"What
Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?"
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MARTIN
NOWAK
Biological Mathematician,
Harvard University; Director, Center for Evolutionary
Dynamics

I believe the following aspects of evolution to be true without knowing
how to turn them into (respectable) research topics.
Important
steps in evolution are robust. Multi-cellularity
evolved at least ten times. There are several
independent origins of eusociality. There
were a number of lineages leading from primates
to humans. If our ancestors would not have
evolved language, somebody else would have.
Cooperation and language define humanity. Every special trait of humans
is derivative of language.
Mathematics is a language and therefore a product of evolution.
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W. DANIEL HILLIS
Physicist,
Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds,
Inc.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone
I
know that it sounds corny, but I believe that
people are getting better. In other words,
I believe in moral progress. It is not a steady
progress, but there is a long-term trend in
the right direction—a two steps forward,
one step back kind of progress.
I believe, but cannot prove, that our species is passing through a transitional
stage, from being animals to being true humans. I do not pretend to understand
what true humans will be like, and I expect that I would not even understand
it if I met them. Yet, I believe that our own universal sense of right
and wrong is pointing us in the right direction, and that it is the direction
of our future.
I believe that ten thousand years from now, people (or whatever we are
by then) will be more empathetic and more altruistic than we are. They
will trust each other more, and for good reason. They will take better
care of each other. They be more thoughtful about the broader consequences
of their actions. They will take better care of their future than we
do of ours.
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ROBERT R. PROVINE
Psychologist
and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland;
Author, Laughter
Human
Behavior is Unconsciously Controlled.
Until
proven otherwise, why not assume that consciousness
does not play a role in human behavior? Although
it may seem radical on first hearing, this
is actually the conservative position that
makes the fewest assumptions. The null position
is an antidote to philosopher's disease, the
inappropriate attribution of rational, conscious
control over processes that may be irrational
and unconscious. The argument here is not that
we lack consciousness, but that we over-estimate
the conscious control of behavior. I believe
this statement to be true. But proving it is
a challenge because it's difficult to think
about consciousness. We are misled by an inner
voice that generates a reasonable but often
fallacious narrative and explanation of our
actions. That the beam of conscious awareness
that illuminates our actions is on only part
of the time further complicates the task. Since
we are not conscious of our state of unconsciousness,
we vastly overestimate the amount of time that
we are aware of our own actions, whatever their
cause.
My
thinking about unconscious control was shaped
by my field studies of the primitive play vocalization
of laughter. When I asked people to explain
why they laughed in a particular situation,
they would concoct some reasonable fiction
about the cause of their behavior—"someone
did something funny," "it was something she
said," "I wanted to put her at ease." Observations
of social context showed that such explanations
were usually wrong. In clinical settings, such
post hoc misattributions would be termed "confabulations," honest
but flawed attempts to explain one's actions.
Subjects
also incorrectly presumed that laughing is
a choice and under conscious control, a reason
for their confident, if bogus, explanations
of their behavior. But laughing is not a matter
speaking "ha-ha," as we would choose a word
in speech. When challenged to laugh on command,
most subjects could not do so. In certain,
usually playful, social contexts, laughter
simply happens. However, this lack of voluntary
control does not preclude a lawful pattern
of behavior. Laughter appears at those places
where punctuation would appear in a transcription
of a conversation—laughter seldom interrupts
the phrase structure of speech. We may say, "I
have to go now—ha-ha," but rarely, "I
have to—ha-ha—go now." This punctuation
effect is highly reliable and requires
the coordination of laughing with the linguistic
structure of speech, yet it is performed without
conscious awareness of the speaker. Other airway
maneuvers such as breathing and coughing punctuate
speech and are performed without speaker awareness.
The
discovery of lawful but unconsciously controlled
laughter produced by people who could not accurately
explain their actions led me to consider the
generality of this situation to other kinds
of behavior. Do we go through life listening
to an inner voice that provides similar confabulations
about the causes of our action? Are essential
details of the neurological process governing
human behavior inaccessible to introspection?
