We Need Animal Cognition, Not Neuroscience

Posted by Matthew Blakeway

A generation ago, it was thought that neuroscience held the promise of solving many philosophical problems. Looking back now over those lost decades, we are able to see that it failed to solve a single one, and arguably created a new one or two.

The purpose of this post is to introduce a single idea, painted with a large brush: As we see our hopes for answers from neuroscience fading, animal cognition may hold the promise of the future. 

 

Neuroscience, it was thought, would tell us many things: what a mind is, whether humans have freewill, or where in the brain we find these things. It would explain consciousness, morality, evil, or why humans tend to believe in prime-moving inter-galactic omnipotent fairies. While there are still philosophers who hold out hope for answers from neuroscience, the failure of progress is striking. An illustration reveals the way in which the arguments typically fail: in his book Freewill, cognitive neuroscientist Sam Harris argued that brain scans revealed a neural blip the moment before a subject was conscious of choosing to act. This, he considered, demonstrated that freewill is a myth, for the reason that the brain acts before we know it. Yet the argument is too easily neutralised. What was the blip? It may just as well have been one part of the brain going, 'OK, Freewill, this is one for your department.'

There are, on the contrary, significant problems that neuroscience has created. For example, its tendency to believe that the mind is nothing but the brain may open it up to a classic problem of logical systems, identified by the mathematical logician Kurt Gödel. Does Gödel's incompleteness theorem imply that the brain is unable to understand itself, so that neuroscience can have no achievable end-goal? Probably! The computer analogy of the brain is an old one, yet it is still useful. We have been inching towards a neuroscientific view that a brain is a biological computing device. Assuming that this is so, the study of the brain may reveal little about how the software works. In moving towards the view that a human mind has no animal spirits or ethereal magic in it, the consequence for neuroscience is that it is ever less in a position to solve philosophical problems – much as we would not have a hope of proving the Church-Turing thesis, or demonstrating why π is an irrational number, by shifting to a study of computer chips.

It may be more helpful for philosophers to turn to animal cognition as their primary input. This field is producing remarkable new finds, and philosophy would do well to absorb their implications. One of its most conspicuous aspects is the study of pro-social behaviour in animals – in contrast with what zoologist Robert Hinde calls 'human aggression in all its deviousness and complexity'. As a case in point, researchers demonstrated that a rat will help another rat in difficulty without needing a reward – if only humans could be relied upon to so act. While the 18th century philosophical view of humankind might be expressed (adopt a tone of pompous bloviation): 'It is the moral sense that separates men from the wild beasts which live in brutal ignorance,' humans do some pretty nasty things. My suggestion is that humans, while they, too, have inherited 'moral emotions', can out-think their own emotions and can manipulate their behaviour tactically. We need to turn the old view of humankind on its head. We don’t need to explain how we are biologically programmed. We need to understand the anomalies.

Such observations promise a rich new vein for philosophy, and it deserves our attentions. By way of illustration, now that we know that rats are compassionate, we may ask why so many bankers and politicians aren’t. Supposing that an economist should persuade bankers and politicians that everybody will become richer if they act in their own self-interest (as has been the case, starting with political philosopher Adam Smith) – then tactically, bankers and politicians may out-think their pro-social inclinations – to the detriment of the poor, and on an alarming scale at that. In this example alone, animal cognition suggests fresh explorations of morality, freewill, and belief, while the answers to the same may explain no less than why it is that our choices polarise all of humanity today.
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Study notes:

Ben-Ami Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. “Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats”. Science. 334, 2011. pp 1427-1430.
Hamilton, W. D. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour”. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1964, 7 (1): 1–16. 

What is a philosophical problem? The irrefutable metahypothesis

By Matthew Blakeway

If we ban speculation about metahypotheses, does philosophical debate simply evaporate? 



Karl Popper explained how scientific knowledge grows in his book Conjectures and Refutations. A conjecture is a guess as to an explanation of a phenomenon. And an experiment is an attempt to refute a conjecture. Experiments can never prove a conjecture correct, but if successive experiments fail to refute it, then gradually it becomes accepted by scientists that the conjecture is the best available explanation. It is then a scientific theory. Scientists don’t like the word “conjecture” because it implies that it is merely a guess. They prefer the word “hypothesis”. Popper’s rule is that, for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must be empirically falsifiable.

When scientists consider a phenomenon that is truly mystifying, it seems reasonable to ask “what might a hypothesis for this look like?” At this point, scientists are hypothesising about hypotheses. Metahypothetical thinking is the first step in any scientific journey. When this produces no results, frustration gets the upper hand and they pursue the following line of reasoning: “the phenomenon is an effect, and must have a cause. But since we don’t know what that cause is, let’s give it a name ‘X’ and then speculate about its properties.” A metahypothesis is now presumed to be 'A Thing', rather than merely an idea about an idea.

