1 Griffin and Edelman on Animal Minds
Man is the paragon of animals, Hamlet said. Indeed, by nearly all measures Man is the best of beasts. Noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in form and moving, express and admirable in action, and so on – but at bottom still a beast who fills Hamlet with disgust. Hamlet is weary of the humanist declarations of the grandeur of Man that have resounded down the ages. Man is the measure of things, pronounced Protagoras at the start of Western Philosophy. Whatever he meant by that grandiloquent utterance, it is true that Man is capable of taking the measure of things – so perhaps, better put, Man is the measurer of things. And that capacity, usually called reason, comes from the extraordinary mind that Man undeniably possesses. Whatever Man is or is not relates to this mind. Hence, what is mind and where does it come from, that is the question, which will be our concern in this and the next chapter. To answer it we must first turn to the animals, among which, as said, Man is the paragon.
Man’s mind is, indeed, exceptional; but Man is not the only animal with a mind. There are other animals that also have minds. In fact, if there were no other species of animals with minds then Man could not have attained one, at least according to Charles Darwin. In an evolutionary sense this is undoubtedly true, for the human mind could not have derived from mindless creatures directly, only from those that already have minds. Hence, to understand the nature of the human mind we must know its origin in animal mind and study that first. Only that understanding will enable us to know what humans inherited from their animal ancestors; and also how they have surpassed their atavistic heritage to become the paragon of animals.
But do animals, apart from Man, have minds? There have been many philosophers, most notoriously Descartes, who have denied this; he maintained that animals are mere bodies and that bodies are machines or automata; a fateful pronouncement whose full force has not been felt till the present time when computing machines were invented. Descartes allowed, of course, that humans, too, have bodies, but he held that they are more than mere bodies since they have minds to initiate and direct their bodily motions, whereas animals lack any such volitional or intellective faculties.
The general term that Descartes uses for these faculties is the Latin “mentis”, but mostly he employs the synecdoche of “pensée” or thought for the whole of the mind. Descartes has still not completely escaped the traditional Aristotelian conception which endowed the lower faculties of nourishment and sensitivity to the body, treating them as vegetative and sensitive psyches, and therefore as bodily and separate from nous or thought, the intellective faculty of mind. Hence, Descartes has no hesitations in ascribing sensations, perceptions and emotions to animals. However, he gives a purely physiological account of these in terms of material animal spirits that bring about bodily effects. Clearly, there is some confusion in Descartes as to what is or is not mental; he is not what we would now call a consistent Dualist, for that came only later with Locke. We shall return to this point in our account of Descartes in Chapter 6.
In more recent times the denial of mind to animals has come from the Behaviourists. Animals are treated as reflex organisms subject to stimulus and response reactions and only capable of changing their reactions through classical conditioning, such as Ivan Pavlov investigated, or operant conditioning such as J.B. Skinner studied. Behaviourism is, of course, equally a rejection of the presence and operative role of mind in humans as well, who are also taken to be stimulus-response organisms, in that respect no different from animals. At this point we shall not consider any further philosophic or scientific points of view that deny mind altogether. Whether this includes neo-Behaviourist philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein and more recently Daniel Dennett is a moot point we shall also not debate here.1 To what extent Cognitivist psychologists and philosophers in general are also implicated in a denial of mind we will leave for later consideration in Chapter 7.
If we grant minds to animals, at least as a working presupposition, then there are three difficult questions to be settled. The first concerns the question whether all animals have minds or only some. If it is the latter, then which are the animals with minds, and where and how is the cut off point between them and those without minds to be drawn? This is an issue we have already raised in Chapter 1 on the origin of animal mind and we will pursue it much further here. The second question has to do with the nature of animal mind: is animal mind the same as human mind or are there fundamental differences between them? If it is the latter, then what are these differences, and how do they manifest themselves? A third question has to do with the emergence of mind in animals due to evolutionary developments: how does evolution generate mind? What kinds of changes are relevant? Is it only a matter of the size and
The approach we shall adopt in answering these questions is an evolutionary and ecological one in line with that which Darwin originally presented in his The Descent of Man (1871). It is evolutionary in that we shall consider the full range of animal capacities in a comparative way, seeking to order species in a hierarchy of abilities as well as one of phylogenetic descent; for the two need not necessarily coincide, as, for example, some cephalopods are more intelligent than many vertebrates. It is ecological in so far as any such capacities must be related to an animal’s environment, its Umwelt to use a term coined by Johann von Uexküll. The nature of Umwelt – the environmental niche that an animal inhabits and to which it responds – is a crucial factor in determining its mental powers. Darwin, like many other ethologists since, tended to be unduly impressed by single cognitive feats found in certain animal species, often based on reports he had gleaned from purely anecdotal sources. He did not place these in the context of the animal’s full range of activities in relation to its environment. He was right, however, in pointing to the continuities that hold between animals and humans, above all the abilities displayed by apes which are so close to the human level.
