Chemicals in the brain

My recent discussions of nature and ethics with a couple of friends (see also the three posts before this one) brought up one other interesting topic. One of them introduced it like this.

He began by saying, "You are probably aware that there are psychologists who claim to have proved that free will is an illusion because all our choices are ultimately determined by a preponderance of electrochemical activity, or whatever.  Others have claimed to know the origin of religious belief in brain activity, in one version due to certain interrelationship between the lobes of the brain.  They say that you can produce a religious experience by the right stimulation of the brain with electrodes or drugs; therefore, the inference that God is the cause of these experiences is invalidated." And he asked, if these results were confirmed in a reliable way, wouldn't that have huge consequences for us?

As a piece of rhetoric, of course they might. But the deduction that starts from the experimental results and ends by explaining away God is logically invalid.

Suppose a few of us were sitting in a room talking over a cup of coffee or a mug of beer. And suppose some psychologist were busy studying my brain, all the while. What's he going to see? Well, the optic nerve will transmit electrical impulses into my brain, which will respond with electrical charges here and a production of certain brain chemicals there. The auditory nerves will bring in more electrical impulses, as will the nerves that run from my fingers as they feel the mug or my mouth as it tastes the drink. All in all there will be a veritable symphony of electrical impulses and neurological chemicals. And if we hypothesize that for some reason all this man can see is my brain, he might therefore conclude, "You see? Those so-called friends don't really exist. This whole experience that Hosea thinks he's having is caused by the electrical impulses and the brain chemistry." What's more, the second half of his statement is actually true! It really is true that the reason I think the others exist is (in this hypothetical case where we are all sitting around a table together) that the electrical impulses in my brain give me the sensation of seeing and hearing them. But to jump from that correct observation to the conclusion that none of them really exists is absurd.

Why can't it be the same with God, or the gods? Just because the brain is reacting this way and that is no proof that what it thinks it sees is unreal ... because the only way we can see anything is for our brains to react this way and that. It's an erroneous inference.

The only difference between the example I just gave and the case of someone experiencing theophany is that in real life the psychologist can probably see my friends around the table but he might not be able to detect the divinity because his equipment isn't designed for it. But that's hardly my problem.

My friend then went on to ask, "Could we go on talking about will, habit, virtue, etc. as Aristotle did if we believed that our minds, souls, emotions, beliefs, decisions, etc. were constituted as these modern scientists say they are?  Could we say, 'It doesn’t matter what modern science discovers about the human mind, will, decision-making, emotions, etc. – Aristotelian moral theory will remain a permanently true analysis of human nature'?"

Yes, I think we could. To argue this brings we have to give a little consideration to scale.

The thing is, at a microscopic scale it might turn out that our thoughts and feelings are made out of chemicals and electrical impulses, but that is different from saying that they are meaningless. It's easiest to see this with examples, so let me talk briefly about romantic love. We all know what it feels like to be in love, right? What Joni Mitchell called "the dizzy, dancing way you feel"? It's a physical sensation that interacts in complex ways with our thoughts and feelings and hopes and longings. And I am certain that, at a physiological level, this feeling can be explained in chemical terms: certain hormones are activated and they cause certain reactions in our brains' limbic systems, etc., etc., etc. So what? That doesn't mean love is unreal. It doesn't mean people will stop reading novels about lovers, or stop seeing tear-jerker movies. And it doesn't mean that, when your heart is broken, you go ask a doctor or a pharmacist to make it all better. Because while yes, at a microscopic scale the sensation is made of chemicals and electricity, we don't live at that scale! The only avenue we have for interacting with the phenomenon of romantic love is at a human scale. And at a human scale, romantic love can't be approached by studying chemicals and electricity in the brain; it's approached through novels and movies and poetry and long conversations. And honestly, when it is a question of falling in love or of feeling your heart break, all the electricity and chemicals in the world can just go hang because they won't do you a bit of good.

I had a couple other examples, but they sound flat and pedestrian after this one so I'm going to let them go for now.

A little farther on he put the question another way by asking, "What kind of moral theory would flow from a view of human beings as basically automata?" And really I don't think such an account changes anything, because even if someone thinks he's proven it, nobody really believes it ... I mean, not "seriously" as the Straussians are fond of saying. Nobody lives their life in accordance with this teaching, because it is impossible.

My first argument is just to quote the impish remark I ran across recently, "Even people who think that everything in life is predetermined look both ways before they cross the street."

