I’m currently reading Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari.[i] The subtitle explains that it is a “brief history of humankind”, and it is the backward-looking precursor to Homo Deus, (which, unsurprisingly, is subtitled A brief history of tomorrow [ii]). Slowly reading, as Sapiens is a big book, well over 400 pages, and also a dense book. I am going against my usual approach, only 10 pages or so a day, with much to absorb, many details to consider. At the same time, there are several surprises, right from the early pages where I read that homo sapienswas just one of the species in the genus homo derived from the Australopithecus apes some two million years ago, and that most of these species co-existed with homo sapiens as recently as 100,000 years ago.
Harari charts a number of changes that led to humans as we see them today. The first was the ‘cognitive revolution’, the ability to go beyond the programming of behaviour by genes. That huge step led on to language, new forms of food (cooking, agriculture), and became unstoppable with the emergence of territorial ambitions, money, religion, and, eventually, the scientific revolution. Much of what he has to say draws on our early history, hunter gatherers living in small tribes. While I didn’t find everything persuasive, his exploration of how we naturally see the world in terms of “them and us” took me back to Tribes [iii], a commentary on sources of identity and why our sense of ‘belonging’ shapes behaviour today, even our participation in the “global economy”. However, in exploring the cognitive revolution, I thought about some of the hotly contested areas of debate today. Kotkin’s book didn’t seem to garner lasting critical respect, and was superseded by Huntington and his account of the clash between civilisations. Kotkin and Huntington both wanted to simplify, explaining the world today in terms of the differences between Chinese, Indian and American and other cultures. To Harari’s credit, he keeps reminding the reader of the complexity of the factors that influence our behaviour.
Early on in his book, Harari is interested in the development of what he calls the ‘imagined order’ [iv], the way in which we organise and make sense of the world by creating ideas, which he describes as insubstantial, yet powerful organising frameworks. His examples are persuasive – democracy, individualism, capitalism, Christianity. None of these are things to be found in the natural world, but they are shared, inter-subjective phenomena that are sustained in our thoughts and imaginations through stories, myths, legends, images. They are critical organising metaphors, sustaining the coordination of thousands, a key step in progressing beyond the families and small bands we see in other members of the ape family.
In exploring how humans developed the ability to create tribes, cities and eventually nations, he focusses on the central importance of having agreements about how and why we live. But what is it we are sharing? He suggests ideas act as programs, shaping behaviour and experience. Is that what humanity is about: the result of models and metaphors that the brain learns and uses to act in the world? It makes us seem like computers, mental processors. Certainly, today that view is central to the debate on what it means to be ‘conscious’.
The question ‘what is consciousness’ has been around for a very long time. For years, the dominant view was that there was something inside us, a soul, that was independent of our physical bodies. A child often comes to the idea that there is a space – somewhere inside his or her head, usually – where the mind is located. “I think, therefore I am”, and the ‘I’ is to be found hiding in that strange place called the brain. As we grow up, the story is ruined by learning that the anatomy of the brain fails to find this special place. It doesn’t exist in a physical sense at all.
Lots of writers have had a go at consciousness. Plato believed in the idea of a soul. Descartes got us into a world of duality. One of my favourites was Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychology professor, who came up with a story about how the mind was originally in two parts. In his account, consciousness arose through the breakdown of this bicameral mind, which took place at the height of Greek thinking some 3,000 years ago.[v] I bought his book 30 years ago. Like a modern James Frazer writing The Golden Bough, Jaynes cherry picked his way through Greek myths and poetry, using the Iliad to prove some of his more amazing conclusions. Great fun, compulsive reading, and totally nuts!
Today, evolutionary biologists are hammering away at any sense there is something other than mental models. The brain as a processor, like a computer, has proven to be a very powerful metaphor. Memory stores, programs, analytical systems, we are walking around with a CPU in our heads, except our version is soft and squishy! I find the ideas exciting, stimulating, but I keep reminding myself that science is as much subject to the uncertainties of fashion as anything else. Do I believe everything can be explained in terms of neural processes?