If we grant minds to humans, then we are bound to grant minds to the higher apes, especially to chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives, who in most respects behave as we do, even though there are crucial differences, as we shall see. Such apes have the full panoply of faculties present in humans, not excluding thought and creativity, but at a much more primitive level. All the main faculties of mind are certainly there: apes perceive and act, they have sensations and feel emotions, they express themselves and communicate, they enter into complex and sophisticated social and even personal relations with their conspecifics as well as human beings. The work of Jane Goodall on chimpanzees in their natural environment is very convincing in all these respects. The work of all those trying to teach apes language, albeit unsuccessfully, such as David Premack, reveals how close apes can come to this archetypal human accomplishment without actually mastering it. The reasons for the failure of apes to acquire language has generated much controversy, advisedly so, for it is a key aspect in determining what separates animals minds from human minds. For the differences between these two types of minds are much more fundamental than Darwin supposed and as other ethologists who have followed in his footsteps maintain; which is not to deny evolutionary continuity between them.
Thus there is no doubt that apes have minds. But as we go lower down the evolutionary ladder doubts begin to arise. We can move from apes to dogs with
Purely intuitively considered, most people would maintain that dogs obviously have minds and frogs just as evidently do not. Some who are more knowledgeable are inclined to say that rats are somewhere close to the boundary between the two realms of mindless and mindful creatures. It seems that with rats and such “small deer”, as poor Tom in King Lear calls them, we first begin to perceive the lineaments of mind. If that is so, then it is at this liminal point that the emergence of mind first begins. In terms of the quintessence of dust, it is where the transition occurs from E3, the origin of animal life as such, to E4, the origin of mind. The next major transition, that from E4 to E5, lies much higher up the evolutionary scale, somewhere between chimpanzees and homo sapiens, but at that point there is an evolutionary gap as the relevant in-between hominin species are extinct. In what follows we shall see to what extent this purely intuitive sense of things can be vindicated by science and philosophy.
We begin considering these matters by taking the views of those who are at the opposite pole to those who hold that no animals have minds, these are the people who believe that all animals have minds. There are numerous ethologists, psychologists, evolutionary theorists, and a few philosophers who explicitly or implicitly maintain this view, or come very close to it. Certainly, hardly anyone believes that amoebas have minds, but even that apparently egregious opinion is upheld by those who think of mind as being present to various degrees in all animals, such that zero degree of mind is only to be found in non-living inert matter. But that is an extreme position that only very few in the West ever entertained, though it is common in the East due to the religious beliefs of Jains and Buddhists.
An important representative of those who adopt a very catholic view on animal mind is the ethologist Donald Griffin. He tends to be very impressed with single startling examples of behaviour and is all too ready to assign mind and all its attributes, such as consciousness, intentionality and thought, on the basis of remarkable communicative performances alone. One such example is the so-called “dance language” of honeybees as investigated by Karl von Frisch,
Griffin calls this “communicative behaviour” and has no hesitation in ascribing mental concepts both to individual bees as well as to swarms. Thus he states that “all this communicative versatility certainly suggests that the bees are expressing simple thoughts, as I have argued elsewhere.”5 He confirms this in stating that “bees are thinking about cavities, and are able to change their ‘allegiance’ from one they have discovered themselves to a better one they have learned about as recipients of symbolic information from the dances of one of their sisters.”6 He caps off the idea that bees engage in “symbolic information” with a long quote from Carl Jung, with which apparently he agrees, and which contains the assertions that “this kind of message is no different in principle from information conveyed by a human being [and] we would certainly regard such behaviour as a conscious and intentional act and can hardly imagine how anyone could prove in a court of law that it had taken place unconsciously…”7
That might well be so if a bee could be put on oath and tested in a court of law for veracity. But not only can a bee not be put into the witness box or even put on trial, it cannot pass the simplest test that a rat can perform with ease; after all, bees cannot learn to run mazes. Griffin, however, likens the location capacities of bees to those of rats, as he puts it.
Gould interprets these data as demonstrating that honeybees employ what are called “cognitive maps”; that is, they have some sort of internal representation of the geometric relationships of important major landmarks and use this to orient their flight when displaced to a novel location within the area with which they are familiar. Similar experiments
with rats and other vertebrates have been carried out by Tolman and others, but insects had not been believed capable of this level of cognition.8
If bees are as cognitively aware as rats, then it follows that if we grant minds to rats we must do so to bees as well. Griffin certainly believes so when he ascribes to them a capacity to think. Jung apparently goes much further than that and believes that they have minds that fall not much short of those of humans. Most probably Griffin would not wish to go as far as that, but frequently, in the language he uses, he expressed himself along the same lines. However, a purely mechanistic explanation for the behaviour of bees is not difficult to envisage.
Clearly, something has gone seriously awry with many peoples’ idea of what is mind and on what basis it can be assigned. Mind, we shall contend, is a holistic concept that can only to ascribed on the basis of a syndrome of defining criteria, not all of which need to be present at once in every case, some might be absent, provided most others obtain; that is to say, mind is not any one thing, but a collection of mental attributes or faculties. The syndrome includes such obvious things as the faculties of perception, sensation, emotion, cognition, attention, perceptual learning and in higher species episodic memory; and overall the kind of behaviour that is purposive. That is to say, the creature must at least to some degree show problem-solving intelligence and learning capacity requiring flexible adaptability that is more than just conditioned responses. This is merely a provisional list of criteria, for only a textbook of animal psychology would be able to exhaustively enumerate them all. Yet we can intuitively apply such a syndrome of capacities to animals. To give a simple example, the experiments in problem solving carried out by Berndt Heinrich on captive ravens seem to be convincing enough for anyone to agree that ravens are highly intelligent birds and can coordinate all their mental faculties in efficient ways to solve difficult problems; which would make it very controversial to deny them minds, unless other contrary evidence is forthcoming.9 The same conclusion applies to Alex the parrot trained by Irene Pepperberg.10 As for other species of less capable and less intelligent birds, the evidence is equivocal, but only an exhaustive investigation of all their faculties would make a judgement possible. Bees would obviously fail such a testing procedure. The main differences between insects, reptiles, fish and some birds as opposed to mammals in general is, as Donald states, that the latter are “much faster learners, have more powerful memories, can map out and retain a large
The ascription of mind to animals is an interpretative procedure that might be called “mind reading” for it shares some of the hermeneutic procedures of reading a strange text. In both cases one formulates initial hypotheses on the basis of the immediately available evidence and then one tests this against the whole text or the animal’s total performance and capacities. One then amends the initial hypothesis or makes a new one and then tests this against the holistic sense one has gained of the animal in the course of getting to know it. And the more one learns about what the animal can or cannot do, the surer becomes one’s “mind reading” skill and the more reliable one’s judgement. Hence, only those who work closely with given species of animals are in a position to exercise such a judgement. On the whole, one would prefer the judgement of ethologists and animal psychologists to that of animal trainers or the owners of pets, even though the latter might have something to teach the former.