My second argument is almost as flippant: on the scale of philosophical seriousness, arguing that human beings are automata is no different from arguing that none of this is really happening because I'm just dreaming it. (Or because you are, I guess.) The answer to such a claim has to be, "OK, now what?" If this is a dream it's a pretty lifelike dream. So after I check whether I can fly (because sometimes in my dreams I can fly) -- nope, just tried, that didn't work -- all I can do is to act as if it's all real. Likewise even if you believe you are an automaton, that doesn't mean you can stop paying your bills or ignore traffic signs. You have to go right on living the way you lived before ... which means acting as if you are a moral agent with free will. Like with my earlier remarks about why the Human Good is compulsory, you really don't have a choice about it. And when you need guidance about how to live as a moral agent with free will, ... well it's like what I said about love: the only useful advice is what's written at a human scale, not a microscopic one. And what advice do we find at a human scale? That's where Aristotle and Plato and Cicero and all the others come into their own.

We are stuck at this level. Pretending that the norms of this level -- this scale -- don't apply to us because it's all just meaningless chemicals is a great way to spend undergraduate bull sessions. But if you try to live that way, you get Leopold and Loeb. Or, to say it differently, nobody can live that way. Not really, and not in the long term. No matter what the guys in the laboratory tell us they have proven.

  

Moral reasoning from Nature

The point of arguing, a couple of weeks ago, that there is a natural teleology for Man is that it makes possible a further argument that there is some kind of natural Good, so that ethics and morality are not just matters of opinion or blind commitment. But of course that, too, relies on argument and not mere assertion. How should the argument go?

I'm going to proceed in three parts. First, I talk a bit about what an answer to this question ought to look like, because it's easier to find an answer if we know what we are looking for. Second, I give two concrete examples of specific judgments about morality or how to live that I show can be derived from Nature and that also match the general description I gave in the first part. There's a third potential example which I won't discuss right now, and I explain why not. Finally, I come back to some of the very clear things my friends have said that they are looking for from this kind of account, to review whether and how far I have provided what they asked me for.

With your forbearance, in everything that I write below I shall refer to Nature as if She were a conscious and intentional agent. Please remember that, by the argument I gave before, I consider this kind of picturesque or metaphorical language to be bijectively, isomorphically mappable to a different kind of language that talks about autopoiesis and stable, self-replicating configurations of biological mechanisms and animal behavior. But the language that describes Nature as if She were a person is shorter, pithier, and prettier. Since the two kinds of language are isomorphic to each other, I may as well use the prettier one.

I.  So -- what should it look like when we reason from Nature to ethics or morality? In the first place, I want to ask for a slight softening of a distinction which you sometimes hear. The distinction is between approaching Nature descriptively and approaching Her prescriptively. The point is that some people will point to anything they like that happens somewhere in the animal or plant kingdom and say, "See? It happens in nature! That means it must be OK." Used as an excuse for bad behavior, an argument like that is plainly silly. On the other hand I do think one should have a pretty wide understanding of a phenomenon before trying to theorize about it. I keep using the example that cats are clearly intended by Nature to hunt mice; but if our experience of cats were so limited that nobody had ever seen a cat hunt a mouse, we wouldn't know that. So I suggest that any adequate theory has to be consistent with the data, or at any rate the vast majority of the non-pathological data. (Disease is also according to Nature, but I assume it is clear that we should not generalize unreflectively from diseased cases to arrive at general principles. I say "unreflectively" because reflection might show us that in this or that specific case, this or that particular disease does not distort the organism's behavior with respect to the question on our minds at the time.)

TL;DR: If we find a behavior that is widespread or universal for a certain critter, we should be cautious before saying that it is wrong for that critter. I hope that qualification is easy to accept.

There's a second point which may be less obvious, but I think it is absolutely critical. Where and how does Nature write Her laws? Nature doesn't speak English, and most of Her Creation doesn't know how to read, so She doesn't write books. She doesn't engrave tablets. But somehow Her creatures (humans, but also cats and all the others too) have to know their laws anyway, or She has legislated in vain. The only answer that makes any sense to me is this: Nature writes Her laws on our hearts, using the ink of our emotions.

It will be objected that people's emotions disagree -- this is why we created philosophy in the first place. But I think in reality this happens less often than we believe; and when it does, I think it is often easy to find extenuating conditions (such as interest or the potential for personal gain) that explain the disagreement. I will not give a complete theoretical argument at this time: instead, I would like to shore up my claim in two other ways.