To me, what makes the advance of science exciting is that it is a continuing story about ideas, no one of which is final. We just keep coming up with more and more complex and interesting ways to describe the physical world, and in doing so explain more, and yet create more problems. The physical world is ‘out there’, and we are, fundamentally, never able to do more than make up stories as to what it is like. Back in Newton’s time, it was real, solid, and made sense, up to a point. Then that paradigm began to fray at the edges, when along came a new way of looking at our solid world, with Einstein and relativity. Then things got into a much bigger mess with the quantum world. Instead of atoms like billiard balls, and everything explicable in terms of linkages between elements, we had to confront a world of uncertainty about space and velocity, electrons as weird ‘smears’ as one writer calls them [vi] The physical world reduced to mathematical possibilities, the multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics.
I don’t begrudge the biologists their moment in the sun. We are being given some insightful ways to think about ourselves, and how we interact with the world. They are not all new, however, and fifty years ago the phenomenologists had a lot to say about the unknowability of the ‘real world’, and the ways in which we construct what we see.[vii] However, today’s ideas will be supplanted in time, as new ways of understanding our brains appear, just as the whole crazy edifice of quantum mechanics, indeterminacy and string theory will be eventually be replaced with another, better framework. There are always new ‘explanations’ appearing: if you were to read too much from the companies in San Jose, you would believe analytics and big data are the answer to – well, to everything! Every so often, when we go back to reading books on the history and philosophy of science we find a solid basis for keeping our feet on the ground.
What am I trying to say? Computers can write music? Sure. And what they will produce will almost certainly be better than many of the ephemeral popular songs of today and yesterday. But music that reaches our souls? Remember the end of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. After one or two scenes that are almost crazy beyond belief, with the statue of the Commendatore being invited by Don Giovanni to dinner, and then plunging him into hell, the opera ends with six of the characters combining in a minute or so of magic, interwoven voices creating a tapestry of beauty. Or listen to Tamino’s sublime song as he looks at a portrait of Pamina in the Magic Flute. Stunning. The beauty of Bach’s St Matthews Passion. You want something more modern? Go and listen to Taylor Swift’s almost inchoate, angry, and bitter recent disc, Reputation: not ‘great’ music, but emotional, visceral and demanding. It made me think of all that pent-up, sublimateded, wrought emotion driving through Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Music like this doesn’t work because it is logical, (pieces like these often break the rules), but because it speaks to us through our hearts. I’m a romantic. I don’t think computers will ever create such music, except by copying what humans have done before.
A few days ago, I was re-reading parts of Julian Jaynes’ book. The heating was on (it was still below freezing outside, after dropping to -13 C during the night), and I began to doze, thinking about brains, and minds and stuff like that. Five minutes later, I was jolted back awake, and saw, quite clearly for a moment, the chinchilla cat I used to have some thirty years ago, walking across the carpet. Then it was gone. What was all that about? The rational scientist would explain that it’s all a matter of aging, the interconnections, models and systems in my brain beginning to fray at the edges, hallucinatory images breaking through. It’s all down to a memory short circuit! Perhaps, but I’d prefer to think I was back recalling life when I first read that book, sitting in the lounge, trying to decide if Jaynes really was nuts, or simply being provocative! And the cat ambled by, as it did then, totally uninterested in me.
I believe that Harari’s second book goes on to propose that the inexorable processes of evolution will continue, and we will, in time, be replaced. I suspect he will argue we will be overtaken by our own creations. Obsolete, but not, as some would have it, dismissed by a new race of ‘super’ humans, the next stage of development; but left in the wayside by intelligent machines, ones that can do what we do and more, faster, better, cleverer. This is the point at which my sympathy for the arguments and claims of evolutionary biologists and Silicon Valley gurus stops. Machines will never have consciousness, nor will they ever suffer from the extremes of emotions, the sense of awe in the face of great art, the yearning induced by great music.
Consciousness is much more than models and games in the brain, it is the ephemeral flame of being that makes me who I am, both alone in my experiences and yet part of a shared community of others, all of us seeking to make some sense of what it is to experience love, joy, fear and depression, to be alive, just for the short time we are.
[i] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, published in 2015 by Harper Collins
[ii] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow, published in 2017, Harper.
[iii] Joel Kotkin, Tribes, 1993, Random House
[iv] Op cit, pages 111-118
[v] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, first published in 1976, Houghton Mifflin.
[vi] Adam Frank, Minding Matter, Aeon Magazine, 13 March 2017
[vii] For years I was particularly fond of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I still like to read a page or two of The Phenomenology of Perception, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), but, I have to confess, get lost fairly quickly. Harari might write dense material, but Merleau-Ponty excelled at the impenetrable!