If one does predicate mind of an animal, then all its faculties and behaviours must be referred to and described in mental terms; one must be in a position to say that it can exercise most mental faculties and not just one on its own. But conversely, if one denies mind to an animal, then it can do nothing mental and no one single mental attribute can be ascribed to it; all that it does can only be described behaviourally. Thus, strictly speaking, since a bee has no mind, it cannot be properly be said to see, only to detect and respond to visual stimuli; it cannot communicate anything by its location dance, only induce a direction-guiding response in other bees, and so on. It is just the opposite with a raven, since that does seem to have a mind. The birds and the bees cannot be coupled together as easily as this is done in primary school.
This holistic nature of mind is even more to be stressed when considering human minds, as Thompson affirms:
When we describe experience we are describing it as belonging to the whole person, and our descriptions have a holistic and normative character. We describe the interrelations of perceiving, intending, feeling, imagining, and acting and try to make sense of these interrelations in various norm-governed ways. By contrast, when we describe the neural processes on which experience depends, we are describing subpersonal phenomena, and our descriptions do not have this holistic and normative character.12
Thus if a certain body is taken to have a human mind, then most such mental faculties must be at once attributed to it, for these are logically interrelated such that any one mental characteristic entails all kinds of others. The mind is a complex unity not a collection of characteristics. Of course, the kind of unity and coherence that is inherent in the human mind, with its self-conscious subjectivity and Ego agency, is vastly superior to the much lower grade integrity of animal minds, as we shall see in the next chapter. Nevertheless, some such holistic features obtain for animal minds as well, depending on their evolutionary level, for the more evolved and accomplished a species is, the better integrated is its mind.
What we have argued for in relation to animal minds applies all the more so to machines. There, too, the holistic nature of mind must be invoked before applying any one mental characteristic or epithet. No machine can be said to think, see, decide, reason or do anything mental since mind as a whole cannot be ascribed to machines, at least not for the present devised or for the foreseeable future ones. Whether that day will ever come when we will be able to speak of machines as having minds is not something which can “in principle” be established or refuted, it is an undecidable proposition. Though the question of whether a device that begins to approach a mind can any longer be spoken of as a machine is one we will consider more closely in Chapter 7. As we have argued in relation to animals, one must not be overly impressed with the single performances of which machines are capable, such as playing chess or recognizing faces, which, if performed by humans, who obviously have minds, attest to high intelligence and perceptual discrimination, but if performed by machines without minds do no such thing.
There are, of course, extreme cases of brain damage or degenerative diseases where an animal or a human being can partially or completely lose its mind, though still remaining alive and active. This happens to humans in the late stages of Alzheimer’s when the brain shrivels away. In the case of animals, experimental studies in brain ablation have been carried out to demonstrate analogous phenomena. The psychologist Richard Morris in Edinburgh subjected rats to hippocampal lesions in order to study the deficits that would result in their learning and memory capacities as compared to normal rats, and thereby to elicit the function of the hippocampus. He trained rats to swim to a submerged platform in a tank of cloudy water. Normal rats were able to swim directly to the platform after 10 trials, but impaired rats were not able to do so. The difference between them is even more marked when the point of entry into the tank is varied, as Patricia Churchland reports:
If the starting point is varied, normal rats swim directly to the submerged platform. If the platform site is then shifted, normal rats learn where to go
in one trial, whereas hippocampal [deprived] rats require many trials, This one-trial learning of location is a rough analogue of declarative memory, and the deficits in the hippocampal [deprived] rats are good, if imperfect analogues of declarative-memory deficits in the hippocampal [deprived] patients.13
For people to completely lose their ability to remember anything and only be able to function from moment to moment is tantamount to losing a human mind, though perhaps still retaining an animal type mind. For an animal, such as a hippocampal deprived rat, to be so unmindful of what it has learned, so as to be unable to adjust its behaviour under changed circumstances and have to relearn everything again, is tantamount to losing its animal mind. It degenerates to a purely mindless behaviouristically determined creature.
But even in such extreme cases, the ascription of mind is still an either-or, all-or-none matter. There can be no such thing as degrees of mind, only kinds of mind, which, of course, vary immensely as between different species and ultimately between humans and animals as a whole. A species of animal either has a mind or it does not, it cannot have a little bit of mind, any more than a girl can be a teeny-weeny bit pregnant. There are, as we have just shown, such things as impaired minds both among humans and animals, but that is a matter of damage rather than degree, and it can only apply to individuals not to a whole species.
