About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Monday, April 29, 2013

What’s the point of demarcation projects?


by Massimo Pigliucci

Readers of this blog know very well by now that, despite (or is it because of?) being both a scientist and a philosopher, I have often defended the idea that science and philosophy are distinct disciplines, and I am critical in particular of those who I think display a scientistic (i.e., intellectually imperialistic) attitude in wanting to expand the scope of science to pretty much everything that is worth knowing, usually at the expense of humanistic disciplines, philosophy in particular.

But, one could reasonably ask, why bother? Why try to explain to the likes of Sam Harris and Michael Shermer that ethical quandaries cannot be resolved by science, be that neurobiology or evolutionary biology? Why argue with Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins that when they think they have rejected “the god hypothesis” or the idea of free will on scientific grounds they have, in fact, smuggled in quite a bit of philosophy to make their case? Who cares which discipline is doing what, isn’t the outcome of our inquiry what matters?

And yet, I wager that all four of the above mentioned people (and others regularly criticized here for similar positions, including Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson) would not at all object to a different demarcation problem, the one separating science from pseudoscience. Indeed, the new collection on the latter topic that Maarten Boudry and I have put together for Chicago Press (out in July) includes a chapter by Shermer himself, who clearly saw value in that particular demarcation problem.

And yet, the demarcation between science and philosophy (S-Ph) has a lot of characteristics in common with the one between science and pseudoscience (S-Ps) (and no, that’s not because philosophy is a pseudodiscipline!). The similarities are to be found along three dimensions, as we shall see in a moment, and together these help explain why both projects are worthwhile. [1]

Before examining the reasons why S-Ps and the S-Ph demarcations are analogous, however, I need to reiterate once more what seems to be a frustratingly common misconception about such projects: when it comes to concepts as complex as science, philosophy and pseudoscience, we will not find simple and sharp dividing lines. There is no small set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that identify any of these fields: overlap and gradation is the name of the game. But just because night slowly yields to day it obviously doesn’t mean that there are no differences between night and day. Nor does it mean that, most of the time, we don’t know perfectly well that it’s night (or day). Rather, a better image is that of a complex intellectual landscape where there are peaks corresponding to the concepts of interest, with the peaks gradually extending from their center and overlapping with nearby peaks. And to make things more complicated, you also need to imagine this intellectual landscape as fluid in time: what was once considered science may have turned into pseudoscience, philosophy into science, and so forth.

Let’s then start with the S-Ps demarcation peoblem, to which most of my readers will likely not object. Why does it matter? There are, I submit, three classes of reasons: intellectual, practical-financial, and practical-consequentialist.

On strictly intellectual grounds, we like to have a reasonable theory that explains why a certain way to carry out inquiries that we call “scientific” seems to be working so well (with the usual exceptions) while another class of activities, those we label “pseudoscientific,” doesn’t. The answer can’t just be that if it works it’s science and if it doesn’t it’s pseudoscience. Aether and the planet Vulcan turned out not to exist, but we don’t think they were pseudoscientific notions when they we initially proposed. Similarly, astrological charts and alchemical methods were never scientific, regardless of the fact that they didn’t pan out. Indeed, even when pseudoscientific notions may turn out to work (as it seems to be the case, in a limited fashion, for acupuncture), they are still pseudoscientific. The difference between the two classes of activities lies in the methodologies employed by their practitioners, both at the theoretical and at the empirical levels. So there is a genuine intellectual problem at play here, one that requires the methods of philosophy, history and sociology to be tackled.

Te second reason why the S-Ps problem is interesting is because there are resources at stake, particularly money and time. The label of “science” indicates a worthwhile activity, while the label pseudoscience indicates something that is not worth pursuing. That is why scientists get academic jobs and research grants, while pseudoscientists (usually) don’t. That is also why it is problematic that the National Institute of Health keeps spending money on “alternative” medicine, or that the British “royal family” (sorry, I just can’t bring myself to use those terms with a straight face) supports homeopathic remedies. In fact, when scientists and skeptics object to such funding, or when they decry the occasional university that confers degrees in parapsychology, they do so precisely by invoking a meaningful demarcation between science and pseudoscience.

Finally, when people cannot distinguish between science and pseudoscience there are consequences: parents do not vaccinate their children, governments in Africa don’t distribute anti-retro viral drugs to people affected by HIV-AIDS, and no meaningful political action is taken to stem the rise of climate change.

Again, none of the above requires a sharp demarcation between the two classes of activities concerned, nor is such demarcation necessarily stable over time. But intellectually, financially, and in terms of practical consequences, the demarcation makes a difference.

A very similar discourse applies to the S-Ph pair. From an intellectual point of view, philosophy is a different kind of activity from science, just like mathematics is in turn different (and yet shares similarities) with both. Literary criticism, say, is even further removed from the philosophy-science-math cluster. Recognizing such differences gives us an appreciation of the diversity of scholarly activities human beings are capable of  and interested in pursuing, and leads to a healthy respect for the skilled practitioners within each field. [I suspect, incidentally, that most of those who think scientistically about philosophy have not actually read a single technical paper in philosophy, so that they literally don’t know what they are talking about. If they had, they would immediately appreciate that technical science is actually done in a very different way from technical philosophy, a fact readily explained by the idea that there is indeed a meaningful demarcation between the two.]

What about consequences in terms of allocation of resources? Here it is particularly puzzling to see some scientists’ acrimony against philosophy, considering that the natural sciences already command a majority of faculty positions on most campuses, and can certainly count on grants that are order of magnitudes larger than those for which humanists compete. This, by the way, is as it should be. Having done research in both science and philosophy I know first hand the disparity of resources necessary for scholarly engagement within each field. But belittling philosophy and the other humanities does carry the danger of convincing university administrators — already bent on running the academy as if it were a for-profit business — that they should cut anything that doesn’t bring in money (though, somehow, it never occurs to them to apply the same logic to athletic programs). Rest assured that programs in philosophy, languages, history and the like would then be the first ones on the chopping block (as indeed has happened over and over in the past several years).

Lastly, the practical consequences? Ah!, I can hear you say, “practical” consequences of eliminating, or even simply belittling, philosophy? Yes, there are consequences, and they are not good for the health of a democratic society. For all the (justified) complaining that our students and citizens are woefully illiterate in science, they are lacking just as much in their ability to write, comprehend complex texts, exercise critical thinking, be aware of their own cultural history and of the meaning and functioning of the laws of their own society. These are, of course, the elements of a liberal arts education, and they are vital for a meaningful democracy (which is why they are constantly under attack from reactionary forces). Education, in a society where we care about the flourishing of our citizens isn’t just a matter of acquiring skills to enter the workforce (as necessary as those are), it is also a matter of helping young minds to mature and develop in a way that will allow them to make wise choices in their own lives, as well as to contribute to society with more than just their labor. All of this is helped by a healthy recognition of, and respect for, the methods, goals and practices of different intellectual disciplines — from the sciences to the humanities.