Can the question of animal consciousness be
stood on its head and treated in a more parsimonious
manner? Instead of considering whether other
animals are conscious, or have a different,
or lesser consciousness than our own, should
we question if our behavior is under no more
conscious control than theirs? The complex
social order of bees, ants, and termites documents
what can be achieved with little, if any, conscious
control as we think of it. Is machine consciousness
possible or even desirable? Is intelligent
behavior a sign of conscious control? What
kinds of tasks require consciousness? Answering
these questions requires an often counterintuitive
approach to the role, evolution and development
of consciousness. |
PAUL BLOOM
Psychologist,
Yale University; Author, Descartes' Baby
John
MacNamara once proposed that children come
to learn about right and wrong, good and evil,
in much the same way that they learn about
geometry and mathematics. Moral development
is not merely cultural learning, and it does
not arise from innate principles that have
evolved through natural selection. It is not
like the development of language or sexual
preference or taste in food.
Instead, moral development involves the construction of a intricate formal
system that makes contact with the external world in a significant way.
This cannot be entirely right. We know that gut-feelings, such as reactions
of empathy or disgust, have a major influence on how children and adults
reason about morality. And no serious theory of moral development can
ignore the role of natural selection in shaping our moral intuitions.
But what I like about Macnamara's proposal is that it allows for moral
realism. It allows for the existence of moral truths that people come
to discover, just as we come to discover truths of mathematics. We can
reject the nihilistic position (help by many researchers) that our moral
intuitions are nothing more than accidents of biology or culture.
And so I believe (though I cannot prove it) that the development of moral
reasoning is the same sort of process as the development of mathematical
reasoning.
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PHILIP ZIMBARDO
Psychologist,
Emeritus Professor, Stanford University; Author, Shyness
I
believe that the prison guards at the Abu
Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night
shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically
and psychologically abused, had surrendered
their free will and personal responsibility
during these episodes of mayhem.
But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight army reservists
were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came
to dominate individual dispositions, values, and morality to such an extent
that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal
sense of personal accountability for their actions—at that time and
place.
The "group
mind" that developed among these soldiers
was created by a set of known social
psychological conditions, some of which
are nicely featured in Golding's Lord
of the Flies. The same processes
that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison
Experiment were clearly operating in
that remote place: Deindividuation, dehumanization,
boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule
control, and more. Beyond the relatively
benign conditions in my study, in that
Iraqi prison, the guards experienced
extreme fatigue and exhaustion from working
12-hour shifts, 7 days a week, for over
a month at a time with no breaks.
There
was fear of being killed from mortar
and grenade attacks and from prisoners
rioting. There was revenge for buddies
killed, and prejudice against these foreigners
for their strange religion and cultural
traditions. There was encouragement by
staff "to soften up" the detainees for
interrogation because Tier 1A was the
Interrogation-Soft Torture center of
that prison. Already in place when these
young men and women arrived there for
their tour of duty were abusive practices
that had been "authorized" from the top
of the chain of command: Use of nakedness
as a humiliation tactic, sensory and
sleep deprivation, stress positions,
dog attacks, and more.
In
addition to the situational variables
and processes operating in that behavioral
setting were a serious of systemic
processes that created the barrel
into which these good soldiers were forced
to live and work. Most of the reports
of independent investigation committees
cite a failure of leadership, lack of
leadership, or irresponsible leadership
as factors that contributed to these
abuses. Then there was lack of mission-specific
training of the guards, no oversight,
no accountability to senior officers,
poor resources, overcrowded facilities,
confusing commands from civilian interrogators
at odds with the CIA, military intelligence
and other agencies and agents all working
in Tier 1A without clear communication
channels and much confusion.
I
was recently an expert witness for the
defense of Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick
in his Baghdad trial. Before the trial,
I spent a day with him, giving him an
in-depth interview, checking all background
information, and arranging for him to
be psychologically assessed by the military.
He is one of the alleged "bad apples" who
these investigations have labeled as "morally
corrupt." What did he bring into that
situation and what did that situation
bring into him?
He
seemed very much to be a normal young
American. His psych assessments revealed
no sign of any pathology, no sadistic
tendencies, and all his psych assessment
scores are in the normal range, as is
his intelligence. He had been a prison
guard at a small minimal security prison
where he performed for many years without
incident. So there is nothing in his
background, temperament, or disposition
that could have been a facilitating factor
for the abuses he committed at the Abu
Ghraib Prison.