Thus far we have sought to specify the positive criteria for assigning mind, but we can also establish negative criteria for a denial of mind. What is characteristic of mindless creatures is that their behaviour is utterly rigid, inflexible and stereotypical and their sensory receptors are oriented to a narrow and highly specific range of stimuli. This is exemplified in the famous experiments carried out on frogs by Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts at mit. The frog only reacts to a bug-like stimulus in its environment and to nothing else. Hence it cannot be said to perceive. Its behaviour in response to the stimulus of rapidly darting out its tongue can be wholly described and accounted for in Behaviourist terms of reflex conditioning. The same is true of the remarkable attack-strategy that spiders employ in their hunt for prey; but they, too, as Donald contends, have no consciousness or mind, because “the spider is too narrow, we might suggest, too rigid and too fixed in its repertoire. It seems blissfully unaware of the most significant objects in its large environment…”14 Frogs, too, react purely automatically to a
The psychology of the frog can be fully accounted for on Behaviourist principles, but this is not true of the psychology of the rat or any other animal with a mind. Among the earliest American psychologists to point this out was Edward Tolman, even though he never spoke of mind for that would have been academically suicidal in American psychology departments, “only toward the end of his long and distinguished career did he confess to being a ‘crypto phenomenologist’”, as Griffin puts it.15 In Europe, of course, psychologists had no such inhibitions in applying mind and mentalistic concepts to animals. However, it was Tolman who exposed the shortcomings of the Behaviourist model in accounting for the behaviour of higher animals starting at the very lowest with rats. As Jerome Bruner recounts much later:
Tolman’s big bang was getting rid of what he called a “telephone switch-board” theory of mind and substituting a “map room” model governed by instrumentalism of “means-ends-readiness”, a kind of heuristic teleology.16
Bruner refers specifically to Tolman’s article of 1948 “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men” published in The Psychology Review. Whether one can so neatly bracket mice and men together is now questionable but at the time it seemed a step away from orthodox Behaviourism.
It is true, nevertheless, that for most lower animals the terms of Behaviourism provide an adequate scientific explanation. But even there, Behaviourism is not always enough since this approach refuses to consider what goes on in the brain and treats it as a black box. But without entering into brain neurology it is doubtful whether an explanation can be given for the location abilities of bees for which something like a “map” in the brain has to be postulated. Neurology must be invoked in all such cases where Behaviourism alone is no longer adequate. This is, of course, true for all schools of psychology, even for
In speaking of mind/brain systems, we are only resorting to a short-hand expression for an all-embracing complex that includes much more than what is contained in the hollow of the skull. The brain on its own is certainly the central part of the physical component of that system, but on its own it is only an organ that is inactive and impotent. It is only when it is linked to a body by means of the nervous system, and the body in turn is nestled within a physical environment through locomotion and the senses that the brain can begin to be active. This holds for all animals regardless of their particular niches, including Man; thought Man’s environment is much more than a niche in the physical world, it is the whole of the known world in so far as we can know it.
Man’s environment reaches beyond that of any other animal species, it goes further than the physical world and extends into the non-physical dimension of a historically constituted social, cultural and linguistic world. As we shall show, this means that the human mind also goes further than the body, even though it is inseparable and totally dependent on the body for its existence. It also means that one must not identify the mind with the body either in the way that identity-thesis exponents of Materialism advocate or the way in which certain schools of Phenomenologists come close to advocating when they identify mind with living body, that is, with Leib as opposed to Körper in the way that Husserl uses these terms.
This is true not only for the mind, but for the brain as well, for no human brain can develop independently of the non-physical objective world of society, culture and language, that which Hegel called “objective mind.” This is evidenced by the fact that the infant’s and child’s brain can only develop in the context of the human world, for it is constituted as a human brain through socialization and enculturation, including the acquisition of language, which must take place in a window of opportunity between birth and puberty, for if that is missed then no characteristically human brain will arise. Children brought up completely outside human society do not have human brains, but something quite other for which we have no name for such cases are historically very rare. Thus the human brain is as much the product of language and culture as is the human mind, as Deacon and many others have argued.17
But even when a human brain has been constituted as in an adult, it is still dependent in its functioning on its connection with the body and environment without which it ceases to be properly active. Sensory deprivation experiments have shown that the brain shuts off when deprived of such stimuli
This approach to mind and body as comprising a mind/brain system governed by the logic of emergence is what is explicitly or more usually implicitly inherent in much contemporary neuroscience and psychology. An explicit statement is that by the neurologist Antonio Damasio:
When I say that body and brain form an indissoluble organism, I am not exaggerating. In fact, I am oversimplifying. Consider that the brain receives signals not only from the body but, in some of its sectors, from parts of itself that receive signals from the body. The organism constituted by the brain-body partnership interacts with the environment as an ensemble, the interaction being of neither the body nor the brain alone.18
Damasio is well aware that most such brain-body organisms do not have minds; they are not mind/brain systems. He is adamant that for mind to arise much more is called for than mere behaviour:
But complex organisms such as ours do more than just interact, more than merely generate the spontaneous or reactive external responses known collectively as behaviour. They also generate internal responses, some of which constitute images (visual, auditory, somatosensory, and so on), which I postulate as the basis for mind… Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuit mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and order those images in a process called thought.19
It may well be that the capacity to form such internal images or representations or “maps” is necessary for mind, though it is a matter of dispute among neuroscientists and philosophers, but it is far from sufficient. If it were enough to constitute mind then it would be difficult to deny mind to bees, who most probably constitute some kinds of representations or cognitive “maps” of food sources which they then outwardly represent in their dances. Unfortunately, this is not enough to grant them mind for they fail such obvious tests as being
There are many nervous systems of great complexity (for instance honeybees) that, by any criterion I know do not possess consciousness. Thus one cannot extrapolate directly from neural complexity or neural activity, to awareness. The physical foundations of awareness cannot lie upon some vague general principle that applies to all nervous systems, but rather upon some very specific design features of particular kinds of nervous systems.20
The same conclusion, we would maintain, applies to frogs. However, what are these specific design features that apply to mind? That is not yet known, neurology has still a long way to go.
