“From a scientific viewpoint, the only real contender for the seat of the mind, or even the soul, is the brain,” says Michael C. Corballis in his new book The Recursive Mind: The origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization.
Corballis is an evolutionary biologist, and, as he mentions repeatedly, an atheist. So when he says that the brain is the “only real contender” for the soul what he actually appears to mean is that there is no real contention at all. You don’t need to assume outside forces to explain human beings. You just need to look at the holy atavistic trinity of evolutionary psyche—primitive cultures, great apes, and autistics. Using the deviations of chimps, rain-forest dwellers, and Rain Man, science can triangulate normality through entirely material means. There is no need to postulate a soul, or God, or transcendence, or miracles.
The refusal of miracles is particularly important for Corballis, and it leads him to some surprising places. Specifically, it causes him to reject the idea that what makes humans into humans is language. Other writers, like Noam Chomsky, have argued that Homo sapiens became the Homo sapiens we know and (more or less) love when they learned to talk.
Chomsky believes the ability to understand language is innate, and that that ability has to precede the use of language itself. This creates a difficulty, though. Joe Hominid, in Chomsky’s view, would have gained no advantage just because deep in his skull he was suddenly able to talk to Jane Hominid. Eventually, of course, the Hominids would learn to converse and this would help them collaborate in the hunting and tracking of mammoths and/or tubers. Until they actually had language, though, the ability to speak would have done nothing for them.
Since, in Chomsky’s view, there was a lag between ability for language and actual language, natural selection is taken out of the picture. Instead, Chomsky suggests that the ability to use language was a bolt from the developmental blue. Or, in Corballis’ paraphrase, it was the result of, “some single and singular event causing a rewiring, perhaps a fortuitous mutation, in the brain.” Corballis notes drily that Chomsky’s “account, although not driven by religious doctrine, does smack of the miraculous.”
Corballis’ goal, then, is to get rid of the miracle. And he decides that the best way to do this is by unseating language as the key to humanity. For Corballis, In the beginning was the Word, should be replaced by, In the beginning was recursion.
Recursive thinking, for Corballis, is the ability to think about thinking. He identifies several recursive processes as characteristic of human beings. First, he points to mental time travel—the ability to imagine past events within current consciousness. This is the basis both of memory and of fiction, which for Corballis is a kind of memory of the future. Corballis also singles out theory of mind—the ability to imagine the state of mind of others (and therefore to imagine them imagining your state of mind and you imagining their state of mind imagining your state of mind imagining their state of mind, and so on.) Corballis argues that theory of mind allows for the development of language. In order to talk to somebody, you have to have a sense that there is a somebody, a consciousness, out there to talk to. Recursion allows humans to share each other thoughts, and it is the sharing of thoughts which allows for language, rather than language which allows for the sharing of thoughts.
It’s an intriguing thesis, and to defend it, Corballis comes up with—well, with not much, at least as far as I can tell. He shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that songbird patterns can be explained without assuming that songbirds have recursive thinking. He demonstrates that primates other than humans appear to have only a rudimentary theory of mind—though it’s hard to tell exactly how rudimentary, since their language is rudimentary too, so we can’t ask them. He notes that those with certain kinds of autism seem to have trouble with recursive thinking and with language. He puts great emphasis on the so-called mirror neurons in monkeys, which appear to be activated when the monkey sees another monkey acting in the same way as the monkey, and also seem to have something to do with language. So the mirror-neurons may link recursion and language—unless, of course, you turn to Corballis’ notes, where he admits that many researchers think the whole mirror-neuron/language connection is a load of monkey pooh.
John Horgan, writing in The Undiscovered Mind, suggested that Corballis’ difficulty in shoring up his theories is not his fault. Rather, it’s endemic to his discipline.
Evolutionary psychology is in many respects a strangely inconsequential exercise, especially given the evangelical fervor with which it is touted by its adherents. Evolutionists can take any set of psychological and social data and show how they can be explained in Darwinian terms. But they cannot perform experiments that will establish that their view is right and the alternative view is wrong—or vice versa.
The specific problem in Corballis’ book is that he cannot experimentally separate recursion and language. How does he know that language didn’t allow us to engage in recursive thinking rather than the other way around? His efforts to nail down this point—by, for example, referring to a remote tribe which some people think may have non-recursive language, or by pointing to autistic people who have difficulty with some kinds of recursive thought but can still learn language—are inconclusive. In fact, after reading this book, I’ve come away impressed not with how much evolutionary psychologists know, but how little. One sheepish note buried in the back of the book even admits that primatologists aren’t sure whether gorillas incessantly vocalize or hardly vocalize at all. If we can’t tell how often gorillas howl, how are we supposed to figure out how human speech is related to human consciousness?
