Vitalist: Your theories are too mechanical, they’re filled with parts, but have no wholes. What they need is some kind of lifelike cement—some coherent essence to hold them together.
I sympathize with that quest for cement, but I can’t see how it could actually help because, whatever adhesive you might propose—such as a single central Self— you’d still be obliged to describe its parts, and what magical glue binds them together. So I don’t see much use for words like ‘spirit’ or ‘essence,’ which only serve to make us re-ask the same questions again. As for terms like ‘I,’ ‘Me,’ or ‘self-aware,’ these appear to be useful ways to refer to the times when we use higher-level self-models.
§9-8. The Dignity Of Complexity
Citizen: I’m horrified by your idea—that a human being is just a machine—and worse, that it is programmed by a slipshod collection of sloppily organized parts and processes. No self-respecting persons would want to think of themselves as any such mess of contraption.
[This section should begin by re-stating the “Easy is Hard Paradox”: “If you wrongly insist that something is simple, then it will remain a mystery—because, if you are actually facing an intricate problem, then you are unlikely to find a path toward solving it, until you recognize how complex it is.”]
Perhaps the most popular concept of what we are assumes that we each have a central core—some sort of invisible spirit or ghost that comes to us as an anonymous gift. But we ought to give credit where credit is due, by recognizing how we came to exist.
We came from an tremendous set of experiments—octillions of trials and errors to which sextillions of creatures devoted their lives, each living and dying in various ways that each may have contributed to giving us a slightly more powerful brain. This struggle proceeded for thirty million centuries and—so far as we know—no other such large and magnificent process has ever occurred in the universe. Accordingly each human mind has resulted from an unthinkably vast history in which animal on earth (including those not in our direct ancestry) spent its life adjusting, adapting, testing, and eventually dying—to see which ones had offspring who best could thrive in all those past environments, which began in oceans and seas, and then extended to the tidelands and shores, and then to the forests, deserts, plains—and, eventually, to our self-made villages and towns. Yet most traditional accounts of our origins make no mention whatever about this prodigious saga of sacrifice—and some institutions have even aimed to suppress any lessons about the eons through which we developed our bodies and brains.
It seems wrong to me to dismiss our minds as though they came as gratuitous gifts. For if, as many of us suspect, our intelligence is unique in this entire universe, then we also must be responsible to all those creatures who died for us: we need to ensure that the minds which we bear do not go to waste through some foolish mistake.
§9-9. Some Sources of Human Resourcefulness
We can credit our human resourcefulness to processes that developed over the vastly different time spans of our genetic endowments, cultural heritages, and personal experiences.
GENETIC ENDOWMENT: Inherited systems in our brains help us to survive the most common kinds of hazards and threats. Those mental resources were selected from variations that occurred over some five million centuries.
If you find a big book about the brain, and examine the index at the end, you will see a list of names of hundreds of different parts of the brain— each of which is known to have appreciably different functions. Each those ‘centers’ or ‘regions’ contains a good many millions of brain-cells which also come in several varieties. Our scientists know a certain amount about what certain of those brain parts do but, generally, the details about how most of them actually work are still largely shrouded in mystery.
CULTURAL HERITAGE: The communal sets of beliefs called ’cultures’ evolved over hundreds of centuries, during which intellectual processes selected ideas from many millions of individuals.
Our cultures must be the principal source of much of our personal knowledge and skills, because no single individual would have enough time to learn so much.
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE: Each year, one learns millions of fragments of knowledge from one’s own private experiences.
Almost everyone understands the extent to which each person’s knowledge and beliefs have been passed down centuries from those of our cultural ancestors. No person, alone, could ever invent as many conceptions as we can observe in any typical four-year old. But fewer of us appreciate the extent of how much such knowledge hides in virtually every language word.[212]
Listen closely to anything anyone says, and soon you’ll hear analogies. We speak of time in terms of space, as like a fluid that’s ‘running out’; we talk of our friendships in physical terms, as in “Carol and Joan are very close.” All of our language is riddled and stitched with such ways of portraying things—and sometimes we call these “metaphors.” Some metaphors seem utterly pedestrian, as when we speak of “taking steps” to cause or prevent some happening. Other metaphors seem more remarkable—as when a scientist solves a problem by conceiving of a fluid as made of tubes. When such analogies play surprisingly productive roles, we notice them, but we rarely notice how frequently we use the same techniques in commonsense thinking.
Some metaphors and analogies have very simple origins, as when they come from stripping away enough details to make two different objects seem the same. But other forms of metaphor are as complex as can be. In either case, metaphors are useful when they represent things in ways that help us to transport knowledge into other realms, where we can still apply the same already -developed skills. And in many cases this results in our most productive, systematic, cross-realm correspondences. In this book these are called ‘panalogies.’
How do we learn our most precious panalogies? I suspect that many of them are virtually born into our brains—because the regions, which represent various realms, have basically such similar wiring that we can discover those metaphors by ourselves. However, we also learn many of our metaphors from the patterns of usage of words by other members of our communities.
On rare occasion, some individual discover a new representation or formulation that is both so fruitful and so easy to explain that it becomes part of the general culture. Naturally, we’d like to know how those greatest discoveries were made. But because this is buried in the past, most of those great rare events may never be explained at all—because, like our evolutionary genes, these need happen by accident only once, and then can spread from brain to brain.
All this has empowered us to deal with huge classes of new situations. The previous chapters discussed many aspects of what gives us so much resourcefulness:
We have multiple ways to describe many things—and can quickly switch among those different perspectives.
We make memory-records of what we’ve done—so that liter we can reflect on them.
We learn multiple ways to think so that, when one of them fails, we can switch to another.