Lamia's Tears

Evolving Creative Minds III

Poor Lamia, beauteously passionate nymph that she was; impaled, then withered, by a philosopher's truth-finding stare. No place for nontruth in Corinth that day.

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? Keats, Lamia

Something tells me, though, that had Keats been writing now, in our exuberantly chaotic postDerridean times, rather than having to shiver, as he did, in the chill epistemic winds blowing down from the Scottish highlands (Abrams 1953, Kallich 1970), his muse might have sung philosophy's fuller praises. In place of the rainbow-unweaving natural philosophy he knew from Augustan neoclassicism, we of course can proclaim modern science, ever more bounteously abstruse, technologic and commercial. Philosophy, out of the nature business for good, one hopes - we scientists have the monopoly! - is once more too eclectic to cram into the confines of one totalizing schema: Continent and New World in a transAtlantic smashup of fine proportions.

Amid this general crunching and grinding of cherished schools, sounds are now being heard from scientific and philosophical quarters that, what with genomes being sequenced, cell cycles clocked, brains scanned, neural nets computed and such like, the mind - human mind, our minds - is now a problem for science. The blind watchmaker has crafted a scientific object that can think and know the truth about itself. Philosophers, apparently, need no longer apply, except maybe for the job of rhetoric custodian, helping keep our symbols lucid and language clean.

I for one dont buy it . The notion that science alone holds all thatÕs important to know about the mind strikes me as not just silly but, if taken even half seriously, as deeply, dangerously wrong. My reasoning on this point is conventional, but the distinctions involved seem, yet again, too little appreciated by the scientizers. In the only world we can live, that of our societies and cultures, to say that X has a mind of the kind relevant to my concerns here - human mind - is to say that X is a person, a moral and aesthetic being (Taylor 1989). Such beings have attributes, such as rights to life, dignity, and freedom, different from those treated in scientific discourse: not naturalistic hypotheses to be dropped into some empiricist mill of conjecture and refutation, but potentially self-evident philosophical discoveries to be acclaimed and defended in the realms of self and political power. All claims to reduce the moral attributes of personhood to natural properties have, thankfully, failed so far, at least as gauged by their actual effect on the structure and practice of science; despite a quickening beauty (McAllister 1996) and much practical clout (Bijker 1997), modern science stands mute in identifying things like rights, or measuring them, and in judging good and evil (though not, once taken into suitably ingenious human hands, in contributing to same).

Truth's best medium?

Nor is this, I think, quite the whole story in favor of greeting with suspicion all grand claims to the mind as a scientific object. For scientists and philosophers of mind alike share an unguarded fascination with prose, especially prose cast in the form of propositions over which debates about truth can simmer. One final solution of such debates would be a text encoding "laws of mind," from which the flux of our human existence would spill out deductively. A scientistic dream, yes, but can all there is to discover about human nature be set in the form of propositions, deductions, and haggles over truth? Subjectivity of being, the nondiscursive poesis of our lives, is apparently bigger than that (McGann 1988, Taylor 1989). So symphonies are important right along with science, and similarly across epics, paintings, loving glances, and healing caresses (Goodman 1976, Scruton 1983).

For the crystallization of this point we can turn not just to Keats, but to Coleridge and Hazlitt too (Abrams 1953, Albrecht 1965, Engell 1981), the three a headwater of a critical stream leading back through eighteenth century English and Scottish criticism (Bate 1945, Kallich 1970) and forward to the modern sociobiology of empathy and altruism: the human person is possessed of, and at times by, a sympathetic imagination, a means of knowing through mergence with some other. Famously, Coleridge's critiques of Wordsworth's poetry pressed forward the distinction between feeling for and feeling with (Wordsworth standing accused by his old friend of rather too much of the former: ST Coleridge 1983/1817, esp. II chs. 15, 22; HN Coleridge 1874/1835, p.181), albeit both with a place in the drama of human knowing. In feeling for the abused child we know the pity their suffering merits and the urgency with which their healing must begin. Through science, we might even know the mechanisms of familial conflict and the personal psychopathology that came into play. But however deep our deductions we remain spectators, apart. In feeling with them, we are transformed in a different manner; their agony becomes ours, and we know existence as they do, through their eyes. In the first, subject and object are split even though there may be a mutual reaching out. In the second, through the epistemic eroticism open to only imaginative moral beings, they become one.

