Six Years Ago Today

Nature creates art, reflects Nature
(at the Honolulu Zoo, July 2010)

Culture comes of nature

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 28, 2011, not one word different.]

This morning I finished reading the concluding chapter of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The chapter, titled “Living with Consciousness,” sketches consciousness’s contributions to the success of living organisms; that is, places it in evolutionary context.

Correspondence: Yet more Trumpery

Edited by Moristotle

“Trump Accuses Media of Not Reporting Voices He Hears in Head” [Andy Borowitz, New Yorker, February 7]. Excerpt:

Cryptic quotes

This week's Cryptoquote solutions^* have included the following:

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.  –Anatole France (1844-1924)

    I suppose that Anatole France intended mainly to lampoon people who not only want—but believe that they are going to have—another, eternal life. (I could, of course, just be projecting that motive onto him.)
    Or did he, too, want that other life—but seriously doubt he'd get it? And did he himself perhaps not know, anymore than anyone else, what to do with his present, short life?
    At any rate, Anatole France seemed to believe that most people (if not all) did "not know what to do" with their lives.
    Is that true?

Walter Berglund, in the July 8 excerpt, commented that "Everybody just wants their [sic] normal life." Isn't "wanting your normal life" equivalent to "knowing what to do with your life"?
    In that case, it would seem that "wanting another which will be eternal" would be to want a whole lot of normal, for a very, very long time.
    [I don't actually believe that "wanting your normal life" is equivalent to "knowing what [you ought] to do with your life."]

But another cryptoquoted author seemed to view things differently:

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims of life is to enjoy it. –Samuel Butler (1612-1680 or 1835-1902?); the earlier Butler is credited with having said or written, "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.")

    If Butler would have agreed with Walter that people want their normal life, he would seem to have thought that they mostly didn't enjoy it much, in which case they might not be too keen to want another, eternal life throughout which they'd have to endure a huge quantity of eventually extremely boring normality.
    Presumably Butler himself had learned to enjoy his life. Was he satisfied with its short-term enjoyment, or did he want another, eternal life to go on enjoying himself? Wouldn't eternal enjoyment of the same sort of thing eventually become excruciatingly boring?

If, as Ken supposes (for the sake of argument, I believe, in commenting on "In the sticks"), "Walter is seeing the world clearly and objectively," everybody's enjoying or not enjoying "their" normal life is leading to global disaster, in which case "they" might very well like to have another, eternal life in order to have another go at it.
    Would that normality go on literally forever, or would eternity, too, become a disaster? And would it forever remain a disaster, or somehow end and, presumably, not be eternal anymore?
    Oh, to be a theologian with some hope (however vain) of being able to figure this out!

I think, for now anyway, I'll just go about tending my garden—assuming that I have some choice in how to respond to this knowledge. But, as Sam Harris argues in his 2010 book, The Morale Landscape, such choice is a paradoxical thing, given that we are "manipulated by neurochemicals or childhood programming" [and other things]—which Ken supposes (for the sake of argument) that we aren't.
    Harris, in his blog essay, "Morality Without 'Free Will'," states that

In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically. There is simply no description of mental and physical causation that allows for this freedom that we habitually claim for ourselves and ascribe to others.

    The paradox is that, nevertheless,

Judgments of responsibility...depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect....Viewing human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from thinking in terms of moral responsibility.

    That is, Harris seems to be implying, people are morally responsible for wanting their normal life, and responsible collectively for herding us toward global disaster, however un-free they may be to act otherwise.
_______________
* My wife quickly solved the Cryptoquote by recognizing the coded shape of Anatole France's name; with the codes for a, c, e, f, l, n, o, r, & t all "broken," decoding what he said was child's play—but probably not as much fun as playing around with some of the questions the quotation raises, especially in the context of Jonathan Franzen's character Walter Berglund, Samuel Butler (whichever one it was), commenter Ken, and Sam Harris.

Culture comes of nature

Nature creates art, reflects Nature
(at the Honolulu Zoo, July 2010)

This morning I finished reading the concluding chapter of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The chapter, titled "Living with Consciousness," sketches consciousness's contributions to the success of living organisms; that is, places it in evolutionary context.
    In earlier chapters, in which he lays out his theory of how the brain orchestrates consciousness and our sense of self—of being the felt protagonists of our lives—he frequently invoked evolutionary development, as, for example, in comparing the brains of mammals to identify the order in which the regions of the human brain developed and the order's implications for the role of the various regions in regulating homeostasis and conferring adaptive, or competititve advantage.
    The following passage jumped out at me as capturing my own developing sense of nature's creating not only biological organisms but in the course of time creating culture by virtue of having created organisms with brains capable of manifesting mind and eventually capable of devising repositories of collective learning. My personal sense is reflected, for example, in my caption for the July 2010 photograph from the Honolulu zoo.
    Damasio writes:

Nervous systems developed as managers of life and curators of biological value, assisted at first by unbrained dispositions but eventually by images, that is, minds. The emergence of mind produced spectacular improvements in life regulation for numerous species, even when images lacked fine detail and lasted only during the perceptual moment, entirely vanishing thereafter....
    Once self comes to mind, the game of life changes, albeit timidly at first. Images of the internal and external worlds can be organized in a cohesive way around the protoself [a theoretical entity in Damasio's theory of the sequence of brain/mind development] and become oriented by the homeostatic requirements of the organism....[pp. 286-287]