The problem is the irrefutability of its existence.
X is a metahypothetical idea, and until we have a hypothesis, we don’t actually know what we are supposed to be refuting. Popper would say that it wasn’t scientific, yet it sprang from a scientific speculation. There is a false impression of truth that actually derives from a misrepresentation of axiom. “X is a thing” actually means “’X’ is a name we have given to an idea where we don’t even know what the idea represents” and the confusion between idea and thing is born. A false logical conclusion arises, not from truth, but because incoherent statements are irrefutable by their nature.

We can trace this through the history of philosophy. Most of it can be reduced to the following two questions:

• “What is X?” and
• “Does X exist?”

- where “X” is a metahypothetical idea that sprang from a scientist speculating about a cause of an unexplained phenomenon. The “X” could represent: God, evil, freewill, the soul, knowledge, etc. Each of these is a metahypothesis that originated with a scientist seeking to explain respectively: the existence of the universe, destructive actions by humans, seemingly random actions by humans, human actions that no one else can understand, human understanding.

The question “what is knowledge?” led to thousands of years of debate that ended when everybody lost interest in it. And I'm sure that the questions “what is freewill?” and “do humans have it?” are currently going through their death throes – again after a thousand years of debate. Or take the statement: “Evil people perform evil actions because they are evil.” If you are reading this blog, you will recognise that as so incoherent that it is barely a sentence, yet the individual components of it frequently pass as explanation for human actions that we don’t like. The idea of “evil” being some sort of thing is irrefutable despite being meaningless. What is there here to refute?

The sheer persistence of any proposition concerning a metahypothesis represented as 'A Thing' is illustrated by a real debate recently. The British actor, Stephen Fry,  gave an interview with Irish television in which he argued that if God exists, then he is a maniacal bastard. [To paraphrase!]

Yes, the world is very splendid but it also has in it insects whose whole lifecycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn’t exist.

Giles Fraser, a Christian, responded with an article “I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry doesn’t believe in either.”

If we are imagining a God whose only power, indeed whose only existence, is love itself – and yes, this means we will have to think metaphorically about a lot of the Bible – then God cannot stand accused as the cause of humanity’s suffering.

I expect that you are positively itching to take a side in this debate. But resist the urge! Instead imagine that you are a Martian gazing down at the tragic poverty of the debates of Earth people. Fry is taking a literal interpretation of God and thereby is converting a metahypothesis into a hypothesis, but he is doing this purely with the intention of refuting it. Deliberately establishing a false hypothesis is a good debating tactic, but a dishonest one.

Fraser responds by taking the literal interpretation and passing it back into the metahypothetical – an equally dishonest tactic of making a debate unwinnable by undefining its terms. It’s like stopping the other team winning at football by hiding the ball. The effect of debates like this is to create an equilibrium stasis where the word “God” is suspended between meaning and incoherence. If it is given a robust definition, it becomes a hypothesis and is empirically refutable. And since its origins were in our inability to explain phenomena (the origin of the universe, life, etc.) for which we now have decent scientific explanations then it is pretty certain that it will indeed be refuted. But if the idea is completely incoherent, then it isn’t possible to talk about it at all. So the word exists – fluidly semi-defined – in the mid-zone between these two states. The concept “God” is an idea about an idea about a cause of unexplained phenomena. It is therefore itself unexplainable.

We can examine the birth of a metahypothesis in real time. Richard Dawkins asked in The Selfish Gene what caused cultural elements to replicate. He speculated that it needed a replicator like a gene:

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

An effect needs a cause. And since we don’t know what that cause is, let us give it a name and then speculate as to what its properties must be. It is beyond funny that the world’s most famous atheist is here caught employing the same method of reasoning that gave birth to the idea of “God”. We will now debate for a thousand years whether memes exist or not. However, the idea is incoherent despite sounding convincingly sciencey. The idea of the “soul” sounded pretty sciencey in Aristotle’s day. Dawkins speculates that the idea of God is a meme, but he fails to notice that the idea of a meme is a meme, and therefore he is trying to lift himself off the floor by his bootstraps.

So... if we ban speculation about metahypotheses, does philosophical debate simply evaporate? Maybe! But it would probably also stop scientific progress in its tracks. If you are in the mood for a brain spin, you might consider whether the idea of a “metahypothesis” is itself a metahypothesis.

Taking this further, if we cannot hypothesise about hypotheses, then does science evaporate too?