Sympathetic imagination draws self into other.

This seems to me a distinction urgently relevant to the claims science stakes over the human mind. Prefatory rumblings, of great potential promise, from quantum theory (Penrose 1994) and cyberspace (Benedikt 1991) aside, the scientific imagination is a kind of feeling for a feeling for the truth to be obtained by demarcating subject and object in a special way, namely that of observer and observed in contact through the scientific method. Feeling with, and the forms of practical wisdom based on it, do not respect this distinction; in fact they eradicate it, and move us to the imaginative practices currently more closely associated with the arts than the sciences. The scientific way of knowing human nature, through an enforced distance between subject and object (i.e., between ourselves and ourselves!), may account in part for the vast difference in the level of public attention given to the human relevance of science as compared, say, to modern cinema and its powerful engagement of the sympathetic imagination. Whether science can or should evolve to encompass modes of knowing and being more closely allied to feeling for, or leave this live- giving task to the arts and humanities, is rather different matter, to which I will briefly return in closing.

Science does, of course, matter. Crucially. Beings who are persons can be treated otherwise. They can be treated as objects, perhaps even scientific objects, their measure taken or their material probed and then left without regard to, or in defilement of, personal being. This is metaphysical rape, pure and simple. More positively, science is the mortal enemy of humbug is all its invidious forms, our best means of testing arguments purportedly grounded in fact. In addition, through our embodiment as carbon-based metazoans we possess abundant traits amenable to scientific scrutiny. Genetically evolved beings, we are, remarkably, the descendants of non-persons: the earliest, molecular replicators of the prebiotic Earth, joined to us by line of organic reproduction unbroken form almost 4 billion years. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that those attributes of our embodiment which, ultimately, sustain our minds are themselves evolutionary innovations and, as physical structures and mechanisms, stand wide open to study by scientific methods. Presumably, such enlightened scientific analysis cannot fail to deepen our appreciation of, our feeling for, personhood's origins, and for its tenuous grip on the Universe.

Hello from the past.

In thus knowing the mind scientifically, we are invited to look around it, at the clues it leaves through its impact on Nature, as well as inside it via the methods of psychology and cognitive science. Either way, one returns unavoidably to evolution, to the remarkable appearance of mind as a recent chapter in the history of life on Earth. Frequently, this history is traced through the assemblages of hominid skulls and brain endocasts, and of stone tools and other artifacts left in the wake of early cultures. Although the insights gleaned from these discoveries are invaluable, my principal interest here will not be the exciting advances in paleoanthrolopogy and archaeology (surveyed with great style elsewhere; see Tattersall 1993, Jolly and White 1995) or the many entertaining stories and speculations about the mind voiced by scientists on the basis of these data (critique in Lumsden 1998). Instead, I wish to turn to sociobiology and its remarkable way of knowing the mind through the Darwinism of whole societies.

Before doing so there is a point, a crucial one, raised and left hanging by my allusions to scientific knowledge of the processes, in brain and society, which sustain the existence of mind. This is the matter of reduction, the swallowing up of apparently complex holistic phenomena by explanations set in terms of simpler componential processes and their patterns of interaction (Lumsden 1997). At first glance, the presence of a "connection" between levels of organization in nature - between neurons and mind, or minds and society, for example - argues against autonomy of personhood and the indifference of philosophy to scientific takeover. If physics, neurophysiology and sociobiology are necessary for instantiation, may they not also be sufficient for an understanding of the thing itself? In the next section I will discuss some findings from modern complexity theory that cast doubt on any easy elision of necessary with sufficient in this sense. That done, I introduce sociobiology as the evolutionary study of societies considered as organized wholes, and then describe its central ideas about social organization among both animals and humans. The principal sociobiological regimes of social organization, the so-called "four pinnacles," can then be described and their correlation with kinds of mind provisionally stated.

