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THE
REALITY CLUB THE
THIRD CULTURE The
New York Times Sueddeutsche
Zeitung |
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Can Dennett really believe that some facile argument about the probability of correctly assembling all of God's parts by chance alone is anything of the kind? Does he really believe that God is (necessarily) complex in the same way as the universe, just more so? And just what metric of complexity does Dennett take to extend so readily from the natural to the supernatural? Does none of this trouble Dennett? Are things really so neat as Dawkins says? RESPONSE
TO OPEN LETTER TO H.
ALLEN ORR By Daniel C. Dennett [2.21.07]
Daniel Dennett seems to think that the author of any review he doesn't like is obliged to spend the rest of his days debating him— even if the review in question was of someone else's book, not his. The sort of extended exchange Dennett now seeks can grow unproductive — especially when the discussion devolves into ad hominem attack — and, given this, I'm less than enthusiastic about continuing it. I will, though, briefly address Dennett's main points here. And then that's it for me. Dennett makes three main points. 1) He rejects my claim that Dawkins failed to grapple seriously with religious thought in The God Delusion in the same way that he grappled with evolutionary thought in The Selfish Gene. Dennett's first argument, from his letter to The New York Review of Books, is that the quality of religious thinking is so poor that one needn't bother with it. This is such a bizarre way to defend a book about religion that it's hard to know what to say. But surely we can agree that if one's conclusion is that religion is indefensibly stupid it's probably best not to start from the premise that religion is indefensibly stupid. Dennett's second argument, from his new letter, is that my comparison to The Selfish Gene is all wrong: Dawkins spent his time in that book explaining sound theories of evolution, not what he considered nonsense. Well, no. What Dawkins actually did in The Selfish Gene was precisely what I asked of The God Delusion: careful analysis of both sides of the relevant debate. While Dawkins claimed that natural selection acts on genes, he devoted considerable time to presenting and refuting those (e.g., Wynne-Edwards) who championed the opposing view, that selection works on individuals or groups. Had he merely told us that those who favor group selection aren't worth considering, I doubt we would've been impressed. 2) Dennett asks me to identify some allegedly serious thinkers on religion. I named two in my review but am happy to name them again: William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I chose these two as both wrote after Darwin and had training in science or engineering; both were, then, presumably in a position to recognize the challenges posed to religion by science. One may or may not find convincing James's attempt to discern whether religion is possible in an age of science or Wittgenstein's interpretation of religious practice. Indeed I myself have reservations about their claims. But I find it shocking that someone writing at book-length on religion would fail to discuss, or even mention, their views or those of their intellectual equals. What, for instance, does Dawkins think of Wittgenstein's picture of religion? Does he reject Wittgenstein's idea that believers sometimes use language in a way that differs from (and is incommensurable with) how we normally use language? Would he even count Wittgensteinian-style religion as religion? And, if not, is it still child abuse? Is it evil? (For more on Dawkins and Wittgenstein, and from a bona fide philosopher, see Simon Blackburn's superb review of Dawkins's earlier book, A Devil's Chaplain (The New Republic, December 1, 2003).) The bottom line is that Dawkins, by ducking serious thought on religion, made things far too easy for himself. One result is that the naïve reader of The God Delusion can walk away from the book wholly unaware that serious post-Darwinian thinkers have wondered if religion is really so simple as Dawkins pretends. 