Darwin's Dangerous Idea (72 page)

advantageous. The very essence of a competitive advantage, whether it be Gregorian creatures take a further big step by learning how to think better in chess or economics, is the discovery and execution of stage-setting about what they should think about next—and so forth, a tower of further moves. [Holland 1992, p. 25.]

internal reflections with no fixed or discernible limit.

What happens to a human or hominid brain when it becomes equipped This, then, is the crane to end all cranes: an explorer that
does
have with words? In particular, what is the shape of this environment when words foresight, that can see beyond the immediate neighborhood of options. But first enter it? It is definitely
not
an even playing field or a
tabula rasa.
Our how good can the "stage-setting" be without the intervention of language to newfound words must anchor themselves on the hills and valleys of a help control the manipulation of the model? How intricate and long-range can landscape of considerable complexity. Thanks to earlier evolutionary pres-the look-ahead be, for instance? This is the relevance of my question about sures, our innate quality spaces are species-specific, narcissistic, and even the chimpanzee's capacities to visualize a novel scene. Darwin (1871, p. 57 ) idiosyncratic from individual to individual. A number of investigators are was convinced that language was the prerequisite for "long trains of thought,"

currently exploring portions of this terrain. The psychologist Frank Keil and this claim has been differently supported by several recent theorists, (1992) and his colleagues at Cornell have evidence that certain highly especially Julian Jaynes (1976) and Howard Margolis (1987). Long trains of abstract concepts—such as the concepts of
being alive
or
ownership,
for thought have to be controlled, or they will wander off into delicious if futile instance—have a genetically imposed head start in the young child's kit of woolgathering. These authors suggest, plausibly, that the self-exhortations mind-tools; when the specific words for owning, giving and taking, keeping and reminders made possible by language are actually 380 LOSING OUR MINDS TO DARWIN

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essential to maintaining the sorts of long-term projects only we human beings Let me sum up the results of this rather swift survey. Our human brains, engage in (unless, like the beaver, we have a built-in specialist for completing and only human brains, have been armed by habits and methods, mind-tools a particular long-term project). (For further explorations of these topics, see and information, drawn from millions of other brains which are not ancestral Clark and Karmiloff-Smith 1994, Dennett 1994c.)

to our own brains. This, amplified by the
deliberate, foresightful
use of This brings me to the final step up the Tower of Generate-and-Test. There generate-and-test in science, puts our minds on a different plane from the is one more embodiment of that wonderful idea, and it is the one that gives minds of our nearest relatives among the animals. This species-specific pro-our minds their greatest power: once we have language—a bountiful kit of cess of enhancement has become so swift and powerful that a single gen-mind-tools—we can
use
these tools in the structure of deliberate, foresightful eration of its design improvements can now dwarf the R-and-D efforts of generate-and-test known as
science.
All the other varieties of generate-and-millions of years of evolution by natural selection. Comparing our brains test are willy-nilly.

anatomically with chimpanzee brains (or dolphin brains or any other non-The soliloquy that accompanies the errors committed by the lowliest human brains) would be almost beside the point, because our brains are in Skinnerian creature might be "Well, I mustn't do
that
again!" and the hardest effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others.

lesson for any agent to learn, apparently, is how to learn from its own They are joined by an innovation that has invaded our brains and no others: mistakes. In order to learn from them, one has to be able to contemplate them, language. I am not making the foolish claim that all our brains are knit and this is no small matter. Life rushes on, and unless one has developed together by language into one gigantic mind, thinking its transnational positive strategies for recording one's tracks, the task known in AI as
credit
thoughts, but, rather, that each individual human brain, thanks to its com-assignment (also known, of course, as "blame assignment" ) is insoluble. The municative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a advent of high-speed still photography was a revolutionary technological way that gives it unprecedented powers.

advance for science because it permitted human beings, for the first time, to Naked animal brains are no match at all for the heavily armed and outfitted examine complicated temporal phenomena not in real time but
in their own
brains we carry in our heads. This fact reverses the burden of proof in what
good time
—in leisurely, methodical backtracking analysis of the traces they would otherwise be a compelling argument: the claim, first considered by the had created of those complicated events. Here a technological advance linguist Noam Chomsky ( 1975 ) and more recently defended by the carried in its wake a huge enhancement in cognitive power. The advent of philosophers Jerry Fodor ( 1983 ) and Colin McGinn ( 1991), that our minds, language was an exactly parallel boon for human beings, a technology that like those of all other species, must suffer "cognitive closure" with regard to created a whole new class of objects-to-contemplate, verbally embodied some topics of inquiry. Spiders can't contemplate the concept of fishing; surrogates that could be reviewed in any order at any pace. And this opened birds (some of whom are excellent at fishing) aren't up to thinking about up a new dimension of self-improvement—all one had to do was learn to democracy. What is inaccessible to the dog or the dolphin may be readily savor one's own mistakes.

grasped by the chimp, but the chimp in turn will be cognitively closed to Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making some domains we human beings have no difficulty thinking about. Chomsky mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the and company ask a rhetorical question: What makes us think we are differ-others to help with the corrections. It has been plausibly maintained, by ent? Aren't there bound to be strict limits on what
Homo sapiens
may Nicholas Humphrey, David Premack (1986), and others, that chimpanzees conceive?

are natural psychologists—what I would call second-order intentional sys-According to Chomsky, all matters of human puzzlement can be sorted tems, capable of adopting the intentional stance towards other things. This is into "problems," which can be solved, and "mysteries," which cannot. The not surprising if our own innate equipment includes a theory-of-mind problem of free will, Chomsky opines, is one such mystery.3 The problem of module, as Leslie, Baron-Cohen, and others have maintained, for perhaps this consciousness, according to Fodor, is another, and McGinn concurs. As the is part of the endowment chimpanzees and we inherit from a common author of books (1984, 1991a) that claim to explain each of these ancestor. But even if chimpanzees are, like us, innately equipped as natural psychologists, they nevertheless lack a crucial feature shared by all human natural psychologists, folk and professional varieties: they never get to com-3. In fairness to Chomsky, all he says is that free will
might
be a mystery. "I am not urging pare notes. They never dispute over attributions, and ask to know the grounds this
conclusion, but merely noting that it is not to be ruled out
a priori"
( Chomsky 1975, for each other's conclusions. No wonder their comprehension is so limited.