The first is to reflect on all non-human animals. By the argument I gave before, each of them has a teleology -- a Good. Therefore certain things are right or wrong for them. How do they know right from wrong? How does a cat know it is supposed to hunt mice? Here I think it is obvious: they do it because it is their nature, or because they have an instinct for it. If you could speak to cats and asked one, the answer would probably be, "I don't know, I just felt like I had to." And if this is true for all non-human animals -- every single one -- then I think it is highly plausible that some version of it is true for us too (although translated into human words and concepts). And this is what I mean when I say that these laws are written on our hearts with our emotions.

The second way I would like to shore up my claim (since, again, I am not giving a full argument at the moment) is to move into Part Two of my argument and look at some examples. I hope that when you see how the examples work, the idea will make more sense.

II.  Very well, what can we say about how Men are designed to live, based on looking at Nature, and how do these match the description I just gave?

First, consider Leopold and Loeb. You remember the case, right? They were University of Chicago students who read too much Nietzsche and decided to prove they were supermen by kidnapping and killing a 14-year-old boy. And everyone was horrified. When you tell people about the story today, everyone is still horrified. I venture to suggest that in their hearts, Leopold and Loeb themselves were horrified at their own crime while they were doing it. That didn't stop them, and I will get to that point in a minute. But the universal horror people feel at this crime is part of why it's not a lot more common.

What's the law from Nature? Not to kill, obviously; but more than that, it is also to care for children. Human children are so helpless for so long that they have to be cared for by adults -- and not just their own parents (who might be elsewhere) but any adults. Bobby Franks (the victim) was a teenager, but he was young enough that the law of Nature requiring care for (and prohibiting harm to) children still applied.

As for the law not to kill -- consider that it is not just human children who are helpless. Alone in the wild, any one of us would be doomed. We can survive only by cooperating, and that means (among other things) not killing each other. Even in wartime, even in active combat, it is hard for soldiers to bring themselves to kill the enemy; this is why the enemy is regularly described as less than human in any number of ways ... to make him easier to kill.

Now, of course Leopold and Loeb actually did it. If I am right that all humans are born with an instinct to protect children and an aversion to killing each other, how is that possible? Well, remember all that time they spent reading Nietzsche. The point is not to blame Nietzsche, but to observe that human beings -- because we have the gift of reason -- are able to override our instincts and talk ourselves into all manner of crimes. People do it every day. That is one of the dangers of reason.

How does this fit the description I gave up in Part One? It fits because the universal reaction to the story of Leopold and Loeb is not to point out where they got their reasoning wrong -- it is to shudder with disgust. Except for genuinely pathological cases (who comprise only the tiniest fraction of the population) it is genuinely not possible to hear this story for the first time and not be appalled. That is the voice of Nature speaking directly to our hearts.

I have already alluded to my second example of a law by Nature, which is not nearly as exciting as the first one. It is that Man is a social animal, an animal designed by Nature to live with other men. (If you prefer, with Aristotle, to say "political" I won't argue but the point I make doesn't require it.) How can I prove that Man is a social animal? In three ways. First, as I have said already, men are nearly helpless in the wild by themselves. Second, we have language: all humans have (the natural capacity for) language, language is one of the ways we distinguish ourselves from all other life, and the capacity for language makes no sense unless we spend most of our lives around others. Third, adult women are always in estrus, or, more precisely, always have the capacity to be sexually receptive and do not display obvious external signs at ovulation. Again, this makes no sense unless we are intended to spend all our time in community with each other. Polar bears, by contrast, come together once a year to mate and otherwise live alone. (They don't have language, either.)

How is this written on our hearts? Every society in the world understands that solitary confinement is the most severe punishment short of torture or death. When an individual chooses solitude as, e.g., a spiritual practice, it is a big deal and very rare. (Note that most monastics are not actually hermits but simply leave one community to join another.) Again, these are things we all just know.

There's one topic that I will not discuss in this essay, namely sexual morality. The reason is that it is too difficult and too complex for me to tackle right now. When you first introduce a theory, stick to the easy examples or applications so that people can see what you are talking about. Save the really complex examples for later. And human sexual behavior -- especially if you count in all the other behaviors that go with it (flirtation, seduction, and the rest) -- is absolutely the most complex behavior we engage in. An adequate account of human sexual nature -- which, as noted way up in Part One, is a precondition for any adequate moral theory -- requires more time than I want to take right now. But please notice two subsidiary points in particular.