3) Dennett claimed originally that Dawkins had no interest in theological or philosophical niceties and was interested instead only in demolishing views that "waft from thousands of pulpits every week". I reminded Dennett that the heart of The God Delusion was Dawkins's own attempt at philosophy, his Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. I also noted that Dawkins's argument hasn't fared so well. In his new letter, Dennett demands to know just what arguments against the 747 gambit I find compelling. At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, I must remind Dennett that my own review featured two arguments against the gambit, which I won't repeat here. It will come as no surprise that I find those arguments pretty compelling. (Dennett will surely explain why I shouldn't.) As for other reviewers, I found Thomas Nagel's argument against Dawkins's gambit equally compelling (though I question some of his comments about life's origin). Dennett assures us that Nagel's attack on the 747 gambit involved "dismissive remarks" not "arguments" but, without a whiff of irony, he offers only this dismissive remark, not an argument. Frankly, I find it astonishing that Dennett thinks the 747 gambit accomplishes much of anything. If Dawkins had offered his argument as a parody of those admittedly puerile philosophical proofs of God's existence, I'd laugh along. But Dawkins clearly believes his argument is much more than this: it's a demonstration that God almost certainly doesn't exist. Can Dennett really believe that some facile argument about the probability of correctly assembling all of God's parts by chance alone is anything of the kind? Does he really believe that God is (necessarily) complex in the same way as the universe, just more so? And just what metric of complexity does Dennett take to extend so readily from the natural to the supernatural? Does none of this trouble Dennett? Are things really so neat as Dawkins says? In the end, my assessment of The God Delusion is unchanged. Long on colorful anecdote and short on rigorous argument, it does much to reveal Dawkins's hostility but little to convince that he's thought deeply about the object of that hostility. It's one thing to express one's impatience with fundamentalist nonsense; it's another to think that one has accomplished significant intellectual tasks— like showing "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God." — H. Allen Orr H.ALLEN
ORR is an evolutionary geneticist at the University of
Rochester where he holds the Shirley Cox Kearns Chair of
Biology. Most of his research focuses on the genetics of
speciation and the genetics of adaptation. |
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Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn't plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They'll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They'll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering. He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he's been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called “America Needs Indians.” That's somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long — as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker — that he's become a cottage industry in academia. |
Can we please get over the hipster parent moment? Can we please see the end of those Park Slope alternative Stepford Moms in their black-on-black maternity tunics who turn their babies into fashion-forward, anticorporate indie-infants in order to stay one step ahead of the cool police? Can we stop hearing about downtown parents who dress their babies in black skull slippers, Punky Monkey T-shirts and camo toddler ponchos until the little ones end up looking like sad-parody club clones of mom and dad? Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies' iPods? |
Ein
nüchterner Blick auf die Geschichte zeigt, dass Optimismus
grundsätzlich gerechtfertigt ist. Denn heute ist die
Gewalt als bestimmendes Moment der Menschheitsgeschichte
auf dem Rückzug. Darauf weist der Psychologe Steven
Pinker von der Harvard University im Internetforum edge.org hin,
in dem er zusammen mit 160 anderen Kollegen und Kolleginnen
auf die Frage antwortet, was sie optimistisch mache. Es
möge
überraschen, so Pinker, aber die Gewalt habe seit Jahrhunderten
drastisch abgenommen. Der Völkermord als gängige
Form der Konfliktlösung, das Attentat zur Erbfolgeregelung,
Exekution und Folter als Strafe, Sklaverei aus Faulheit und
Habgier seien heute Seltenheiten und, wo sie aufträten,
Gegenstand heftigerKritik. Was lief hier richtig? fragt Pinker,
und stellt fest, dass wir wenig zu antworten wissen. Dies
läge wohl daran, dass wir immer danach fragten, warum
es Krieg gibt, und niemals, wieso der Frieden da ist. ......Fast
alle Antworten in der Sammlung, die demnächst als Buch
erscheint, sind von solchem Optimismus getragen. Geograph
und Biologe Jared
Diamond ist optimistisch, weil es in der Wirtschaft
manchmal Entscheidungen gibt, die auch für die Menschheit
gut sind. Brian
Eno ist es, weil die Akzeptanz der Erder-wärmung
das größte Versagen des Marktes transparent gemacht
habe. J.
