DILEMMA
These are the central questions that the great philosopher David Hume said are of unspeakable importance:
- How does the mind work, and beyond that
- why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these two considerations together,
- what is man's ultimate nature?
We keep returning to the subject with a sense of hesitancy and even dread. For
- If the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect - we are biological and our souls cannot fly free.
- If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.
Deity can still be sought in the origin of the ultimate units of matter, in quarks and electron shells (Hans Kung was right to ask atheists why there is something instead of nothing) but not in the origin of species. However much we embellish that stark conclusion with metaphor and imagery, it remains the philosophical legacy of the last century of scientific research.
No way appears around this admittedly unappealing proposition. It is the essential first hypothesis for any serious consideration of the human condition.
- Without it the humanities and social sciences are the limited descriptors of surface phenomena, like astronomy without physics, biology without chemistry, and mathematics without algebra.
- With it, human nature can be laid open as an object of fully empirical research, biology can be put to the service of liberal education, and our self-conception can be enormously and truthfully enriched.
But to the extent that the new naturalism is true, its pursuit seems certain to generate two great spiritual dilemmas. (The first) is that
no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history.
Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them. I believe that
the human mind is constructed in a way that locks it inside this fundamental constraint and forces it to make choices with a purely biological instrument.
If the brain evolved by natural selection,
even the capacities to select particular esthetic judgments and religious beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanistic process. They are either direct adaptations to past environments in which the ancestral human populations evolved or at most constructions thrown up secondarily by deeper, less visible activities that were once adaptive in this stricter, biological sense.
The Essence of the Argument, then, is that;
- The brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly.
- The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and
- Reason is just one of its various techniques.
Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are the past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago.
Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind and their preservation is the ultimate rational for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes,and we are their survival machines. People; are "lumbering robots blindly programmed" by our genes which "control us body and mind" --to ensure the survival of their genes. Gene Machines.
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
(One Human Nature continues here); ...Steven Weinberg has pointed out that physical reality remains so mysterious even to physicists because of the extreme improbability that it was constructed to be understood by the human mind.
We can reverse that insight to note with still greater force that
the intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even to understand itself but to promote the survival of human genes.
The reflective person knows that his life is in some incomprehensible manner guided through a biological ontogeny, a more or less fixed order of life stages. He senses that with all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope, and anxiety that characterize the species he will in the end be sure only of helping to perpetuate the same cycle.
Poets have defined this truth as tragedy. Yeats called it the coming of wisdom:
Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
The first dilemma, in a word, is that
- we have no particular place to go
- the species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature
It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and materials crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But what then?
Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized?
- Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions, like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.
- Marxism and other secular religions offer little more than promises of material welfare and a legislated escape from the consequences of human nature. They, too, are energized by the goal of collective self-aggrandizement.
- The French political observer Alain Peyrefitte once said admiringly of Mao Tse-tung that "the Chinese knew the narcissistic joy of loving themselves in him. It is only natural that he should have loved himself through them." Thus does ideology bow to its hidden masters the genes, and the highest impulses seem upon closer examination to be metamorphosed into biological activity.
The more somber social interpreters of our time, such as Robert Heilbroner, Robert Nisbet, and L. S. Stavrianos, perceive Western civilization and ultimately mankind as a whole to be in immediate danger of decline. Their reasoning leads easily to a vision of postideological societies whose members will regress steadily toward self-indulgence. "The will to power will not have vanished entirely," Gunther Stent writes in The Coming of the Golden Age, “but the distribution of its intensity will have been drastically altered.
- At one end of this distribution will be the minority of the people whose work will keep intact the technology that sustains the multitude at a high standard of living.
- In the middle of the distribution will be found a type, largely unemployed, for whom the distinction between the real and the illusory will still be meaningful . . . He will retain interest in the world and seek satisfaction from sensual pleasures.
- At the other end of the spectrum will be a type largely unemployable, for whom the boundary of the real and the imagined will have been largely dissolved, at least to the extent compatible with his physical survival."
Thus the danger implicit in the (first dilemma) is
the rapid dissolution of transcendental goals toward which societies can organize their energies.
Those goals, the true moral equivalents of war, have faded; they went one by one, like mirages, as we drew closer.
In order to search for a new morality based upon a more truthful definition of man, it is necessary to look inward, to dissect the machinery of the mind and to retrace its evolutionary history.
But that effort, I predict, will uncover the second dilemma, which is the choice that must be made among the ethical premises inherent in man's biological nature.
...let me state in briefest terms the basis of the (second dilemma)
innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct.
If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.
On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/
- Society, through its laws and institutions, already regulates behavior.
- It does so in virtual blind ignorance of the deep reaches of human nature.
- By relying on moral intuition, on those satisfying visceral feelings of right and wrong, people remain enslaved by their genes and culture.
- Only by penetrating to the physical basis of moral thought and considering its evolutionary meaning will people have the power to control their own lives.
- They will then be in a better position to choose ethical precepts and the forms of social regulation needed to maintain the precepts.
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
- John Rawls opens his influential A Theory of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: "In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests."
- Robert Nozick begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm proposition: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do."
These two premises are somewhat different in content, and they lead to radically different prescriptions.
- Rawls would allow rigid social control to secure as close an approach as possible to the equal distribution of society's rewards.
- Nozick sees the ideal society as one governed by a minimal state, empowered only to protect its citizens from force and fraud, and with unequal distribution of rewards wholly permissible.
- Rawls rejects the meritocracy;
- Nozick accepts it as desirable except in those cases where local communities voluntarily decide to experiment with egalitarianism.
That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the "thinking" portion of the cerebral cortex.
Human emotional responses and the more general ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial degree by natural selection over thousands of generations.
The challenge to science is to
- measure the tightness of the constraints caused by the programming, to
- find their source in the brain, and to
- decode their significance through the
- reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the mind.
Success will generate the second dilemma, which can be stated as follows:
- which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and
- which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated?
- we will have to decide how human we wish to remain-in this ultimate, biological sense - because
- we must consciously choose among the alternative emotional guides we have inherited. To chart our destiny means that
- we must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge.
Because the guides of human nature must be examined with a complicated arrangement of mirrors, they are a deceptive subject, always the philosopher's deadfall.
The only way forward is to study human nature as part of the natural sciences, in an attempt to integrate the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities.
- Neurobiology cannot be learned at the feet of a guru.
- The consequences of genetic history cannot be chosen by legislatures.
- ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely wise.
- only hard-won empirical knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum choices among the competing criteria of progress.
On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/