After
a four-day long trial, part of which
included my testimony elaborating on
the points noted here, the Judge took
barely one hour to find him guilty of
all eight counts and to sentence Sgt.
Frederick to 8 years in prison, starting
in solitary confinement in Kuwait, dishonorable
discharge, broken in rank from Sgt. to
Pvt., loss of his 20 years retirement
income and his salary. This military
judge held Frederick personally responsible
for the abuses, because he had acted
out of free will to intentionally harm
these detainees since he was not forced
into these acts, was not mentally incompetent,
or acting in self-defense. All of the
situational and systemic determinants
of his behavior and that of his buddies
were disregarded and given a zero weighting
coefficient in assessing causal factors.
The
real reason for the heavy sentence was
the photographic documentation of the
undeniable abuses along with the smiling
abusers in their "trophy photos." It
was the first time in history that such
images were publicly available of what
goes on in many prisons around the world,
and especially in military prisons. They
humiliated the military, and the entire
chain of command all the way up the ladder
to the White House. Following this exposure,
investigations of all American military
prisons in that area of the world uncovered
similar abuses and worse, many murders
of prisoners. Recent evidence has revealed
that similar abuses started taking place
again in Abu Ghraib prison barely one
month after these disclosures became
public—when the "Evil Eight Culprits" were
in other prisons—as prisoners.
Based
on more than 30 years of research on "The
Lucifer Effect"—the transformation
of good people into perpetrators of evil—I
believe that there are powerful situational
and systemic forces operating on individuals
in certain situations that can undercut
a lifetime of morality and rationality.
The Dionysian aspect of human nature
can triumph over the Apollonian, not
only during Mardi Gras, but in dynamic
group settings like gang rapes, fraternity
hazing, mob riots, and in that Abu Ghraib
prison. I believe in that truth in general
and especially in the case of Sgt. Frederick,
but I was not able to prove it in a military
court of law.
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ALUN ANDERSON
Editor-in-Chief, New Scientist
Strangely,
I believe that cockroaches are conscious. That
is probably an unappealing thought to anyone
who switches on a kitchen light in the middle
of the night and finds a family of roaches
running for cover. But it's really shorthand
for saying that I believe that many quite simple
animals are conscious, including more attractive
beasts like bees and butterflies.
I
can't prove that they are, but I think in principle
it will be provable one day and there's a lot
to be gained about thinking about the worlds
of these relatively simple creatures, both
intellectually—and even poetically. I
don't mean that they are conscious in even
remotely the same way as humans are; if that
we were true the world would be a boring place.
Rather the world is full of many overlapping
alien consciousnesses.
Why
do I think they might be multiple forms of
conscious out there? Before becoming a journalist
I spent 10 years and a couple of post-doctoral
fellowships getting inside the sensory worlds
of a variety of insects, including bees and
cockroaches. I was inspired by A Picture
Book of Invisible Worlds, a slim out-of-print
volume by Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944).
The same book had also inspired Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, the
Nobel Prize winners who founded the field of ethology (animal behaviour).
Von Uexkull studied the phenomenal world of animals, what he called their "umwelt",
the worlds around animals as they themselves perceive them. Everything
that an animals senses means something to it, for it has evolved to fit
and create its world. Study of animals and their sensory worlds have
now morphed into the field of sensory ecology, or on a wilder path, the
newer science of biosemiotics.
I
studied time studying how honey bees could
find their way around my laboratory room (they
had learnt to fly in through a small opening
in the window) and find a hidden source of
sugar. Bees could learn all about the pattern
of key features in the room and would show
they were confused if objects were moved around
when they were out of the room. They were also
easily distracted by certain kinds of patterns,
particularly ones with lots of points and lines
that had very abstract similarities to the
patterns on flowers, as well as by floral scents,
and by sudden movements that signalled danger.
In contrast, when they were busy gorging on
the sugar almost nothing could distract them,
making it possible for myself to paint a little
number on their backs so I distinguish individual
bees.