Nevertheless, all neurological work points to the conclusion that neural complexity or neural activity is the essential precondition in any such design features peculiar to minds. For without an inordinate degree of complexity, one so large as not to be susceptible to surveyability, even in principle, a purely reductivist conclusion would follow that the system in question is merely mechanistic and not a mind/brain system. With a purely mechanistic or behaviouristic brain-body system, there can be no emergence of mind and the logic of emergence, that of an indissoluble non-identity, cannot be applied. This will form the nub of our argument about emergence in Chapter 5. This is the reason that we cannot ascribe an emergent mind to organisms whose behaviour can be explained solely by reference to neural processes alone or by reference to sequences of linear stimulus-response chains, namely, one dimensionally.
The scientific study of the brains of animals has now been going on for some centuries at an ever increasing rate. Tremendous progress has been made since the development of new high technology resolution means of observation and recording and since the riddle of genetic inheritance has begun to be solved by molecular biology. But there is still a long way to go even with the simplest organisms. Decades of research have by now been undertaken on one of the very simplest of all animals, C. elegans a small barely visible worm that has but 959 cells altogether; that began with Sydney Brenner and his team in Cambridge, England in the mid-1960s and has been continued in Cambridge, Massachusetts and many other places all over the world.21 This worm has always exactly
One of the best examples of work in unravelling the brain mechanism of a single function is Eric Kandel’s work on so-called “memory” and “learning” in the sea-snail Aplysia California. As Horgan reports:
Kandel’s group showed that both habituation and sensitization produce molecular changes in neurons controlling Aplysia’s withdrawal reflex. In the case of habituation, neurons discharge fewer neurotransmitting molecules into the synapse connecting them to adjoining neurons; sensitized neurons, conversely, discharge more neurotransmitter. These experiments provide evidence for a proposal, first advanced in the 1950s by Donald Hebb, that learning varies the strength of connections between neurons.23
The Hebbian “fire-wire” rule for the connection of neurons doubtlessly works for all brains, including human ones as well. But that is still very far from showing how these neurons link up to form neural nets, and how such nets interact to constitute behaviour, let alone mental phenomena. As Jerome Kagan remarks “…the big prize is understanding the relation between molecular and behavioural events.”24 But when that prize will be awarded is beyond our predictive powers to determine.
The presence or absence of mind is not directly proportional to the size of a creatures brain or the sheer number of neurons it possesses. This is made evident by Donald in the case of the octopus:
It carried the invertebrate system to its ultimate expression, having somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight hundred million neurons… It has remarkable perceptual intelligence with an exquisite sense of touch and
very good vision. But it does not have very many options as far as action is concerned. It can either approach and eat or run away and hide.25
The reason for this great disparity between brain size as measured in number of neurons and poverty of behavioural repertoire, as Donald explains, is that the octopus “uses up to 80 percent of its central neurons to arrive at such decisions.”26 Otherwise, its “memories are triggered only passively by associative cues. Thus the creature is a slave of its environment unable to conceive of an agenda of its own.”27 On this assessment, it is doubtful whether the octopus can be ascribed a mind. But there might be strong disagreement on this score, especially from those who work with octopi.
In what follows we shall make use of the geometric analogy and speak of one dimensional, two dimensional and three dimensional brain systems. The one dimensional systems are the purely linear physical brain-body systems of mindless organisms. The two dimensional are those where another dimension above the purely linear has to be invoked to account for the observed behaviour of an organism. These are the animals, starting approximately with rats and ravens, to which we assign the emergent attributes of mind and consider them as mind/brain systems in the extended sense previously described. Such creatures must, therefore, be studied psychologically, since they have a psyche in the Aristotelian sense, as well as neurologically and behaviouristically according to the laws of Behaviourist psychology. As we shall presently see, the higher laws of Gestalt and Gibsonian psychology also apply to them. In the next sections we shall seek to show that human beings occupy a still higher dimension of mind, namely, that they are three dimensional mind/brain systems. The grounds for considering these paragons of animals to be in this way above animals and closer to the angels – as Hamlet declares, “how like an angel in apprehension” – we shall examine in the next chapter.
