click here for ordinary reading click here for a high contrast version

Seriously, what is a human being?

Prospectus

What I want to do if I may is to explain a project I have and to ask for your help with it. It's about what a human being is.

Boring, you may say. We know what a human being is - an animal with a terrific piece of wetware on top. We don't know all the details by any means, but unless you have a professional knowledge of cutting-edge neurophysiology and cognitive science - which I don't - you won't be able to help us there.

I think that's probably right.

My project is a historical one. It is about the question of what a human being is, but it tries to get clear about the different answers to that question that are to be found in the Modern period.

At the end, I hope, having worked our way forward, you will be able to help me with the question: What do we think we are today?

The big picture I am trying to defend is this.

There are three conceptions of the human being in the modern period:

• Early Modernity: a human being is a mind and a mind is a congeries of mental atoms.
• 19th Century: a human being is a mind, but a mind is mental process or processes.
• Beyond the 19th Century: a human being is a mind, but a mind is computation by the brain.

Timeline

Early Modernity

We are all familiar with the notion in Descartes that a human being is a mind.

'I ... concluded,' he says, 'that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that " I," that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is." Descartes, Discourse on method, Part 4; Selected Philosophical Writings, p.36. Read this passage in the context of the Discourse as a whole in the e-text translation by Newby.

So a human being was a mind. But what sort of a thing was a mind?

Well, we all know too of the notion that it was a cupboard stuffed with ideas.

This was a boat floated by John Locke, and it sailed until the end of the 18th Century (though it lost its deck and keel and sides towards the end). Locke articulated his conception of the mind by applying to mentality the ideas that were current in physics: the ideas of corpuscularianism.

Everything physical is made up of small particles or corpuscles.

Opinions differed over what properties the corpuscles possessed, and over what forces there were that might impact on them, but they were generally considered to be lifeless and mindless, inert entities moving under the influence of a limited number of forces. The movements of these corpuscles, and the configurations they got into, were held to be responsible for all the features of the experienced universe.

John Locke's work was to develop the notion that mentality like physicality consisted essentially of 'corpuscles' - but mental 'corpuscles', not physical ones. Just as physics proposed to explain physical phenomena in terms of the corpuscle and forces acting upon it, so the mind was to be studied scientifically with a parallel assumption - that everything mental was to be understood in terms of 'ideas' and the 'mental forces' to which they were subject. The theory of mental causation which developed out of Locke's approach was dubbed 'associationism' because of the 'laws of association' that were assumed to govern the linking up and sequencing of ideas.

So - I'm just reminding you - the mind in the early Modern period was thought of as a collection of quasi-particles called 'ideas'. Locke thought of these quasi-particles as contained in a quasi-cupboard - and actually that there was a sort of quasi crane within the cupboard capable of a certain amount of construction work. (There may have been a person in here observing events as well..)

Unfortunately, if one attempts to pursue in more detail the foundational analogy between a mental idea and a physical corpuscle, it appears that none of the obvious features of the corpuscular model actually carry across to the mental. Corpuscles are material and spatial, ideas are mental and do not belong to space. Ideas are quasi-corpuscles, not corpuscles, we may say - a locution that conveniently camouflages the difficulty.

Hume's attempt to move beyond suggestive analogy and express what is literally true of the mental corpuscles - he calls them 'perceptions' - which are to be invoked in explanations of mental phenomena goes like this:

'All perceptions' Hume says, 'are distinct. They are, therefore, distinguishable, and separable, and may be conceived as separately existent, and may exist separately, without any contradiction or absurdity.' Treatise, Appendix.

Here we have in succinct and literal form the fundamental conception in the early Modern conception of mentality: mentality as made up of quasi-atoms, the 'ideas' of John Locke, the 'perceptions' of David Hume.

All that is to set the scene for late 18th Century, when a different conception began to take shape.

The 19th Century

You may think Kant, but I'm not sure myself that he is on the progressive side of the revolution. I will say instead: Liebig. Liebig was a chemist.
I say this because the new understanding of the mind grows out of the application of chemical analysis to substances found in or produced by animals and plants.

To make my point, I need to make sure we understand each other at this point.

Chemical analysis

Summary: the development of chemical analysis leads to the conception of the body as a network of chemical processes

Chemical analysis showed what a substance was made up of, and revealed the proportions of the various components identified. It relied, as far as animal and plant substances were concerned, to begin with on destructive distillation. At the beginning of this technique you just burnt the stuff you wanted analyse and collected the products. Later, you didn't actually burn it. Burning is a form of oxidation, and if you heated the stuff of interest with an oxidising agent, you could exert much tighter control over the process and the collection and weighing of products.

