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The Great Debate: Being Human


Persons, Evolution, Neurobiology
by David Large

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Taking persons seriously

In their discussions of human beings, including questions of human nature, freewill, intention and other related topics, philosophers often bring into play the notion of the person. It seems useful to introduce the notion of the person to help find a way out of the maze of physicalism, epiphenomenalism, genetic reductionism, biological determinism and lots and lots of other ‘isms’.

Today I’ll be using the word ‘person’ as a philosopher’s term of art. This is different from the commonplace usage meaning roughly ‘you there’. Equally it is not intended to be a noun for a strictly defined object to be treated by the methods of empirical science. If you think that it is then that’s something you will need to argue for.

The philosophical notion of a person requires us to assent to a general position like the following. Please note that there is no need to worry about this being general. The fact that it will need to be amended to suit individual cases is one of its virtues.

When something is in a position within a society, a culture, an economy, a political system and a set of facilities, possesses a certain maturity, and is involved in a discourse, then there arise certain considerations for that something. These considerations involve rights, responsibilities, freedoms, political inclinations, aesthetic experiences, sensibilities, and, material and intellectual resources. Where this is the case that something may be properly termed a person.

Simply looking at the neurobiology and genetic make up misses all this out. (I would say that with evolutionary psychology this is the case too.) If you choose to ignore this situation, if you choose to dismiss these considerations, or replace them with something else, then you throw the baby out with the bath water.

On this view, human beings are to be considered and defined at the level of the person, and importantly, human nature, dispositions and pre-dispositions do not reduce below this level. The most we can say for the biological approach is that while being human is connected to human biology and to what Steven Pinker calls the new sciences, human nature is not constituted by human biology, and human nature is not explained by a biological approach alone.

Now, no one is saying that you have to accept this view. What I am saying is that if you want to reduce things below this level, if you want to include evolution, genetics and neurobiology in the proper description of human beings you have to

a) come up with some reasons and arguments for what you are doing and b) show why this, the generally accepted view, is wrong.

Neuroscientists, geneticists and evolutionary psychologists very often assume that the person-centred view is a non-starter. They set aside or ignore the person and talk about the sorts of things they think offer the right level of analysis. In doing this they often walk straight into a whole set of long discussed philosophical arguments which, I am sorry to say, they do not appear to be equipped to deal with. Okay, they’re not philosophers doing philosophy. Nevertheless, it would be nice to see these long standing positions discussed or even acknowledged.

Evolution and consciousness

Having established the notion of the person let’s turn to consider the ways evolution and neurobiology may enter our debate. First, I’ll say something about evolution, then look at its possible relationship with neurobiology. I’ll finish this piece by speculating on how philosophers, geneticists and neuroscientists, may interact over these issues.

Nowadays, evolution has become all things to all thinkers. To say you don't believe in evolution pretty much means that you don't believe in science at all. Other than sheer faith, e.g. divine creation, evolution is the only currently plausible scientific explanation.

So what's the problem? Well there is none, so long as everyone agrees on more or less everything to do with human nature, biology, and evolution. The trouble is that there are few areas so riven with debate, dispute and bad tempers as those of human nature, biology, and evolution.

One way out of this is to move to the general and say that evolution is the substrate in which all relevant debates take place, much in the same way as Christianity is the substrate in which Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant etc debates take place. The trouble here is that these debates, just as with Christianity, are thought, by more or less everyone involved, to cut to the very heart of what evolution is. In other words it’s the evolution of human beings that forms the subject of the debate, and you can’t really have your substrate being your subject!

Let's now bring in the human mind and consciousness. What is the human mind? What is consciousness for? Where has it come from? Why do humans have it? Can anything other than humans possess minds and this sort of consciousness, self-consciousness if you like? Can questions about mind and consciousness be addressed through an understanding of evolution?

The seat of the mind and consciousness is taken to be the brain. And if you want to know about the brain then the best thing to do is to ask a neuroscientist. A neuroscientist will describe to you in physico-chemico-electrical terms what the brain consists of and how it operates. Furthermore, a developmental neurobiologist will tell you how the brain came to be this way. Roughly, they will tell you how the lower brain developed first to deal with the lower functions, the mid brain developed next to deal with more advanced, let’s say mammalian, functions and, finally, how the frontal lobes of the human brain developed to accommodate the sorts of things we take to be specifically human such as memory and recall. Please note: This last step includes the sorts of things we look to other animals and robots to possess in order that we may call them intelligent, minded or conscious.