First, I do believe it can be done. That is, I am persuaded that sexual morality can be addressed according to the same general schema that I am proposing here for other things. I'm not completely sure that I am qualified to write such an account, however. Even if I were, it would double or triple or quintuple the length of this letter and it would add in so many trees that nobody could see the forest. If we want to discuss this particular subtopic in more detail, let's do it another time. (For a preliminary indication, though, check out this essay here, and maybe this one too.)

Second, one of my friends reminded me (in the conversations that preceded this essay) of Leo Strauss's remark in a letter to his friend Karl Löwith that no discussion of homosexuality should forget the connection between the sexual organs and the process of generation. (I may have the quote slightly wrong.) I'm pretty sure my friend seconded this opinion and hoped that my analysis of natural morality would back it up. Sorry, no such luck. When I say that sexual behavior is the most complex thing we do, one corollary is that -- with all due honor to Strauss's renowned wisdom -- nobody can give an adequate account of our sexual nature (and therefore morality) in half a sentence in an informal letter. I assume that Strauss himself would agree with this. As he pointed out in another context, nobody can study everything; and Strauss never pretended to be a philosopher of sex.

III.  So much for my examples, at least for now. Have I provided what was asked for?

Yes and no. In some ways, mostly no.

No, I do not provide any new, hitherto unknown intellectual tools that allow us to make the grammatical transition from "is" to "ought" in a logical argument. And if someone has talked himself into some course of action that is evil, I can't talk him out of it with pure logic.

But we already knew that, right? Think of any of the great monsters of history: Hitler, Stalin, Caligula ... take your pick. Do any of us think that there could ever possibly be a logical argument that would have dissuaded any of them? I mean, ... we all know from experience how weak a tool logical persuasion can be when we are facing much smaller stakes, like trying to convince a small child it's time to put away the toys, come inside, and take a bath. And we know that the great monsters of history have been implacably convinced of their own rightness. So in reality, I can make an argument that would persuade someone else that Hitler or Stalin or Caligula did terrible things. (And anyone else could already have done this too.) But I don't think I could have persuaded the men themselves, even if I could travel back in time and speak their languages (because nobody else could have, either).

But when my friend asks me, "Can we reason: 'Human beings have X as part of their nature, and therefore, in this situation, you ought to do Y, you are obliged to do Y, you are morally required to do Y, you should be ashamed of yourself and feel guilty if you don’t do Y'?" there I think my answer is a qualified Yes. "Qualified" because what is involved is not a process of ratiocination. But "Yes" because when it is truly a question of violating some law given by Nature, everyone agrees. The agreement isn't a logical deduction. It is an instinctive revulsion, disgust, or horror at the violation, one that everyone recognizes and understands. We may not be able to argue logically that the evildoer should be ashamed of himself and feel guilty. My point, though, is that he will anyway. The only way he won't is if he has blocked himself off from his true feelings with too many layers of words and reasoning and bullshit. But the true feelings will still be there anyway, even if he refuses to admit them.

My friend inquires, furthermore, what about the person who asks:

“Why should I be forced by law or social pressure to conform to the current views of the constraints of human nature?  Why can’t I experiment outside of law and custom with modes of conduct contrary to such “human nature”?  Even if such experiments might be self-destructive, why is it “wrong” for me to attempt them?  I concede it might be impractical, i.e., that I might not have much success in fighting against certain innate human realities, but why “morally wrong”?”

My answer is that he doesn't really have any choice. He asks, "Why should I be forced?" but really this means, "Why should I be forced to be a man and not an alligator?" Bad news, dude, you're not an alligator! "Why" is a meaningless question in this context. As long as you are a human being, your inner nature will reject with disgust any attempt to violate the Good for Man. You can talk yourself out of it -- Leopold and Loeb sure did! -- and if you do that then you probably won't listen to any of my arguments to the contrary. But some night, at 3:00 in the morning, you will find yourself huddled in a ball under your blankets keening softly to yourself, "Dear God what have I done?"

For what it is worth, I believe I am saying exactly the same thing here that Plato says in the Republic. (If I remember right, most of this part is in Books 8 and 9.) He argues, you recall, that the reason to perform just actions is that it is the only way to keep all the elements of your psyche in balance ... which means, it is the only way to live the way you are designed to live, as a human being ... which means that it is of your nature to live morally, or justly, and that any disruption of moral or just behavior makes you unhappy. Either it makes you feel remorse, or it means that you live a life perpetually out of balance and out of touch with your true self (like the tyrant) in which case you can't detect the remorse because everything else inside you is all wrong as well.

