Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Click here to subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.
Good morning! You’re probably expecting Vasudevan Mukunth, the science editor at The Wire. But I’ll be filling in him for this morning. My name is Thomas Manuel. I’m a writer from Chennai and though I’ve won an award for writing something, I’m not a science-editor of anything. [VM – this award]
Standing as we are, on the shoulders of giants, I have a lot of respect for those who can set up ladders and climb even higher. I myself have other interests. Like, how did these giants get here in the first place? Why are they all old white men? What’s their favourite kind of sandwich?
These interests of mine, lying as they are not in scientific pursuits but rather in what happens in their periphery, are probably because my parents had Frantz Fanon and not Richard Feynman in the family library. Growing up, science (along with many other things including cooking and programming) seemed to occupy a separate magisterium. I’m happy to admit that I’m rectifying that gap but the damage is done. When I think of science, my heart is drawn to its historical roots, its sociological baggage and its philosophical underpinnings.
So, that said, here’s this week’s Infinite in All Directions – about consciousness.
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Things We Don’t Understand #1: The Mind
In a conversation with the philosophers Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Dennett, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss joked that he studied physics because it was easy: “If I wanted to do something hard, I’d do consciousness”.
The mind is one of the most interesting frontiers of science today. Each new discovery is carefully dissected, debated, contradicted and, somehow, slowly, progress is made. The intense scrutiny is more than justified – there’s almost no branch of human endeavour that can claim to be disinterested. From self-help pop psychology to linguistics to medicine to economics, the mind matters.
One of the writers I really enjoy reading on the subject is Yohan John, a computational neuroscientist who regularly writes columns for 3QuarksDaily. His essays have ranged from topics such as the power of names and idols to the stickiness of ‘mind-body’ metaphors.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my favourite essays,’Persons all the way down: On viewing the scientific conception of the self from the inside out’:
Among neuroscientists, one of the most well-known cautionary tales is that of phrenology: the 19th century “science” that claimed to be able to peer into your soul by measuring bumps and dents on your head. The idea was that these hills and valleys were signs of size differences in areas dedicated to mental faculties such as “amativeness”, “concentrativeness”, “aquisitiveness”, “wit” and “conscientiousness”. So a bump near your zone of “amativeness” would mean that your brain has allocated additional resources towards the pursuit of love and sex. It all sounds quaint and Victorian — I imagine steampunk authors have taken the idea and run with it.
But if we strip away the old-fashioned terminology, how different is the concept of a brain area for “wit” from the concept of a “cognitive area” in the brain? How different is the idea of a center of “amativeness” from the idea that oxytocin is a love molecule? And is the idea that conscientiousness is baked into the brain any different from the idea that morality or altruism is baked into the genome?
There is a kind of implicit metaphysics underlying the idea of a “brain area for X”, a “neurotransmitter for Y” and a “gene for Z” — we might call it the neo-phrenology of the self. For every psychological state, however complex, the neo-phrenologist assumes that there must be some equivalent entity at the level of brain region, or chemical, or gene.
As someone who’s always going to be looking at science from the outside in, I’m a great admirer of those who can convey the wonder and complexity and limitations of what we know. Especially if they can do it with a neat turn of phrase.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things #1: Cognitive Biases
Talking about limitations on what we know, if you haven’t heard of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, you should check out Michael Lewis’ new book on the duo, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. Here’s an excerpt.
Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists who pioneered the study of the irrationality of the human mind through the documentation and exploration of our mental heuristics and innate biases. You might’ve heard of confirmation bias but what about the conjunction fallacy? Tversky and Kahneman found that the people they tested felt it was less likely that a good tennis player would “lose the first set” than that he would “lose the first set but win the match.” Or to put it in other words, a good tennis player was more likely to win after losing a set than lose a set in the first place. Doesn’t make any sense, right? Well, it doesn’t mathematically but it does feel like if a tennis player was good, he’d be better at comebacks than losing sets.
This kind of work was revolutionary. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler of Nudge fame referred to Tversky and Kahneman in their recent New Yorker piece as “the Lennon and McCartney of social science”.
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Things We Don’t Understand #2: Reality
Getting back to consciousness, another thing that might be affected is reality itself. Consider cognitive scientist David Hoffman’s theory of reality.
I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.
I’m not qualified to comment on the theory itself obviously but the reduction to points of view must cheer people in the humanities who have been saying this all along! On a more serious note, there is an interesting question here – is what Hoffman is doing even science?
Watch this video of the conversation between Krauss, Pigliucci and Dennett that I mentioned earlier.