Craig Venter erwartet eine Revolution der Entscheidungskultur,
wenn außerhalb der Wissenschaft ihre jüngsten
Methoden
übernommen werden. Diese beruhten vor allem auf dem Erkennen
irrelevanter Informationen. Die Zukunft ist also kein
Überwachungsstaat. Vor allem die Infor ation-stechnologie
ist unter den Optimisten im Trend. Auch Afrika, der verlorene
Kontinent, erlebt hier einen Boom, der viel verändern
wird. |
Optimismo... Las tragedias individuales, dice Anderson, venden muchos más periódicos y atraen muchos más televidentes que las tendencias generales A
menudo, después de abrir el periódico, ver
las noticias o vivir algún suceso especialmente triste,
acaba uno con la idea de que el mundo era mucho mejor antes
y que vamos rumbo a la decadencia, soledad, podredumbre y
extrema violencia. En algunas partes y épocas efectivamente
es así. Pero no lo es en general...Dos
amigos míos me recordaron, en escritos de fin de año,
que hay mucho que criticar, afrontar, cambiar, pero también
hay mucho que celebrar. Chris
Anderson escribió sobre el extremo sobrerreportaje
que ocurre cuando hay un incidente terrorista, accidente
masivo o desastre natural. Esto ocurre porque, en la mayoría
del mundo, este tipo de muertes violentas no son lugar común.
Hay grandes reportajes precisamente porque son sucesos excepcionales.Las
tragedias individuales, dice Anderson, venden muchos más
periódicos y atraen muchos más televidentes
que las tendencias generales. "Perro ataca inocente
infante" es mucho más poderoso que "la pobreza
se redujo en un 1 por ciento". Pero aunque la segunda
nota es mucho menos atractiva en términos mediáticos
significa salvar y mejorar muchas más vidas. |
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Human
Nature Redux Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.... ...Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science. From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau. Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We're tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups. This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don't understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other's throats are valuable and are altered at great peril. ... |
A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life ...Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication last month of "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God" (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator. Reading Dr. Sagan's new book is like running into an old friend at a noisy party, discovering he still has all his hair, and repairing to the den for a quiet, congenial drink. "I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship," he writes at the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, a travel guide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in the brain, and the meaning of the potential discovery — or lack thereof — of extraterrestrial intelligence. Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. Sagan warns at one point of the danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God's plan. ... ...In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. "A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it anymore," Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently. Some of the books that resulted, such as Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion," have been criticized as shrill, but Ms. Druyan said: "People like Carl and Dawkins are more serious about God than people who just go through the motions. They are real seekers."... ...Dr. Sagan was many things, but shrill was not one of them. The last word may as well go to Dr. Dawkins himself, who in a 1996 book nominated Dr. Sagan as the ideal spokesman for Earth. In a blurb for the new book, Dr. Dawkins said that the astronomer was more than religious, having left behind the priests and mullahs. "He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about," Dr. Dawkins wrote. "They have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the universe." |
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NASA GOES DEEP Boulder, Colo. — AFTER years of spending our nation's space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon ... and beyond. We are finally, bodily, going to make our way into space, this time to stay. It is an opinion long and widely held within the space-exploration community that the Nixon administration's termination of the program that built the Saturn V Moon rocket was a gargantuan mistake. One of the biggest challenges in exploring space is propulsion — that is, getting from point A to B efficiently, safely and quickly. And when the cargo is human, the challenges are even greater. One of our crowning technological achievements during the 1960s was the Apollo program and, in particular, the development of the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V was the largest, most powerful vehicle the United States had ever built. It had a launching capacity more than five times greater, a developmental cost 25 percent lower and a build-and-operate cost less than half of that of today's space shuttle. In those early days, the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating. Back then, NASA plans called for an aggressive integrated human flight program that would expand on the developments of Apollo: the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth-orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars, all by the mid-1980s. Those plans also included a 50-person