I’m about 2 years late in writing a follow-up to So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution? published on 2009/05/05. For those who don’t follow the link to that earlier article, I’ll quote the first paragraph:
Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and for all our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we think ourselves to be, that the universe isn’t nearly the place our ancestors thought it to be.
We don’t wish to see ourselves as developing over time, constrained and gifted in limited ways. We’d prefer to be born as some sort of higher-level creature who just is. This self-contained creature, living in the world but not inherently changed by interactions with that world, can do good if he wills. He can do evil if he wills. In either case, there is a persistent ‘I’ unchanged in fundamental ways by responses to reality. Along those lines, we think we can be smart without actually making the effort to acquire knowledge or to develop the intellectual talents we might have as a result of genetic inheritance or our early environments.
What are we at birth if we have no preformed mind, or — equivalently — preformed soul? We have brains which are inclined to respond to our environments and form relationships which are the beginning of those traits of our human being which we group together as the as-if- or pseudo-entity we call ‘mind’. In a sense, we’re born with what might be called a human-species brain, no one having all the raw talents which evolved over the millenia, but each one having some of those talents. (For the sake of speaking concisely, I’ll ignore those born with only small parts of a complete brain or with other severe problems.)
It’s becoming clear from modern brain research that human beings are not even born with a sense of ‘self’. That sense develops over time and is embodied in brain regions which are under very active investigation. Two related lines of research have indicated that so-called ‘near-death’ and ‘out-of-body’ experiences are due to disruptions of these brain regions which regulate our sense of self. See Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge for a discussion of news reports covering some of this research. One strong implication of this knowledge about our sense of self is that such a sense is unstable. At some level, we know this sense of self has developed over our lives and can develop further, in bad or good directions. But this isn’t comforting knowledge. It’s damned disturbing knowledge and we try to suppress it. Philosophers and theologians try to justify a permanent, and sometimes immortal self, by positing soul-stuff which isn’t subject to the development and decay of mere matter. Even for Christians who claim faith in an all-powerful God, an immortal soul seems a good hedge on that promise of a resurrection. Many skeptics and even some downright atheists seem to agree that some sort of a hedge is necessary even if they don’t believe in the possibility of life after death. Even most ideological Darwinists seem to write and talk as if we’re born as some entity which could be labeled ‘Person: John Smith’ and then die as the same person.
Many of my readers are likely to have read of these developmental processes in the brain which play a role in our sense of self. Many are also likely to know that the brain-regions of blind human beings adjust so that regions usually devoted to vision develop differently or even redevelop to ratchet up the capabilities of hearing or touch. We can quite plausibly conjecture that brain-regions devoted to physical movement were hyper-developed in Vladimir Horowitz, Fred Astaire, and Joe DiMaggio. The brains of mathematicians, adult musicians, and writers seem to be especially well-developed in the language centers of the brain. Gauss was a genius in languages as a boy and was far from unusual for a mathematician. Einstein was particularly good in two subjects in those years we Americans call ‘high-school’ — mathematics and Latin.
Gauss and Einstein went on to develop their minds in response to the abstract aspects of mathematics and physics. This doesn’t mean they were narrow-minded. Gauss was a very good practical businessman and Einstein was a good violinist and pianist. I’m sure that such men had other interesting and rich aspects to their total personalities. Certainly, neither was inclined to sit on a couch and wait for pre-packaged, that is — false, experiences to be presented to them.
We’re born with specific characteristics and specific talents which can be developed. We’re also born into specific environments which offer a limited number of opportunities. Within those pre-conditions and limitations, there’s a lot of room for becoming a moral creature or an immoral creature, a thinking creature or a non-thinking creature, an acting creature or a passive creature. A corrupted understanding of ‘intention’ would excuse us from our sins and failures, especially those which are comforting to us, by teaching us — falsely — that you’re a good man so long as you feel good about yourself. “My intentions are good, so I’m good even if I don’t have the courage or the faith to stick up for my professed beliefs, even if I don’t have the gumption to develop my talents as woodworker or amateur photographer or helper-of-neighbors. After all, I have television shows and DisneyWorld to fill my spare time.”