These, then, are the reasons why demarcation projects are important. By all means, let’s disagree about the criteria that separate science from philosophy, and both of them from pseudoscience (and pseudophilosophy — there is such a beast). But let’s do that in a productive and mutually respectful fashion, not with silly declarations such as “if it has to do with empirical evidence it’s science,” which makes no more sense than to claim that everything that has to do with thinking counts as philosophy. And of course, let’s not neglect the many bridges or borderline areas between science, pseudoscience, philosophy and all the rest. Those areas may very well turn out to be interesting and fruitful in their own right.

————

[1] This post is not about how to separate science from philosophy, or science from pseudoscience per se. On the first topic I have written several times on RS and in other places, and the second has been covered broadly in my Nonsense on Stilts, and will be revisited more in depth in the forthcoming edited volume, Philosophy of Pseudoscience. Here, I am concerned with the distinct question of why such demarcation problems are worthwhile to begin with.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Twenty-first Century Sublime


by Steve Neumann

Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 

William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

The sublime ain’t what it used to be. The word used to designate those human experiences that were best described by words like exalted, elevated, majestic, magnificent, glorious — a sampling from my Merriam-Webster dictionary. In times past, the feeling for the sublime was evoked by the myriad phenomena of nature: mountains, oceans, landscape vistas, atmospheric cataclysms, large exotic animals, etc. But where is our feeling for the sublime today? Surely many of us still find it in the aforementioned phenomena, but our modern wonderment at nature may have become somewhat tempered by the ubiquity of scientific explanations. 

So it seems to me that our feeling for the sublime, if it is to happen at all, will have to come more and more from culture. Of what does our twenty-first century culture consist? For the majority of Americans, at least, culture is primarily the products of, and engagement with, the entertainment industry: popular music, movies, television, etc. [1] In the following sections, I want to examine certain aspects and permutations of the sublime, one example of where I’ve personally found it in popular culture, and what a positive relationship to a newly-conceived notion of the sublime might look like for us. 

I. The Sublime 

In contrast to our experience of beauty, which includes a pronounced element of pleasure, our experience of sublimity also involves a significant feeling of fear. And whereas pleasure is associated with familiarity, desirability, predictability, etc., fear carries connotations of risk, uncertainty, and aversion. 

The sense of fear normally arises due to the dangerousness of the object evoking it: for instance, we can easily drown in the vast, tumultuous ocean; and that great white shark circling us can easily tear us to pieces. In other words, we are both drawn to the otherness of the shark — where our sense of curiosity, or the anticipated satisfaction of that curiosity, elicits a feeling of pleasure — and repelled by the mortal peril its enormous jaws and razor-fine teeth represent for us. The danger involved is a danger to our continued bodily existence, which plays into the “flight” part of our fight-or-flight instinct. 

In addition to the rational fear of impending physical harm noted above, and the irrational fear of the unknown that a sublime object or experience presents us with, there is another type of fear that can be perceived, though perhaps at a near-subconscious level: the loss of our sense of Self; and this is a psychological fear, which manifests itself as a less imminent and intense version of the physical fear. Though, within a naturalistic worldview, the duality of the physical / psychological is, at bottom, the same fear: the fear of nonexistence. And what I mean by the “loss of our sense of self” is not that which is identified as the goal of the spiritual practices of Hinduism or Buddhism, but that Self which is experienced as inopportunely nullified after having experienced itself favorably as a more or less stable and unified entity up until that point.

Innumerable poems, myths and spiritual memoirs have all delivered a common yet curious message with regard to the sublime: the incorrigible indifference, the intractable independence, irritates us like a grain of sand in the craw of an oyster. And if the human being persists in contemplating the sublime object, eventually she may reach a point where her own sense of coherence is thrown into doubt. She comes to understand, or is forced to understand, that she is not the center of the universe; and that, not only has the universe likely existed for an infinity before her, it will likely continue existing for an infinity after her. And while she may possess a good comprehension of her own embodied boundaries and limitations, her lack of comprehension of the apparent boundlessness of the universe unsettles her, at least initially. 

In the relevant spiritual disciplines, this state of being is intentionally sought out; and once it is achieved there may be an overwhelming sense of resignation and peace. But the effect of a fortuitous encounter with the sublime tends to elicit more existential dread than Nirvana-like equanimity. I think this is mainly because our family environment, our educational system, our social milieu, the larger popular culture — all of them collude to erect in each individual a cogent, consistent and persistent identity; in other words, a strong sense of Self. Society has a vested interest in having its members being stable and (relatively) predictable selves. 

II. The Sublimation of the Sublime

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes what he considered the defining two aspects of classical Greek culture: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The latter is represented as the kind of “will to life” Schopenhauer described: a blind, incessantly groping, irrational will; whereas the former aspect is the form-giving tendency that seeks to create a harmony out of the chaos. Nietzsche argued that Classical Greek culture was born of the conflict of these two opposing forces. What does this have to do with the sublime? I propose that the Dionysian “will to life” itself can be experienced has a sublime phenomenon; and what’s more, that the perpetual clash of the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in and around us offers us an opportunity to sublimate the sublime.

Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, realize that what we call our will, whether free or not, is in constant motion. I’m not talking about our “willpower”; I’m talking in a more general sense here. As an example, anyone who has tried to practice mindfulness meditation immediately realizes how nearly impossible it is to focus on only one thing without the constant chatter of the mind forcing itself into one’s awareness. The human mind is restless, a cheeky monkey; even when unconscious in a sleeping state our mind is active. Whether we are engaged in our work, trying to pay attention to our partner or family, or even when driving — our mind involuntarily wanders. So we don’t control our will in the way we believe we do. In a sense, it controls us. It’s not my intention here to get into the endlessly forked path of human agency and philosophy of mind — that would take us too far afield of the main topic of this post. But hopefully I gave you an idea of the nature of the will I’m talking about. 

This Dionysian will, being something we don’t control, can therefore be acknowledged as something other, and as something other working through us. And it’s the combination of this feeling of otherness (and the proximity of this otherness) and lack of control that disquiets us. And though I described this will as a “will to life,” I think a more accurate description is Nietzsche’s phrase “will to power,” where power is understood as expansion, incorporation — in a word, growth — and not mere domination of the weaker by the stronger. 

The Dionysian will, possessing a persistent independence and indifference, can then be conceived of as a sublime object, akin to the great white shark I mentioned previously. And if we conceive of the Dionysian will as a will to power as defined above, it contains the duality of pleasure and fear that is characteristic of our response to sublime phenomena: it simultaneously attracts and repels us. On the one hand, we begin to be vaguely uneasy about the source and intentions of this will; while on the other hand we are delighted by the feeling of power and excited by the possibilities that power represents. 