It’s not that Corballis doesn’t have any good ideas. His argument that language developed first as gestures rather than speech, for example, seems both clever and perfectly plausible. And seeing recursion as the essential human trait is entirely reasonable… and even (perhaps despite Corballis’ best efforts) has theological precedent. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, argued that what made humans human was their capacity for “self-transcendence.” Human beings can look at themselves looking at themselves; they know they’re going to live and that (less cheerily) they’re going to die. “Man’s melancholy over the prospect of death is the proof of his partial transcendence over the natural process which ends in death,” Niebuhr writes in his essay “Humour and Faith.” Recursion, our ability to see ourselves being ourselves, is, for Niebuhr, both our triumph and our tragedy.
Corballis doesn’t see it as a triumph or a tragedy, though. Nor does he phrase recursion in terms of self-transcendence. That sort of theological language is…well, too theological. Instead, Corballis prefers to discuss material things; why humans stood upright, where the Neanderthals went, how different languages indicate tense. All of which is certainly interesting, but misses the main point.
That point being that humans actually are fairly miraculous. I actually find Corballis’ argument for gradual change under evolutionary pressure more convincing than Chomsky’s theory of sudden mutation. And yet, Chomsky’s bolt from the blue is a metaphoric truth, even if it isn’t a factual one. Humans are really, really different than our closest relatives—more different than can be accounted for on the basis of evolution or genes. There’s a rupture there that defies fully material explanation.
Which is where language, followed or preceded by recursion, comes in. Language is both social, existing between individuals, and private, existing within the core of our identities. “I think therefore I am” is a piece of language. If it can’t be said, it doesn’t exist, and then where are we?
Perhaps even more importantly, language is a material thing; it’s a technology. But it’s also inseparable from ourselves. We create it and it creates us, recursively. Language retools us. We were apes—we still are apes—but we’re apes that are constantly remaking ourselves in the image of words such as “human being.” Evolutionary psychologists can natter on (as Corballis does) about how women are biologically programmed to be nurturers and men are biologically programmed for science. But the more they natter, the more they show that the nattering is what matters, not the programming. What our ancestors did is a lot less important than what they said.
And if the saying is the thing, it’s possible that Corballis is looking for the soul in the wrong place. Perhaps it’s not in the brain, after all. Maybe it’s where the Bible says it is—in that non-space between and within us known as the Word.
Zizek talks in this spiel on Buddhism about German scientists who can control rat movements via electrical impulses, and who claim that when they start doing this to humans, humans will probably feel as if the movements are voluntary. Which nobody even worries about with regard to the rats/
Anyhow, he suggests that meditation is cool because it allows us to see through the illusion of free will. But the existence of God sort of takes care of that problem on a linguistic level– which is the insight of Nicolas Malebranche in Occasionalist theology.
This reminds me of what Lacanian-of-the-moment Adrian Johnston decries in his work. He says that his fellow psychoanalysts (particularly Lacanians) tend to obscure the original lack as though it were miraculous. He says that we should be looking for a material origin for the lack which psychoanalysts demand somewhere in the brain/body/social complex. I tend to agree with him. Insisting that the “mind” is something spooky is a dubious and unhelpful gesture at best. Your claim that it “defies fully material explanation” is puzzling. Do you mean that it goes beyond the individual brain and body? This seems clear. You have to look at human context (social and otherwise) to understand what they are. But you have to do that for a whole host of other animals, as well. Figuring out how something operates is never simply a matter of looking at an individual thing in isolation.
As a side note, Bert, could you explain the second paragraph a little bit? How does the existence of God take care of the problem?
“Insisting that the “mind” is something spooky is a dubious and unhelpful gesture at best.”
Why is it unhelpful? Or dubious? It seems like a little humility in admitting that we don’t actually necessarily understand how human beings work is likely a good thing.
Right– I read Adrian Johnson in a Hegel book about the “weakness of nature”– he invokes Lacan’s mention of the Holy Spirit as the immanent incompleteness of reality. I’ve read several Zizek things about how Hegel displaces Kant’s transcendent gap into the external world.
For Adrian Johnson, this means the Creator is impotent and that people are “out-of-control specters.” But it seems to me that if the Symbolic (linguistic) God, the big Other, is properly understood as the Real that defies signification. Forget holes in reality– reality IS a hole, to paraphrase Sonic Youth. The words we use and phenomena we experience are what is incomplete.