To
make sense of this ever changing behaviour,
with its shifting focus of attention, I always
found it simplest to figure out what was happening
by imagining the sensory world of the bee,
with its eye extraordinarily sensitive to flicker
and colours we can't see, as a "visual screen" in
the same way I can sit back and "see" my own
visual screen of everything happening around
me, with sights and sounds coming in and out
of prominence. The objects in the bees world
have significances or "meaning" quite different
from our own, which is why its attention is
drawn to things we would barely perceive.
That's
what I mean by consciousness—the feeling
of "seeing" the world and its associations.
For the bee, it is the feeling of being a bee.
I don't mean that a bee is self-conscious or
spends time thinking about itself. But of course
the problem of why the bee has its own "feeling" is
the same incomprehensible "hard problem" of
why the activity of our nervous system gives
rise to our own "feelings".
But
at least the bee's world is very visual and
capable of being imagined. Some creatures live
in sensory worlds that are much harder to access.
Spiders that hunt at night live in a world
dominated by the detection of faint vibration
and of the tiniest flows of air that allow
them to see fly passing by in pitch darkness.
Sensory hairs that cover their body give them
a sensitivity to touch far more finely grained
than we can possibly feel through our own skin.
To
think this way about simple creatures is not
to fall into the anthropomorphic fallacy. Bees
and spiders live in their own world in which
I don't see human-like motives. Rather it is
a kind of panpsychism, which I am quite happy
to sign up to, at least until we know a lot
more about the origin of consciousness. That
may take me out of the company of quite a few
scientists who would prefer to believe that
a bee with a brain of only a million neurones
must surely be a collection of instinctive
reactions with some simple switching mechanism
between then, rather have some central representation
of what is going on that might be called consciousness.
But it leaves me in the company of poets who
wonder at the world of even lowly creatures.
"In
this falling rain,
where are you off to
snail?"
wrote
the haiku poet Issa.
And
as for the cockroaches, they are a little more
human than the spiders. Like the owners of
the New York apartments who detest them, they
suffer from stress and can die from it, even
without injury. They are also hierarchical
and know their little territories well. When
they are running for it, think twice before
crushing out another world.
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MARGARET WERTHEIM
Science
writer and Commentator; Author, Pythagoras'
Trousers
We
all believe in something and science itself
is premised on a whole set of beliefs.
Above all, science is founded on the belief
that things are comprehensible and that
by the ingenuity of our minds and the probing
of ever more subtle instruments we will
ultimately come to know It All. But is
the All inherently knowable? I believe,
though I cannot prove it, that there will
always be things we do not know—large
things, small things, interesting things
and important things.
If theoretical physics is any guide we might suppose that science is
a march towards a finite goal. For the past few decades theoretical physicists
have been searching for a so-called "Theory of Everything," what
Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg has also called a "Final Theory." This "ultimate" set
of equations that would tie together all the fundamental forces which
physicists recognize today—the four essential powers of gravity,
electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces inside the cores of atoms. But
such theory—if we are lucky enough to extract it from the current
mass of competing contenders—would not tell us anything about how
proteins form or how DNA came into being. Less still would it illuminate
the machinations of a living cell, or the workings of the human mind.
Frankly, a "theory of everything" would not even help us to
understand how snowflakes form.
In an age when we have discovered the origin of the universe and observed
the warping of space and time it is shocking to hear that scientists
do not understand something as "paltry" as the formation of
ice crystals. But that is indeed the case.
Kenneth
Libbrecht, chairman of the Cal tech physics
department is a world expert on ice crystal
formation, a hobby project he took on more
than twenty years ago precisely because as
he puts it "there are six billion people
on this planet, and I thought that at least
one of us should understand how snow crystals
form." After two decades of meticulous
experimentation inside specially constructed
pressurized chambers Libbrecht believes he
has made some headway in understanding how
ice crystallizes at the edge of the quasi-liquid
layer which surrounds all ice structures. He
calls his theory "structure dependent
attachment kinetics," but he is quick
to point out that this is far from the ultimate
answer. The transition from water to ice is
a mysteriously complex process that has engaged
minds as brilliant as Johannes Kepler and Michael
Faraday. Libbrecht hopes he can add the small
next step in our knowledge of this wondrous
substance that is so central to life itself.
