Yesterday’s Peter Robinson / Tom Wolfe discussion has some interesting overlap with my report on the Tucson consciousness conference in the current print edition of NR (or at greater length but less coherently here).
Again, I think Tom is shaky on the science. “Our evolution came to an end when we developed speech?” Huh? What brought it to an end? Not only is there no known process to stop it, not only is there clear evidence that our evolution has continued down to the present day, some geneticists have recently argued that it is actually accelerating.
And “language is an artifact … a human construct”? What, with no biological substratum? I’d like to see Tom argue that point with Steven Pinker.
And I never understand what people mean by “we are not machines.” (Though that was Peter, not Tom.) I think what they mean is that we are machines, but that there has to be a ghost in the machine to make it work.
Well, that’s what Apaches thought about the locomotive. The Apaches were wrong. Our own ghost-in-the-machine speculators may not be: it’s an open question. “Open” means we don’t know. To pretend that we know is presumptuous. And given the simply terrible historical record of “ghost” explanations for observed phenomena — earthquakes, eclipses, illness, and everything else under the Sun, and indeed for the Sun itself — “ghost” explanations are probably not the way to bet.
Again, Tom agrees with Peter that “the human mind explains status” … then goes on to mention status among social animals! Status rankings are all around in the higher animals. It’s natural that once humans acquired speech, they incorporated it into their status-achieving toolbox. This doesn’t tell us anything about human particularism.
Other questionable remarks, too: It wasn’t 19th-century psychologists who doubted the ghost in the machine, the idea goes back at least as far as Hobbes. Someone better versed in philosophy than I am could probably trace it to the Ancients. “Nowadays it [models of brain function] is all computers.” If Tom can find a neuroscientist who agrees with that, I’ll buy them both dinner at Shun Lee. (If he can find me one who believes in the ghost in the machine, same deal.)
None of this matters much. Great novelists don’t come along often, and we should cut them pretty near as much slack as they want. I shall be first on line for Tom’s next book. I hope he won’t mind my saying, though, that he needs to get up to date on his mind science. It’s not really hard work, there are lots of good popularizers out there: Pinker of course, and John Horgan for starters. Tom’s next book will be a fun read in any case, but a tad more fun if he gets the science right.
Oh (going back to one of the earlier segments). it’s not the case that Darwin would be forgotten if he hadn’t written Origin. The earlier (by 20 years) Voyage of the Beagle was a bestseller. Just for that, he’d be remembered as a minor early-Victorian travel writer and naturalist.