semi-permanent Martian base by the end of the 20th century. Instead, we went nowhere. Why? Because, largely for political reasons, we renounced the Moon, abandoned Apollo and the Saturn V and retreated to low Earth orbit, where we've spent the last 25 years going around in circles. The cost to the nation of this misstep was enormous. For starters, we lost an investment, adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollars, of $160 billion. That was the cost to get to, land on, walk on, drive on and otherwise explore the Moon. (Of that amount, $29 billion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was the approximate cost of the Saturn V.) What's more, the production facilities for the Saturn V and the other lunar exploration components, like the command and lunar modules, were all closed. At that point, we lost both the technological means for human deep space exploration and the collective knowledge of tens of thousands of engineers and scientists trained in human spaceflight. Equally troubling is what we put in place of Apollo. The $38 billion developmental cost of the shuttle has gotten us nowhere in the solar system fast. And the International Space Station could have been built with only half a dozen Saturn V launchings instead of the more than two dozen shuttle trips that will be required to finish it. The bottom line: a colossal misuse of funds and a disheartening lack of progress and loss of time. The termination of the Saturn V program also had a stifling effect on the robotic exploration of other planets. In essence, we lost the ability to deliver larger, and in some cases faster, payloads elsewhere in the solar system. Take, as an example, the 5,600-kilogram Cassini spacecraft, which was launched in 1997 and is now in orbit around Saturn. Its launching was timed so that after spending two years looping around the inner solar system to pick up speed, it could rendezvous with massive Jupiter for an additional boost that would send it to Saturn. All told, its flight time took seven years. Had the Saturn V, modified with an appropriate fourth upper stage, been used to launch Cassini directly to Jupiter first, its flight time to Saturn could have been cut by more than half. In space, as on Earth, time is money, and the money saved could have been spent elsewhere. Alternatively, for the same flight time, a vehicle of greater launching capacity can deliver a heavier payload. Take as an example the 480-kilogram New Horizons spacecraft, launched over a year ago to fly by Pluto in 2015 and eventually to explore the Kuiper Belt of icy debris that lies beyond it. Had it been launched on a modified Saturn V rocket, New Horizons could have carried a payload that was 15 times heavier and far more scientifically capable. In the end, instead of having a ubiquitous presence throughout the solar system, humans haven't set foot on the Moon in 35 years, and even our robotic explorations in that time have been throttled because we deliberately reduced our access to deep space. Today, however, NASA is again looking up and out. Vigorous efforts are under way to complete the space station in order to fulfill international commitments that would be unwise to violate. When that is done, the plan is to retire the space shuttle in 2010 in favor of a new program to return to the Moon, with a party of humans, by 2020. A mainstay of this program is the Ares launching system, capable of sending 65 metric tons to the Moon — exceeding the capacity of the Saturn V by more than 40 percent. The official plans call not for flag-planting and grab-a-few-rocks-and-go but, by 2025, a solar-powered, human-tended, continuously inhabited research outpost rising from either the north or south pole of the Moon, where sunlight is persistent and water ice may be present. Sustainability, made possible in part by the use of lunar resources, is one goal. Another is on-site preparations for a push to the next outpost, Mars. And human spaceflight is not the only enterprise to benefit. Robotic reconnaissance, which by necessity must precede the dispatch of humans, has been ongoing for nearly 50 years. In that time, all the simple things have been done. Future missions to the planets and their moons will be more ambitious than anything yet tried. As one example, imagine what our future robotic travels around Saturn might be like. The Saturn planetary system includes Titan, a cold Mercury-sized moon with a dense, organic-laden, hazy atmosphere and a strangely Earth-like, variegated surface sculptured by winds and hydrocarbon rains. It also includes Enceladus, a moon one-tenth the size of Titan, whose jets of water vapor and fine icy particles extend thousands of miles into space and may very likely erupt from organic-rich liquid water reservoirs just below its surface — making this satellite arguably the most promising target we have available to us for astrobiological investigation. A scientifically comprehensive mission to this part of the solar system, using Ares and a Cassini-like trajectory to Saturn, could easily include several exploratory vehicles. One would be a Saturn orbiter far more capable than Cassini. This vehicle, in turn, would be large enough to carry and deliver a fully equipped balloon-borne scientific payload to float through the atmosphere of Titan and study its surface up close, and an Enceladus lander with equipment that could determine the moon's physical properties and ascertain whether or not pre-biotic chemistry, and perhaps life, has arisen there. In other words, robotic exploration, and