Studying ice crystals is Libbrecht's hobby—in his "day job" he
is one of the hundreds of physicists who are working on the LIGO detector
which is designed to detect gravitational waves that are believed to
emanate from black holes and other massive cosmological entities. Gravity
waves have been predicted by the general theory of relativity, and hence
physicists believe they must exist. Here the matter of belief has literally
bought into being a an extremely expensive machine. Any successful theory
of everything will have to account for gravity, the most mysterious of
all the forces and the one physicists least understand. Like the other
three forces, physicists believe gravity must ultimately manifest itself
in both wave and particle forms. LIGO is designed to detect such waves,
if indeed they do exist.
Some years ago the science writer John Horgan wrote a marvelously provocative
book in which he suggested that science was coming to an end, all the
major theoretical edifices now supposedly being in place. Horgan was
right in one sense, for high-energy physics may be on the verge of achieving
its final unification. But in so many other areas, science is just beginning.
Only now are we acquiring the scientific tools and techniques to begin
to investigate how our atmosphere works, how ecological systems function,
how genes create proteins, how cells evolve, and how brains work. The
very success of "fundamental science" has opened doors undreamed
of by earlier generations and in many ways it seems there is more than
ever that we do not know. At a time when journals tout theories about
how to create entire universes it is easy to imagine that science has
grasped the whole of reality. In truth our ignorance is vast—and
personally I believe it will always be so.
Rather than pretend we will soon know it all, I suggest we might adopt
instead the attitude of the great fifteenth century champion of science,
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa titled his major work On Learned
Ignorance. A complex and poetic fusion of mathematics, scientific
speculation and Catholic theology, Cusa puts forward in this book the
view that we can never —even in principle—know everything.
Only God can do that. We mortals, confined within the world itself can
never see it whole, from the outside as it were. But while we cannot
know it All, Cusa insists we can know a great deal and that science and
mathematics will take our knowledge forward. Our ignorance then can be
ever more learned. Not omniscience then, but an ever more subtle and
insightful unknowing is the goal that Cusa advocated. In the humble snowflakes
Ken Libbrecht studies we have the perfect metaphor for such a view—though
they melt on your tongue, each tiny crystal of ice encapsulates a universe
whose basic rules we have barely begun to unravel.
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KENNETH FORD
Physicist;
Retired director, American Institute of Physics;
Author, The Quantum World
I
believe that microbial life exists
elsewhere in our galaxy.
I
am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If
the proposition I believe to be true is to
be proved true within a generation or two,
I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I
will bet on its truth there.
I
believe in the existence of life elsewhere
because chemistry seems to be so life-striving
and because life, once created, propagates
itself in every possible direction. Earth's
history suggests that chemicals get busy and
create life given any old mix of substances
that includes a bit of water, and given practically
any old source of energy; further, that life,
once created, spreads into every nook and cranny
over a wide range of temperature, acidity,
pressure, light level, and so on.
Believing
in the existence of intelligent life
elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter.
Good luck to the SETI people and applause for
their efforts, but consider that microbes have
inhabited Earth for at least 75 percent of
its history, whereas intelligent life has been
around for but the blink of an eye, perhaps
0.02 percent of Earth's history (and for nearly
all of that time without the ability to communicate
into space). Perhaps intelligent life will
have staying power. We don't know. But we do
know that microbial life has staying power.
Now
to a supposition: that Mars will be found to
have harbored life and harbors life no more.
If this proves to be the case, it will be an
extraordinarily sobering discovery for humankind,
even more so than the view of our fragile blue
ball from the Moon, even more so than our removal
from the center of the universe by Copernicus,
Galileo, and Newton—perhaps even more
so than the discovery of life elsewhere in
the galaxy.
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DONALD HOFFMAN
Cognitive
Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual Intelligence
I
believe that consciousness and its contents
are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and
fields never were the fundamental denizens
of the universe but have always been, from
their beginning, among the humbler contents
of consciousness, dependent on it for their
very being.