P-157). This mild suggestion has been eagerly inflated by others into a scientifically based Ours would be, too, if we had to generate it all on our own.

demonstration!

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impenetrable mysteries, I can be expected to disagree, but this is not the place should be unimpressed by the example, for not only can the monkey not to pursue such issues. Since neither Chomsky nor Fodor thinks he himself can understand the answers about electrons, it can't understand the questions explain free will or consciousness, the claim that it is humanly impossible is (Dennett 1991d). The monkey isn't
baffled,
not even a little bit. We definitely doctrinally convenient for them, perhaps, but also in considerable tension understand the questions about free will and consciousness well enough to with another claim of theirs. In other moods, they have both (correctly) hailed know what we're baffled by (if we are), so until Chomsky and Fodor and the capacity of the human brain to "parse," and hence presumably understand, McGinn can provide us with clear cases of animals ( or people ) who can be the official infinity of grammatical sentences of a natural language such as baffled by questions whose true answers could not unbaffle them, they have English. If we can understand all the sentences (in principle), couldn't we given us no evidence of the reality or even likelihood of "cognitive closure"

understand the ordered sets of sentences that best express the solutions to the in human beings.6

problems of free will and consciousness? After all, one of the volumes in the Their argument is presented as a biological, naturalistic argument, re-Library of Babel is— must be—the best statement in fewer than five hundred minding us of our kinship with the other beasts, and warning us not to fall pages of short grammatical English sentences of the solution to the problem into the ancient trap of thinking "how like an angel" we human "souls" are, of free will, and another is the optimal job in English on consciousness.4 I with our "infinite" minds. But it is in fact a pseudo-biological argument, one daresay neither of my books is either of those, but that's life. I can't believe that, by ignoring the actual biological details, misdirects us away from the that Chomsky or Fodor would declare either of those books (or the trillions of case that can be made for taking one species—our species—right off the scale runners-up) to be incomprehensible to a normal English reader.5 So perhaps of intelligence that ranks the pig above the lizard and the ant above the they think that the mysteries of free will and consciousness are so deep that oyster. We certainly cannot rule out the possibility in principle that our minds no book, of any length, in any language, could explain them to any intelligent will be cognitively closed to some domain or other. In fact, as we shall see in being. But
that
claim has absolutely no evidence in its favor to be derived more detail in chapter 15, we can be certain that there are realms of no doubt from any biological considerations. It must have, um, fallen from the sky.

fascinating and important knowledge that our species, in its actual finitude, Consider the "closure" argument in more detail. "What is closed to the will never enter, not because we will butt our heads against some stone wall mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us of utter incomprehension, but because the Heat Death of the universe will may be closed to the monkey" (McGinn 1991, p. 3 )• Monkeys, for instance, overtake us before we can get there. This is not, however, a limitation due to can't grasp the concept of an electron, McGinn reminds us, but I think we the frailty of our animal brains, a dictate of "naturalism." On the contrary, a proper application of Darwinian thinking suggests that
if we
survive our current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us.

4. Two other books in the Library are the most compelling "refutations" of these mas-Why shouldn't Chomsky and Fodor and McGinn love this conclusion? It terpieces, but of course the Library doesn't contain any refutations, properly so-called, of grants to human minds—and only to human minds—an indefinitely expand-any of the
true
books on its shelves. These hatchet jobs must be merely
apparent
ing dominion over the puzzles and problems of the universe, with no limits refutations—an example of a fact that must be true but is systematically useless, since we in sight. What could be more wonderful than that? The trouble is, I suspect, could never tell which books were which, without the help of, say, God. The existence of this sort of fact will become important in chapter 15.

that they deem the
means
to be unsatisfactory; if the mind's power is due to cranes, not skyhooks, they would just as soon settle for mystery. That 5. Chomsky has in fact revised his earlier views about the nature of language, making a distinction these days between "E-language" (the external—and you might say eternal—

attitude, at any rate, has often surfaced in these controversies, and Chomsky Platonic object, English, in which so many of the books in the Library of Babel are has been a primary source of authority for it.

written) and "I-language" (the internal, intensional, idiolect of an individual), and he denies that E-language is a proper object for scientific study, so he would probably object to the straightforward way I have run this objection (Steven Pinker [personal communication] ). But there are more devious ways of running the argument and appealing only to the I-language of individuals. Can Chomsky or anyone else give a good reason for 6. Fodor has bitten this bullet: "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material believing that any five-hundred-page book of short sentences meeting the I-language could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea standards of any normal, literate individual would be incomprehensible ("in principle") about how anything material could be conscious" (Fodor 1992). In other words, if you to that person?

so much as
think
you understand the question of consciousness, you're mistaken. Take his word for it—and change the subject, please.