Minds and Brains

Gary Gutting recently posted an article to the NY Times philosophy column “The Stone” in which he had this to say:

Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable atheism.

I’m quite familiar with these “agnosticism is more rational than atheism” arguments. I usually find the proponents of these arguments to be insufferable in their quest to prove agnosticism a superior philosophy to that of atheism, a more “juvenile” or “arrogant” position put forward only by the philosophically naive (Dawkins, etc).

Gutting seems to suggest that because sensible people report some kind of direct awareness of a divine being and because theologians have found ways of rationalizing these experiences, this lends credence to the supposition that agnosticism is the preferable stance insofar as we can’t “reject the [supernatural] hypothesis out of hand”. But this begs the question against the possibility of giving an overwhelming empirical explanation of exactly why and how religious hallucinations are possible.

Let’s say we have two competing explanations of the religious experience of “direct awareness of a divine being”. The first explanation is based on a naturalistic metaphysics. It starts from the expansion of the universe, the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, organisms, mammals, apes, and humans, etc. It tells this story in exquisite detail, with all the gory details filled in how the brain evolved over time. At some point in history, a side effect of human brain evolution was the advent of auditory hallucination wherein we experienced our dead ancestors, friends, deities, and demons talking to us. The naturalistic explanation thus explains the origin of “divine awareness” in terms of how the hallucination of divine authorities projected from the subconscious mind had some kind of adaptive power. Scientists are now able to experimentally induce the experience of a “divine being” by magnetically stimulating certain parts of the temporal cortex with a so-called “God Helmet“.

The second explanation is the supernatural explanation, which suggests that the best explanation of why we seem to experience immaterial realities and impossible experiences of divine beings is that there actually are divine beings and immaterial realities. Think about the logic of this for a second. This would be like saying the best explanation of why dreams are magical is that dreams actually are magical, as opposed to simply being the result of the brain being in an altered state of consciousness. It substitutes complete explanatory power for zero explanatory power. We can induce subjective experience of supernatural entities with magnetic stimulation, but the best explanation of what actually causes the experiences is that there actually are supernatural entities? Unless someone can put forward a non question-begging argument as to why induced experiences are different than “real” divine experiences, the supernaturalistic explanation seems to simply fly in the face of the well established  rationality of scientific metaphysics.

Philosophers seem to think that religious experiences are based on logical speculations about necessary beings. On the contrary, the first gods were crude auditory hallucinations. Look at the book of Amos. God is experienced as a thunderous booming voice:

“The LORD roars from Zion

and thunders from Jerusalem;

the pastures of the shepherds dry up,

and the top of Carmel withers.”

If you look at the subjective reports of these “direct experiences of divinity” and compare them with the reports of schizophrenic auditory verbal hallucination, the similarities are striking. For example, 20 year old schizophrenic Tobas reports:

I felt the Lord in me. This is when the voices began. At first they were only whispers, but then louder, but still soft. It was Jesus speaking to me. He would tell me what to do and ask me questions. Jesus would speak to me alone and no one else. Then I became a backslider. The Devil started talking to me. (He was unable to imitate the voice of the Devil) The devil told me bad things. He told me to kill myself. The Devil just wouldn’t leave me alone because I was a backslider.

These are the experiential grounds for Gutting’s “preference” for agnosticism. What are we supposed to make of the prevalence of auditory hallucinations in nonpsychotics, of the prevalence of hallucinated playmates in childhood, of the prevalence of voice hearing in the homeless and even in nonverbals? Naturalistic metaphysics theoretically has an explanation for all of this. Supernatural explanations of such phenomena barely make sense and certainly aren’t capable of producing theories such that prediction and control of the phenomena become possible (as with naturalistic metaphysics).

I have one last point. Gutting says:

It follows that [atheists] have no good basis for treating the existence of God as so improbable that it should be denied unless there is decisive proof for it. This in turn shows that atheists are at best entitled to be agnostics, seriously doubting but not denying the existence of God.