This use of chemical oxidizing agents, replacing burning, was developed to begin with by Lavoisier. It revolutionized the accuracy of analysis. Better and better agents were identified, until by the 1830s analysis had been refined into a standard laboratory technique that was reliable and accurate.

Liebig's Analytical Laboratory in 1840 Thanks to Liebig Museum in Giessen

In the first decade of the 19th Century therefore you have more and more substances found in living things being subjected to analysis: and the picture begins to emerge, first, of the living thing as producing a range of (now) organic substances, and then as tantamount to chemical laboratories themselves. The living thing came to be seen as a configuration of chemicals which had been produced by the body.

Processes

But there was step beyond that. Given the identification of more and more chemicals produced within the body, the question arose of what happened to them once they had been produced. Surely they must interact with each other? But if they did, it must be in a tightly ordered way - ie an animal body was not to be thought of as a kind of compost heap. The idea took shape that the chemical interactions which must be going on in the body were organized into processes - ordered sequences of chemical changes which kept repeating over and over - 'iterated' let us say. They were processes that had to be highly integrated with each other, but that said, that was all there was to an organism. It was conceived of as a complex of chemical processes - and as simply a complex of chemical 'processes'. That was what an organic body was.

Alexandre Herzen articulates the conception in the second half of the 19th Century, declaring an animal to be:

"a workshop of material and dynamic transformations, maintaining its physical and chemical constitution through a perpetual exchange of matter and force with the outside world."
Alexandre Herzen, Physiologie de la volonté , Paris, 1874, Translated from the Italian by Ch. Letourneau. p.129. Quotation taken from Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction, English edition, New York, 2003, Zone Books. (1st published in French, 1999.) p.147.

The concept of 'process' being applied here - the idea of a sequence of changes which iterate - was not new. It is there in traditional tin-mining, where a continuously flowing stream is used to lift and let drop a line of hammers which break up break up the ore and pound it to powder. Or of course, think of the wind-powered corn mill. But it was achieving a new prominence in the period I am talking about - the turn of the 18th Century.

The chemical changes people knew about and exploited in the 18th Century were single-shot. You put the raw materials into a pot, you heated the pot and collected the products. And then did it again. Eg the production of charcoal. You heat a heap of burnt bones, wood and sugar together, remove the result, and repeat.

But with the 19th Century you get the invention of chemical works which operated continuously: raw material feed in at one end and a continuous flow of product emerges at the other end. Eg the production of town gas, first made available in the first decade of the 19th Century.
It is this idea of process which transfers to thinking about the mind in the early decades of the 19th Century.
There are two significant features of the mind as mental process or processes, the idea taken over from early 19th Century physiology. One is flow. The other is activity.

The mind as flow

It's in respect of this feature that I call the new concept of mind dynamic.

It's the way the mind is thought of as like a flame. Particles of carbon become incandescent, part of the flame, then lose their incandescence as they move on out of it. Or a waterfall: water molecules become part of the waterfall as they tip over the edge, they fall, but as they hit the bottom they leave it as they become part of the stream instead.

19th Century writers want to think of the mind like that.

They also think of the mind as activity.

The mind as mental activity

The waterfall is not a complete analogy for the 19th Century mind, because we don't think of the water molecules as caught up in complex iterating sequences of change on their way to the stream below. But that is how the 19th Century theorists did conceive of the mind: mind as process or processes, just as organic metabolism was processes.

Let me point to a couple of 19th Century philosophical luminaries to show them embracing this new picture. I actually don't want to limit my claim to philosophers - I want to say the new conception of mind as process or processes becomes part of the common ground, the ground on which arguments can be joined. But a few clear cases will help!

Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer is an early exponent (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819). Mind for Schopenhauer is essentially what he calls a 'will', drawing on and thinking he can coherently adapt the Kantian 'noumenal self' for this purpose. (The individual 'will' he supposes can be thought of as part of something he calls the 'universal will', but that perhaps need not detain us.) Schopenhauer wants us to understand the individual will not as a statically-conceived structural feature but an activity. It is actually a very special type of activity, he says: it is "an endless striving". (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation p. 164.)

He explicitly draws the analogy I have just referred to - the analogy between this conception of the will and the understanding of the organism that was taking shape as he wrote.
"... [T]he constant renewal of the matter of every organism can ... be regarded as the mere phenomenon of ... continual pressure and change, and physiologists are now ceasing to regard such renewal as the necessary reparation of the substance consumed in movement. The possible wearing out of the machine cannot in any way be equivalent to the constant inflow through nourishment. Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will." Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, first published as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1819, Dover edition translated from the German by E.F.J.Payne, New York, 1966, Dover, p. 164.

