The End of Faith (35 page)

In physical terms, every action is clearly reducible to a totality of impersonal events
merely propagating their influence: genes are tran- scribed, neurotransmitters bind to
their receptors, muscle fibers contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. For
our commonsense notions of agency to hold, our actions cannot be merely lawful products of
our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to pre- dict
themand yet, were our actions to be actually divorced from such a causal network, they
would be precisely those for which we could claim no responsibility. It has been
fashionable, for several decades now, to spec- ulate about the manner in which the
indeterminacy of quantum processes, at the level of the neuron or its constituents, could
yield a form of mental life that might stand free of the causal order; but such
speculation is entirely oblique to the matter at handfor an indeterminate world, gov-
erned by chance or quantum probabilities, would grant no more auton- omy to human agents
than would the incessant drawing of lots. In the face of any real independence from prior
causes, every gesture would seem to merit the statement “I don't know what came over me.”
Upon the horns of this dilemma, fanciers of free will can often be heard making shrewd use
of philosophical language, in an attempt to render our intuitions about a person's moral
responsibility immune to worries about causation. (See Ayer, Chisholm, Strawson,
Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watsonall in G. Watson, ed., Free Will [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982].) Although we can find no room for it in the causal
order, the notion of free will is still accorded a remarkable deference in philosophical
and scientific literature, even by scientists who believe that the mind is entirely
dependent upon the workings of the brain.

What most people overlook is that free will does not even correspond to any subjective fact about us. Consequently, even rigorous introspec- tion soon grows as hostile to the
idea of free will as the equations of physics have, because apparent acts of volition
merely arise, sponta- neously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it
makes no difference), and cannot be traced to a point of origin in the stream of
consciousness. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny and the reader might observe that
he no more authors the next thought he thinks than the next thought I write. We may have
the ethical obligation to preserve certain rocks for future generations, but this is an
obligation we would have with respect to other people, not with respect to the rocks
themselves. The equation of a crea- ture's being conscious with there being “something
that it is like to be”

NOTES TO PAGES I74-I75 275

said creature comes from T. Nagel, “What Is It like to Be a Bat,” in Mor-

tal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). 9 That is, they felt no pain, in the phenomenal sense; even Descartes could see that animals avoided certain
stimulihe just didn't think that there was “something that it was like” for them to do so.
His error here is based on a kernel of truth: it is conceivable that something could seem to be conscious without being conscious (i.e., passing the Turing test says nothing about whether or not a physical
system actually is conscious; it just leaves us feeling, from the outside, that it probably is). Behaviorism
amounts to the doctrine that seeming to be conscious is all there is to being conscious. If even a kernel of truth is to be found lurking here, I

have yet to find it. 10 Cited in J. M. Masson and S. McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The

Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), 18. 11 The stakes here should be obvious. What is it like to be a chimpanzee? If we knew more
about the details of chimpanzee experience, even our most conservative use of them in
research might begin to seem uncon- scionably cruel. Were it possible to trade places with
one of these crea- tures, we might no longer think it ethical to so much as separate a
pair of chimpanzee siblings, let alone perform invasive procedures on their bodies for
curiosity's sake. It is important to reiterate that there are surely facts of the matter
to be found here, whether or not we ever devise methods sufficient to find them. Do pigs
led to slaughter feel something akin to terror? Do they feel a terror that no decent man
or woman would ever knowingly impose upon another sentient creature? We have, at present,
no idea at all. What we do know (or should) is that an answer to this question could have
profound implications, given our

current practices. All of this is to say that our sense of compassion and ethical respon-

sibility tracks our sense of a creature's likely phenomenology. Compas- sion, after all,
is a response to sufferingand thus a creature's capacity to suffer is paramount. Whether or not a fly is “conscious” is not pre- cisely the point.
The question of ethical moment is, What could it possi- bly be conscious of?

Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether or not ani- mals have conscious
mental states at all. It is legitimate to ask how and to what degree a given animal's
experience differs from our own (Does a chimpanzee attribute states of mind to others?
Does a dog recognize himself in a mirror?), but is there really a question about whether
any

nonhuman animals have conscious experience? I would like to suggest that there is not. It
is not that there is sufficient experimental evidence to overcome our doubts on this
score; it is just that such doubts are unrea- sonable. Indeed, no experiment could prove
that other human beings have conscious experience, were we to assume otherwise as our working hypothesis.

The question of scientific parsimony visits us here. A common mis- construal of parsimony
regularly inspires deflationary accounts of animal minds. That we can explain the behavior of a dog without resort to notions of consciousness or mental states
does not mean that it is easier or more elegant to do so. It isn't. In fact, it places a
greater burden upon us to explain why a dog brain (cortex and all) is not sufficient for consciousness, while human brains are.
Skepticism about chimpanzee consciousness seems an even greater liability in this respect.
To be biased on the side of withholding attributions of consciousness to other mammals is
not in the least parsimonious in the scientific sense. It actually entails a gratuitous
proliferation of theoryin much the same way that solipsism would, if it were ever
seriously entertained. How do I know that other human beings are conscious like myself?
Philosophers call this the problem of “other minds,” and it is generally acknowledged to
be one of reason's many cul de sacs, for it has long been observed that this problem, once
taken seri- ously, admits of no satisfactory exit. But need we take it seriously?

Solipsism appears, at first glance, to be as parsimonious a stance as there is, until I
attempt to explain why all other people seem to have minds, why their behavior and physical structure are more or less iden- tical to
my own, and yet I am uniquely consciousat which time it reveals itself to be the least
parsimonious theory of all. There is no argu- ment for the existence of other human minds
apart from the fact that to assume otherwise (that is, to take solipsism as a serious
hypothesis) is to impose upon oneself the very heavy burden of explaining the (apparently
conscious) behavior of zombies. The devil is in the details for the solip- sist; his
solitude requires a very muscular and inelegant bit of theorizing to be made sense of.
Whatever might be said in defense of such a view, it is not in the least “parsimonious.”