If the Dionysian will is the Energy that William Blake speaks of in the epigram to this post, then the Apollonian tendency in us is our ability to reason. Essentially, it’s the age-old dichotomy of Reason vs. Impulse. But it’s the integration of the Apollonian and Dionysian in us that is the goal of the sublimation of the sublime. I’m using the term “sublimation” in what I believe to be Nietzsche’s sense: human reason arranging and employing the chaos of impulses in a way that gives the human being an unaccustomed power over herself, and not an extirpation of the impulses. The Dionysian provides the flow of life and the Apollonian provides the direction, like water through a sluiceway. Energy may be the essence of life, with the potential for both creation and destruction, while Reason is the defining, limiting and containing boundary of that force. Energy is the splitting of an atom; Reason is the nuclear reactor. So it’s the wise exploitation of this partnership that redeems life for us. 

When we truly experience the sublime, our sense of weakness and vulnerability is brought into stark relief. We realize how impotent we really are, how small, how insignificant in the big picture of things. Additionally, for those of us who have extricated ourselves from a religio-moral interpretation of the world, our previous values seem insufficient or even worthless. This is the experience of nihilism, as defined by Nietzsche:

Thus the belief in the absolute immorality of nature, in [aimlessness] and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary affect once the belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable. Nihilism appears at this point, not that the displeasure at existence has become greater than before but because one has come to mistrust any “meaning” in suffering, indeed in existence. One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain.

The Will to Power, section 55

The vital question, therefore, is: how does one overcome this nihilism? How do we now redeem life? According to Nietzsche, the Greeks had their art of tragedy, where the Greek spectator was able to viscerally experience the turbulent vicissitudes of life brought about by the Dionysian will, but within the shielding structure of the performance of the tragedy on stage. A rough analogy might be witnessing the awesome power of an atomic bomb from a safe distance. But what do we moderns have? We still have tragedy, I suppose, in our plays, films and TV shows; but it lacks the requisite profundity. Or is it that we have become sort of desensitized to the healing effects of tragedy through the sterilized ubiquity of the tragic art form in our entertainment industry? And is the sublime today more akin to shallow beauty, or even a cheap hedonism?  

If we take culture to consist primarily of the sum of the plastic arts, visual arts and music; and if we consider the sublimation of the sublime to be the prime means of putting the power of redemption back in our earthly hands, then we must make a concerted effort to recognize, accept and exploit the relevant aspects that can elevate life for us if we are to experience an enduring sense of triumphant living, of living heroically as vulnerable embodied beings in a natural world. We simply have to stand in a different relation to culture. It is this desire to have a positive relationship to the sublime that animates Religious Naturalism:

... Religious Naturalism (spiritual naturalism) includes the idea of a sound emotional life... We sense and appreciate an essence, a grandeur and a magnificence in Nature, in which we take great joy. We are awed by its vastness and complexity. We revere these qualities but do not worship them. Nature is the interrelated conditions and processes for our emergence as living and thinking beings. We respect this context and are committed to an environmental ethic that honors it. 

I generally chafe at the idea of organized movements, so I don’t identify myself as a Religious Naturalist. But it’s this notion of participation mystique that is similar to Nietzsche’s conception of what the Greek spectator experienced while watching the Greek tragedies. While I stated before that when one contemplates a sublime object one feels the foundation of one’s being tremble and shake, this losing oneself in the appreciation of the magnificence of the sublime can also paradoxically serve to bolster the feeling of synthetic unity with the natural world that Religious Naturalists and others seek. 

It’s the emotional response here that is decisive. We tend to experience both positive (pleasure) and negative (fear) emotions in the face of the sublime. Concurrently, the continual cycle of the Apollonian / Dionysian clash also produces a mixture of emotions, where the Dionysian will may be judged negatively because of the strife it tends to cause, while the Apollonian shaping may be judged positively since it brings order to the chaos. But it’s the distinguishing characteristic of this sublime interplay that, when harnessed, creates the difference between merely living and living powerfully. The idea of sublimating the sublime is the greatest stimulus of life par excellence.

III. The Music of the Sublime

I’ve been drawn to the sublime since before I knew what it was. From a young age, I was very in tune with the natural world, constantly outside exploring in all seasons. Though I was of course impressed by natural phenomena like mountains, oceans and storms, I was particularly drawn to birds, especially birds of prey. But I’ve found the sublime, as I’ve defined it in this post, in a most unlikely place: the music of Led Zeppelin, and specifically in their live performances. I’ve been fortunate enough to have access to dozens of their live shows when they were at the height of their power. I’ve been listening to them for about twenty-five years now; it’s the element of the sublime in their performances that sustains that interest. 

I realize it may seem improbable or difficult to understand or even identify what in their performances was “sublime,” so let me give a little background. The founder of the group, and the genius behind the music, Jimmy Page, has always been notoriously press-shy; but there are some tidbits of insight into his artistic philosophy that can be gleaned from the few interviews that are out there. An art school student, he often talked about Led Zeppelin’s music in terms of “light and shade.” As the famous rock journalist, Cameron Crowe recounts:

At Page’s home, [Page and Plant] explored each other’s tastes by playing favorite records — everything from Buddy Guy to the Incredible String Band to Muddy Waters and Elvis. Then Page broke out an odd choice. It was Joan Baez’s dramatic version of the ballad, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” Page outlined a plan for a band that could play a song like that. “I’d like to play it heavy,” he said, “but with a lot of light and shade.”

And Robert Plant recently opined: “So for every big, strong, flamboyant moment, there would be, within it and around it, some kind of subtlety that set us apart.” Here’s Plant describing the genesis of what is arguably the most recognizable song in rock n’ roll history, “Stairway to Heaven”:

“Yeah, I just sat next to Pagey while he was playing it through. It was done very quickly. It took a little working out, but it was a very fluid, unnaturally easy track. It was almost as if–uh-oh–it just had to be gotten out at that time. There was something pushing it, saying ‘you guys are okay, but if you want to do something timeless, here’s a wedding song for you.”

In addition to Plant describing the preternatural feeling of necessity in creating that song, he also exemplifies the Dionysian will working through the artist when he says things like “I can’t stand to see the grass grow under any artist’s feet, I want them to constantly create and recreate.” 

While the band’s studio recordings exhibit the yin-yang light and shade dynamic that drove its members, their live performances were alchemical crucibles of experimental improvisation. The relentless nature of the Dionysian will was on nightly display. They never played the same song in exactly the same way. To be fair, sometimes this experimentalism went awry — whether it was due to drug use or the rigors of their exhausting touring schedule, who knows. But most of the time it worked, and it worked gloriously. 

What’s abundantly evident in the best of these performances, and what excites me the most, is the dynamic battle between the lavishly fecund Dionysian creativity constantly bumping up against the Apollonian structure of each song. It’s visceral, and you can feel it play out as it threatens to burst apart at one moment only to coalesce in the next. It’s like a herd of wild animals scattering anarchically over the plains, only to be reigned in again into a coordinated whole. And the vitality and fluidity of the improvisation between the four elements of the band — the drums, bass, guitar and vocals — generates a discordia concors that lifts it out of the context of a mere musical performance and into a novel cultural experience of the sublime. Page describes it thusly:

The motto of the group is definitely ‘ever onward.’ If there ever is to be a total analysis, it’s that. The fact is that it’s like a chemical fusion… there’s so much ESP involved in it. It sounds pretentious, but it’s true. That’s just what it is. When there are three people playing on stage, instrumentally, and I’m in the middle of a staccato thing, and [Bonham] just for some unknown reasons happens to be there doing the same beats on the snare drum… that sort of thing is definitely a form of trans-state… it is sort of communication on that other plane.