Gutting makes a familiar move here against the atheist. He makes it such that the atheist is said to “deny” the existence of God, that is, to say “there is no God and I am 100%” positive of this because of such and such arguments”. This is not my understanding of atheism. I am, strictly speaking, an agnostic atheist. That is, someone who lacks a belief in god (a-theist) but does not claim “there is no God and I am sure of it”. For all I know, Deism is an open possibility. But I can’t think of a good reason why the pathetic scribblings of human theologians and metaphysicians would accurately represent anything about this supposed Deist-God that exists “outside” the natural universe. In this respect, we can say that agnostic atheism is the “preferred” stance for all possible gods, but given the naturalistic explanation of human religious experience, atheism is preferable in respect to particular deities hallucinated by the faithful. And moreover, since agnostic atheism is itself a properly respectable a-theism (lacking all positive endorsement of the claim “supernatural deities exist”), we can say that atheism in general is preferable over agnosticism.

I just reread Julian Jaynes’ chapter on the brain in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and it’s really fascinating. He raises some incredible questions. First, he notes that almost all important brain functions are represented bilaterally in the brain. This makes evolutionary sense because functional redundancy is a survival skill in the event of injury. But curiously, language is not bilaterally represented yet it is perhaps the most important function in human existence, separating us from the animals. We would not be human without it, as feral children sadly demonstrate. Moreover, the left hemisphere is often called the “dominant” hemisphere because most people are right-handed, and thus have a left-hemisphere dominance in voluntary control (and there is even a right eye field dominance).

There must be a good reason then why something as important as language wouldnt have been bilaterally represented during evolutionary development. We know from lesion studies that if we take out the Wernicke’s area in the left hemisphere during childhood, the whole mechanism of language will transfer to the right hemisphere. So it isn’t that the right hemisphere corresponding to left language areas is incapable of bilateral language redundancy, it’s that it must subserve some other function that is even more valuable for us than language. Jaynes asks, what is this function? His answer:

The selective pressures of evolution which could have brought about so mighty a result are those of the bicameral civilizations. The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods. (103-104)

This is Jaynes’ hypothesis of the “bicameral mind”. The bicameral mind is based on the metaphor of a divided house, like two selves housed in one brain (similar to split-brain patients). On the right side is the god-complex, grounded in the right temporal cortex. It’s function was to solve problems by synthesizing complex information and relaying linguistically-coded behavioral instructions to the other side, the mortal-complex, grounded in the left temporal cortex. The gods obeyed and the humans heard. And to hear was to obey. This function substituted for voluntary will in our preconscious ancestors.That this might be true is evidenced by the fact that the temporal lobes have their own private communication channel: the smaller anterior commissures. Moreover, articles like these:

• Auditory hallucinations and the bicameral mind
• Neuroimaging, auditory hallucinations, and the bicameral mind
• Auditory Hallucinations and the Temporal Cortical Response to Speech in Schizophrenia: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
• Activation of bilateral auditory cortex during verbal hallucinations in a child with schizophrenia

show that the neural substrate for schizophrenic hallucination is the the right temporal cortex, as per Jaynes’ theory.

Accordingly, we might be able to tell the following “Just So” story. First, emphasize that the first complex societies were authoritarian through and through, or at structured by a rigid social hierarchy. Moreover, we could assume that the development of narrative skills would have been to (1) allow the dominant fathers and chieftons to more easily give complex commands in terms of dense linguistic codes (2) allow people to better remember and recount what their fathers, and their father’s father, had instructed them to do in times of need. This generational chain of command was more important and sacred that anything else. The fathers and chieftons would remember the instructions of their father and chiefton on how and when to plant the crops, how to be brave and fight when the time comes, how to live in the Dorian mode and die a honorable death (so that your fame will live on), etc. At this early point in our social evolution, we can assume that language was represented bilaterally in the brain given its importance for keeping the cultural traditions alive and the social control mechanisms operating smoothly.

Granting all this, we can then hypothesize that a scaffolding effect arose as a result of the linguistic control mechanisms. The scaffold was this: everyday, day after day, our ancestors’ brains would have been directly sculpted by the following habit schema: leader commands, I obey. After so many years, this voice would have sculpted the motor pathways in the brain such that hearing it would always result in obedience, much like modern day hypnosis. Such was life; authoritative to the core. Next, we can suppose that these ingrained obedience patterns might have started “looping” in the brain, like a melody or thought that gets stuck in your head all day. As Jaynes says

Let us consider a man commanded by himself or his chief to set up a fish weir upstream from a campsite. If he is not conscious, and cannot therefore narrative the situation and so hold his analog “I” in a spatialized time with its consequences fully imagined, how does he do it? It is only language, I think, that can keep him at this time-consuming all-afternoon work. A Middle Pleistocene man would forget what he was doing. But lingual man would have language to remind him, either repeated by himself, which would require a type of volition which I do not think he was capable of, or, as seems more likely,by a repeated ‘internal’ verbal hallucination telling him what to do. (p. 134)

It was the unique behavioral opportunies of enduring-attention that provided the selection pressures for the right hemisphere language centers to be readapted for hallucinatory self-regulation. This would explain why schizophrenia has such a strong genetic component and why it remains with us today despite being so dysfunctional in a modern society (answer: because it was once kept people alive to listen to their voices). New evidence is even indicating that auditory hallucinations are more common in “normals” than previously supposed, especially in children (e.g. imaginary companions).