The same criticism applies to any view that would make the human brain a unique island of
mental life. If we withhold conscious emotional states from chimpanzees in the name of
“parsimony,” we must then explain not only how such states are uniquely realized in our
own case but also why so much of what chimps do as an apparent expression of emo-

NOTES TO PAGES 175-177 277

tionality is not what it seems. The neuroscientist is suddenly faced with the task of
finding the difference between human and chimpanzee brains that accounts for the
respective existence and nonexistence of emotional states; and the ethologist is left to
explain why a creature, as apparently angry as a chimp in a rage, will lash out at one of his rivals without feel- ing anything
at all. If ever there was an example of a philosophical dogma creating empirical problems
where none exist, surely this is one.

12 For a recent review of the cognitive neuroscience of moral cognition see W. D. Casebeer,
“Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 840-46. It is clearly too early to draw any strong conclusions from this
research.

13 There is a wide literature on morality and ethicsI use these words inter- changeablybut
like most writers who have pretensions to “first philos- ophy,” I have not found much use
for it here. In considering questions of ethics, I think we should exhaust the resources
of common sense before we begin ransacking the armory of philosophies past. In this, my
intu- itions are vaguely Kantian and therefore lead me to steer as clear of Kant as of any
other philosopher. Putting the matter this waypurporting to take “common sense” in hand,
where others have gotten mired in tech- nicalitiesrisks begging many of the questions that
certain readers will want to ask. Indeed, one person's common sense is invariably
another's candidate for original sin. The manner in which I have circumscribed the domain
of ethics is also somewhat idiosyncratic, and consequently my account will fail to catch
some of the concerns that people regularly con- sider to be integral to the subject. This,
as far as I can see, is not so much a weakness of my approach as one of its strengths,
because I believe that our map of the moral wilderness should be redrawn. The complex
inter- relationships between morality, law, and politics will also be set aside for the
present. While these domains certainly overlap, an analysis of their mutual (and well
contested) influence upon one another is beyond the scope of this book.

14 A circularity is surely lurking here, since only those who have demon- strated the
requisite degree of convergence will be deemed “adequate.” This circularity is not unique
to ethics, however; nor is it a problem. That we generally require people to demonstrate
an understanding of current theories before we take their views seriously does not mean
that revolu- tions in our understanding of the world are not possible.

15 C. Hitchens, “Mommie Dearest,” Slate, Oct. 20, 2003, slate.msn.com. 16 R. Rorty, Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in

Philosophy (Taipei: Institute of European and American Studies,

Academia Sinica, 1999), 90-91. 17 William James is usually considered the father of pragmatism. Whether

he should be viewed as having extended the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, or
utterly debauched it, seems to be very much an open questionone that can be persuasively
answered either way by consult- ing James in half his moods. There is no doubt that the
great man con- tradicted himself greatly. As George Santayana said, “The general agreement
in America to praise [James] as a marvelous person, and to pass on, is justified by
delight at the way he started, without caring where he went.” (See his Persons and Places [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963], 401.) For the tenets of pragmatism, I have principally
relied on the work of Richard Rorty, who articulates this philosophical position as
clearly and consistently as any of its fans or critics could wish.

18 The emphasis on utility, rather than on truth, can be easily caricatured and
misunderstoodand has been ever since William James first articu- lated the principles of
pragmatism in a lecture before the Philosophical Union of the University of California in
1898. Far from being the absur- dity of wishful thinking that Bertrand Russell lampooned
in his History of Western Philosophywhere we encounter a wayward pragmatist finding it useful to believe that every man in
sight is named Ebenezer Wilkes Smithwhen presented in all its subtleties, pragmatism can
be made to seem synonymous with every species of good sense. One can easily find oneself
careening, in a single hour, through the stages that James sketched for the career of any
successful theory: at first it appears ridiculous; then true but trivial; then so
important that one is tempted to say that one knew it all along.

19 P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 171. 20 We should note that realism is an epistemological position, not an onto- logical one. This
is a regular source of confusion in philosophy. It is often assumed, for instance, that
realism is opposed to various forms of ideal- ism and subjectivism and, indeed, to certain
developments in the physi- cal sciences (like Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics)
that seem to grant the mind a remarkable role in the governance of creation. But if the
moon does not exist unless someone is looking at it, this would still be a realistic truth
(in that it would be true, whether or not anyone knew that this is the way the world
works). To say that reality has a definite character is not to say that this character
must be intelligible to us, or that it might not be perversely shiftyor, indeed, that
consciousness and

NOTES TO PAGE l 8 l 279

thought might not play some constitutive role in defining it. If reality changes its
colors every time a physicist blinks his eyes, this would still be a realistic truth.

21 There is a naive version of realism that has few defenders today. It is the view of the
world that most of us inherit along with ten fingers and ten toes and maintain in
innocence of philosophy. Such realism holds that the world is more or less as common sense
would have it: tables and chairs really exist in a physical space of three dimensions;
grass is green; the sky is blue; everything is made of atoms; and every atom is crammed
with particles tinier still. The basic view is that our senses, along with their
extensionstelescopes, microscopes, etc.merely deliver us the facts of the universe as they
are. While being an indispensable heuristic for making one's way in the world, this is not
the stuff of which current scientific and philosophical theories are made. Nor is it the
form of real- ism that any philosophical realist currently endorses.