The
world of our daily experience—the world
of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their
attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is
a species-specific user interface to a realm
far more complex, a realm whose essential character
is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents
of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires,
in general, that they do not. For the point
of an interface, such as the windows interface
on a computer, is simplification and ease of
use. We click icons because this is quicker
and less prone to error than editing megabytes
of software or toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific
interface, this world of our daily experience,
should itself be a radical simplification,
selected not for the exhaustive depiction of
truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If
this is right, if consciousness is fundamental,
then we should not be surprised that, despite
centuries of effort by the most brilliant of
minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory
of consciousness, no theory that explains how
mindless matter or energy or fields could be,
or cause, conscious experience. There are,
of course, many proposals for where to find
such a theory—perhaps in information,
complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism,
discriminative mechanisms, quantum effects,
or functional organization. But no proposal
remotely approaches the minimal standards for
a scientific theory: quantitative precision
and novel prediction. If matter is but one
of the humbler products of consciousness, then
we should expect that consciousness itself
cannot be theoretically derived from matter.
The mind-body problem will be to physicalist
ontology what black-body radiation was to classical
mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense,
later the provenance of its final supersession.
The
heroic defense will, I suspect, not soon be
abandoned. For the defenders doubt that a replacement
grounded in consciousness could attain the
mathematical precision or impressive scope
of physicalist science. It remains to be seen,
of course, to what extent and how effectively
mathematics can model consciousness. But there
are fascinating hints: According to some of
its interpretations, the mathematics of quantum
theory is itself, already, a major advance
in this project. And perhaps much of the mathematical
progress in the perceptual and cognitive sciences
can also be so interpreted. We shall see.
The
mind-body problem may not fall within the scope
of physicalist science, since this problem
has, as yet, no bona fide physicalist theory.
Its defenders can surely argue that this penury
shows only that we have not been clever enough
or that, until the right mutation chances by,
we cannot be clever enough, to devise a physicalist
theory. They may be right. But if we assume
that consciousness is fundamental then the
mind-body problem transforms from an attempt
to bootstrap consciousness from matter into
an attempt to bootstrap matter from consciousness.
The latter bootstrap is, in principle, elementary:
Matter, spacetime and physical objects are
among the contents of consciousness.
The
rules by which, for instance, human vision
constructs colors, shapes, depths, motions,
textures and objects, rules now emerging from
psychophysical and computational studies in
the cognitive sciences, can be read as a description,
partial but mathematically precise, of this
bootstrap. What we lose in this process are
physical objects that exist independent of
any observer. There is no sun or moon unless
a conscious mind perceives them, for both are
constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific
user interface. To some this seems a patent
absurdity, a reductio of the position, readily
contradicted by experience and our best science.
But our best science, our theory of the quantum,
gives no such assurance. And experience once
led us to believe the earth flat and the stars
near. Perhaps, in due time, mind-independent
objects will go the way of flat earth.
This
view obviates no method or result of science,
but integrates and reinterprets them in its
framework. Consider, for instance, the quest
for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).
This holy grail of physicalism can, and should,
proceed unabated if consciousness is fundamental,
for it constitutes a central investigation
of our user interface. To the physicalist,
an NCC is, potentially, a causal source of
consciousness. If, however, consciousness is
fundamental, then an NCC is a feature of our
interface correlated with, but never causally
responsible for, alterations of consciousness.
Damage the brain, destroy the NCC, and consciousness
is, no doubt, impaired. Yet neither the brain
nor the NCC causes consciousness. Instead consciousness
constructs the brain and the NCC. This is no
mystery. Drag a file's icon to the trash and
the file is, no doubt, destroyed. Yet neither
the icon nor the trash, each a mere pattern
of pixels on a screen, causes its destruction.
The icon is a simplification, a graphical correlate
of the file's contents (GCC), intended to hide,
not to instantiate, the complex web of causal
relations.
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DENIS
DUTTON
Philosopher
of Art, University of Canterbury, New
Zealand; Editor, Arts & Letters
Daily
In
a 1757 essay, philosopher David Hume argued
that because "the general principles of taste
are uniform in human nature" the value of some
works of art might be essentially eternal.