The sociobiology of humankind, we will see, calls into question any scientistic dream of a "final understanding" of mind and culture expressed in the form we presently envisage for scientific theory, namely a body of propositions set up for hypotheticodeductive prediction or historical retrodiction/exegesis (or both). Society and culture are ever in flux, our imaginations remaking the world that helps make us as we create ourselves and it. After introducing sociobiologyÕs Òfourth pinnacle,Ó that allocated to the human achievement, I will argue that a science of such worlds cannot be based on theories expressed in fixed propositional form. Minimally, the theories themselves must be dynamic entities, creative agents that, literally, rewrite and re-express themselves in ways unpredictable ab initio by their founding authors. Scientific theories with these properties are a form of artificial life, self-evolved (after an initial push by us) to chase after the truth and meaning of human evolution. It is just possible that such agents of our understanding might better capture the poesis of mind as well as the creative openness of past and future, and better address, as science, our evolved needs to feel with as well as for. To this point I return briefly in the final section.

Obviously, the qualifications and concerns I am voicing here do not apply with equal force to all conceivable kinds of mind. I am concerned with "mind" as "human mind," imaginative consciousness and personhood. In so focusing I am in no way claiming the absence of urgent issues having to do with individuals (such as billiard balls and black holes) that are nonmentative nonpersons, individuals (such as jellyfish) that are mentative nonpersons, individuals that are some intuitive sense at least quasi-persons (warmingly, primates and cetaceans; chillingly, multinational corporations), or former persons (the brain-dead), or persons-to-be (our children yet unborn). Quite the opposite. Nor am I claiming that attributes such as moral rights are the prerogative solely of personhood (current debates over animal rights mark a case in point), that the only rights relevant to persons are moral ones (arguably, a "right to be beautiful" makes a more ostensibly aesthetic claim than a moral one, while a lamentable "right to be gorgeous" in our celebrity-soaked culture does both), or that the only thing important about persons is rights (duties matter too, for one thing). Yet, it is around the human mind that the aspirations to scientific objecthood now range with particular intensity, and the challenges to science can, I believe, be seen with particular clarity. They stand mid-range on a spectrum that begins with mind as indisputably a scientific object (jellyfish mind, however modest) and stretches off into the mysteriously unknowable (the minds of those yet-to-be).

Reducibility, and Otherwise

Tracts on human consciousness and the philosophy of mind these days look more and more like textbooks of psychology and neurophysiology (a sampling: PM Churchland 1984, PS Churchland 1986, Edelman 1992, Penrose 1994, Cairns- Smith 1996). However, not even the most detailed study of how the hippocampus stores memories, or how neurotransmitter levels correlate with mood change, or where in the neocortex consciousness is hiding will, in itself, necessarily supply a reduction of human mind to bodily process. The reason, as Lynn Trainor (1997) has recently pointed out in his study of biophysical complexity, is that at least two types of emergent properties are to be distinguished in complex systems. The first, such as a system's total weight, can ultimately be explained fully in terms of the system's parts and their interactions. He calls such properties reducibly emergent: Their supervenience on the whole system might be complicated to figure out but is, at last, trivial in the sense that it follows deductively from what the parts are doing.

Not so with properties in the second category, which Trainor terms irreducibly emergent. These also are properties of the system considered as a whole, but unlike their reducible cousins they cannot be explained by reference to the system's parts and their interactions, however intricate and subtle these may be. Not translatable into to any discourse framed solely in terms of parts and interactions, they nonetheless influence all deductions from it. Trainor gives examples of irreducible emergence in atomic physics (superfluidity is one). He then notes that, since even comparatively simple, lifeless physical systems are irreducible in the sense just described, it would come as no surprise if some attributes of body, mind, and embodiment are too. Human consciousness seems a prime candidate.