Now, in our imagined society, linguistically-coded verbal commands from fathers to sons dominated the social control mechanisms of behavior regulation. A son grows up everyday listening to his father command him like a puppet. The father himself grew up obeying his father, in addition to the tribal chief (and so on for centuries). The chiefton dies suddenly. We don’t have a concept of death. His body is lying there motionless but he isn’t giving orders anymore. How can we get the chiefton to command us once more? We take his body and clean it, dress it, and prop it up as if he were doing his normal day to day business. We give him food and drink and all his favorite material possessions, trying to appease his spirit so that he will command us again. Wait! A voice belows. The body speaks again! He commands once more! But now it is different. Now he is directly talking to us, more powerful and more authoritative than ever. We cannot refuse his voice; we cannot stop it from compelling us. The voice is heard even when the chieftons body is not around. The gods and demigods are born. True ancestor worship begins. Sophisticated burial rituals to induce commands from dead bodies show up in the archeological record. Such work has routinely discovered disembodied heads and scenes of daily life in burial tombs. Why would they mess with the dead bodies of their leaders? To induce auditory hallucinations. Such began religion and the priestclass. Such began schizophrenia and the bilteralization of language on the left, body-controlling side, and the all-knowing language of the gods on the right side, stepping in to command us during times of stress and crutch decision making. The trigger for hallucination is stress but for most moderns, the threshhold is high. For some, however, it is low, far too low (hence schizophrenia).

To be continued…

UPDATE May 25, 2009
I have been thinking of a new way to conceptualize the difference(s) between human consciousness and that of non-human animals. I claim that one difference (amongst many) between humans and non-human animals is that is it possible for us to be classically schizophrenic, that is to say, capable of experiencing auditory hallucinations of a disembodied(or embodied in the idol of  TVs, air vents, walls, etc) voice that has forceful behavioral influence and is in terms of language, concepts, and personalities; capable, as shown in normal unconscious sleep, of enormous problem solving/rationalization power through whatever modality/context confronted in the environment. Animals, of course, are incapable of experiencing this form of linguistic-auditory hallucination because obviously they don’t have a language complicated enough for the development of personality, complex metaphor, and deeply analogous reasoning. Without a conceptual framework for complex personality narratives, common schizophrenic command hallucinations would not be possible.

Furthermore, I want to claim that the phenomenon of experiencing auditory hallucinations from an authoritative disembodied voice/spirit in response to novel stimulus/stress makes perfect sense in terms of Julian Jaynes bicameral theory of human evolution. He puts forwards lots of neurological/archeological evidence that until the environmental context of advanced civilization emerged, the psychic life of man was divided roughly into a bicameral order between Man and God(s), with the “God(s)” issuing direct behavioral control to the obeying “Man” in the advent of novel, stressful stimuli through auditory hallucination.  Jaynes speculated that the corresponding neural substrate for this bicameral mentality was (roughly speaking) the left/right temporal cortexes respectively. Modern neurimaging studies have corroborated this speculation and we already know from the classic Penfield stimulation studies that if you excite the right temporal cortical area, the majority of right-handed people will experience auditory hallucinations in terms of disembodied/authoritative voices speaking to them in terms of direct behavioral-social control (think of schizophrenics “obeying” the voices they hear automatically). This is also confirmed in modern transcranial magnetic stimulation studies. Furthermore, on the neurological level, we already know that the right hemisphere is better at performing vestigal “God” functions such as synthesizing complex information from novel stimuli and unconsciously “understanding” complex environmental information in terms that are relevant to the behavioral pragmatics of the “person” on the left side of the brain. Obviously this is a bit of a simplification, but behavioral and lesion-studies show overwhelmingly the functional lateralization of the neocortex and I have really seen no good overarching theory to explain why this is so except for Jaynes’ theory.

