobiological levels. The brain is made of billions of
neurons with still greater numbers of connections between them. And vast amounts of
resources are presently being directed to brain mapping projects focused on
understanding these connections and hence the so-called “connectome.” But we have
already made profound advances at higher neurobiological levels where we now have
increasingly detailed accounts of what I term ‘rich psychological’ properties like
remembering, fearing, hoping, etc.
For example, in cognitive neuroscience the work of researchers like Endel Tulving
(2002) has provided us with sophisticated accounts of rich psychological properties like
episodically remembering, i.e. remembering a particular episode. Whilst in affective
neuroscience, writers like Jaak Panksepp (1997, 2012) have given us accounts of
properties like fearing. As these researchers emphasize, such accounts are based on
multiple lines of evidence, including testing on human subjects, cases of lesions or
damage in humans, evidence from animal studies, some evidence from molecular and
cellular levels and findings from imaging studies.
This work on our rich psychological properties has provided us with well confirmed
hypotheses that illuminate what philosophers term the “roles” of such properties. Thus
episodic memories are individuated by being produced by sensory organs, like eyes,
producing other rich psychological properties, and producing muscle stimulations,
usually in combination with other rich psychological properties. Given the nature of
these characteristic productive roles, we can provide plausible arguments about which
kind of individual, i.e. animal or brain, instantiates remembering, fearing, etc. A wide
range of individuals can be considered and a number of reasons offered, but let me
stick to the most obvious of each. So let us assume the candidate individuals are an
animal or a brain. And let us note that scientific notions of parthood plausibly imply that
parts and wholes do not productively interact. But eyes and muscles are parts of
animals; the animal does not productively interact with its own eyes or muscles and
hence does not play the right productive role to instantiate rich psychological properties.
In contrast, the brain does productively interact with sensory organs and muscles, since
our physiology is constructed to facilitate just such interactions. Thus our new
neuroscientific accounts of rich psychology plausibly support such properties being
instantiated in the brain.
In fact, this is just what working scientists, like Tulving, Panksepp, and many others
increasingly assume. Thus researchers have moved from describing remembering as a
“psychological” property to terming it a “neurocognitive” property. Wittgensteinian
philosophers (Bennett and Hacker 2003; Pardo and Patterson 2013) increasingly attack
such scientific practices as committing a “mereological fallacy” of ascribing properties of
wholes to their parts. Such critics assume scientists have unwittingly violated our
ordinary practices of ascribing rich psychology to animals rather than their parts,
including any organ like the brain. However, the critics are missing the detailed
theoretical arguments of the type I sketched above that justify the scientific practices.
Neuroscientists are not falling into a fallacy, but are instead committed to a rich,
explanatorily successful set of hypotheses supported by multiple lines of evidence. It is
this theoretical framework that underwrites the scientific practice of ascribing rich
psychological properties to brains rather than animals and which hence also challenges
the everyday practices of ascribing rich psychology to animals that the Wittgensteinians
prioritize without any similar theoretical defense.
I contend that these developments in the neurosciences necessitate our adopting a new
account in the foundations of neuroscience that I term ‘Expansive’ materialism, since
the view frames the point that the neurosciences have recently expanded our
understanding of the properties of brains to include rich psychological properties like
remembering, fearing, etc. Crucially, Expansive materialism takes the sciences to posit
rich psychology but at the highest neurobiological level since this materialism accepts
what we might term “expansive” (or “thinking”) brains that instantiate rich psychology.
Expansive materialism thus contrasts with both of the opposing views that presently
dominate the foundations of neuroscience and which were each thrown up in response
to much earlier developments in the sciences.
On one side, inspired by the neuroscience of the 1970s and 1980s, focused on the
molecular and cellular levels, we have the ‘Eliminative’ materialism of writers like Paul
and Patricia Churchland (1981, 1986) that contends rich psychological properties will
have no place in the sciences. However, cognitive and affective neuroscience now
routinely posit rich psychological properties at the highest neurobiological level, so we
should favor Expansive materialism over Eliminativism. On the other side of the current
debates, driven by the emergence of cognitive science, in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, we
have what I term the ‘Separatist’ materialism attributed to Jerry Fodor (1968, 1974), and
others, that contends the sciences should study rich psychological properties, but
claims that rich psychological properties are instantiated in a level of
individuals above the brain. In this case, Expansive materialism should be preferred
over Separatism given our new evidence that rich psychology is plausibly instantiated in
the brain.
The latter illustrates some of the deep changes in the intellectual landscape wrought by
the neuroscience revolution. And these implications plausibly extend to our
understanding of our deeper nature. Neuroscientific evidence is all too often associated
in the media with “nihilist” positions that claim that the neurosciences show that the self
and ourselves are illusions (Metzinger 2009, Hood 2012). But our brief survey now
allows us to appreciate why a novel positive position about our natures actually falls
from the scientific development. For example, prominent neuroscientists like Panksepp,
or Michael Gazzaniga (2005), are thus increasingly defending the view that we are
identical to expansive brains as positions on the Foundational Question. And, once
again, we can quickly appreciate the argument behind this contention.
