The Delusions of Certainty

  Technology will march on. Genetic engineering will alter the future. Human bodies are still needed for reproduction, but interference in the process is ongoing. Arguably, anyone with a pacemaker or a prosthetic limb is already a cyborg. Then again, haven’t false teeth, wooden legs, and glass eyes qualified as cyborg material for some time? Isn’t the blind man’s cane an extension of himself? Women who can afford it are freezing their eggs in greater numbers. Biological research will undoubtedly uncover new ways of thinking about what we are and how we grow. There is a field called “wet artificial life” or “wet A-Life,” which is working to create artificial cells out of biochemicals that are self-organizing and self-replicating and made from both organic and inorganic substances. These are hybrids, not purely artificial entities. Cellular automata, first invented by von Neumann, have become a world unto themselves, computer simulations of simple cell patterns that emerge into complex systems when they are run long enough. There are soft artificial life programs such as Tierra, a computer software system that creates spontaneously evolving programs that reproduce, mutate, and evolve in the computer’s memory. Tierra’s creator, Tom Ray, does not think his program is simulating life. He believes it is life, but most people I have read disagree with him.

  Definitions are sticky. What is a simulation of life and what is real life? A virus is a peculiar parasitic thing that is dead and alive. What is real emotion and what is simulated emotion? When an actor feels genuinely sad as he repeats his lines, is the simulated emotion now real? What is a mind and what is a brain? Are they two different things or are they one and the same? If mind is not brain, how are they different, and if they are different, how could they interact? If I think I will get better because the doctor spends time with me and hands me a pill, how does this “psychological” state become a healing process through the release of opioids in my brain? Is there a theoretical model for the mind that can take in the organic complexities of the brain when the complexities of the brain are not yet understood?

  What has become ever more clear is that the elegant reductive mathematical models so beloved by physicists, a host of philosophers, and the champions of CTM have not generated artificial creatures like us. GOFAI has failed, and that is why scientists and philosophers and scholars of various inclinations and concerns have been led to rethink the paradigm, to turn away from computational theory of mind toward bodies and their know-how. Concept neurons do not resemble actual neurons. Physicists who have tackled the problem of consciousness have not had more success than anyone else in explaining it. There are competing ideas but no consensus. The laws of physics should not apply piecemeal. In an essay written for a popular audience, the physicist Steven Weinberg reiterates that the laws of physics must be universal and must correspond to an “objective reality,” but then he admits to a “complication”: “None of the laws of physics known today (with the possible exception of the general principles of quantum mechanics) are exactly and universally valid. Nevertheless many of them have settled down to a final form, valid in certain known circumstances.”293 There are “holes” in knowledge in physics, too. It remains incomplete. There is no theory of everything.

  The Thinking Body

  What is thinking? Are thoughts the utterances of each person’s internal narrator? Are thoughts identical to inner speech? There is no private language, as Wittgenstein argued. When I use words, they are words I share with other people even when I’m talking to myself. Words are alive between you and me. Language happens among us. Do unconscious thoughts use words? Do thoughts take place only in a person’s mind and/or brain? Or does one think with one’s whole body? Do babies think? Could a false pregnancy be a form of bodily thought? Can the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems symbolize wishes and fears? How are a crow’s thoughts like mine? How is it possible for me to think what I have never thought before?

  I have a picture in my mind of my childhood house. I can take the three steps to the front door, open it, and walk from room to room in my mind. When I revisit those rooms, what is going on in me? How is my imagined body movement related to actual body movement? And what about invented people and places? What about fantasies? When I write and find myself stuck on a sentence, it is always helpful to stand up and take a little walk around my study or down the hallway because my motion inevitably jogs the sentence loose. I move to get the sentence moving. How does that work?

  Does a dog on a walk with her master have a visual image of the park in her mind as they make their way there together? When my dog Jack was alive, he used to nap on his bed in the hallway and sometimes I would watch him dream. His paws would move in a pantomime of running, and he would make a series of brief muted yelps. I had a fantasy he was chasing squirrels, and I wondered what his dream squirrels looked like. In my dreams I walk down corridors. I fly. I fight off interlopers, robbers, and monsters. I write in the margins of mysterious books I am reading. I am always moving in my dreams, but my sleeping body itself is in the grip of motor paralysis.

  Where do poems and music and fictional characters come from? Can we find an algorithm for Emily Dickinson’s work and program a computer to write the way she did? Some people believe in the truth of the triangle, that reason is disembodied and dispassionate, that meaning can be separated from our lived bodily experience, that the imagination and emotion play no role in reason. Others do not. How do we think? Some believe truth takes logical form, and the trick is to establish the rules that govern mental atoms or psychons and then explain step-by-step a mind, human or machine. In Discourse on Method, Descartes famously offered four rules as certain guides to truth. By closely following the rules, a person can move step-by-step, without wasting mental effort and never taking what is false for what is true, until he gains knowledge of everything within his capacity to understand.294 Descartes believed that truth is the conformity of a thought with its object.