Considered as a general principle of natural order, irreducible emergence is at present little understood outside a few specialized models. It would be premature to speculate at length on its role in human nature. I should point out, however, that at least two conditions known to favor irreducibility are intrinsic to persons: heterarchy and symmetry. Heterarchy is a term coined by Warren McCulloch (1965) in his theoretical studies of the brain, later popularized in mind theory by Douglas Hofstadter (1979), and subsequently used extensively by me in mathematical models of gene-culture coevolution (Lumsden and Wilson 1981, 1983; Findlay and Lumsden 1988; Kreindler and Lumsden 1994; Lumsden 1997). It refers to that mode of spontaneous self-organization in which processes on a more global level of patterning feed back (or "down") to influence parts and their interactions on an underlying organizational level. Emergent properties of overall organization must therefore be introduced to explain the interactivity of the parts that give rise to the spontaneous self-organization. For example, as imaginative social beings our choices and decisions are shaped by our awareness of and beliefs about macrosocial forms, such as consumer trends and large bureaucracies (vividly personified for us as "Uncle Sam" or "Big Brother," for example) - social forms that we ourselves ultimately join with others to create.

Symmetry, too, can fuel irreducible emergence. In atomic physics, the springboard is the stipulation that the overall physical state of certain kinds of system (expressed by the quantum mechanical wave function) be unchanged under the mathematical permutation of its equivalent components (which appear as the arguments of the wave function) - a microphysical egalitarianism. Is it possible that human society obeys similar rules because its reality for its members is that of a community of free and equal persons, a mathematical treatment of the which must bow to any invariances in societal state contingent on persons, all morally equivalent, interchanging among functional roles? In posing such questions we obviously must take very seriously the possibility of a deep scientific understanding of the link between mind and society. To see why, let us consider zoological history.

Enter Sociobiology

Sociobiology (Wilson 1975) brings Darwinism to the study of whole societies. Sociobiology is the scientific discipline which is devoted to understanding all forms of group living, including those of animals and humans, from the perspective of evolutionary theory. The principal technical novelty of sociobiology is its treatment of societies as populations subject to evolution by natural selection. Each animal society has a characteristic size, overall genetic structure, means of information transfer among its members, dominance structure, and other traits of the society considered as an organized whole. These traits can be observed as they change over time, just as the chemistry, neurobiology, and behavior of individual organisms can themselves be studied. The principal intellectual novelty of sociobiology is, I believe, its hypothesis that whole-society traits are emergent, adaptive properties designed by evolution. They arise, or emerge, from the behavior of the individual members of the population, but are difficult to predict solely on the basis of information about these individuals.

Sociobiology is the cosmology of the human sciences.

Sociobiology is closely allied with ethology and evolutionary psychology, fields with which it is often confused. The latter two can be defined loosely as the evolutionary study of patterns of behavior in individual organisms under natural conditions. All three disciplines deal with the history of species and the manner in which behavior adapts organisms to their environment. Ethology and evolutionary psychology concentrate on the details of individual behavior, including the activity of the nervous and endocrine systems. Sociobiology takes up the organization of entire societies and the roles that individual behavior, including especially interactions among individuals, play in bringing these organizational patterns to life. It is also concerned with irreducible emergence as a force in organizing more complex social populations and shaping their change over time. Thus sociobiology is, in a direct sense, the cosmology of the sciences devoted to social behavior. It examines sociality in the broadest possible scientific perspective, erecting comparative frameworks that accommodate all conceivable patterns of group living. Sociobiology proposes four pinnacles across the range of possibilities that can be recognized in these patterns: the colonial invertebrates (corals, sponges, colonial jellyfish); the social insects (ants, bees, wasps, termites); monkeys, apes, and social mammals excluding human beings; and us (Wilson 1975, 1978; Lumsden and Wilson 1983).