IV. The Twenty-first Century Sublime

In a way, what has traditionally been called “spirit” can be re-conceived as being born of the conflict between the Dionysian will to power and the Apollonian desire for structure and harmony: wholehearted engagement with this conflict moves one beyond mere bodily demands and concerns and propels one into a transfigured state of being. So the encounter with the sublime doesn’t have to be merely an experience that happens to us; it can be the defining experience of our lives, discoverable in our common culture, and can fortify and redeem life by allowing us to live creatively in auspicious consonance with the inevitable adversities of that life. 

———

[1] For simplicity’s sake, I am also including “social technologies” like social media, online gaming, and the Internet in my conception of culture.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Science, morality, and genital mutilation

by Massimo Pigliucci

As readers of Rationally Speaking know, recently Michael Shermer and I have had a friendly debate over the role of science in answering moral questions. I commented on an initial article by Michael, invited him to respond on these pages, and provided a point-by-point commentary on his response. We then both appeared at the 2013 Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, where Julia Galef moderated a spirited but, I think, informative discussion between Michael and me on the same topic.

A couple of days ago, Michael tweeted the link to the podcast episode, with these two comments:

Can science tell us what is ‘moral’? Shermer (yes) v. Pigliucci (no, not sure, don’t know, maybe, depends, doubtful)

and:

Is female genital mutilation wrong? Shermer (yes) v. Pigliucci (depends, sometimes, in some cultures yes in others no)

I was a bit surprised by this, as well as taken aback. Surprised because I thought I made very clear, during the live discussion, that I do think female genital mutilation is wrong, and gave my reasons for it. Taken aback because, frankly, tens of thousands of people may now think that I am a moral relativist (including my 16 years old daughter!), which I am most definitely not, and that I have no principled objection to female genital mutilation, which I definitely do.

After an email exchange with Michael, we both agree that I would publish this post to rectify the record, and that he would tweet it to his followers, with the same aim. Below you will find three items: first, a transcript of the bits of the podcast where I explain my position on female genital mutilation; second, a transcript of the bits of the podcast where I explain my position on the relationship between science and philosophy when it comes to ethical issues; third, a question that Michael sent me directly, asking me to include it in this post, and my response.

I want to thank Michael for yet another example of how to conduct civil and productive discourse in the skeptic community. We will continue to disagree, but hopefully our thoughts will stimulate discussion and understanding.

1. On female genital mutilation

@15:20 [Michael] So Massimo, back to my opening example. Would you say that in some cultures female genital mutilation is morally acceptable? You think it’s ok.
[Massimo] No, I don’t.
[Michael] Why? On what basis?
[Massimo] I don’t because I don’t think it is ethical to force especially a child, especially somebody who cannot actually object to it, to undergo pain for arbitrary reasons that are not useful to the person. It’s okay to undergo pain for reasons that are not arbitrary and are good for you. Like, you know, if you have to have an operation to get a tumor out of the way, well that’s going to cause you pain. And if I have to do it on a child, even without her consent, I think that’s ethically acceptable. But in [the other] case I don’t. Now, this was the short story, then we can get into a more complex discussion because in fact the choice of the child, the welfare of the child, is not just as simple as a question of, as a matter of, pain or not pain. There is also the societal context, because as it turns out if you don’t do it the children will suffer because they live in a certain society. Now I still think that doesn’t outweigh the idea that genital mutilation is wrong, so I still think it should be objected to.

@18:19 [Michael] I think we can do better than what you just said about female genital mutilation. I think we can do better than that. Than just say well, you know, in Western democratic cultures it’s wrong, but for those other cultures...
[Massimo] That is not at all what I said. I said that it is wrong, period.
[Michael] How do you know that it’s wrong period?
[Massimo} I think I explained that I think it’s wrong to impose pain for arbitrary reasons. And those are arbitrary reasons, as I said, as opposed to I’m going to cure you of a tumor.
[Michael] What are you basing that on?
[Massimo] That’s not based on any empirical evidence whatsoever, because what empirical evidence would that be, that people don’t want to feel pain and want to feel pleasure? If that were all the basis to our morality we could just hook ourselves to a drug machine for the rest of our lives. we would be very happy and not in pain. And yet most of us don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to do. Why not?

2. On the relationship between science and philosophy as it pertains to ethics

@19:54 [Massimo] By the way, I should, again, just in case there is some doubt, I should reiterate that I don’t think science is irrelevant. In fact, no moral philosopher thinks science is irrelevant, or [that] empirical evidence is irrelevant to these discussions. It’s a question of how do we balance things out.

@23:09 [Michael] Why not add [science]? It’s a great tool.
[Massimo] But who is arguing against adding it?
[Michael] You seem to be.
[Massimo] No, I don’t think so. We need to be careful about making this distinction. Again, I don’t think any reasonable moral philosopher would object to importing empirical evidence, empirical issues, into discussions of morality. The question is how much does that empirical information weigh.

@23:53 [Massimo] As I said during my talk before this discussion here, the major distinction, or a major distinction, between science and philosophy, and the reason I do think that they really do need to both work together on these and other issues, is that science deals with the empirical world, and philosophy tends to deal with logical possibilities. ... Logical possibilities are much broader than empirical possibilities, which is another way to rephrase Julia’s question a minute ago. Which is science constantly will underdetermine, the empirical information, will constantly underdetermine our ethical problems, because our ethical problems are a question of conflicts of values. We need to explain to ourselves and to others why is it that certain things need to take priority over others. The empirical information is relevant, but it doesn’t determine a unique answer.

3. Michael’s question and my response

Massimo, you and I agree that Female Genital Mutilation is morally wrong, but can you say that it is absolutely, objectively wrong? That is, can you do more than say you personally think it is wrong but you acknowledge that other people in different cultures than ours think it is acceptable, and that being the case you cannot condemn their actions against women as immoral? The point I was trying to make in my lecture and in our discussion is that I go so far as to say that there is no moral universe (culture, worldview, etc.) in which FGM is not immoral, based on the fundamental moral principle of not harming individuals. I argue that the individual is the fundamental moral agent because the individual is the primary target of natural selection, and thus it is in our nature to survive and flourish, and so actions that permanently rob us of our nature are immoral. Thus, I can deduce that permanently mutilating women robs them of their right to flourish as fully human individuals. Likewise, banning gays from getting married is immoral (and, conversely, gay marriage is moral) because it robs these individuals of their right to survive and flourish according to their nature. You apparently reject my argument for this basis of morality. You and I agree on these two issues (FGM is immoral, gay marriage is moral), but I think our disagreement is in WHY. I claim that FGM is absolutely and objectively morally wrong, and that we can defend this position in a solid scientific argument. You apparently disagree with this. If so, can you explain WHY you think FGM is wrong?