Accordingly, before modern civilization and its exponentially more complicated social hierarchies become an “input” into the incredibly plastic brain as known by modern neuropsychology, there was a bicameral split in mentality/brain function that was in terms of the synthetic “God” part of the brain providing behavioral input to the dominant “human,” left hemisphere of language/self initially in terms of the hallucinated voices of chieftans within small social groups and only later, dead chieftans and then dead god-chiefs, and finally, gods and god-kings/stewards. This evolution brought with it enormous complexity in social structure, creating the middle men of priesthood and spiritual ritual. This theory explains why it is was an almost universal human ritual to “feed” the dead(with god-kings spoiled with grand presentations of food and wealth) and provide them with everyday items necessary for living, because the progeny still “experienced” those chieftans in terms of prolonged, temporally delayed, auditory hallucinations (again, think of schizophrenics), providing social-hierarchical control which evolved into the elaborate god-kings rituals of ancient civilization and ultimately into the “spiritual” culture we have today, with a fanatical obsession with the afterlife , witnessed in nearly every culture around the world. This explains why our history is filled with stories of schizophrenic prophets who still “heard” these vestigal right-brain auditory hallucinations in terms of the cultural heritage of each individual culture, i.e God or whatever.

I highly recommend The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The antithesis of a crackpot, Jaynes was a lecturer at Princeton for decades, and was invited to lecture all across the world for elite academic crowds.  So while his theory is radical and the implications are paradigm-shifting for almost every academic field, only a few cautious supportors (Daniel Dennett for one, albeit with large reservations) ever caught on to his theory. I think this is largely because of the broadly multidisciplinary scope of Jaynes theory. The over-specialized academic world was simply bogged down by the sweeping nature of the bicameral theory, which requires people to rethink everything they have ever known about humans and human culture.   The broadly interdisciplinary theory links together many diverse, seemingly unrelated phenomena: the possible independence of right and left cortical hemispheres as shown in split-brain patients, schizophrenia and the overwhelming “reality” of their hallucinated voices and why they so often obey them, why so many people are convinced that they can speak/have spoken with dead relatives, God, spirits, etc., archeology and the importance of god-kings and idols for everyday social control in ancient civilizations (most houses were built surrounding a non-functional temple/”house” of their god-king where they offered food/supplies to them, similar to religious offerings today), why something so important as language could have evolved to be so lateralized when every other important function is bilateral for redundancy purposes and many, many other related phenomena. Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness is truly the “Origin of Species” for the 20th century.

———————–

[Original Post]

What does it mean to be a human? What is being? What is the difference between the being of humans and the being of non-humans?

These are all important and difficult to answer questions. Martin Heidegger was one philosopher who took it upon himself to attempt to answer some of these questions. His aim was to work out the general meaning of being and to do so concretely. Did he succeed? Some would say yes, others no. In this post, I’d like to sketch out a part of his answer, focusing on the the last question: the difference between the being of humans and the being of non-human animals i.e. the ontological difference.

The distinction between being and beings is there, latent in [humans] and [their] existence, even if not in explicit awareness. The distinction is there; that is to say, it has the mode of being of [humans]: it belongs to existence. Existence means, as it were, “to be in the performance of this distinction.” Only a soul that can make this distinction has the aptitude, going beyond the animal’s soul, to become the soul of a human being…we call the distinction between being and beings, when it is carried out explicitly, the ontological difference.

I’d like to concentrate on the part I made bold. This is crucial to his definition of what it means to be a human being[Dasein]. Essentially, humans comport themselves toward their own being. Another way of putting this awkward phrase is that humans take a stand on their own being. This is what “being in the performance of [the ontological difference]” means. Through the particular ways in which humans act within the world, we make this ontological difference a part of our existential mode of being. This means we always perceive/conceive and act in the world in terms of the difference between being and beings, between the the ontological being of ourselves and the entities which make up the physical world. There is something-it-is-like to be us, and that something has to do with how we already pre-ontologically make a distinction between being and beings.

Whether or not you think of all this is useless metaphysical mumbo-jumbo or an historical attempt to answer one of the most important questions in philosophy is up to you, but hopefully I made it clear that Heidegger was at least an original thinker.

edit: I have updated the original post to fix the inconsistencies pointed out by Roman Altshuler.

UPDATE: What does it mean to be human: take two