  Broadly stated, the correspondence theory of truth in Anglo-American analytical philosophy of language similarly binds thoughts to the world. I think there are lemons in the refrigerator can be proven one way or another by opening the door of the refrigerator. The relation between a thought and the world can therefore be understood in terms of true and false. Of course, if “the mind” is not inherently logical or if logic is not an avenue to every truth, and if what human beings think and perceive is modified by the character of their brains and bodies, which means they don’t have direct access to the world, the story is not so simple.

  In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the painter Lily Briscoe asks about Mr. Ramsay’s philosophical work. His son Andrew answers her: “Subject and object and the nature of reality.” Lily has no idea what this means, so Andrew clarifies. “Think of a kitchen table then, when you’re not there.”295 Since Plato, the table has had an exemplary role in philosophy. David Hume used the table as an example: “That table, which just now appears to me, is only a perception, and all its qualities are qualities of a perception.”296 For Hume, we have no perfect idea of the table. We have only the perception of a table. Puzzling out the existence of things independent of an observer is a philosophical conundrum that has tormented many philosophers on both sides of the Channel. And yet, what if one looks at experience itself? What if these problems arise, not from our immediate experiences in the world as bodies moving from here to there, but only after we begin to reflect on that experience, see the body as a thing, and draw lines between the psychological and the physiological, person and environment, nature and nurture.

  Before these concepts and borders arrived on the scene, Merleau-Ponty argues, “the unity of man has not yet been broken; the body had not been stripped of human predicates; it has not yet become a machine; and the soul has not yet been defined as existence for itself. Naïve consciousness does not see in the soul the cause of the movement of the body nor does it put the soul in the body as the pilot in his ship. This way of thinking belongs to philosophy.”297 The French word âme means not only soul but also spirit or
psyche. The body’s “predicates” might be translated as Dreyfus’s “know-how” or the body’s “can-do,” which he borrowed both from Merleau-Ponty and from Heidegger’s idea of objects as “ready to hand” or “handy” for human action. But before all of them, Henri Bergson wrote in Matter and Memory (1896), “The objects which surround my body reflect the possible action of my body on them”298 (italics in original).

  In a series of lectures she gave on philosophy in the academic year 1933–34, the philosopher Simone Weil also proposed that perception involves movement. The lectures were transcribed by one of her students, and then edited and published later, so they are not verbatim. “Every thing that we see suggests some kind of movement, however imperceptible. (A chair suggests sitting down, stairs climbing up, etc.)” For Weil, “the body grasps relationships and not particulars.”299 This thought is startlingly similar to what J. J. Gibson, writing after Weil, but at the same time as Merleau-Ponty, called “affordances.”300 He maintained that the affordances of the environment are what they offer the animal. For the human animal weary of walking in the park, a bench is an affordance for resting awhile. Perception is not neutral or “value free.” The meaning of the bench cannot be captured by its dictionary definition, but rather is produced in a relation between perceiver and the thing perceived. The mouse fleeing a cat, who notices a nice little hole in the wainscoting, doesn’t need symbols for that hole to have meaning. The animal’s rescue is imminent. Subject and object are in another relation in this theory, which Gibson called ecological. The relation is dependent on characteristics of both the animal and the environment. I can rest on the bench, but I can’t flatten out my body and scoot into the hole. A hole in my wainscoting is something to be filled to keep the mouse out of my living room.

  And what about conscious human thinking? Weil argues that “the body classifies things in the world before there is any thought.” She gives an example in her lecture. If someone raps on a table, another person can immediately imitate the rapping without counting. I would add that although most people can imitate a short, irregular rhythm, if a person is asked to count and rap at the same time, the counting may interfere with recalling the beats. Such rhythmic imitations are part of preconceptual know-how. “What makes an impression on the body are things as a whole and relations. So, when we are on the point of giving birth to thought, it comes to birth in a world that already is ordered.”301

  What if Vico—whose ideas anticipate the later thought of Weil, Gibson, and Merleau-Ponty—is right, and thinking begins with our moving bodies before we learn to speak? Vico describes his early people as having far more “body” than “reflection.” The giants weren’t able to recognize their own mirror images or consider their own thoughts. Instead, he tells us, they were “all vivid sensation in perceiving particulars, strong imagination in apprehending and enlarging them, sharp wit in referring them to their imaginative genera, and robust memory in retaining them. It is true that these faculties appertain to the mind, but they have their roots in the body and draw their strength from it.”302 From intense feelings, metaphor was born, a link forged between body and world.

  Long ago, Vico writes, people lived in a world in which everything was alive: the body of the sky ignited and roared, and the people below gaped up at it in wonder and made a sound of awe. Their language began with gestures that were punctuated by a few monosyllables. And they understood the world through their own bodies, through its “senses and emotions,” “the human and its parts.” “Thus,” he elaborates, “head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and potatoes; the mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake, a saw, a comb.”303 His list goes on. We make the world in our own image. The story he tells begins with corporeal sensation and emotion that become metaphor and poetic imaginative language, which in turn become abstract concepts.