Schopenhauer and Hegel Thanks to Shardcore

Schopenhauer does not distinguish explicitly between the two dimensions of the new physiological thinking - x as a network of processes and organic processes as involving constant throughput of material constituents - but both elements are clearly in play as he theorises about the mind. It is activity, and is in constant flux.

Hegel

Along the corridor from Schopenhauer Hegel was thinking much same thoughts. "Thoughts are self-moving functions" he declares. (Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, 10, Section 33; "Hegel by Hypertext" edition.)

"For intelligence, understanding (Verstand), is thinking, pure activity of the self in general."(Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, 10, Section 33; "Hegel by Hypertext" edition.)

"[R]eason is purposive activity." (Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, 10, Section 33; "Hegel by Hypertext" edition.)

Hegel's dialectic as process

There's a take on Hegel's 'dialectic' that attempts to link it very directly to the physiological theorising taking place at the time.  It says that the root idea at work here is exactly the notion of ‘process’ to be found in the physiology of his time.

‘Dialectic’, in short, is the process idea.

Remember what he says as he addresses social change: there is thesis, which prompts antithesis, and that antithesis coming to bear on thesis produces synthesis. Synthesis then takes on the role of thesis and the cycle - Hegel would have us believe spiral - repeats.

What you have here, it is argued, is a transparent transformation of the chemical idea of process: a sequence of changes which iterate.

The claim I am setting out here, that Hegel took the basic idea of history as following a dialectical development from physiology, was Friedrich Engels writing in 1878 (originally in Anti-Dühring). The dialectical perspective is dissatisfied, he says, with the 18th Century conception of change, which takes 'things and their material reflexes, ideas,' as 'isolated ... to be considered one after the other...fixed, rigid, given once for all.' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 5. Feuer, Fontana, p.124.)

What we find with close thought is that 'cause and effect are conceptions which hold good only in their application to individual cases,' and that 'as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 9. Feuer, Fontana, p.125.)

Engels identifies the source of this perspective:

'Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically...' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 11. Feuer, Fontana, p.126.)

He uses the same scientific examples as Schopenhauer: the dynamic conception of the organism.

'In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 8. Feuer, Fontana, p.125.)

The great merit of the Hegelian system, Engels continues, is that ' for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development...' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 13. Feuer, Fontana, p.127.)

For Engels then perhaps the key point seems to be that historical change is a continuing flux. (Quite a helpful conception for a revolutionary.)

But at the same time, you will notice, he commits himself rather casually to the much more important thesis that historical change is developmental, is somehow driven in a certain direction. Hegel's achievement was that:

'for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development...' (ref above; my emphasis).

But where does the development come from? There is nothing in the early 19th C physiological concept of chemical process to support the idea that processes on their own develop, ie change in a sustained direction.

But if Hegel did think that a mind, properly conceived, was the sort of thing that did develop, he was not alone. It seems to be there in Schopenhauer, when he talks of 'striving': the individual will he says is not to be thought of as a statically-conceived structural feature but an activity. That's OK - that's the basic process idea. But then he says of the will (= for Schopenhauer mind = person) that it is "an endless striving". (ref given above). But that's not from physiology. That's not supported by the physiological notion of a sequence of change that reiterates.

Other voices from the 19th Century are not afraid of lurching into teleology either.

Maine de Biran is one: self is consciousness and consciousness is 'an active striving power'.

Or, to take a further example, here is the best a modern expositor can make of the self - the mind - in Schelling:

"What Schelling proposes is a vision of the Absolute as One, as a single multi-faceted, self-creating, continuously developing cosmos of which nature is one aspect, the human mind another... " Solomon, Continental Philosophy since 1750, Oxford, OUP 1988, p.54.

From the enveloping fog the notion of the individual self as 'self-creating' and 'continuously developing' emerges rather clearly. No distinction is made between person, mind or self; and what we have here is what I am calling the 'dynamic' conception of 'it'. But the Absolute is not just a physiological-type process: it is a process that 'continuously develops'.

So my point here is that though Engels may be right in thinking that writers of this early 19th Century period may have got their conception of process from physiology, they didn't get from that source their idea of the mind as striving, as creating, ie as pursuing a goal or goal.

I think what you have here is a familiar sleight of hand: you appeal to science to support your thesis, and it sort of does: but only sort of.

It's not difficult to see where Schopenhauer and Hegel and the others in that vein got their idea of development from. The physiologists were studying animals, after all, and these of all things are notable for the way they start off small and simple and grow - mature - develop - into something large and complex. The leitmotif of Romanticism: think animal, forget clockwork.

My point is not that they are not entitled to think development but that they didn't get this from cutting edge physiology.

I don't myself see how in itself that kind of move helps. I want to know how an animal develops before I can make much that is useful from the suggestion that we should think animal not machine.