Given this we may say with some justification that evolution is the process responsible for human beings being conscious, minded beings. The trouble is that we don't have to say any such thing. Indeed, we need not say anything about evolution at all. All that's needed for an explanation by evolution seems to be an explanation by a neuroscientist. On this description evolution becomes wholly redundant having been entirely replaced by neuroscience. All things relevant to mind and consciousness, all the structures and all the mental phenomena, occur thanks to neurobiology and neurobiology alone. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that evolution had anything to do with it.

Neurobiology and neuropsychology

To date, it is not clear that neuroscience can ever tell the whole story about the mind and consciousness. At the moment all that is claimed with any confidence is that the neuroscientist can explain the workings and operation of the brain. Within the discipline of neuroscience, nothing is specified as being the mind or as not being the mind. Nothing is specified as to what, neurobiologically speaking, the mind or consciousness actually is.

Now, when we talk about minds we usually mean two sorts of things:

i) clever logical, maths-like stuff including reasoning, intention and prediction, and
ii) airy, fairy stuff such as feelings, imagination, and art of various sorts.

One first thought about this is that neuroscience could get to grips with the logical, maths-like stuff but would, it seems, be all at sea when it comes to accounting for the airy, fairy stuff. How then can we account for this? The best, it seems, we common folk can manage is folk psychology, and that, we are told, is of no scientific use at all. So here we need to turn not to folk psychology but to psychology itself. And so, the psychological sciences seek to capture the airy, fairy notions of the mind, not in uncritical folk psychological terms, but in a solid, scientific way.

Where the neuroscientist can find no matter to investigate, where neurobiology is unable to provide a material explanation, the psychologist steps-in with causal, functional and other, non-material sorts of explanation. And isn’t that it? Where there is no neurobiological explanation there, there is a psychological explanation. Where there is no psychological explanation there, there is a neurobiological explanation. On this view, neuroscience and psychology together deliver a complete account and explanation of mind and consciousness, and hence human beings. Moreover, there is no room for any other kind of explanation. In particular evolution is so shown to be redundant speculation.

The place of evolution

This would seem to be more or less the whole story for the human mind. But what about other animals, other brains, other minds? Our neurobiological-neuropsychological method of explanation can account for the brains and minds of human beings but cannot, it seems, offer an account of the differences between the brains and minds of different species, or of the differences between the brains and minds of the same species at different stages of development.

There is then, it would seem, a place for evolution after all at this more general, non-individualistic level. Here, while neurobiology may be seen as the structure and psychology the scripture of a particular species, the species itself, it turns out, is but one of a number of very different species. And this fact, of a world filled with many very different species of organisms is to be explained by a general, overarching theory that we call evolution.

So what sort of explanations does this make evolutionary explanations? Well, they must be explanations that account for differences between species or differences between different stages of species. Evolution therefore does not account for how a species operates in the way that it does.

There is, it must be said, much confusion about this point. What we need to consider in evolution are differences between different species, like Darwin in 'The Origin of Species', or differences between stages of a single species, like Darwin in the 'The Descent of Man'. This means that the sort of notion we need in order to produce evolutionary explanations is the sort of notion that cuts across species and across stages of a single species, and is always open to evolutionary considerations. And yes, such a notion is the notion of a gene.

This then is the place of evolution, of Darwinism and of genes. This place is not the place occupied by neuroscience or by psychology. Evolution is not empirical science but is a method of comparison and of explanation by comparison. Though it may use data provided by empirical science, its purpose and use differs markedly and certainly from that of empirical science.

And now for …

What neuroscientists would like is a biological theory of human beings informed by evolutionary theory. What they usually achieve is a biological interpretation of human beings. This produces interpretations such as the blank slate, the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and evolutionary psychology. In fact all the things Caspar and I discussed in our day school at the Newcastle Science Festival 2004, The Great Debate: Of Blank Slates and Zombies. All these interpretations fall short of an adequate account of what it is to be human. Today, we are looking at some of the reasons why this may be. But put simply, it seems that an account of what it is to be human cannot do without a consideration of humans as persons, and that is something that no amount of neuroscientific, psychological or genetic research can give us. That we can see this is so, and explain how this is so, is the work of philosophy.

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