the insights that will be gained from it into the character, development and evolution of planetary bodies and even life itself, will be taken to new heights and, in turn, pave the way for the eventual arrival of humans throughout the solar system. Anyone up for an extreme excursion to the Enceladus Interplanetary Geyser Park? All told, the subtext is invigorating and unmistakable: Humanity's future need not be confined to mere survival on our home planet. Other worlds beckon, we know how to reach them and we will once more be outward bound. And we will not be alone. China, India and Russia, all eager to be or remain prominent players on the world stage, have independent plans to stride the lunar surface. And Australia, Canada, Japan and the member nations of the European Space Agency will be pooling their resources with us in the return to the Moon — a circumstance that will bring the cost of the effort to any one nation within reason. THIS won't be a space race so much as a global exodus undertaken by an international community. And peaceful cooperation among nations, as a tangible means to build strong lasting international partnerships and defuse tensions and conflicts in the future, will be a welcome result. In hindsight, maybe the pace of progress was predictable. Humans first explored Antarctica in the early 20th century. Decades passed before we had the technology that would allow us to establish a permanent presence. History will indicate the same for our interplanetary forays. Our initial “small step for a man” on the Moon took place in 1969. A half-century later, we will be there anew, to live and work. To reach that future will require two critical ingredients: adequate financing and a long-term cross-administration commitment that supports steady, uninterrupted progress. Our first reach for the Moon took us from President Kennedy's spoken words to the lunar surface in little over eight years under a budget profile that saw peaks in the annual NASA budget of more than $30 billion in current dollars — a shocking number by today's standards and a good measure of how important we then considered the endeavor. While sustained budgets of that magnitude are out of the question today, what is not out of the question is our ability to pay to keep the goal front and center. We are now spending in Iraq, in a single month, $9 billion — more than half the annual budget NASA needs to stay on course. Forty-five years ago today, John Glenn Jr. became the first American to venture into orbit around the Earth. Just 9 years old, I knew at that moment that the future would be big and wide, and that I might go places no one had ever been before. There could be no better way today to encourage an equally optimistic belief in the future than to embark on an odyssey that presents tremendous challenges, demands discipline and rigor, requires decades-long focus, inspires international cooperation, promotes lasting peace, improves life for all and paints a stirring vision of an expanded human presence beyond the Earth. There could be no better way to say: the future is boundless, and it belongs to us.
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FALLING
IN LOVE
No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways — nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness. What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about?....
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FALLING IN LOVE 1-1 Infatuation
Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machine — so we often hear such statements as this:
No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways — nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness. What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about? Hear our friend charles attempt to describe his latest infatuation.
On the surface such statements seem positive; they're all composed of superlatives. But note that there's something strange about this: most of those phrases of positive praise use syllables like "un," "less," and "in" — which show that they really are negative statements describing the person who's saying them!
Our friend sees all this as positive. It makes him feel happy and more productive, and relieves his dejection and loneliness. But what if most of those pleasant effects result from his success at suppressing his thoughts about what his sweetheart actually says:
Thus, Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments — even when, as shakespeare said, we still may be partly aware of them:
We are equally apt to deceive ourselves, not only in our personal lives but also when dealing with abstract ideas. There, too, we often close our eyes to conflicts and clashes between our beliefs. Listen to richard Feynman's words:
What does a lover actually love? That should be the person to whom you're attached — but if your pleasure mainly results from suppressing your other questions and doubts, then you're only in love with Love itself.
Indeed, once those short-lived attractions fade, they sometimes go on to be replaced by more enduring relationships, in which we exchange our own interests for those of the persons to whom we're attached:
Yet even this larger conception of Love is still too narrow to cover enough, because Love is a kind of suitcase-like word, which includes other kinds of attachments like these:
We also apply that same word Love to our involvements with objects, feelings, ideas, and beliefs — and not only to ones that are sudden and brief, but also to bonds that increase through the years.