See What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? for the first of several responses to the book How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the brain-scientist and philosopher Walter J. Freeman. In that response, I quote a couple paragraphs from that book:
I want to describe a neural basis for goal-directed actions that is common to both humans and other animals because it reflects the evolution of human mechanisms from simpler animals in which intent can operate without will. The concept– “intentionality”–was first described by [St.] Thomas Aquinas in 1272 to denote the process by which humans and other animals act in accordance with their own growth and maturation. An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. It differs from a motive, which is the reason and explanation of the action, and from a desire, which is the awareness and experience stemming from the intent. A man shoots another with the intent to kill, which is separate from why he does it and with what feeling.
Lawyers following in the steps of Aquinas understand and use these distinctions. Psychologists commonly do not. Philosophers have drastically changed the meaning of the term, using intention to denote the relations that a thought or a belief has to whatever it signifies in the world, but physicians and surgeons, again following Aquinas, have preserved the original sense in applying the word to the processes of growth and healing of the body from injuries, thus retaining its original biological context. I believe that animals have awareness, but not awareness of themselves, which is well developed only in humans. Self-awareness is required for volition: animals cannot volunteer. [How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, page 8]
In fact, when you take that step towards that goal of, say, conforming of your own thoughts and those of your children to what is needed by an evil government which sends you checks and also threatens you in various ways, that step is your intention, not your not-yet suppressed desire to do what’s right and certainly not your maturing justifications of your cowardly acts. You’ve become a slave of a sort, one enslaved — mostly — by being willingly changed to possess the behavior of a slave. And, yet, modern man with his strange belief that he is truly his consciousness, and — at convenient times — only distantly related to his body and its habits, needs to feel good. After all, modern man’s not exactly intellectual in the manner of an ancient Greek philosopher-monk. His sense of self and his very self-respect is tied to that consciousness which is increasingly nurtured by a badly decayed educational system and the allied entertainment industry.
The real point within the context of this article is that we learn to think as slaves if we passively allow our brains to be shaped from the outside, even by a truly pious and intelligent master. We must respond actively to our environments to develop living and flexible minds. So far as I can tell, few human beings in this age develop living and flexible minds. I wrote a short article about scientific research that showed that infants learn best by experience, Active Responses are Necessary for Shaping the Human Mind where I note that “one of the problems with classroom instruction as currently practiced [is that it’s] a passive and non-effective way of learning in which the over-burdened teacher is trying to push pre-processed knowledge into the heads of thirty students of varying talents and interest[s] and [levels of] maturity.” We do still worse when we put those poor students in front of television screens. I also don’t think it’s a very good situation for teachers who have a desire to teach and maybe even a liking, if not a love, for the subjects they teach. Such teachers would be the only active creatures in the typical classroom and they would be exhausted and frustrated by the effort to energize members of a passive and directed herd. At this point, one begins to appreciate the class clowns who display enough initiative to make jokes.
A recent article on the Internet, Bringing Up Robots: Machines learn to walk faster, and better, if they figure out crawling first tells of indications that even mechanical learners, such as robots, can learn more sophisticated skills or behaviors if they learn by experience, by active responses to reality.
Robotics engineers have found their machines learn better by active responses to their environments as we continue a long and painful experiment of educating children by sitting them in classrooms, forcing them to learn habits of passivity, and then pushing textbook knowledge into their bored, little heads. Whatever this might accomplish, it doesn’t nurture the process of developing minds in those children. We don’t know how to properly develop minds because we have no plausible understanding of what a human mind is or even of what knowledge is. I’ve written much on these subjects. For now, I’ll refer the interested reader to an article I posted in 2009: The Disembodiment of Knowledge in Modern America. We don’t know to develop our minds because we don’t really know what it means to know.
Are we building a world in which robots will be active learners while human children will continue being passive, mechanical learners?