waking to discover

for much of this afternoon I have been dreaming that I am in an armchair reading Raymond Tallis and waking to find that I am. None the less, his latest book, which I am reviewing for the Graun is very important. Amongst other things, it is a prolonged and lethal attack on the Churchlands, and, to a lesser extent, Daniel Dennett. Below the fold a sample of the argument.


bq.. The fundamental error of evolutionary epistemology and, indeed, all neurobiologically and biologically-based accounts of human cognition is that it denies the gap between the knower and the known. Because it denies this gap, it cannot accommodate the notion of ‘truth’ which, as We have seen, is most typically about a correspondence between one entity (for example, a sentence) and another (for example, a state of affairs) achieved through an identity of senses. Closer coupling achieved by the fit between neural activity and the exigencies of the environment – so that the one triggers the other – does not constitute a truth or knowledge relation. Without the gap, the uncoupling, these relationships collapse into one of mere causation.

The causal interaction between organism and environment – howsoever finely tuned to ensure the immediate and long-term needs of the organism – does not amount to a truth relation, a knowing relation, or even a sensing relation.

Which, from the point of view of (materialist) evolution, is no great loss. For if it is survival that you are after, unconscious mechanisms are the better bet. Actions informed by knowledge tested to be true after deliberation seem a cumbersome method of interacting with the environment to promote survival. A gene that is really ‘selfish’ and really does know its business is hardly likely to requisition for its survival an organism that engages with the environment in this ponderous way -or not in the first instance, or for the first few million years anyway. After all, it is only in recent centuries, too late for evolutionary mechanisms to have had a hand in it, that knowledge, and actions informed by declarative knowledge, have greatly extended our power to make the world safe for ourselves. From the evolutionary point of view, knowledge (and agency and deliberateness) are as useful as a hole in the head. Not only, then, does materialist evolutionary theory fail to deliver knowledge, truth, deliberateness and agency, but they are of little or no evolutionary value. As I have remarked elsewhere previously,18 if you were serious about survival, which would you choose, an errorless mechanism or knowledge-mediated activity, with all its room for error at the inception of knowledge and technology?

Freedom, deliberateness of action, etc., therefore, make absolutely no sense within the evolutionary framework – not just because of the
latter’s materialism but because mechanisms are more reliably and more perfectly coupled to needs (seen in the wider sense) than are free actions. Mechanisms, by definition, cause things to happen more efficiently, smoothly and reliably than actions can bring them about and there are things that are ‘achieved’ by mechanisms – most things, including amazing tours de force such as building a human brain in utero – that no deliberate action can begin to match. Even though it is comparative advantage we are talking about, we could imagine that more comparative advantage could accrue to a beast with better mechanisms (including instincts) than to a creature encumbered with self-consciousness. The progressive fine-tuning of instincts would seem to be a more effective strategy than an increasingly persuasive illusion of free action.

Truth, agency, knowledge, therefore, have no place in the Darwinian scheme; the very fact that we now elude the survival of the fittest – or that fitness is being redescribed in all sorts of unbiological ways that make no sense in nature – shows how unDarwinian we are. The emptiness of evolutionary epistemology, with its reduction of the criteria of truth to survival, lies in the fact that distinctively human knowledge began to deliver on the Darwinian imperative of survival only long after humans had parted company with the natural world. Knowledge works only for an animal uncoupled by knowledge from nature. This is the animal that operates less with what is before her than with possibilities and for whom what is actually before her is a realisation of general possibilities, and a source of future possibilities. Knowing humans are connected to the world through possibilities, which do not exist in nature (since nature is composed entirely of actualities), not just through energy exchanges.

The most striking flaw of the neo-Darwinian accounts of human beings is that it overlooks the discontinuity between Man and nature that is written into the very structure of knowledge. The Knowing Animal confronts nature as something that is before him, set over and against him. And out of this confrontation, and the connected collectivisation of consciousness, comes a second nature, a human world created within the biological universe. Evolutionary epistemology fails to see that knowledge is an awakening out of the immersed condition of beasts; from their conditions of being coupled mechanisms. We humans uniquely wake out of and to nature. As Schelling put it: ‘Nature opens its eyes within man and notices that it exists.’

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2 Responses to waking to discover

  1. It’s all a bit species-chauvinistic, isn’t it? I’m probably reading it wrongly, but from this you’d think that there’s no range of cognitive abilities in nature, that there’s Man The Knowing Animal, apart and seperate from the all of the rest. That is, to put it mildly, utter bollocks. It’s a curve. Hell, Gorilla’s hold wakes, for goodness sake. If that’s not abstract knowledge in action, what is?

    After all, it is only in recent centuries, too late for evolutionary mechanisms to have had a hand in it, that knowledge, and actions informed by declarative knowledge, have greatly extended our power to make the world safe for ourselves. From the evolutionary point of view, knowledge (and agency and deliberateness) are as useful as a hole in the head.

    Tallis needs to watch more animals in the wild. The squirrel hiding nuts, or the bonobos punishing free riders in their groups, or the co-operative behaviours of any number of species would seem to me to show that knowledge and deliberateness and agency are very useful indeed, and all the more useful the more you have. That seems a very strong evolutionary principle to me.

  2. oh, dear me, an aberrant apostrophe to boot. damn it all

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