Michael, let me unpack your claim, before I explain (again) my position on female genital mutilation, gay marriage and the like. Your argument seems to be:

1. The individual is the primary target of natural selection.
2. (1) Makes the individual the fundamental moral agent.
3. Natural selection favors human survival and flourishing.
4. From (3), human nature demands the survival and flourishing of the individual.
5. Anything that violates (4) is immoral.
6. FGM (or the prohibition against gay marriage, or other things) violates (4).
7. Therefore, (from 2, 5 and 6) FGM is morally wrong.

Premise (1) can be questioned. Indeed, it is a well known problem for individual-based selection theories to explain the evolution of altruism and of moral sentiments more generally. Some sort of group selection seems necessary, though I don’t have a definitive position on that. Still, I will let this premise stand for the sake of argument.

To derive (2) from (1) is a non sequitur. Since natural selection has targeted every individual of every other species, and yet the category “moral” seems to apply only to human beings (and perhaps a few other species), something is clearly missing in your account. I suggest that what is missing is the evolution of a brain capable of self-reflection, as well as the entire phenomenon of cultural evolution. Those are crucial conditions that have to occur in order to be able to talk about morality. Nonetheless, let’s proceed as if.

(3) is clearly wrong: natural selection promotes the survival and reproduction of individuals, the concept of flourishing doesn’t enter into it. (Notice that already at this point your argument has crumbled, since all one has to show is that one or more of the premises is untenable. But let’s continue.)

(4) would indeed logically follow from (3), except for the fact that (3) itself is not true.

(5) is a stipulation for which you give no argument. I may agree, but then again it is easy to come  up with counter examples: when we punish a member of society for wrong doing we usually deprive him of his ability to flourish (and sometimes to survive, via the death penalty). But surely you will agree that that is morally permissible. Except that to justify punishment for moral wrong doing we need to explain why we allow exceptions to (5). This would quickly lead us to a philosophical discussion of rights, justice, etc.

(6) is a stipulation, with which I agree. But not for the reason you give, since in your case it is based on (4), which in turn relies on (3), and I reject the latter. (See below for my positive reasons.)

Given all the above, your conclusion (7) does not follow logically from your premises.

And yet, as you noted, we do agree that FGM is wrong, so I need to explain why by way of a different account from your own.

To begin with, the way you asked the question seems to me to lead to a false dichotomy: either one thinks that FGM is “absolutely, objectively wrong,” or one is a moral relativist. But the options afforded by moral philosophy are much broader than that. Once again, I am not a moral relativist. But you seem to be a strong moral realist (“absolutely, objectively”), which is a very untenable position (ironically, it puts you in the company of Kant — though for different reasons from his own — and that should make you feel uncomfortable).

My position is that morality in the modern sense is the result of a process of evolution favoring pro-social behavior (not “flourishing”), which we can trace to other species of primates, followed by millennia of self-reflection and discussion among human beings (i.e., cultural evolution, which doesn’t enter into your scenario at all). As such, I think moral precepts are contingently (as opposed to absolutely) and non-arbitrarily (as opposed to “objectively”) true. Neither of those two qualifiers comes even close to moral relativism. The contingency arises from the fact that morality makes sense only for certain types of intelligent, conscious, social animals, like us. If we were a radically different type of organism we may have developed different moral norms, or perhaps no morality at all. Non-arbitrariness separates morality from, say, rules of etiquette. But ethics is often an issue of balancing contrasting rights and alternative norms of behavior, so that there may be more than one reasonable way to address a particular moral problem, and none of the reasonable alternatives may be objectively better than another one.

Let me give you a simple example before we finally turn to FGM. Consider Michael Sandel’s discussion of the recent practice of lobbyists in Congress to pay homeless or poor people to secure a place for them for a particular hearing in which they are interested (while presumably they have lunch at an expensive restaurant nearby). Some people consider the practice wrong, because it bypasses the standard system of queuing, which allows interested citizens (not just lobbyists) to attend congressional hearings. The idea is that buying a place in a queue goes counter to the egalitarian purpose of the queue, limits access to the democratic process by ordinary citizens, and undermines the integrity of the institution of Congress. Others, however, argue that the practice of queue-buying is justified because it deploys a market approach to the problem of limited seating (if you really want to go there, you show that by how much you are willing to pay), and it has the positive side effect of giving money to the poor or homeless.

Which view is absolutely, objectively right? Empirical evidence here simply doesn’t enter into it, since everyone agrees on the relevant facts (which, needless to say, are not “scientific” facts, but mundane, everyday observational facts). The way a moral philosopher would go about it (read Sandel’s chapter, it’s illuminating) is by unpacking the premises of the contrasting positions, exploring what they logically entail, thereby clarifying the problem. But at some point we need to decide what we value more: equal access by citizens to government, efficiency of the system, collateral benefits (such as money for the homeless), or what? There are plenty of wrong answers, but not necessarily a clear (absolute, objective) winner, and the empirical evidence — though relevant — underdetermines the problem.

And now back to female genital mutilation. As I said in the podcast (see transcripts above) I think it is wrong because I subscribe to a broader moral principle: that it is wrong to impose pain on others, particularly if unable to object, for arbitrary reasons. From the broader principle I derive my specific objection to FGM, since the reasons advanced by its supporters are indeed arbitrary. The qualification that followed during the podcast, and which may have engendered your confusion about my position, is that even though FGM is wrong, there are a number of consequences for girls who do not undergo the procedure when they enter the adult population, since they will be shunned by men in their own society. This sort of consequence very much affects the ability of those women to flourish, don’t you think? Still, I remain convinced that, on balance, and despite the risk of not being able to marry and have a family, FGM is wrong and needs to be condemned. In other words, I think those societies — and especially their male members — should revise their moral system. But this isn’t the result of any calculus about the women’s overall degree of flourishing, it’s the result of ethical reflection that leads me to condemn the practice despite the fact that women who do not undergo it, in those societies, will very likely have lower flourishing than they would otherwise.

Now, you can ask me where the broader principle that causing pain for arbitrary reasons to non-consenting human beings comes from. There we agree that by nature human beings recoil from pain and suffering, so that other things being equal this should be avoided. But I frame this within the context of my preferred moral framework, virtue ethics, not on an evolutionary account (because natural selection doesn’t favor flourishing — Aristotle himself was big on human nature, obviously without any input from evolutionary theory). Notice, of course, that there are plenty of other things we could ascribe to human nature (e.g., violence, xenophobia) which I think are wrong on ethical grounds, but which you would have a hard time criticizing (since they did evolve, possibly by natural selection).

[I should add, to hopefully prevent further misinterpretation, that we hardly need “science” to give us the basic outline of human nature, just like we don’t need, say, an fMRI scan to tell us that a girl undergoing genital mutilation is in pain. That said, in some cases we may want actual science, especially psychology, to come to the table with empirically relevant input.]

