Biology (and Spirituality) is Biotiful

Biology (and Spirituality) is Biotiful As I once put it (imitating a famous passage of Rousseau): “The first animal who, having enclosed a bit of the worldʼs substance within his skin, said ʻThis is meʼ was perhaps the true founder of individualized life. But it was the first animal who, having enclosed a bit of time within his brain, said ʻThis is my presentʼ who was the true founder of subjective being.” —Nicholas Humphrey. I was reading these days Nicholas Humphrey and his works on consciousness and meaning of self and life, from Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye and A History of the Mind, to The Mind Made Flesh, Seeing Red, and Soul Dust. Humphrey arrives at a Santayanian view of consciousness (the self), that is, that our selves are important for our spiritual life. That our sense of self in our consciousness gives us meaning to life and does so successfully is part of the job our human consciousness do, and do well, that is why natural selection favours it (cf. Humphrey on «Blind sight» on the Web): one fights the more to stay alive and reproduce when life is seen as valuable and important for personal reasons. Jessica Whaman, in Narrative Naturalism, interprets consciousness from within the Santayanian ontology, in particular from Scepticism and Animal Faith and Realms of Being. She also sees that conciousness gives us meaning for it is an activity in our minds that heals us and gives value to us as persons.1 Feeling, not only thinking, is what our consciousness do so well. In this sense, Owen Flanagan’s distinction in The Really Hard Problem between the hard problem (consciousness or mind) and the really hard problem (meaning in a material world), is just one. Consciousness is what gives value and meaning to our lives. I cannot recommend Humprey’s books on consciousness enough. Let us select some paraphraphs from Soul Dust, the last one he has written, and where he reunites all the ideas he has collected during some thirty years of thinking on 1 For a fair review on that book including some criticisms of her position about Santayanaʼs spirituality (contemplation of ideas and feelings in our conciousness), cf. Daniel Morenoʼs review at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338666587_Santayana_y_la_filosofia_de_la_mente_actual. this question:2 You were not alone. Something like this happened today to countless other individuals here on Planet Earth. Our planet, we are told, is merely a condensate of stardust, not so different from all the other minor cosmic bodies that litter the universe. But this one planet has become home to an extraordinary phenomenon. Here is where sentience evolved. Here is where conscious selves have come into their own. Here live souls. The reason is the ultimate one, the hand of natural selection. Since consciousness, as we know it, is a feature of life on earth, we can take it for granted that—like every other specialized feature of living organisms —it has evolved because it confers selective advantage. In one way or another, it must be helping the organism to survive and reproduce. And of course this can happen only if somehow it is changing the way the organism relates to the outside world. Consciousness is a magical mystery show that you lay on for yourself. You respond to sensory input by creating, as a personal response, a seemingly otherworldly object, an ipsundrum, which you present to yourself in your inner theatre. Watching from the royal box, as it were, you find yourself transported to that other world.3 Replication is not what theatres are about. Instead, theatres are places where events are staged in order to comment in one way or another on the world—to educate, persuade, entertain. In this sense, the idea that one part of your brain might stage a theatrical show in order to influence the judgment of another part of your brain is perfectly reasonable— indeed, biologically reasonable Consciousness is a self-created entertainment for the mind? A show that dramatically changes your outlook on life, so as to help you—however indirectly—to propagate your genes? 2 His article «The society of selves» (2007) reunites his thoughts quite clearly. It is a beau-tiful and impressive essay. You can read it HERE. 3 Santayana writes in Soliloquies in England (1922:214): “Apparently there is not energy enough in the human intellect to look both ways at once, and to study the world scientifically whilst living in it spiritually.” And he adds later on (p. 228): “Spirituality, then, lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely as a vehicle for joy.” In Realms of Being (Charles Scribnersʼs Sons, New York, 1927-1942) he wrote (p. 612): “Nothing could be ontologically more unlike nature than spirit is; yet nothing could be better able to mould itself, in its own manner, to every detail and convolution in nature, so as to survey it and know it; nothing could diversify and enrich nature more radically, adding a moral dimension to what would otherwise be merely material”. Humphrey succeeds in Soul Dust to explain why spirit (i.e. consciousness) achieves this very same thing. What is sensation? In modern human beings, sensation—for all its special phenomenal features—is still essentially the way in which you represent your interaction with the environmental stimuli that touch your body It is important to recognize that sensation is not the same thing as perception. Perception is the way you represent the objective world out there beyond your body … Sensation, by contrast, is always about what is happening to you and how you feel about it … Now, sensation as human beings experience it is, of course, a state of mind: a cognitive state in which you represent things to yourself as being this way. We should assume, then, that our distant ancestors—let’s suppose them to be, say, wormlike creatures living in the Cambrian seas—were in this respect like plants. They too would have reacted expressively to stimulation, in ways that took precise account of the nature of the stimulus and how they evaluated it. But, at least to begin with, it would have been a mindless activity: expression without mental representation. Now, if the animal had been monitoring its responses by observing from the outside, there would have been no way of both eliminating the responses and preserving access to this information. However, if the animal were in fact monitoring not the actual behaviour but the motor command signals, there was a neat solution. This was that the responses should be internalized—or, as I have put it, privatized. How to do this? Given the requirement that the responses should continue to carry relevant information about the stimulus, they still had to implicate the locus of stimulation on the body somehow. But this could be achieved without too radical a transformation by converting the responses into virtual responses at loci on a virtual body. Therefore, what occurred, I suggest, was that the responses began