Maybe this is enough for now.

__________

Update (added 2022-08-21): A character in John Michael Greer's novel The Shoggoth Concerto summarizes the same point in different words. She is describing another character (who has expressed the desire to exploit others as slaves because "nothing matters"). And she says, "♪ I understand.♪ ♪He knows that the world has no eyes, but he does not know that he has eyes.♪" (p. 108) Yes, exactly. 

     

Who dares to be better than Aristotle?

A week ago I posted about something I called "Strauss's Paradox" on the strength of an extensive quote from Leo Strauss. I have more to say on the subject of applying natural reason to questions of ethics, but first I want to step aside to look at a question Strauss asks in that long quote.

His topic is whether there is a teleology for Man, because any natural ethics would have to be based on some kind of natural teleology. And what he says, in his normally indirect way, is this:

"From the point of view of Aristotle -- and who could dare to claim to be a better judge in this matter than Aristotle? -- the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion is solved."

Now, Strauss never states whether he agrees with this opinion, or not. He asks rhetorically who dares to claim to be a better judge than Aristotle, but we can't see his face as he asks it -- so we don't know if he is smirking at a private joke, or in dead earnest. But what he does give us -- and this is vintage Strauss -- is a footnote to the exact references in Aristotle on which he bases his remarks. That footnote reads in full as follows:

Physics 196a25 ff., 199a3-5

OK, what does Aristotle say in those places? I don't own a copy of the Physics and it took me a little while to find a copy online that included Bekker numbering. But I finally found a PDF of the Revised Oxford Translation. Here, therefore, are the two paragraphs which include the passages that Strauss indicates.

196a25-196b4 There are some who actually ascribe this heavenly sphere and all the worlds to spontaneity. They say that the vortex arose spontaneously, i.e. the motion that separated and arranged the universe in its present order. This statement might well cause surprise. For they are asserting that chance is not responsible for the existence or generation of animals and plants, nature or mind or something of the kind being the cause of them (for it is not any chance thing that comes from a given seed but an olive from one kind and a man from another); and yet at the same time they assert that the heavenly sphere and the divinest of visible things arose spontaneously, having no such cause as is assigned to animals and plants. Yet if this is so, it is a fact which deserves to be dwelt upon, and something might well have been said about it. For besides the other absurdities of the statement, it is the more absurd that people should make it when they see nothing coming to be spontaneously in the heavens, but much happening by chance among the things which as they say are not due to chance; whereas we should have expected exactly the opposite.

198b34-199a8 Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or for the most part come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do; nor heat in summer but only if we have it in winter. If then, it is agreed that things are either the result of coincidence or for the sake of something, and these cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of something; and that such things are all due to nature even the champions of the theory which is before us would agree. Therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.

To summarize. The first selection says that we are more likely to find design in the heavens than we do on earth, because there is never anything new in the heavens. The second selection says that we can see regular patterns in nature, so therefore natural events cannot have come about by accident.

Leaving Strauss aside for a minute, is there any way that we could accept these arguments today?

• The first one fails because we now know that things do change in the heavens: stars are born and die, and rocks fall from interplanetary space to land on the Earth.
• The second one confuses the assertion (a) that the world originally arose in an unplanned way long ago in the depths of time (but follows definite laws so that after a while regular patterns have showed up) with the assertion (b) that all events in nature happen stochastically all the time. Since (b) is plainly false, Aristotle infers (mistakenly, I think) that (a) must also be false. 

In other words, neither argument would fly today. It is true that the second paragraph could be reworked or adapted into something stronger, by making the argument that the regularities of natural physical law are so remarkable that the odds are against them having happened by accident. But the first paragraph is -- in light of what we know today -- clearly a joke.

The only remaining question is the biographical one whether Strauss understood that those arguments could not stand on their own today. If yes, then his footnote is intended as a subtle wink and nod to his reader, allowing him to pay public deference to the pre-modern view of teleology while not really believing it. If no, then it is a remarkable coincidence that he just happened to find two such weak arguments to support a position he really believed.

Of course the man is dead now, so I suppose we shall never know for sure. But my guess is for Yes. As far as the biographical question about Strauss's personal opinions is concerned, I find the argument from design (i.e., that he chose those passages on purpose) stronger than the argument from random accident.