He observed that the "same Homer who pleased
at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago,
is still admired at Paris and London." The
works that manage to endure over millennia,
Hume thought, do so precisely because they
appeal to deep, unchanging features of human
nature.
Some
unique works of art, for example, Beethoven's Pastoral
Symphony, possess this rare but demonstrable
capacity to excite the human mind across cultural
boundaries and through historic time. I cannot
prove it, but I think a small body of such
works—by Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Murasaki
Shikibu, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Wagner, Jane
Austen, Sophocles, Hokusai—will be sought
after and enjoyed for centuries or millennia
into the future. As much as fashions and philosophies
are bound to change, these works will remain
objects of permanent value to human beings.
These
epochal survivors of art are more than just
popular. The majority of works of popular art
today are not inevitably shallow or worthless,
but they tend to be easily replaceable. In
the modern mass art system, artistic forms
endure, while individual works drop away. Spy
thrillers, romance novels, pop songs, and soap
operas are daily replaced by more thrillers,
romance novels, pop songs, and soap operas.
In fact, the ephemeral nature of mass art seems
more pronounced than ever: most popular works
are incapable of surviving even a year, let
alone a couple of generations. It's different
with art's classic survivors: even if they
began, as Sophocles' and Shakespeare's did,
as works of popular art, they set themselves
apart in their durable appeal: nothing kills
them. Audiences keep coming back to experience
these original works themselves.
Against
the idea of permanent aesthetic values is cultural
relativism, which is taught as the default
orthodoxy in many university departments. Aesthetic
values have been widely construed by academics
as merely contingent reflections of local social
and economic conditions. Beauty, if not in
the eye of the beholder, has been misconstrued
as merely in the eyes of society, a conditioning
that determines values of cultural seeing.
Such veins of explanation often include no
small amount of cynicism: why do people go
to the opera? Oh, to show off their furs. Why
are they thrilled by famous paintings? Because
they're worth millions. Beneath such explanations
is a denial of intrinsic aesthetic merit.
Such
aesthetic relativism is decisively refuted,
as Hume understood, by the cross-cultural appeal
of a small class of art objects over centuries:
Mozart packs Japanese concerts halls, as Hiroshige
does Paris galleries, while new productions
of Shakespeare in every major language of the
world are endless. And finally, it is beginning
to look as though empirical psychology is equipped
to address the universality of art. For example,
evolutionary psychology is being used by literary
scholars to explain the persistent themes and
plot devices in fiction. The rendering of faces,
bodies, and landscape preferences in art is
amenable to psychological investigation. The
structure of musical perception is now open
to experimental analysis as never before. Poetic
experience can be elucidated by the insights
of contemporary linguistics. None of this research
promises a recipe for creating great art, but
it can throw light on what we already know
about aesthetic pleasure.
What's
going on most days in the Metropolitan Museum
and most nights at Lincoln Center involves
aesthetic experiences that will be continuously
revived and relived by our descendents into
an indefinite future. In a way, this makes
the creations of the greatest artists as much
permanent achievements as the discoveries of
greatest scientists. That much I think I know.
The question we should now ask is, What makes
this possible? What is it about the highest
works of art that gives them eternal appeal? |
DAVID
MYERS
Psychologist,
Hope College; Author, Intuition
As
a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven
axioms:
1. There is a God.
2. It's not me (and it's also not you).
Together, these axioms imply my surest
conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours)
contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite
and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.
And that is why I further believe that we should
a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a
certain tentativeness (except for this one!),
b) assess others' ideas with open-minded
skepticism, and
c) freely pursue truth aided by observation
and experiment.
This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism
helped fuel the beginnings of modern science,
and it has informed my own research and science
writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely
by searching our own minds, for there is not
enough there. So we also put our ideas to the
test. If they survive, so much the better for
them; if not, so much the worse.
Within psychology, this "ever-reforming" process has many times
changed my mind, leading me now to believe, for example, that newborns
are not so dumb, that electro convulsive therapy often alleviates intractable
depression, that America's economic growth has not improved our morale,
that the automatic unconscious mind dwarfs the conscious mind, that traumatic
experiences rarely get repressed, that most folks don't suffer low self-esteem,
and that sexual orientation is not a choice.
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