  Vico’s tale of humankind is also the tale of a single’s person’s growth into adulthood, from speechless, wailing baby to contemplative adult. He stresses children’s ability to learn by imitation: “We observe that they generally amuse themselves by imitating whatever they are able to apprehend.”304 Vico railed against Descartes’s ideas, but his own thought, although never completely lost, remained marginal. His fame as a thinker has often turned on those who read and loved him—Herder, Marx, and Joyce, for three. He is regarded as the first philosopher of history. Unlike the neo-Darwinians, he believed that the mind changed in history and that forms of thought, although influenced by the body, are not inflexible. In Vico, the Stone Age mind becomes a modern mind.

  The idea that abstract concepts and thought emerge from an embodied form of internalized movement has been gaining ground in a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and literary studies. For these thinkers, purely abstract, symbolic manipulations do not explain mental life. Like Dreyfus, they do not think “know-how” can be digitized. Human beings have learned to do a lot because they are bodies that must navigate the ups and downs and ins and outs of the spaces around them. The sight of a laden table invites me to sit down and eat. For neuroscientists who have taken the corporeal turn, what matters most in perception is not that the brain produces an accurate representation of the world, but rather that what an organism perceives leads to adaptive action. As Weil argued, “Everything we see suggests some kind of movement.” Learning, habit, and expectation shape perception and create predictions for how to act under particular circumstances in particular places.

  In Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2001, Andreas K. Engel, Pascal Fries, and Wolf Singer announce the turn, borrowing a word from Kuhn. “In cognitive neuroscience, we are witnessing a fundamental paradigm shift. Classical theories viewed the brain as a passive, stimulus-driven device that does not actively create meaning by itself, but simply reacts to sensory inputs and copies pre-specified information.” The authors go on to argue that this passive view of the brain led to the idea that perception delivered a “veridical” or truthful “internal world model” that provided information about the world that was independent of the viewer’s context. This, they contend, is a mistake and they go on to say that the paradigm shift can be encapsulated in the “new” concept: “situatedness.”305 Not so new, it would seem, but new perhaps to these scientists.

  The idea that the brain is a predictive, creative organ, not a passive receiver and processor of information, returns us to frogs, the same creatures many students dissected in ninth-grade biology and the ones John Dowling mentioned, animals with less “hardwired” visual systems than human beings. In 1958, Humberto Maturana, a young Chilean neurobiologist, wrote his PhD dissertation on the neurophysiology of frog perception. In 1959, he was a coauthor of what would become a famous paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” The three other authors were Jerome Lettvin, William McCulloch, and Walter Pitts, the same McCulloch and Pitts of the 1943 paper on binary neurons. What the paper demonstrated was that the frog’s visual system did not represent the world out there but constructed it. Perception is not about registering an objectively given world but about how an individual nervous system—frog or human—creates what is there through its interaction with the environment. Therefore, as Dowling argued, the human visual system with its greater plasticity adjusts itself to lenses that turn the world upside down better than a frog’s does. This does not mean human vision is accurate and a frog’s deceptive. They are different. Nor does it mean the world does not exist, but rather that neither frogs nor human beings can jump out of their bodies and peruse a world that is not reliant on their bodies for its configurations.

  For Maturana, this finding would have a revolutionary effect, and he would take it to its logical end. In a later paper, he wrote, “Therefore we literally create the world in which we live by living it.”306 He came to oppose a Cartesian-Newtonian way of understanding the world, which is independent of the person doing the looking—the observer.
Maturana went on to write a short but dense book with another Chilean scientist, Francisco Varela, titled Autopoiesis and Cognition, which was first published in English in 1980. I read the book twice very slowly and found it difficult both times. This much seems clear: An autopoietic system is dynamic and self-organizing and continually adjusts itself in order to maintain its physiological equilibrium or homeostasis. An organism’s interaction with and perception of its environment is determined by its own autonomous structure. Autopoiesis draws on cybernetics and its emphasis on dynamic interacting systems that are not reducible to its parts. The authors also maintain that any autopoietic system, whatever it is made of (it could theoretically be metal, wires, and plastic) is sufficient for life. Further the two argue, “No description of an absolute reality is possible.”307 Although this is hardly a shocking thought in the history of philosophy, it still makes many contemporary scientists uneasy. Despite the fact that autopoiesis remains outside mainstream science, the theory has generated a huge literature of commentary, inside and outside biology.

  Maturana and Varela’s biology directly addressed epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—which shaped their views of scientific research and the nature of perception, but Varela developed and expanded these ideas. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch state plainly in their book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, that their work is a continuation and elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. For them, “organism and environment enfold into each other and unfold from one another in the fundamental circularity that is life itself.”308 Varela called these interactions “couplings” with the environment. Commenting on Varela’s work after his death, a group of scientists note, “If . . . the environment doesn’t contain pre-defined information that is independent of the ‘domain of coupling’ that the autonomous system defines, it literally in-forms the system’s coping.”309 There is no objective independent information out there in the world, but what is out there affects the closed internal systems.