Finally, FGM is a bad example for our discussion, since we both agree that it is wrong, though we arrive at that conclusion very differently. Much more informative would be to debate cases where we disagree on the ethical judgment itself (perhaps the queue-buying one mentioned above?). That would be more revealing of our differences, but I guess we’ll have to leave it for another time.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Rationally Speaking podcast: the Pigliucci-Shermer debate on the science of ethics

In a special live Rationally Speaking, taped at NECSS 2013, Julia Galef moderates a lively discussion between Massimo and Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptic Society and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. The topic: Can science tell us what is "moral"?

This discussion comes after both men have tackled the question separately in books (Massimo's Answers for Aristotle and Michael's The Science of Good and Evil), and jointly in a recent debate on the Rationally Speaking blog. Questions under scrutiny include: Does "natural" = "morally right"? How do we make tradeoffs between different people's happiness? And what role should science and philosophy play in making these decisions?

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Why the problem of consciousness won’t go away

Guest post by Michael Lopresto

[Michael is a PhD student at The University of Adelaide (Australia). His thesis explores evolutionary psychology from a much neglected empiricist perspective, arguing against the dominant nativist paradigm. He argues against the existence of specialised modules for things like language acquisition and moral sense, and tries to ground cognitive function in connectionist computational models (also a much neglected approach, nowadays). Jesse Prinz and Kim Sterelny are major influences.]


One of the main tasks of philosophers is to solve what are sometimes called “location problems.” We start with a conception of reality that we’re happy with, namely the description of the world that comes out of physics. This conception is both strongly supported by empirical evidence, and conceptually very clear. The problem is that it’s hard to square many aspects of our everyday experience with it. How is it — for instance — that morality, or meaning, or mathematics can exist in a purely physical world? In come the philosophers (hopefully to make matters better rather than worse) to try to “locate” these things into whatever conception of the world we’re happy with. To solve a location problem is to understand how it is that the thing we’re trying to locate — be it moral properties or anything in our manifest experience — fits conceptually into our picture of the physical world.

My project here is to ask whether it’s possible to locate consciousness in the physical world. That is, can we locate phenomenal properties in the physical world? My thesis is that given our conception of the physical world, it is in fact extremely difficult to locate phenomenal properties within it. 

So, how are we to understand phenomenal properties? Phenomenal properties (or simply experiences) are defined by what it’s like to have those properties (an expression made famous by Thomas Nagel is his seminal 1974 paper “What is it like to be a bat?”). There is something it’s like to experience the redness of red, to have a visual experience of a yellow lemon, to feel pain, and to hear the music of Beethoven. This is the phenomenon — the felt quality of experience — that I’m trying to distil. Note that this is different from other mental phenomena such as representation (content or aboutness). Representational properties are defined by  their ability to be true or false. Representation allows an organism to get around in the world, to behave intelligently and promote its survival. Now, giving a naturalistic account of representation — that is, an account that is both physical and makes no reference to antecedent representations — is an interesting and extremely challenging task (try talking about a physical thing that represents some object, without talking about a prior representation). The most popular accounts that philosophers have given have been in terms of causal-covariation (brain states get to be about certain objects in virtue of causally-covarying with them in the right way, over the organism’s lifetime, or its evolutionary history); or resemblance (brain states get to be about certain objects by resembling them). 

Still, neither theory makes any mention whatsoever of phenomenal properties: it is perfectly coherent (and plausible) to explain mental representation without any mention of phenomenal properties. This is important to note because mental representation is what explains behaviour — they are objects in the brain that have causal powers and bring about the property of aboutness that is ever so important if an organism is to avoid predators and find nutrients and mates. 

Our visual experience of a lemon has both representational and phenomenal properties: to explain our ability to represent lemons we need not posit anything phenomenal, as causal-covariation or resemblance will suffice, providing us with all the causal powers we need to respond to lemons in the right way. Our phenomenal experience of lemons and other such things is essentially defined by what it’s like to have those experiences, and those experiences can’t be defined in terms of any causal role the experience may happen to accompany. Representation is defined by function and structure, and consciousness is defined phenomenally.    

Now that we’re clear about our conception of the phenomenal (and how it’s distinct from the representational), what about the physical? Physics gives us a conception of reality as purely functional and structural in character; that is, defined by its dispositional properties. We have empirical knowledge of the external world because the world impinges causally upon our senses and our instruments of measurement. We have empirical knowledge via perception, and our percepts are caused by the dispositional properties of the objects we’re perceiving. For example, when we perceive the yellow lemon, we perceive its yellow colour, it’s oval shape and so forth. Such considerations give us the content of physicalism: the metaphysical thesis that everything is physical, where “physical” is defined by what physics tells us about, namely, dispositions. Mass is defined by resistance to acceleration, charge is defined by how a particle behaves in an electric field, and so forth. 

Now that we have a clear conception of consciousness, as defined by phenomenal properties or what-it’s-likeness, as well as of the physical world, as defined by function and structure, is it possible to locate consciousness in the physical world? It seems to me that it’s not. Function and structure only gives rise to more function and structure, and what it’s like to have an experience can only be understood in terms of what it’s like to have an experience. Some philosophers certainly have tried to understand experience in nonexperiential terms, such as those of function and structure. Daniel Dennett has proposed that we should understand experience as verbal reports of experiential states (which certainly don’t refer to experiences as I’ve conceived them). Alva NoĆ« and Kevin O’Regan have suggested that experience is a sensorimotor function. Michael Tye and Fred Dretske have argued that experience is a representational relation between mind and external world. And there are many other such attempts to “functionalize” experience. Antti Revonsuo has quite ingeniously given a counterexample to many of these views: dreaming. When we dream, we have rich experiences independently of any sort of embodiment or behaviour, we undergo a sort of paralysis, and there are no verbal reports, no sensorimotor function, and no causal-representational-connectedness with the external world. 

As it happens, dreaming is also an excellent counterexample to some misguided people who claim that the mind is not representational. Our dreams are about bungee jumping and nights of passion and losing teeth — at least some of my dreams are. Revonsuo sees consciousness as a biological phenomenon, and from such a perspective attributes certain functional properties to experience. Dreaming, for example, has an adaptive advantage in Revonsuo’s view, because dreaming functions as threat simulation. Dreams tell us possibilities about what can go wrong, and what to look out for. I find it quite plausible to say that dreaming evolved in organisms to simulate threats. Where I would perhaps disagree with Revonsuo is that threat simulation is a property of experience as such. Couldn’t dreams be representational but unconscious? It seems to me that experience adds no substantial content to the representational aspect of a dream. 

The point is, Revonsuo has provided a concrete counterexample to some theories of consciousness (possibly all theories that attempt to understand experience in non-experiential terms). Are there abstract counterexamples that would apply to all such theories that try to account for consciousness in terms of function and structure? I think there are, in the form of two very well known thought experiments: the zombie argument and the knowledge argument. 