Why do we pack such dissimilar things into those single suitcase-words? As we'll see in section 1-3, each of our common "emotional" terms describes a variety of different processes. Thus we use the word anger to abbreviate a diverse collection of mental states, some of which change our ways to perceive, so that innocent gestures get turned into threats — and thus make us more inclined to attack. Fear also affects the ways we react but makes us retreat from dangerous things (as well as from some that might please us too much). Returning to the meanings of Love, one thing seems common to all those conditions: each leads us to think in different ways:
This book is mainly filled with ideas about what could happen inside our brains to cause such great changes in how we think. 1-2 The Sea of Mental Mysteries From time to time we think about how we try to manage our minds:
But we can't hope to understand such things without adequate answers to questions like these:
In short, we all need better ideas about the ways in which we think. But whenever we start to think about that, we encounter yet more mysteries.
Now, everyone knows how anger feels — or Pleasure, Sorrow, Joy, and Grief — yet we still know almost nothing about how those processes actually work. As alexander Pope asks in his Essay on Man, are these things that we can hope to understand?
How did we manage to find out so much about atoms and oceans and planets and stars — yet so little about the mechanics of minds? Thus, newton discovered just three simple laws that described the motions of all sorts of objects; Maxwell uncovered just four more laws that explained all electromagnetic events; then einstein reduced all those and more into yet smaller formulas. All this came from the success of those physicists'
Then, why did the sciences of the mind make less progress in those same three centuries? I suspect that this was largely because most psychologists mimicked those physicists, by looking for equally compact solutions to questions about mental processes. However, that strategy never found small sets of laws that accounted for, in substantial detail, any large realms of human thought. So this book will embark on the opposite quest: to find more complex ways to depict mental events that seem simple at first! This policy may seem absurd to scientists who have been trained to believe such statements as, "One should never adopt hypotheses that make more assumptions than one needs." But it is worse to do the opposite — as when we use "psychology words" that mainly hide what they try to describe. Thus, every phrase in the sentence below conceals its subject's complexities:
For, "look at" suppresses your questions about the systems that choose how you move your eyes. Then, "object" diverts you from asking how your visual systems partition a scene into various patches of color and texture — and then assign them to different "things." similarly, "see what it is" serves to keep you from asking how recognitions relate to other things that you've seen in the past. It is the same for most of the commonsense words we use when we try to describe the events in minds — as when one makes a statement like, "I think I understood what you said." Perhaps the most extreme examples of this are when we use words like you and me, because we all grow up with this fairy tale:
This "Single-Self " concept serves us well in our everyday social affairs. But it hinders our efforts to think about what minds are and how they work — because, when we ask about what selves actually do, we get the same answer to every such question: 15
 A Self Controlling Its Person's MindWhat attracts us to this queer idea, that we don't make any decisions ourselves but delegate them to some other entity? Here are a few kinds of reasons why a mind might entertain such a fiction:
However, although the single-self concept has practical uses, it does not help us to understand ourselves — because it does not provide us with smaller parts we could use to build theories of what we are. When you think of yourself as a single thing, this gives you no clues about issues like these:
Instead, the single-self concept offers only useless answers like these:
Whenever we wonder about our minds, the simpler are the questions we ask, the harder it seems to find answers to them. When asked about a complex physical task like, "How could a person build a house," you might answer almost instantly, "Make a foundation and then build walls and a roof." however, we find it much harder to think of what to say about seemingly simpler questions like these:
Of course, those questions are not really simple at all. To "see" an object or "speak" a word involves hundreds of different parts of your brain, each of which does some quite difficult jobs. Then why don't we sense that complexity? That's because most such jobs are done inside parts of the brain whose internal processes are hidden from the rest of the brain. At the end of this book, we'll come back to examine the concepts of self and identity, and conclude that the structures that we call our selves are elaborate structures that each of us builds to use for many purposes.
1-3 Moods and emotions
Sometimes a person gets into a state where everything seems to be cheerful and bright — although nothing outside has actually changed. Other times everything pleases you less: the entire world seems dreary and dark, and your friends complain that you seem depressed. Why do we have such states of mind — or moods, or feelings, or dispositions — and what causes all their strange effects? Here are some of the phrases we find when dictionaries define emotion.