Let me put it this way. When someone writes about how mysterious the “mind” is I typically think that they are engaging in some sort of mystical wish fulfillment. They don’t want the mind to be explainable for whatever reason (often religious or anti-scientific) so they call it unexplainable in principle. However, you can put my anxiety at ease fairly easily. What would it take for you to think that the mind was explained, Noah? I’m not saying we have done it and you’re blind to it or that we will do it. I just want to know what your criterion is for our ability to explain the mind. If I hand-crafted a human being that you could befriend, I can only imagine that would be enough. Short of that, what sort of “proof” or “support” would you accept?
Bert, I’m still not sure what you mean, but it sounds like you’re taking a page from the ole philosophy of difference spinozist-nietzschean playbook. For better or worse. I’m not sure what the real difference would be between saying “everything is incomplete” or “everything is excessive”. They both express the same incapability to totalize.
Well, I could turn it around and say that when I hear people say they can explain the mind, it makes me think they have a mystical desire to believe we can explain human beings.
And I really don’t know what an explanation of the mind would look like. Which seems consistent with my point that we don’t really know how to explain the mind, right? If we could define clear parameters for how to explain it, we’d be well on our way to explaining it. I don’t think we even know what we don’t know we don’t know, at this point.
Noah, I think that Owen is trying to parse the difference between calling something a “problem” (we don’t know X; I wonder how we can find out) and calling something a “mystery” (we can never know; X is irreducible to our ways of knowing).
Calling something “spooky” — or, to use your terms, calling something a miracle, even in a way that is only “metaphorically” truthful — smacks of mystery, not humility. It is the ultimate form of knowingness, I would say.
I appreciate Horgan and his fellow mysterians, and I am enough of a Sartrean to embrace your vision of human beings conceptually thrusting themselves, through language, into the future. But your dismissal of Corballis’s scientific enterprise — his evidence, his method — seems unwarranted and bit unfair.
For instance, looking for examples of language-use and/or recursive/predictive thining in animals, or moments where recursive thinking and non-recursive languages come together in humans seems like *exactly* the way in which one would explore this problem scientifically. Making claims about theories of mind based on animal behavior seem little different from exploring the existence of theories of mind in infants – or, for that matter, in adults. (After all, spoken language itself is a form of behavior that acts, imperfectly, as an index to intentional states.)
To knock Corballis by saying, “I’ll guess we’ll never know since we can’t ask the gorillas” or “There’s disagreement about vocalizations patterns among gorillas so we can’t hazard any larger claims,” seems completely to miss how science works, especially when your counter-theories do not seem to require any evidence whatsoever, other than the deeper truth of metaphor.
My first comment was written without reference to Owen’s second explanation and your response. Sorry if it seems slightly off-center.
I don’t really quite get how saying “it doesn’t seem like we know this, and I don’t see how we’re likely to know it” is hubris. Unless any skepticism directed at science is hubris, since only science is true humility. I don’t really buy that, but I think it’s the paradigm on which our culture often functions, more or less.
Corballis’ claims don’t seem to match up at all with what the science indicates. He says stuff about mirror neurons without really pointing out that the research isn’t there to back it up. I get why you want to do that in a popular book, but I don’t think it’s anti-scientific to point out that his claims and his evidence are really, really far apart. Science just does not mean you get to pull stuff out of your ass and then put the caveats in the footnotes and have people take you seriously.
Peter hit the nail on the head. If searching for human consciousness really is a fruitless endeavor, it’s in no need of your comment. Particularly because you just said that you wouldn’t know what a good explanation would look like if you saw one. Leave us starry-eyed space cadet scientists to our dreaming and tinkering.
If you have no criterion for what you would want to see in order to have a satisfactory explanation, then from what perspective are you attempting to level the explanations of others?
Except that the starry-eyed scientists aren’t happy to stay in their own land and leave everybody alone, are they? They kind of rule the world, with their pragmatism and their insistence that they can make people run better and faster and stronger if they can just have oodles of funding and can torture the odd rat or thousand and can ignore the pesky footnotes.
I don’t really have a problem with people doing research or trying to figure out how the mind works. I don’t think it’ll get anywhere in particular, but pursuing knowledge is fine. But the idea that the actions of scientists have no real world consequences, and that only experts should be allowed to comment on them, is pernicious in the extreme.
It’s a question of power– knowledge about knowledge is the ultimate recursive authority-claim– especially when “recursion” is the very motif of that knowledge. Sublime gnosis.
What do you think explains gendered sexuality/ What do you think will resolve relativity and quantum physics? I feel fine trusting that everything will be broken down to a circuit diagram eventually, but I don’t think that will solve all the problems of sentience. Putting a bookmark on our ignorance and calling it negativity, versus calling it recursion, hardly seems more hubristic.