The zombie argument asks us to conceive of a physical duplicate of ourselves, thus preserving all the same dispositional properties, but who is lacking consciousness. Our zombie’s representational faculties are identical, so it will be behaviourally identical to ourselves, with all the same abilities to discuss the existence of consciousness, make the same verbal reports, discriminate between stimuli in the same way, and so forth. Is such a scenario coherent? If it is, then physicalism is false, as physicalism says that consciousness is to be located in the dispositional properties of the world. 

So, are zombies conceivable? If we distinguish between two sorts of conceivability, positive and negative, we are in a better place to see. Positive conceivability requires knowing what it takes for something to be true: “2 + 2 = 4” may be a good example, or if you’re really clever, Fermat’s Last Theorem. Some examples of things that are not positively conceivable are inconsistent objects, such as the impossible triangle. When I try to positively conceive of the impossible triangle, it’s like looking at an object in the dark with a flashlight: you can see any two consistent sides of the triangle, but the three sides together, creating the inconsistency, are obscured from view. Negative conceivability requires being able to detect a contradiction in some hypothesis, say, “2 + 2 =5”. Negative conceivability is perhaps most relevant here, as it seeks to find incoherence. Is the conjunction of physicalism and zombiehood incoherent? Physicalism says that if certain dispositional properties are the case, then certain phenomenal properties will be the case. When we conceive of their being no phenomenal properties, but the very same dispositional properties, we will never detect incoherence because phenomenal properties are defined by what it’s like, and dispositional properties are defined by their causal and spatial relations. So it would seem that such considerations tell us that we can’t locate consciousness in the physical world. 

The knowledge argument is about Mary the super neuroscientist, who grasps the complete set of physical facts regarding how the brain works, and particularly about colour vision and the physics of light. However, Mary was raised in a black and white environment. Upon being released, it seems that Mary will learn something completely new, say, what it’s like to experience red. What it’s like to see red is a fact that Mary doesn’t know before her release. However, physicalism says that complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge simpliciter, and if physicalism is true, then Mary ought to learn nothing at all upon release — which few physicalists have had the courage to say. 

The knowledge argument has provoked many responses (many of which probably make matters worse), but I’ll only deal with a few here. It has been said that the knowledge argument starts from epistemological premises and finishes at a metaphysical conclusion: premises about what Mary knows, and a conclusion about what’s not physical. Some people have argued that this inference is invalid. I think this response is mistaken. If you know that the metal bar in front of you is one meter long, then it follows that the metal bar is one meter long. Another response has been that Mary doesn’t learn any new facts upon release, she only acquires new abilities. Mary may have complete physical knowledge of the brain before her release, but she may not know how to swim or ride a bike. This deficit in her knowledge doesn’t lead us to any metaphysical conclusions, so why should any other case? The reason is that physical knowledge is factual — it has entailments about what is true about the world — whereas abilities are know-how and have no such entailment relations. David Lewis for example, argued that upon seeing red, Mary could then imagine red things and identify red mail-boxes and the like. But I think this analysis has things exactly the wrong way around. Knowing what it’s like to see red explains your ability to imagine and identify red things, it’s not that your ability to imagine and identify explains your knowing what it’s like to see red. 

Consideration of the zombie argument and the knowledge argument gives us a strong reason to suppose that we’ll never be successful in locating consciousness in the physical world, as we’ve conceived it. Given this predicament, we can either reconceive what it is to be a phenomenal property, or we can reconceive the physical world. Physicalists have typically tried to reconceive phenomenal properties, but in many cases it seems to me that they’ve made matters worse than they were to begin with — saying that consciousness is outside the head, for example. But another option is to reconceive the physical world. It’s possible that perception tells us only about the dispositional nature of the physical world, and that introspection tells us about the intrinsic nature of the physical world. This gives us some insight into why it is that we can’t locate phenomenal (non-dispositional) properties in physical (dispositional) properties, and why it is that the zombie and Mary thought experiments are coherent.

[Editor's note: for a different perspective on Mary and the zombies, see this recent RS post by Massimo]

Monday, April 15, 2013

Understanding the conservative mind, without brain scans


by Massimo Pigliucci

Is Nietzsche to be found somewhere between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia? This is just one of a series of intriguing claims I am encountering while reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, by my CUNY colleague Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

The context of that specific statement is Robin’s contention that there is a level of coherence among reactionaries across times and places, so that it is possible to draw parallels between the thoughts of people so apparently different from each other as the three mentioned above. But my goal here is not primarily to discuss the details of the book (which I’m still reading, and to which I will likely come back), but rather to use it as a vehicle for a broader discussion of what in philosophy are referred to as levels of analysis.

Let’s begin with something very different from the topic of how conservative minds work. Say that you are interested in the workings of a particular ecosystem, like the Arctic tundra. Pertinent topics of study will include the composition, distribution and abundance of the fauna and flora of the tundra, as well as of the nature of the various species-species interactions, i.e., you’ll be doing population biology and biogeography. It will also be relevant to know things about the local climate, its short term variability, and its long term changes (both past and future). So you’ll engage in a bit of climate science and paleoclimatology. Moreover, you’ll need to develop an understanding of nutrient cycling within the ecosystem, thereby bringing geology and geochemistry into the mix.

There are also a number of scientific disciplines that will likely not cross your mind to engage during your study of the Arctic tundra: quantum mechanics and cosmology, for instance. Why not? Isn’t the tundra a particular type of bio-physical system on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy? Shouldn’t cosmology, therefore, be relevant? And isn’t everything that makes up said ecosystem made of quarks and other subatomic entities, the understanding of which is obviously the province of fundamental physics?

The answer to the latter questions is that while yes, the tundra and everything in it is both made of particles and located in a certain corner of the cosmos, neither level of analysis is informative to the problem at hand, namely the description and understanding of the bio-dynamics characteristic of the Arctic tundra.

This, mind you, isn’t an argument against ontological reductionism (the claim that everything is made of the basic stuff identified by fundamental physics), nor is it a panegyric on behalf of emergent properties. Ontological reductionism may or may not be true, and conversely strong emergentism may not or may hold, and you’d still have no use for quantum mechanics and cosmology when it comes to ecosystem studies. The issue is epistemic, not ontological.

If the case I have just made for the tundra is relatively uncontroversial (as I certainly hope it is!), then we are ready to move to another one that is a bit more complicated and certainly more controversial: the issue of “the conservative mind” with which we began.

Let’s start easy: we can surely agree that conservatives (meaning human beings who expound one version or another of a range of political positions collectively referred to by political scientists and philosophers as conservative, as opposed to progressive) are also made of quarks and located in a particular corner of the Milky Way. And yet, just like in the case of the Arctic tundra, neither quantum mechanics nor cosmology will tell us anything relevant about the conservative mind, yes?

Now let’s zoom in a little. Coming from “above,” so to speak (i.e., zooming onto our problem while descending from a cosmic perspective), we may want to embark on a philosophical analysis of the ideas proposed by conservatives; or (not exclusive) we may be interested in the history and sociology of the conservative movement.

