Survival of the Whichest?

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TODAY is, embarrassingly, still based on a pre-19th-century view of man and his place in the cosmos. I'd like to explain here why this is and how we can change it, then put forward several simple observations that seem to have eluded philosophers and scientists alike -- and which I think will serve to guide the development of philosophy for many years.

The single impression that remains with me of my second visit to Disneyland, at age 11, was that I knew then that behind the fairytale façade was a maze of machinery and electronics. The magic was gone. I am convinced that mankind has been hiding from a similar disappointment regarding the magic we see in ourselves.

Thomas S. Kuhn's 1962 monograph, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, described how truly earth-shaking scientific discoveries, such as Galileo's, Copernicus', Newton's and Darwin's, required a complete change of perspective in order to be understood and accepted. This paradigm shift, or change in world view, was in each of these cases truly revolutionary.

I would argue that this is because these were self- shaking theories: With each one, man lost a measure of his own marvelousness -- and it hurt. To go from the complacent belief that we were the center of the universe and the purpose of all creation, to the ignominy of discovering our kinship to apes! (The latest word is that chimpanzees' closest cousins are not gorillas, but us!)

First science, then more gradually the public, came to accept these theories in turn. For Darwinism, however, the revolution is incomplete. It has yet to reach many of us -- most notably fundamentalist Christians ... and philosophers.

I include philosophers here because their conversion is only partial. Search as I might, I could find none who paid more than lip service to the concept of evolution; none who actively pursued its philosophical implications. (Bertrand Russell deserves honorable mention for having come the closest, both in terms of his affinity for science and his departure from anthropocentrism.)

The very word "philosopher" exudes dignity. It is no coincidence that the most challenging philosophy I've encountered in this decade was in Beyond Freedom and Dignity -- by a scientist, B.F. Skinner. Skinner was able to entertain the idea that man's behavior was mechanistic. And, though he oversimplified by neglecting the most important part of the human mechanism, the mind, he was nevertheless able to break free of the tradition of anthropocentrism. If previous scientific revolutions involved a few pinpricks to human vanity, the current one that's been plodding along for some 40 years in the field of neuropsychology will cause a rather explosive deflation.

In 1949 Donald O. Hebb proposed that what we humans experience as self, soul and mind are in actuality manifestations of neurological function -- not the more mystical, independent entities we naturally imagine. Since then, the evidence in support of his proposition has grown to be overwhelming.

First, an explanation of why the old view has prevailed throughout human history: Think "blue." The concept which comes to mind, blueness, has no physical reality. We associate it with objects which radiate light in a specific range of frequencies. The light is a physical phenomenon; our perception of blueness is entirely psychological. Similarly, what a rose "smells like" is our neurological perception of the specific molecular structures that have traveled from flower to nose. These are simple, one-to- one perceptions; let's add some complexity.

Do you recognize, say, Ronald Reagan's voice? Or the love theme from Tchaikowsky's "Romeo and Juliet"? The qualities you experience, as real as they seem, are far removed from the combinations of sound frequencies and rhythmic patterns that produced them. Our neurological impressions of such complex things truly seem to take on separate identities of their own.

Here it is, with no punches pulled: Mind, self and soul have the same relationship to neurological function that color has to light frequency, sound has to acoustic frequency and smell has to molecular structure. Until philosophy accepts this, it has nowhere to go.

I hear the anguished cry of wounded egos: "Why!? Could we have deluded ourselves this long?" The answer is: we had to. Our perceptive mechanisms are the products of lengthy evolutionary selection. The better they worked, the better we survived. The more kinds of perception we had, the more survival advantage accrued. Stop and ask yourself: How would you expect perception to manifest itself? As an exact duplicate of whatever is perceived? Fortunately for all of us, thinking "elephant" doesn't place the real thing inside one's head.

Philosophers have long agonized over accepting information from an individual's inductive processes. Yet those processes build the paradigms without which we can launch no deductive explorations. We make mental models of the objects and processes of our environment. As infants, our models are very rough ones, which are refined -- or replaced -- with accumulated experience. How do we know that the kinds of models we make, and the inductive processes which form them, are reasonably accurate? Because they exist. If they weren't accurate enough, they would have led our ancestors directly to extinction.

Epistemology -- the study of how we know what we know -- must now be linked to developmental psychology. Imagine Descartes as an infant, musing, "I think, therefore I am." Preposterous. Descartes could think as an adult, but only after his set of mental models was largely complete. He thought because he existed, and existed as a man made capable of thought by his inherited model-making ability. Epistemology, then, must cope with a necessary circularity: We can't know anything until we've accumulated enough perceptions to flesh out the appropriate models -- at which point we can begin to wonder about perception, among other things. For human philosophers, metaphysics (our collection of models) must precede epistemology, which must in turn support the original metaphysics -- or our models are suspect.