Paradoxes of the Four Pinnacles

When social evolution is examined from the sociobiological perspective, from colonial invertebrates to human beings, a seeming paradox emerges (Wilson 1975). As one ascends a scale arranged on the basis of neural organization and behavioral complexity, one descends in the quality of many traits intuitively associated with sociality, such as altruism, cooperation, division of labor, and social integration. With the appearance of human mind in evolutionary history, this decay of societal coherence is abruptly reversed - a macroevolutionary event of enormous consequence. What has happened?

The classic sociobiological explanation, which gets us as far along as pre- human social living, is fairly tight. The members of coral colonies and similarly clustered groups of invertebrates originate from a single fertilized egg, then multiply by simple fission and budding off of entire new organisms. These co- resident individuals are genetic clones. Under this circumstance natural selection, operating through inclusive fitness, can easily overcome strictly individual selection: looking after a neighbour is the same as looking after oneself as far as the dynamics and spread of replicating gene variants are concerned. The members of advanced colonial invertebrates, such as the Portuguese man-of-war, comprise into a single superorganism almost indistinguishable from a single well- knit multicellular organism. Mind, to the extent the term applies at all, is in these superorganisms at most a physiological or homeostatic mind, dedicated to managing the relatively straightforward nutritive and reproductive requirements of the colonial assemblage.

Pinnacle 1

Similar considerations hold for the social insects, but to a lesser degree. Colonies of ants, bees, and wasps comprise mostly sisters. Because of the comparatively exotic mechanism of sex determination in these insects (haplodiploidy), sisters are more closely related to each other than are mothers to daughters. On the average, three-quarters of their genes, instead of half, are identical by common descent and natural selection can favor the emergence of social forms in which daughters give up their individual reproductive interests to work on behalf of their sisters. The insect society is far less well integrated than that of a colonial invertebrate, but is still more so than mammalian and human societies. The individual worker may show extreme phenotypic and behavioral specialization related to its tasks and duties in the colony. Although far from perfectly coupled to and integrated with those of its sisters, its efforts tend to be altruistically directed to the welfare of the colony as a whole. The form of mind sustained by these insectsÕ exquisitely organized brains is essentially "stygmergic," i.e. specialized to the recognition and support of group needs through individual behavioral acts that are based on cues the colony member obtains from its immediate, local environment.

Pinnacle 2

Mammalian societies depart even further from an idealized pattern of total societal cohesion than do the social insects. The members of a monkey troop or killer whale pod are less intimately associated (and related) than are colonial invertebrates. They are also more likely to recognize and treat each other as individuals. Sociobiology proposes that, due to the pattern of diploid inheritance governing gene transmission in these societies, the individual mammal only marginally serves the welfare of its group. In fact, the opposite generally holds: social life is exploited for the improvement of survival and reproduction of self and immediate kin. In comparison with corallites or ant workers, the members of a mammalian society are self-centered, strife-ridden, and preoccupied with sexual roles. "Political" is perhaps the word best suited to describe the form of mind sustained by the complex nervous systems of these animals: attuned to the nuances of shifting opportunities for enhanced reproduction, and capable of the swift decision-making needed for adroit individual response.

Pinnacle 3

This trend toward decreased societal integration is partly reversed in human beings. We humans have thereby attained impressive levels of cooperation, altruism, division of labor, and social integration without completely surrendering our basic mammalian heritage of personal identity and individual welfare. What form of mind lies behind this evolutionary achievement? Perhaps the term "protean" will serve our need for now, allowing us to gesture toward an imaginative consciousness able, by dint of figurative thought and language (the litotic chimp or synecdochical dolphin have yet to be discovered), creativity, and shrewd insight to get into things - truth, meaning, feelings, one another - and do something with them. To understand this form of mind and the societies it creates, it has been necessary to broaden human sociobiology and ask how culture is able to rewrite the agenda of replicating genes.

Pinnacle 4

Coming up soon: "Gene-culture Coevolution"

Acknowledgements

Research support from the Medical Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, the J.P. Bickell Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenhein Foundation has been instrumental to the work reported here, and is gratefully acknowledged. All images copyright © 1998 PhotoDisc, Inc.

References

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