We all routinely assume the truth of what I call the ‘Thinker Thesis’: that you are
identical to the individual in your chair that instantiates the properties of remembering,
fearing, thinking, etc. However, as we just outlined, and as these neuroscientists are
well aware, the neuroscience revolution supports the conclusion that the brain in your
chair instantiates the properties of remembering, fearing, thinking, etc. So, applying the
Thinker Thesis, the obvious conclusion is that you are identical to a certain brain. Since
brains and animals are not identical, we can thus also conclude that you are not
identical to an animal. We are consequently led to a new answer to the Foundational
Question—you are an expansive, or thinking, brain embodied in a certain animal whose
body it controls and experiences as itself.
At this point, you are probably writing off my claims, and the view that we are brains, as
just the kind of implausible speculation that philosophers churn out when we have
obvious, and overwhelming, evidence to the contrary. So let us briefly examine the
putative evidence that supports the claim that we are identical to animals, for I suggest it
looks questionable. This evidence appears to take two main forms for most of us. First,
though rarely discussed by philosophers, there is the evidence of our own lived
experience. And, second, as I noted above, there is the putative “fact” that evolution
establishes that you are identical to a Homo sapiens animal.
The first kind of support is easy to appreciate. Right now you are having an experience
of your body or a “proprioceptive” experience. And you directly experience certain
fingers and arms, for example, as yours, as owned, or simply just as you. But if fingers,
arms, etc. are you, then you are plausibly a body and hence a Homo sapiensanimal.
We can thus see why our lived experience drives a deeply compelling intuitive judgment
that we are animals.
In response, however, we need to mark some of the recent findings that the
neuroscience revolution has supplied about our proprioceptive experience. First, we
now know that the ownership aspect of our experience can be turned off. For instance,
there are people with brain lesions who experience their limbs but do not experience
them as their own. Like all aspects of our experience, we can thus see that ownership is
a constructed aspect of this representation. Second, and more importantly, we have
scientific accounts of the characteristic role of the property of proprioceptively
experiencing which, for example, is produced by certain receptors in the limbs,
produces various other rich psychological properties, and produces muscle stimulations,
in association with other rich psychological properties. But, once again running the type
of argument about the productive roles of properties sketched above, we may thus
conclude that proprioceptive experience is instantiated in the brain. Applying the Thinker
Thesis we can thus use our bodily experience to show we are identical to a brain
and not an animal. It therefore appears that, however deeply they sway us, our intuitive
judgments based upon our lived experiences are unreliable and should not be trusted.
What about the evidence from evolution? Basically, in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, something like this little argument was used to dispatch the previously
dominant view that we are identical to a kind of individual descended from individuals
directly created by God:
(1) You are either not evolved and a kind of individual descended from individuals
directly created by God, or you are evolved and are identical to an animal.
(2) You are evolved.
Therefore, from (1) and (2):
(3) You are identical to an animal.
Against the background of this argument, offered in the scientific context of earlier
debates in the last century, one can see why so many scientists assume evolution
establishes we are animals.
The problem is that premise (1) is now either known to be false or at the least not
known to be true. Brains and other organs are evolved. And given the arguments
outlined above it is now plausibly a live option that we are the kind of brain illuminated
by the neuroscience revolution. Consequently, we can now only safely assume this
premise:
(1*) You are either not evolved and a kind of individual descended from individuals
directly created by God, or you are evolved and identical to an animal, or you are
evolved and identical to a brain.
Slotting (1*) into the argument, rather than (1), we can still knock out the claim that you
are a directly divinely created kind of individual, but we can now only conclude that you
are either identical to an animal or identical to a brain.
So, I suggest, there are good reasons to doubt that evolution establishes you are an
animal. And, if one takes rich psychology to be central to our natures, as our
endorsement of the Thinker Thesis suggests we do, then one can wonder how
evolutionary biology alone could have resolved the Foundational Question prior to the
development of scientific accounts of rich psychology? One might thus be unsurprised
that the rise of the new sciences of the mind/brain, with their findings about rich
psychology, should have deep implications about how the Foundational Question
should, and should not, be answered.
In finishing, I should note that almost every stage of my argument is contentious. My
claims about the foundations of neuroscience, my arguments about what we are, or
about experience and evolution, and more, will all be disputed. But my aim in such a
short piece has not been to establish such claims. Instead, my detailed goals have been
two-fold. On the negative side, I hope I have provided a sense of why there are
now scientific reasons to doubt that we are identical to animals—or at the very least to
acknowledge that claiming we are animals requires a defense that is presently all too
rarely supplied in the sciences and wider debates. Whilst on the positive side, I hope I
have highlighted the increasingly good reasons we have to believe that we are identical
to the kinds of expansive brains illuminated by the neuroscience revolution.
Overall, I hope to have given you a sense of why some scientists are beginning to argue
we may not be what the sciences have thought we are for the last century. Buckle-up
for the jarring set of debates that will hit us over the coming years. For the Foundational
Question about our deeper natures is scientific, open once again, and we are rapidly
piling up findings suggesting an answer that is alien both to our ordinary ways of
thinking of ourselves and to the received scientific wisdom as well.
Carl Gillett
2013-2014 NDIAS Fellow
Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University
References
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