Coming in from “below” (i.e., adjusting our epistemic zoom while ascending from the quantum mechanical level), we could consider the psychology of the conservative mind, or its brain anatomy and physiology, or even inquire as to whether there are “conservative genes” that may help us explain, say, the Red/Blue state divide in the United States of America. Which, naturally, would then lead us to ask how and why such genes evolved in the first place.

I think all these perspectives (i.e., from philosophy, sociology, psychology, neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology) are pertinent, but some much more than others. That is, I argue that some of these approaches will be epistemically significantly more informative than others in terms of the task at hand, to wit, understanding the conservative mind (hint: notice that I am using the term mind here, not brain).

At this point you may want to pause before reading any further, and perhaps place online bets with other Rationally Speaking readers as to which of the above fields I am going to up-play or down-play in what follows...

As you must have realized, we live in a brave new era of brain scans and genomics, so that every claim that comes with an fMRI attached to it (or, less sexy, a high throughput DNA scan), is ipso facto cool and scientifically interesting. [No, I’m not implying that neurobiology and genomics are not actually interesting. Then again, quantum mechanics and cosmology are also interesting, and yet irrelevant to understanding tundras...]

The problem, of course, is in assessing the usefulness of claims made on the basis of these new technologies. For instance, it may be interesting to see which areas of the brain are primarily involved in, say, reading as opposed to talking. But that some areas of the brain underly both activities is a truism: how else did you think you were capable of reading and talking?

Take, for instance, several recent studies showing particular patterns of brain activity during meditation or deep prayer. Skeptics of the more mystical claims made by practitioners of these techniques triumphantly say: “Ah! See? There is nothing transcendental about this stuff, it’s just your brain doing weird things.” True believers retort along the lines of: “I told you so! There really is a transcendental realm that the human brain is uniquely equipped to access!” In reality, of course, the fact that our brains behave in a particular manner when we engage in meditation or prayer says absolutely nothing about the reality, or lack thereof, of any supra-physical realm. That is because we expect to see those very patterns under either scenario, so that the high-tech demonstration of “your brain on prayer” tells us what we already knew: whatever behavior a human being engages in, it’s got to have something to do with his brain.

Back to conservatism. A few months ago, Julia Galef and I had a nice conversation with Chris Mooney during a Rationally Speaking podcast, focusing on his latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality.  The first quibble I have with Chris’s book is the title [1]. While his previous volume, The Republican War on Science, was aptly titled (it was, after all, about the anti-science attitude of the G.W. Bush administration), this one is, I think, unnecessarily contentious: it’s not Republican brains in particular that are of interest, since Republicanism is a specific product of a given time and culture (indeed, modern day Republicans have very little to do with, say, Lincoln-type Republicans), but rather the conservative attitude of which contemporary Republicanism in the United States happens to be a particular instantiation.

Be that as it may, Chris’s book has received much attention because it promises to provide a scientific (as in natural science, particularly neurobiology and genetics) understanding of the problem at hand, rather than a “merely” philosophical, historical, sociological or psychological one. [Of course, if you happen to be a conservative, and in particular a Republican, you will not see what “the problem” is in the first place.]

While Chris is careful to dispel easy accusations of biological reductionism and determinism, he does paint a picture whereby the brain (not, more expansively, the mind) is the main locus of the conservative attitude, and where there is evidence of a genetic basis for conservatism, with a hint of (just-so) scenarios concerning how such attitude may have been engrained in some of us by natural selection in the distant past (say, the Pleistocene, far earlier than the onset of the Grand Old Party).

I do not wish to engage in a detailed critique of specific claims made in the studies that Chris used as the basis of his book. Some of that criticism has been done in thoughtful reviews of the volume (there were also a number of decidedly not thoughtful ones), and at any rate several of those studies are sound, as far as they go. The question I wish to raise is just how far do they, in fact, go in providing us with an understanding of the conservative mind.

Not much, and far less, I think, than the combination of psychological, sociological, historical and philosophical approaches do.

Let’s start with the evolutionary biology. Broadly speaking, there is little doubt that the repertoire of human behavior evolved over a long period of time, and that some of that evolution was adaptive in nature (i.e., the result of a process of natural selection). But readers of this blog should know that I put little stock into many specific evolutionary psychological explanations, for a variety of methodological problems that I do not need to repeat here.

As for the genetics, again, it should certainly be uncontroversial (pace some extreme postmodernists) to claim that genes affect human behavior, but even Chris points out that the amount of variation in the population explained by candidate genes for complex human behaviors (such as homosexuality, and probably even more so the somewhat fuzzy concept of conservatism) is a small fraction of the total. Significantly less appreciated is the point that if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best.

It also means that much of the explanatory power to be found in brain activity is actually dependent on the environment and/or on its interactions with the basic structure of the brain itself. [And a further complication is that brains develop through time and maintain a degree of plasticity throughout one’s life. Yet, for obvious logistical reasons, we don’t have as yet any study using fMRI to track changes in brain activity in response to the bewildering variety of environmental stimuli we all experience from the pre-natal period until we die.]

Which is why the most informative loci of analysis to understand conservatism are the historical-sociological (the broader environment), the philosophical (the conceptual stuff of which conservative ideas are made of), and the psychological. This last one is, of course, connected to the lower level that is the target of neurobiology, but contra what appears to be an increasingly common misconception, psychology doesn’t reduce to neurobiology. Or, to put it another way, neurobiology isn’t psychology done with fMRI, and therefore more “scientific.” That’s because psychology deals with the mind, not just the brain. The mind (I actually prefer to use a verb, minding, because we are not talking about an object) is what the brain does when it interacts with the various layers of the external environment. And these layers are shaped by the history, sociology and philosophy of ideas.

That is why, for instance, it only took me a few pages to find the first interesting statement in Robin’s book: “conservatism is ... the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” One may agree or not with this way of conceptualizing conservatism (i.e., in terms of power struggles), but Robin proceeds to give a detailed political-sociological-historical-philosophical analysis to back it up, and one cannot reject his take on it without engaging in some detail with his analysis.

Along similar lines, Robin writes: “Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality and the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality ... is not the threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers.”

Proceeding from this way of framing the issue, Robin immediately arrives at an interesting analysis of the otherwise highly puzzling fact that libertarians tend to be associated with conservatives, rather than with progressives (or rather than distancing themselves from both): “When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. ... This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth.”

I am not suggesting that Robin’s analysis is necessarily correct. I am still near the beginning of the book, and I will need time to process his framework and the historical and sociological evidence he brings to the book. But my brain (!) sure started working at a much higher rate than usual even while reading the introduction to The Reactionary Mind, while the same brain seems to have by now developed a dulled response to yet another fMRI scan or just-so story about the very distant evolutionary past of Homo sapiens. And that’s because I think evolution, genetics, and neurobiology are far less explanatory of the conservative (or, for that matter, the progressive) mind than the disciplines that Robin’s book calls upon as resources. This is no slight to the natural sciences in question, no more than the one delivered by the ecosystem ecologist who wisely ignores cosmology and quantum mechanics.

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[1] Unless he objected to it and the publisher overruled him, which happened to me with Answers for Aristotle...