A week ago I wrote here about cephalopods -- the octopus and similar creatures. I was then, and am now, motivated by some comments in Peter Godfrey-Smith's book about them, OTHER MINDS. I want to add to those thoughts today. The reason Godfrey-Smith (a professor of philosophy at CUNY) is so interested in them is that they are arguably a case where mind, consciousness, and the use of language have emerged with an evolutionary path very different from our own. Most writing on other, non-human, minds focuses on creatures with whom we share a lot of adaptive history: the other primates, for example, or even the marine mammals. But on the tree of life, the branching off that separates octopuses, squids, etc. from humans and other mammals of land or sea took place a long, long time ago. This, Godfrey-Smith says, presents is with a situation similar to that which would occur were we to encounter a form of life that had evolved on another planet. So: what do we learn by way of com...
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The philosophy of Henri Bergson, summarized. (I may have done this before but I can't find that post now, so we'll try again.) Time is real and important: it cannot without loss be treated in Einsteinian fashion as a particular dimension of space; Because time is real, novelty and free will are also realities: the future contains surprises that could not even in principle have been determined by calculation from the facts existing today; One must make a sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition. Intelligence is very useful — it is a survival mechanism for humans — but it cannot grasp the essence of reality, the movement of time. Intelligence geometricizes, which is why intelligent people often find themselves denying the first two propositions; As a philosophy of biology, Bergsonism asserts too that there is something about life that escapes mechanistic formula: that life and its evolution can never be explained as so much organic chemistry. Bergson populariz...
John Searle is no longer affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. He has been stripped of his emeritus title. This is quite a comedown since Searle's name regularly shows up on lists of the most prominent and influential philosophers writing today. Let's review a little intellectual history. As of the late 1970s, the dominant view of consciousness, intelligence, and the mind-body relationship among professional philosophers in the Anglosphere was functionalism. There was a lot of disagreement about the details, but mostly consensus on the big picture. The idea was that the brain was a machine that functioned more or less like a digital computer. Or, at any rate, its functions could be indefinitely approximated by a digital computer. Thus, there was nothing fundamental (just irrelevant biological history) setting the brain aside from what algorithms embodied with wires and on/off gates can or will eventually be able to do. Alan Turing had speculated ab...
This will continue my examination of Nicholas Wade's book, A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE: GENES, RACE, AND HUMAN HISTORY (2014). In my first blogpost on point, I observed and approved of Wade's observations that races are biological realities, and that their development has left more recent genetic traces than sometimes thought. Sociobiologists sometimes posit that we are adapted for a period of about 10,000 years ago. Wade convincingly makes the case that there is no reason to develop such an arbitrary line. Also, race-differentiated genetics go beyond obvious features such as skin pigmentation or hair follicles. They determine matters such as the whites of our eyes, or the phenomenon of blushing, which may well in turn mould the development of behaviors. But in the second post, I made the case that Wade wants to press this point much further than his evidence will take it. He wants to argue that people inherit patterns of behavior in a strong sense, that behavior (for ex...
A recent issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Michael Pollan on the intelligence of plants. I've learnt as a consequence that between 2005 and 2009 there existed a professional entity known as the Society for Plant Neurobiology. The title is intriguing. Plants don't have nervous systems, so in a literal sense there can't be a plant "neurobiology." But the society was created n 2005 by botanists who believe, in Pollan's paraphrase, that the "electrical and chemical signaling systems [that] have been identified in plants ... are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals." The scientists within this Society are wary of association with the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants and the hucksterism they believe it represents. The SPN changed its name to something less intriguing in 2009, possibly (Pollan's article suggests) as a result of government pressure. The federal subsidizers of promising scientific research...