As we shall show, the three kinds of brain systems relate to each other in a hierarchical nesting manner, such that the higher types encapsulate within themselves much of what belongs to the lower types. So that the three dimensional brains also encompass aspects of the two and one dimensional brains. This is what makes the metaphor of dimensions apposite. It is also in keeping with evolutionary developments, for these reveal that earlier structures are never completely expunged but built on and put to different uses in a more evolved context. So it is with the evolution of the brain, where earlier forms
The neurological theory that fits best with our account of one, two and three dimensional brain systems is Gerald Edelman’s theory of neural group selection (tngs) which he develops in a number of books of which The Remembered Present is the most relevant in this context.28 In this work Edelman distinguishes between the operations of the brains of three classes of animals: those that exhibit mere adaptable behaviour without consciousness, those with primary consciousness, and those with higher order consciousness, which corresponds exactly with our three dimensions inherent in the three types of brain systems nested within each other.
As we cannot go into the complexities of brain neurology or the technicalities of tnbs, we shall merely excerpt some of Edelman’s major findings, especially those that are less likely to be disputed. The theory as a whole has been subject to considerable controversy from rivals in the field; when it was first presented it was scathingly reviewed by Francis Crick and others. We cannot go into these arguments here, and given the rapidity of theoretical changes in this fast-moving field, it is possible that they are no longer relevant. It is perhaps ironic to note that Edelman’s collaborator Giulio Tononi and Crick’s collaborator Christof Koch have joined forces in advocating a new Integrated Information theory (iit). We are not in a position to discuss this here; but it will be interesting to see when that theory is in its turn superseded, for no theory in this field lasts very long, and this tells us much concerning the present state of science.
The crucial turning point in Edelman’s account of the evolution of the brain is the emergence of consciousness which we can identify with the origin of mind. This has enormous evolutionary survival advantages for the animals that first accomplish it, as Edelman puts it: “primary consciousness permits an animal to regulate the salience of various parts of a stimulus complex in terms of its own individual adaptive needs and, above all, to guide its actions and behaviour to reach particular goals.”29 For “without a means of developing a composite ‘image’, relieved to some extent of the immediate flux and variation of signals, an animal would be at the mercy of simultaneous but disparate environmental happenings.”30 Edelman’s main concern as a neurologist is to
- (1)perceptual categorization by selective systems in primary and secondary cortices of each modality.
- (2)memory including sequential as well as temporary unitary elements.
- (3)learning and
- (4)a biological self-nonself distinction.31
How all this takes place in the brain is illustrated by the accompanying diagram in Edelman’s book which we cannot explain in detail or reproduce, but must refer the reader to the original source.
Primary consciousness, which develops in what we have called a two dimensional brain system, “may be briefly described as the result of the ongoing discrimination of present perceptual categorization by a value-dominated self-nonself memory.” This is what Edelman calls “present memory”. Memory as recategorization is a specific dynamic process that is crucial to primary consciousness because it involves what Edelman calls a “discriminative bootstrapping – the self-nonself memory must be built of previous perceptual categorizations by a conceptual system. Only after a considerable amount of experience accumulates can detailed conceptual discrimination of current categorization occur.”32 By the term “conceptual discrimination” Edelman means something as basic as perceptual discrimination and categorizations which all sentient animals perform.
Memory as recategorization is explained in terms of generalization of an initial category discrimination which transforms it:
Categories are not immutable but can be altered by the current state of the animal. Indeed, one of the most extraordinary properties of animals capable of perceptual categorization is their ability to generalize: after encounter with a few instances of a category under learning conditions, they can recognize a great number of related but novel instances.33
This results in a kind of memory that is not a fixed reproduction of stored items (as in a computer) but a constantly transforming activity. It transforms the neural processes themselves: “recall, under the influence of constantly changing contexts, changes the structure and dynamics of the neural population
Higher order consciousness, which depends upon a three dimension brain system, develops out of primary consciousness. It is, of course, the consciousness characteristic of humans for one of its main preconditions is language – “a uniquely human activity in its full symbolic and syntactic manifestations, but one foreshadowed in higher primates such as chimpanzees.”36 Language with its “rich syntax and grammar is inconceivable without the ability to produce concepts and primary consciousness, on both of which a subject-predicate relation will ultimately be based.”37 This is as much as to say that higher order consciousness depends on primary consciousness, or in our terminology that a three dimensional brain system is based on and encapsulates a two dimensional one. In this sense, the animal mind is still there within the human mind, and in all kinds of circumstances it can revert back to it and act purely unconsciously as far as higher order consciousness is concerned.
Through having language humans become self-conscious, “they are (with the possible exception of chimpanzees) the only self-conscious animals.”38 Hence they can report directly on their own conscious states, whereas the consciousness of animals “can only be arrived at only by correlating morphology and behaviour … it also rests on the hypothesis that their behaviour is regulated by some sort of image.”39 Unfortunately Edelman provides no specificity as to which animals are conscious and which are not. Thus he provides no answer to our problem of where in the evolutionary continuum of animal species mind begins. Perhaps he considers this a problem for zoologists and ethologists and not for neurologists such as himself. Perhaps, for similar reasons, he is also not too clear as to why chimpanzees might constitute the only non-human exception to the possession of self-consciousness, which, as we shall show in the next chapter, is one of the defining features of humanity. If
2 Gibson and Gregory on Perception
The essential distinctions between mindless animals and those with minds, on the one hand, and between animal and human minds, on the other, can be made across the whole gamut of mental faculties, all those mental attributes apart from which it is not possible to ascribe mind to an organism. For as we argued previously, mind is a holistic concept, it either exists as a whole or not at all, but that whole is made up of mental parts, such as, just to mention a few key faculties, perception, action, motivation, cognition, emotion, imagination, memory and many more. Any one of these cannot exist on its own but only in the context of the whole syndrome of mind. Furthermore, there are intricate entailment relations between them, such as, for example, that between desire, belief, expectation and so on depending on what is desired. This logical integrity of mind is, of course, best exemplified by the human mind. Animal minds are far less integrated, but these too must display some such inner coherence or they cannot be considered minds at all.