Bernard

The answer to this question of mine, how goal-directed change comes about in the animal and plant, of course in the end did indeed come from physiology – it didn’t come from the line of non-empirical speculation disowned but even so licensed by Kant.

It came with Claude Bernard, who took the earlier basic physiologist's concept of process and thought a bit about one of its features.

The root idea is this: if you take a basic process - a sequence of changes which reiterate - you can consider the possibility of some of the products of one iteration as altering the conditions under which the second iteration takes place. This is the basic notion of feedback is it not.

It requires the basic notion of processural change, but it builds on that. It envisages a very special form of processural change, where product of iteration 1 becomes part of the condition under which iteration 2 occurs, and the product of iteration 2 becomes part of the conditions under which iteration 3 occurs: and so on.

You immediately see how this feature can be sued to get the process to 'pursue goals'. By careful chemical engineering you can devise a system which keeps a process running steadily in spite of variations in the availability of, say, fuel. You fix it so that the organism is prompted to breath faster if x is produced, and make sure the slower the process runs the more x it produces.

Bernard himself used this thought of his to show how an organism kept going in the face of perturbations in its environment. Feedback processes were used he argued to build an ‘internal environment’ for the bulk of the organism's metabolism. The internal environment was kept constant by a series of feedback-controlled buffer mechanisms.

So by the end of period 2 – my shorthand, the 19th Century - it was possible to think that physiology – in particular the mid-century work of Bernard - applied to the mind gave the picture of the mind as 'process', yes, but also left open the possibility of mental process being developmental, or more generally goal-directed.

And indeed the concept of a goal-seeking process was applied to the mind. Not by everybody, so in no sense part of the common ground. But by a highly,  deeply, influential figure nonetheless, a noted student of the mind with a background in the physiological laboratories of Germany in the mid 19th Century and one who quite explicitly acknowledged the materialist, physiological inspiration for his theories: I mean Freud, whose early thinking about the mind tried the idea of a system which sought the goal of minimising the excitement suffered by the conscious mind.

Thinking as computing

Since the conception of the human being as mind, with mind understood as processes of thinking another change has taken place. I don't know quite yet what it is, because the obvious thing to say surely can't be sustained: which is that thinking is now outsourced.

The change I think decisive is rooted in the rise of information-handling devices from the 1930s onwards.

Cyber Girl Thanks to jurko, via Sarah L.

As we begin to think of the brain as a computing device our conception of the mind alters again.

It is still mental process, and we shall still understand that process as at bottom chemical.

But what we now think is that this complex of chemical processes is conducting logical, including mathematical operations. It's an information-handling device, a computer, or at least has the powers of a computer and exercises them.

Do we say that we think or that our brain thinks? Are we happy saying that our brain does our thinking for us?

If we give into this way of thinking the 1st person has ceded something mighty important to a third. Worse almost than selling responsibility for our energy supplies to the French.

Perhaps the situation is this.

You hear it said, less and less frequently perhaps, that the one thing a computer can never be programmed with, or otherwise acquire, is a 'sense of self', an identity as a first person. But as we develop ever closer familiarity with intelligent machines, as they advance, - that’s to say, ever closer and easier relationships - what we will encounter is not a limitation in them but a change in what we think we are.
To take a very different figure, Nietzsche alerts the intelligence to the cloathlessness of Emperors Schopenhauer and Hegel and Kant:

"With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." One thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," [Hollingdale has 'I' instead of 'ego' throughout. Very helpful!] is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"- even the 'one' contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula - 'To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently - ' . . .Beyond Good and Evil, sections 16 and 17, Zimmern translation

But, Nietzsche prompts us to conclude, this is an invalid inference. To think is an activity,  yes. But there is no reason to think it is activity that must be the work of an agent.

Summary of theses

1. In the 19th Century, the mind begins to be thought of as process(es) not quasi-corpuscles.

2. The way through to the conception we have today (which I of course assume is correct) is with the people who pursued physiology. The Kant-licensed philosophers contributed heavily to social change - to the Russian revolution - but did nothing to advance the understanding of mentality.

3. Kant is important because he split philosophy from science. He didn't do anything to help forward the understanding of mentality. In remaining committed to a structural view of the mind (not a dynamic, processural, one) he belongs to the 18th Century.

4. The essential promptings towards a processural understanding came from physiology. The processural understanding in physiology yielded via Claude Bernard an understanding of how mechanisms (based on processes) could display goal-seeking behaviour.

5. When Bernard's thinking was reintroduced in the 20th Century it contributed decisively to the development of the computer. Thinking of the brain as a computer prompts another shift in our understanding of the human being. The human is still a mind, and mind is still the process of thinking, but the process of thinking is now thought to go on in the brain.

6. In outsourcing thinking, the 'I' will need some rejigging.

END