If you didn't yet know what emotions are, you certainly wouldn't learn much from this. What is subjective supposed to mean, and what could a conscious affection be? In what ways do those parts of consciousness become involved with what we call "feelings" ? Must every emotion involve a disturbance? Why do so many such questions arise when we try to define what emotion means? The reason for this is simply that emotion is one of those suitcaselike words that we use to conceal the complexity of very large ranges of different things whose relationships we don't yet comprehend. Here are a few of the hundreds of terms that we use to refer to our mental conditions:
Whenever you change your mental state, you might try to use those emotion-words to try to describe your new condition — but usually each such word or phrase refers to too wide a range of states. Many researchers have spent their lives at classifying our states of mind, by arranging terms like feelings, dispositions, tempers, and moods into orderly charts or diagrams — but should we call Anguish a feeling or a mood? Is Sorrow a type of disposition? No one can settle the use of such terms because different traditions make different distinctions, and different people have different ideas about how to describe their various states of mind. How many readers can claim to know precisely how each of the following feelings feels?2
In everyday life, we expect our friends to know what we mean by Pleasure or Fear — but i suspect that attempting to make our old words more precise has hindered more than helped us to make theories about how human minds work. So this book will take a different approach, by thinking of each mental condition as based on the use of many small processes. 1-4 Infant emotions
One moment your baby seems perfectly well, but then come some restless motions of limbs. Next you see a few catches of breath, and then suddenly the air fills with screams. Is baby hungry, sleepy, or wet? Whatever the trouble may turn out to be, those cries compel you to find some way to help — and once you find the remedy, things quickly return to normal. In the meantime though, you, too, feel distressed. When a friend of yours cries, you can ask her what's wrong — but when your baby abruptly changes his state, there may seem to be "no one home" to communicate with. Of course, i do not mean to suggest that infants don't have "personalities." soon after birth you can usually sense that a particular baby reacts more quickly than others, or seems more patient or irritable, or even more inquisitive. Some of those traits may change with time, but others persist throughout life. Nevertheless, we still need to ask, What could make an infant so suddenly switch, between one moment and the next, from contentment or calmness to anger or rage? To answer that kind of question, you would need a theory about the machinery that underlies that infant's behavior. So let's imagine that someone has asked you to build an artificial animal. You could start by making a list of goals that your animal-robot needs to achieve. It may need to find parts with which to repair itself. It may need defenses against attacks. Perhaps it should regulate its temperature. It may even need ways to attract helpful friends. Then once you have assembled that list, you could tell your engineers to meet each of those needs by building a separate "instinct-machine" — and then to package them all into a single "body-box."  What goes inside each instinct-machine? Each of them needs three kinds of resources: some ways to recognize situations, some knowledge about how to react to these, and some muscles or motors to execute actions. 
What goes inside that knowledge box? Let's begin with the simplest case: suppose that we already know, in advance, all the situations our robot will face. Then all we need is a catalog of simple, two-part "IfVDo" rules — where each If describes one of those situations, and each Do describes an action to take. Let's call this a "Rule-Based Reaction-Machine." Rule Based Reaction-Machine IFs DOs
Every infant animal is born with many IfVDo rules like these. For example, each human infant is born with ways to maintain its body temperature: when too hot, it can pant, sweat, stretch out, or vasodilate; when too cold, it can shiver, retract its limbs, or vasoconstrict — or metabolize to produce more heat. Then later in life, we learn to use actions that change the external world.
It would be naive to try to describe a mind as nothing more than bundles of IfVDo rules. However, the great animal psychologist nikolaas tinbergen showed in his book The Study of Instinct 3 that when such rules are combined in certain ways, they can account for a remarkable range of different things that animals do. This sketch shows only a part of the structure that tinbergen proposed to explain how a certain fish behaves.
of course, it would need much more than this to support the higher levels of human thought. The rest of this book will describe some ideas about the structures inside our human minds. 1-5 seeing a Mind as a cloud of resources We all know ways to describe our minds, as they appear to us when seen from outside:
This book will try to show how such states of mind could come from machines inside our brains. To be sure, many thinkers still insist that machines can never feel or think.
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