to get short-circuited before they reached the body surface, becoming targeted instead at points closer and closer in on the incoming sensory nerves, until eventually the whole process became closed off as an internal circuit within the brain. The response still retains vestiges of its original evaluative function, its intentionality and hedonic tone. But now it has become a virtual expression occurring at the level of a virtual body, hidden inside your head. Now it is indeed a kind of pantomime—something whose purpose is no longer to do anything about the stimulation but only to tell about it. Action has become acting. And where is the sensation you experience at the end of all this? Sensation is where it has been since early on: sensation is sentition—the privatized expressive activity—as monitored by your mind. You monitor what you are doing so as to discover what is happening to you. And the representation you form of your own response is the sensation of red. Thus, for you to have the sensation of red means nothing other than for you to observe your own redding. Note the bias in both Flanagan’s and Fodor’s formulations, toward thinking of consciousness as contributing to the capacity to do something. They are both assuming, as indeed almost everybody does, that the role of phenomenal consciousness—if it has one—must be to provide the subject with some kind of new mental skill. In other words, it must be helping him perform some task that he can perform only by virtue of being conscious However, I have another idea. What if the role of phenomenal consciousness is not this at all? What if its role is not to enable you to do something you could not do otherwise but rather to encourage you to do something you would not do otherwise: to make you take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest you, to mind about things you otherwise would not mind about, or to set yourself goals you otherwise would not set?4 But from here on I want to put aside all the usual subject matter of cognitive science—intelligence, information processing, decision making, attention, and so on—where people have looked in vain for a role for consciousness, and to explore instead the impact of phenomenal experience on subjective purposes, attitudes, and values. However, I would go further than Dennett. I think this list is still too cautious and biased toward traditional kinds of evidence. Neither he nor 4 I wrote a scene on this important question in my Opus II, called «The Dread». any other mainstream philosopher of consciousness seems to have recognized how consciousness may contribute to personal growth. In short, when you have read books on consciousness based on the reductionism of physicalism and neuroscience, you realize that they are trapped when explaining the problem of mind or consciousness. For physicalism, it is a really hard problem. But not if you explain it in philosophical, naturalistic, human, functional, 5 biological terms. As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby say in The Adapted Mind, to understand the mind and its evolved psychological mechanisms or modules, you need to know the biological function why the mind was favored by natural selection: it enhances survival and reproduction. In the case of neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman in Wider than the Sky a n d A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, you realize he knows what consciousness does, but is trapped in his physicalism. Edelman for sure knows what the mind does (reentry being key for the extended present the mind works with notwithstanding), as Humphrey does, but he does not extend on it too much, only at the end and in passing. We can quote some words of his as a neuroscientist and human being to end this piece from the second work cited: Without life, the intricate behavioral webs of wasps and the structures of termite colonies certainly are not likely to arise spontaneously. But as impressive as these colonies are, they cannot be compared to the grand view of the universe that has emerged from the workings of higher-order consciousness in human beings. We continue to describe our place in the universe by scientific means and, at the same time, give ourselves comfort and significance in that place by artistic means. In the realization of both ends, it is consciousness that provides the freedom and the warrant. Disillusion is the beginning of wisdom, said Santayana. The end is happiness. That is why Santayana is so valuable as the paramount philosopher of imagination in the History of Philosophy. He knew what philosophy and reason were for.6 John Gray knows not this at all, as I said in another essay 5 Jessica Wahman in Narrative Naturalism writes: “Santayana’s epistemology of animal faith, though distinct in important ways from the theories of the pragmatists, nonetheless shares with these approaches the claim that knowledge is functional, contextual, interpretive, and geared toward consequences, and this is, in part, because knowledge is bound up with the solving of practical problems.” Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason (Charles Scribnerʼs Sons, New York, 1905-1906, Volume 1, Chapter IX): “Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. Mind is the bodyʼs entelechy, a value which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain perfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should remain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.” 6 “For him [Fréret, a radical French philosopher around 1722], the chief purpose of philosophy is to change human life. There would be no point in men priding themselves on possessing reason, he urges, if we fail to ( s e e HERE). But Nicholas Humphrey does know this perfectly well. A Naturalist philosopher should read Santayanaʼs complete Opus, Richard Dawkinsʼs The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchamker, and Climbing Mount Improbable, to be followed by Matt Ridleyʼs The Origins of Virtue a n d The Red Queen, to end it all up (as a beginner naturalist) with David Bussʼ Evolutionary Psychology. The New Science of the Mind. He should not ignore to round it all off with Nicholas Humphreyʼs Seeing Red and Soul Dust. Nota Bene. To see the importance of sensation and feeling as the function of consciousness, read these words written by Santayana (The Sense of Beauty, Cambridge, Mass., Vol. 3, MIT Critical Edition, 1988, p. 34): “Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the perception of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from perception; by the objectification of the elements and their appearance as qualities rather of things than of consciousness. The passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of sensation.” use reason to procure that tranquility of spirit and inner repose providing the pure, untroubled felicity which is the promise of ʻtrue philosophyʼ – that is ʻà rendre heureuxʼ.” (Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 736.)