I don’t think at all that only experts should be allowed to comment on the doings of scientists. In fact, I think the person on the street probably has a better notion of what makes a human person is than most scientists.
If your problem, though, is with the human/animal/environmental costs of scientific endeavor, then I’m right there alongside you. I went to philosophy grad school, not a developmental psych research institution. However, the tone of the original article was taking umbrage with the actual ideas at work. You seem to be criticizing from a place with no position, which makes your critical range infinite. No explanation (or endeavor) is so air tight that it can stand up to skepticism without criterion. It makes every explanation meaningless, because you can refuse reasons at your discretion. It’s like arguing with someone who, in return, punches you in the nose.
It’s not like that, though. Violence isn’t a metaphor.
I’m criticizing from the position of a layperson who finds the idea of recursion as the basis of consciousness interesting, but think that the arguments made in this book add up to a whole lot of nothing, and don’t even come close to proving the sweeping claims that the author sets out. I don’t know why that’s either unfair or illogical.
And the practical things done in the name of science have a lot to do with the ideas that science claims to be able to provide. If you think you can unlock all the keys to human consciousness, then torturing a few rats seems like a worthwhile price to pay. Skepticism as to the plausibility of the ends is an important part of trying to argue that, no, in fact, any means are not worthwhile.
Do you think that language can’t be a form of violence? That’s fair, I’m just wondering. People in power often refuse the reasons of those who aren’t as viable and it often looks like violence to me.
Regardless, we’re getting at the real motivations/agenda underneath the tone of the article, and that’s what I was looking for from the beginning. I like the slight turn that we’ve taken now, which I think is a good one. If you were willing to entertain the idea that recursion is the basis of consciousness, but then found it unsatisfactory by the claims of its own account, I have no problem with that. I think that there is a slight difference between that and saying that you have, to quote, “I really don’t know what an explanation of the mind would look like.” Am I wrong in thinking there’s a tension between claiming that you wouldn’t know what an explanation looked like and then evaluating what you considered an attempt at an explanation? I didn’t accuse you of being unfair or illogical. It’s simply hard, if not impossible, to have a conversation with somebody when they will not accept any reason that you give because you think that the thing at stake does not admit of reasons. No amount of straight talk about the subject will convince some believers there is no God, simply because they won’t accept any reasons that you give them. Similarly, no amount of straightforward reason giving will convince climate skeptics because they have decided in advance that they will not accept the sort of reasons on offer. Which is all fine and good. It just moves us out of the region of conversation and into the region of not having all that much to say to each other at all, unless you can connect via narrative or some other indirect method.
As to your final paragraph, I personally think that it’s going to be hard to convince people that it is impossible to explain much of anything. Saying “You can’t do that.” is rarely an effective tactic in the realm or morality or anywhere else. Asking about the desirability of a certain goal or the ordering of priorities seems like a more plausible (if a bit more liberal) way of convincing people of the proper ends of their attention.
You’ve got the last word (if you want it), in this line of conversation, by the way. Good talk. If you ask me questions, I will, of course, oblige.
I don’t think it’s right to equate arguments about God and arguments about climate science. There are lots of good reasons to say that scientific straight talk is not especially applicable to the first. Not so much the second.
Language can be violence, or used in violent ways; I’ll agree with that, perhaps backtracking somewhat. I don’t think expressing skepticism in the way I was necessarily is much like punching anyone in the nose, though.
I think that efficacy and plausibility are actually hugely effective arguments, or groundworks for arguments. I think it’s true that at our current cultural moment, we are reluctant to take “we can’t do that” for an answer. But I think that we’d be a lot better off if we’d take more seriously propositions like, “we really can’t fix Afghanistan,” or “there just is not any good way to make every citizen of the United States absolutely safe in every way, so maybe we should reassess our security policy in light of that.”
I don’t necessarily think it’s contradictory to say, “I don’t really know what a good explanation of this would look like,” and also to say, “this particular explanation is not convincing.” And to also say, I don’t really know that there is going to be a convincing explanation of this thing. For example, I don’t really understand string theory especially well, but if you told me that it functioned through a system of wires and pulleys, I would be skeptical.
Language can certainly be violent– which is why discussing these kinds of truth-claims as forms of claiming power (authority) makes sense. It is possible to not deny scientific truth-claims and still deny ultimate gnosis.
Dear Mr. Berlatsky,
Corballis’ argument that language originated in gesture has at least one forerunner — Condillac, who in his Essay on Language imagines that early humans spoke in a language of gesture. He suggests that the language was not purely mimetic, but quite highly developed and was only slowly replaced by “sounded” language. It’s interesting to see that the idea of a language of gesture is being revived.