Where mass shootings and other violent events spur some to closely follow media and social media, I see them as reason to reduce media intake, given the preponderance of half-baked or opportunistic responses from commentators and political figures alike. Even turning away from the news, though, perplexing questions about humanity persist.
At a holiday party, Splice Today contributor Todd Seavey introduced me to author Jonathan Leaf, whose new book The Primate Myth argues against constructing theories of human nature, typically ones emphasizing violence, from studies of chimps and other primates. I was reminded of terminology from long ago that I wish had caught on. The late neurobiologist Steven Rose, in his 1973 book The Conscious Brain, decried “chimpomorphs” and “machinomorphs,” as well as “irrationalists,” for various misconceptions about humanity.
The “chimpomorphs,” according to Rose, contended human behavior’s “best understood by studying that of chimpanzees, rats or other species” and is largely “innate, genetically determined and unmodifiable.” The “machinomorphs” claimed human actions “can now be” or “soon will be mimicked or improved upon by computers and other machines, which in the mid-term future will be given the vote and in the longer term will rule the world.” This was, bear in mind, over 50 years ago. The “irrationalists” believed “the uniqueness of brains (and humans) is irreducible and inexplicable in terms of traditional methods of science, thus introducing a more or less sophisticated version of ‘the god of the gaps,’” where something unexplained is attributed to the divine (or, via similar reasoning, to aliens).
All those terms could be used profitably today. The evolutionary psychologists whom Leaf criticizes are chimpomorphs, perhaps with Rose’s definition tweaked to emphasize the “chimp” part, as a focus on rats evokes the lab work of a different school, the behaviorists. Today’s AI evangelists are machinomorphs, admittedly with far better technology than the 1960s computer scientists who thought something like 2001’s HAL imminent, but still prone to sweeping extrapolations of technological prowess and human obsolescence.
The irrationalists Rose focused on were mind-body dualists, such as neurophysiologist John Eccles, who’d written the brain was “the sort of machine a ‘ghost’ could operate, if by ‘ghost’ we mean in the first place an agent whose action has escaped detection by even the most delicate physical instruments.” In the paperback edition of The Conscious Brain, Rose truncated that Eccles quote in a footnote, perhaps making Eccles sound more like a ghost-hunter than was warranted. Dualism has less scientific cachet than when Rose wrote, having mostly faded from neuroscience, but philosophers believing mind plays some fundamental role in the universe, and isn’t reducible to matter, remain influential.
Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin takes an intriguing approach to such questions in his new book One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind. His research has focused on biological mechanisms of memory, a field pioneered decades ago by Eric Kandel’s Nobel Prize–winning work on snail synapses. In this book, however, Kukushkin proposes that moving beyond materialist explanations doesn’t require “ghosts or miasmas” but rather a shift in perspective to “ideas” or “essences.” Kukushkin notes that one could say, “A muscle in a leg of a human clad in blue and white propelled a spherical object into a network of synthetic strands in a metal frame,” but the meaning is better stated as: “Messi scored a goal for Argentina in the World Cup finals.”
One Hand Clapping undertakes a sweeping recap of natural history, including the advent of multicellularity and sexual reproduction. That milestone brought the beginnings of individuality and increasing complexity, reaching an unprecedented degree with humans. It also meant organisms could no longer have all their behavior encoded in genes but would need brains. Ultimately, though, the human brain ended up with “two separate sources for our desires and motivations.” One is the cerebral cortex, “the thinking machine, the essence of which is to learn from the environment, understand its patterns, and act based on this understanding.” The other is a “reward system, the wanting machine,” that pushes us out of our comfort zone, ensuring we’re never entirely satisfied by anything for long.
“A happy life,” writes Kukushkin, “is a compromise between the free-spirited cortex and the dictatorial reward system.” While he notes the wisdom of Buddha in recognizing how desire causes suffering, he reassures: “Not everyone needs to rid themselves of all desire. All we need to do is balance the budget.” Furthermore, while genes always have a hold on us, our genetic legacy quickly gets diluted with generations of our descendants. But ideas can endure even amid such material shifts, he argues. “Your words can live for as long as there’s anyone there to hear them.”