As previously explained, “reading” the mind is a kind of hermeneutic activity: we can attribute any one mental characteristic to a body and then proceed to confirm that most of the others of the mental syndrome are there as well. If the test fails then we must withdraw the original attribution or modify it accordingly. Nevertheless, this does not make it impossible to concentrate on one faculty and provide a psychological theory for it alone without having to theorize about all the others as well, provided that it be understood that other faculties have to be also accounted for at least implicitly. This is, in fact, how most of the major schools of psychology proceed. With that proviso in mind, we shall concentrate in this section on just one of the key faculties of mind – perception.
Perception is a crucial faculty for it is what puts an organism in touch with its environment; and sight is the outstanding sense for it enables more of the environment to be perceived than any other. A mindless animal, such as a frog, has sense organs which interact with various stimuli impinging on them from the environment; a frog registers and reacts to bug-like flying objects, but not much else. Hence, it does not perceive, though in a colloquial sense it does “see”. An animal with a mind does perceive for it apprehends a wide variety of
This is only partially the case in animal perception since the animal mind is much more limited than the human mind. It is even less so the case for mindless creatures, which cannot even be properly spoken of as perceiving, since that is a mental act, but in common parlance nobody would deny that an animal with eyes can see. This is a mere terminological problem which should not hold us up as we will differentiate one mode of seeing from another, and come to separate mindless from mindful seeing.
For terrestrial animals sight is the most important of all the senses for it enables them to locate things at a distance, which is crucial for survival. As is well known, different eyes have evolved among a number of species quite independently of each other. The crucial question is not what kind of eyes a creature has or where they are located, which is a physiological issue, but what they can register or see, which is an ethological and psychological one, but which is not to deny that there are close connections between the two factors. Thus, for example, a frog cannot see objects not because of the structure of its eyes alone, but because of the way its whole brain is configured in a one dimensional linear fashion. As a result, its brain can only register stimuli of a very specific kind; otherwise it sees nothing of its immediate environment.
Some mindless animals register very specific and precise single features of their environment, as for example, bees that respond to colours of flowers or spiders to types of prey, but they are stereotypically fixated to those alone, and cannot shift their gaze, as it were, to anything else. Donald remarks that such animals have visual systems that “are designed to carry out certain specialized operations with great efficiency,”40 but are otherwise completely inflexible. However, as he goes on to point out, it is different with animals of a higher evolutionary calibre:
[Insects, fishes, reptiles and frogs] cannot move beyond this and adapt to novel situations. A frog may perceive its mate; it cannot create categories for the other players in its environment. It is inflexible. With birds and mammals the picture changes. They are flexible knowing creatures with
a wide view. This introduces new criteria for awareness, flexibility and adaptability.41
These are, of course, also criteria of mind. We have already seen how ravens, as demonstrated by Heinrich’s experiments, can see things that few other birds can, namely, how one thing, a lump of meat, is connected to a piece of string such that pulling on the latter will bring the former into reach. A rat would be able to see this as well but with some difficulty and a chimpanzee with great ease.
Chimpanzees stand at the apex of animal perceptual capacities, just below humans. Much of the animal kingdom can be arranged in a hierarchy of grades of perception of increasing complexity and abstraction, which, of course, is closely correlated with levels of intelligence. Thus as Donald explains:
Apes can discriminate hand signs that are too complex or subtle for dogs, dogs can read aspects of behaviour missed completely by rats. Events can be arranged in a hierarchy of complexity; the simplest events are those that are closest to the level of object perception. A hand sign is an object in motion, and the perception of a hand sign or visual emblem as a unified event is well within the capacity of an ape.42
But, as Donald goes on to state, “even this level of event perception does not suffice for language”, which points to the fact that human perception is of a still higher order, as it were, on another dimension of mind. As we shall soon see, it involves the apprehension of symbolic and other such meaningful relations between things that no animal can perceive.
According to Donald, “the perception of events is the ultimate objective of the perceptual process, at least in reasonably complex animals.”43 And he goes on to add that “apes are particularly good at visual-event perception.”44 Ever since Köhler began these investigations at the time of the First World War, a tremendous amount of research has been performed on the perceptual capacities of apes, especially chimpanzees and bonobos their pigmy cousins. A lot has been learned, but still not anywhere near enough about how and why they cannot compete with humans in perception. Clearly, symbolic skills are
Much of the work on visual perception of the Gestalt school relies on seeing pictures, drawings and diagrams from the one static point of view, as is also the case with many visual illusions. Hence, Gestalt theories of form, figure-ground and so on are much more appropriate to human rather than to animal vision. Experimental work to substantiate all this relies on subjective linguistics reports from human subjects on what is being seen and how aspects can change, rather than on behavioural indicators. Hence, much of what the Gestaltists propound as universal features of perception only hold for certain modes of human perception.