If nature can be regarded as indifferent, careless, and unconscionable, then human consciousness creates the possibility of questioning nature's ways. The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in the sweep of natural history. The appearance of neurons, with its attending diversification of behavior and paving of the way into minds, constitutes a momentous event in the grand trajectory. But the appearance of conscious brains eventually capable of flexible self-reflection is the next momentous event. It is the opening of the way into a rebellious, albeit imperfect response to the dictates of a careless nature.
    ...The self that I envision as capable of rebelliousness is a recent development, on the order of thousands of years, a mere instant in evolutionary time. That self draws on features of the human brain acquired, in all likelihood, during the long period of the Pleistocene. It depends on the brain's capacity to hold expansive memory records not only of motor skills but also of facts and events—in particular, personal facts and events, those that make up the scaffolding of biography and personhood and individual identity...Last, it depends on the invention of external memory systems parallel to those held by each brain, by which I mean the pictorial representations offered by early painting, carvings, and sculpture, tools, jewelry, funerary architecture, and, long after the emergence of language, written records....[pp. 289-290]

Damasio's "Rebelliousness" (as in culture's rebelling against and trying to improve nature) I can't but read in the context of this blog's recent theme of a few individuals rebelling against certain aspects of popular (or majority) culture: religious beliefs and practices that rational people would think we could have outgrown, burdensome traditions that tether us to unprofitable pasts, adolescent politics that degrade our national business into playground bullying....
    It would seem that culture has a way yet to mature before the benefits of self's having come to mind can be realized by a collective majority of the organisms who possess a human brain.

Seeking

Karen Pryor's wonderful book previously cited, Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us about the Animal Mind, asks in Chapter 9, "Why is the click so much fun?" (She's referring to the fun manifested by animals during clicker training.)
    Her search for answers led her to several neuroscientists, finally including Jaak Panksepp, who "is interested in the positive emotions, including having fun. He is somewhat notorious for his paper on laughing rats." Watch Panksepp tickle a rat in the "Laughing Rats" video in Chapter 10 at www.reachingtheanimalmind.com.
    Pryor writes:

One of Panksepp's primary interests is the hypothalamus, another part of the primitive brain [besides the amygdala, involved in fear responses] that is associated with basic emotions....
    Given stimulation in the same area of the hypothalamus, human medical subjects report a sense of excitement, a sort of restless eagerness, quite enjoyable really, although agitating. It seems as if something really marvelous is about to happen, if you can just figure out what it is. Panksepp identifies this phenomenon as being part of a system he calls the SEEKING circuit (this formal scientific term is spelled with capital letters)....
    There's a good evolutionary reason for searching for necessary resources, and the occasional success reinforces the process; however, there's more to it than that end goal. The urge to seek and explore needs to function not just when you are in need of food or warmth or shelter, but when you're feeling quite relaxed and happy already. That's when you have the energy and the desire to go exploring, so exploring needs to be reinforcing in itself, or we wouldn't get up and do it for "no good reason." [pp. 184-86]

Having borrowed a copy of Panksepp's 1998 textbook, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, from a UNC library, I began reading it yesterday as I waited to be seen by my neuro-ophthalmologist. Chapter 8 is about "SEEKING systems and anticipatory states of the nervous system." It begins with a striking quotation (which I only vaguely remembered) from Oliver Sacks's 1973 book, Awakenings:

"I feel saved," [Leonard L.] would say, "resurrected, reborn. I feel a sense of health amounting to Grace....I feel like a man in love. I have broken through the barriers which cut me off from love." The predominant feelings at this time were feelings of freedom, openness, and exchange with the world; of a lyrical appreciation of a real world, undistorted by fantasy, and suddenly revealed; of delight and satiety with self and the world.

    When I lay in bed this morning, creaky and reluctant to get up, I reminded myself of what I'd read in Panksepp. After only half a minute of only half-attentive "meditation" on the subject of the reading (was I stroking my own hypothalamus?), I induced in myself sufficient eagerness to arise and meet the world.

Moral consequence of Descartes' error

Antonio R. Damasio, in his 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, identifies the error of René Descartes [1596-1650] as occurring a few lines after his famous statement, "I think, therefore I am." Says Damasio:

Here Descartes was after a logical foundation for his philosophy...But just a few lines below, Descartes clarifies the statement unequivocally:

From that I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this "me," that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is. [p. 249]

We don't need Damasio to tell us that "from [I think, therefore I am]" Descartes can know no such thing. But here's how Damasio puts it:

This is Descarte's error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism. [pp. 249-250]

None of this should be new to us, but of course to many people it is, and they reject it. They persist in Descartes' error, and perhaps even in a moral failure that derives from it:

Versions of Descartes' error obscure the roots of the human mind in a biologically complex but fragile, finite, and unique organism; they obscure the tragedy implicit in the knowledge of that fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And where humans fail to see the inherent tragedy of conscious existence, they feel far less called upon to do something about minimizing it, and may have less respect for the value of life. [p. 251]

I like to think that Jesus Christ's philosophy of compassion was rooted in his appreciation of this inherent tragedy. He came to be known as "The Man of Sorrows," suffering for mankind (if not also for "lesser" animals on the food chain, like my dog Siegfried and the birds whose still bodies he finds in our back yard). I would like to think that Jesus felt sorrowful for them too. My mother did, and I do.
    Alas, "The Man of Sorrows" tradition seems to refer to Jesus's personal suffering because of being required by God to "bear our griefs and carry our sorrows," being "smitten of God, and afflicted," "wounded for our transgressions," "bruised for our iniquities," and having laid on him "the iniquity of us all." And all that. Nothing to do with our actual human tragedy.
    But we know not of the actual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. We know only the fabulous creature whose life and teachings were variously described by a number of people, including quite a few who had no personal acquaintance of him, having been born after he died. As I said, I like to think that his compassion rose out of a sense of the fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness of conscious existence.