The philosophical approach to human values, ethics and aesthetics, must also be an evolutionary one. Yet today's most respected philosophers seem to regard human values as being as fundamental as, say, the force of gravity. Examples: Mortimer Adler, in his recent (and important) book, Understanding Our Constitution, calls the pursuit of happiness (rather than life or liberty) our most fundamental right. Sidney Hook and Paul Kurtz define human rights in social terms. Yet, to me, it is clear that all rights derive from one fundamental: life itself. This perspective is exhaustively examined by Ayn Rand in her many books on Objectivism. Natural rights are those I would have when completely alone. Social "rights," ranging from civil justice to a turkey in every pot and a Porsche in every garage, are more properly goals that "just growed" ... common needs or wants which men have come to claim as their due under some "contract" with society. But, as Pulitzer winner E.O. Wilson (On Human Nature) demonstrated, even society and all its mechanisms have been wholly determined by evolutionary forces.

The evolutionary perspective began in zoology and paleontology; it spread from the earth sciences to sociology when E.O. Wilson invented sociobiology. It has even entered psychology: You can read Richard Lynn's evolutionary theories on the relative superiority of visuospatial intelligence in Asian peoples in the latest Mensa Research Journal ($5 to MERF, c/o Mensa, 2626 E. 14th St., Brooklyn, NY 11235-3992). Welcome, now, to evolutionary philosophy.

Ayn Rand does well in defining "value" as something a man acts to gain and to keep. All of our appetites and needs, both individual and social, lead us in pursuit of survival. Hunger leads us to find food, thirst leads us to water, exhaustion brings sleep, pain repels us from danger. And we owe all to the drive to reproduce -- for the fundamental attribute of life is (Observation #1) not that it ekes out an individual existence for a while, but that it spans generations. Where would we be if our most remote microbe ancestor had merely existed -- or even if it had developed music, art and philosophy -- and then failed to reproduce?

So we reproduce, and evolve. What are the forces of evolution? We all know about natural selection -- but where does it lead us? Observation #2: I've identified three fundamental evolutionary attractions -- attributes which are evident, either singly or in combinations, in every successful evolutionary adaptation I've encountered. They are excellence, variety and security. Every human trait, every social urge, every animal instinct is directed toward one or more of the three. Some examples:

Freedom is variety of opportunity. Truth is an excellent match between reality and opinion. Kinship extends security within its ranks. Specialization is always in pursuit of excellence. Diversified investments -- variety again. Free markets -- variety and excellence. Education pursues variety and/or excellence. Peace is the secure opposite of strife. Justice aims to provide security of liberty and property to the widest variety of people under its care. Try it yourself, with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs: survival, safety, acceptance, esteem and self-actualization.

More examples, this time from a negative perspective: Inbreeding violates variety. Murder, theft, assault and the like are threats to security. Laziness thwarts excellence. Greed, in pursuit of variety or excellence, may victimize others (violate security) and involve waste (anything but an excellent use of resources).

On a larger scale: Socialism aims for economic security for all persons, but fails to motivate excellence or achieve variety. Capitalism institutionalizes variety, motivates excellence, but often neglects security. Dogma, be it political or religious, promises security, claims excellence, but exorcises variety. Imperialism pursues variety and security for one group at the expense of another.

One caution: The elements are simple, but the applications can be impossibly complex. Which of the three attractions account for happiness? Ah ... first we must examine all of the drives, appetites, even the whims -- which, satisfied, together make us feel happy. Complex. But you'll find all three elements present, nonetheless.

You may have already noticed: Sometimes the three attractions come in conflict with one another. If you want to be really good at something, you must specialize; yet you might want to diversify into other activities as well. The choice: Which is more important to you, excellence or variety?

The pioneer goes off in pursuit of variety -- of places, experiences and knowledge; the race car driver chases excellence all the way to the checkered flag. Both do so in spite of considerable risk -- and probably in spite of exhortations from others who are much more concerned with security.

Nature, too, appears to be most concerned with security. Boldness ventures forth only from a secure lair. Experiments in variety are relegated to the periphery of the central, secure gene pool. A cursory look at Jungian personality typology shows that half of mankind is clearly dominated by security needs, while only about 20 percent of us (sensation/perceiving types) are much inclined to take dangerous risks.

Danger itself has been transformed. Mankind, once concerned with starvation, predators, disease and other natural calamities, now worries about a whole new class of things. Politics heads the list: What will my boss think? What rights will I have under this government? Why can't I have what they have?

More: Our appetites, once valuable forces for survival, are now indulged for their own sake, out of all proportion to need. Runaway consumption and self-absorbed thrill-seeking are the symptoms of a species out of its natural element.

We must consciously adopt, as mankind's common goal, the same pursuit of excellence and variety from a basis of security by which Nature has guided us all along. Civilized man has removed himself from Nature's harsh but effective stewardship. We are now responsible for our own evolution.

I'll leave you with one last observation -- a word of encouragement: Every guidance system needs a feedback mechanism; the human mind's is this: "How'm I doing?" Self-esteem, or the lack of it, governs not only the values we choose, but whether or not we can be mobilized to achieve them. It is possible to develop in mankind around the world the inner conviction that each of us is connected with all others, and is to some degree responsible for our common future. This will happen by making it socially unacceptable to engage in bigotry or isolationism, motivating individuals to move toward an enlightened attitude. It won't be easy; the "them vs. us" mentality is very deeply ingrained. We must teach our children -- and each other -- that, within the confines of Homo sapiens, there is no "them." Only us.