According to James Gibson, the figure-ground phenomenon is derived from seeing outline drawings on paper: “the paper surface appears to become ‘background’ and to recede while the enclosed form seems to take on ‘figural’ qualities and to stand out.”45 On the basis of this account, which he supports by reference to Kurt Koffka’s work of 1935, The Principles of Gestalt Psychology, Gibson comes to the following conclusion:
A corollary of this definition is that the figure-ground phenomenon has been derived from a perception of outline-form, not from a study of all forms or of all perceptions. The universality of the phenomenon as ordinarily described is therefore questionable. It is one of the most convincing tenets of Gestalt theory in its battle with elementarism but whether it will serve as the fundamental basis for a complete theory of perception is not so certain.46
As Gibson also points out, “the original laws of visual organization were formalized by Wertheimer (1921), on the basis of observations with dots, lines and outlines, and their implications were developed by Koffka (1935).”47 What relevance such Gestalt laws can have for animal perception is far from clear. Thus,
Gibson himself develops what he calls an ecological theory of perception, which though closely related to the Gestalt theory, some authors in fact refer to it as such, yet is different from it in that it is primarily designed to account for animal perception. Hence, its emphasis on “ecology” and the relation of the animal to its environment in determining what and how an animal perceives. As we shall see, it is far less suitable for specifically human forms of perception, except, of course, in so far as humans are animals and can also perceive in the same way. To relate an animal’s perceptions to its environmental niche, Gibson coins the term “affordances”, which he explains as follows:
I have suggested that the environment consists basically of substances, surfaces, places, objects and events. These perceivables have a special kind of meaning that I call affordances; animals and children learn to see what they afford for them. The learning is tacit not explicit, i.e. most of it is not put into words. They are perceived by looking around and getting around (ambient and ambulatory vision as described in The Ecological Approach, 1979).49
He goes on to note that “these parts of the world have not been recognized by psychologists and philosophers as what animals perceive.”50 Affordances are “ecological, in the sense that they are properties of the environment relative to an animal.”51 They are not what psychologists and philosophers assume perceptions is based on, they are not sense-data or sensations or “phenomenal qualities of subjective experience (tertiary qualities, dynamic and physiognomic properties, etc.)” or “simply the physical properties of things now conceived by physical sciences.”52 The study of all the various kinds of affordances that are either innately given or acquired through experience by animals and young children has been one of the main preoccupations of James Gibson and his wife Eleanor Gibson. She has particularly concentrated on the affordances
Gibson is quite clear that the perception of affordances is only given or acquired by what he calls higher animals, namely those with minds. Lower animals, those that are mindless, do not perceive, they merely register and respond to stimuli impinging on their sense organs. According to Gibson, “perception is essentially an act of attention”, which clearly makes it a mental act.53 Gibson is very insistent that the perceiver does not “contribute anything to the act of perception” but merely “picks up” the “information” that the ambient array of light makes available. This has put him at odds with most other theorists of perception, above all with Richard Gregory, as we shall see later. It has also led to accusations that he had adopted a naïve realist philosophy of perception. But this is far from the case, and is due to a deliberate misunderstanding of his purely psychological approach, as we shall seek to show.
However, it is true that Gibson eschews any representative theory of perception, or any that relies on unconscious hypotheses or expectancies or anything else of this inferential nature. Perceiving is very different from the mere receiving of stimuli and interpreting them, it is an act:
Acts are not responses to stimuli and precepts are not responses to stimuli. An observer is not “bombarded” by stimuli. He extracts invariants from a flux of stimulation. Affordances, and the stimulus information to specify affordances, are neither subjective nor objective but transcend this dichotomy. The actor/perceiver and the environment are complementary.54
Hence, lower animals that merely register stimuli do not perceive, and no mind can be ascribed to them. This provides one clear criterion based on perception whether an animal has a mind or not, which can be applied under laboratory conditions and tested through experimental controls; but it can also be utilized “in the world”, as it were, by means of ethological observation of the animal in its natural habitat.
According to Gibson, lower animals do not have senses in the proper sense, merely physiological organs for registering outside energies impinging on them; they have photoreceptors and not eyes, strictly speaking:
We are accustomed to say that the stimulus for an eye is light and in truth it has long been known that the stimulus for the kind of photoreceptor found in lower animals is the light falling on it. The effective limits of wavelength and intensity may be measured. Accordingly it is easy to assume that the stimulus for the eye of a higher animal is the light falling on a mosaic of photoreceptors. But this analogy is misleading, for the characteristic activity of an eye is not that of a simple photoreceptor.55
Gibson goes on to ask what it is that stimulates what he calls “an eye proper”: “to what is it sensitive, considered as an organ instead of a mosaic of cells?”56 His answer is his concept of “ambient light”, for mere light as such “is much too simple an answer”. This move opens up a new approach to vision and perception in general.
Gibson’s whole approach to perception is philosophically very ambitious. He is intent on denying the basis for the kinds of indirect or representative theories of perception that have been current since Kepler and Descartes, as we shall show in Chapter 6. He aims, instead, to provide a theory of direct perception somewhat reminiscent of Aristotle, and thereby to remove the ground from under psycho-physical parallelism sensation theories (Helmholtz, Müller, et al.), from Behaviourist theories of stimulus and response (B.F. Skinner), and from Cognitivist theories of information processing and the detection of cues (David Marr, et al. at mit). There are swingeing critiques of all of these in his work. Instead, as his friend Gunnar Johansson puts it, “the main function of ecological optics is to develop a model for how reflected light carries visually decodable information about an organism’s environment.”57 But what “decodable information” means and how “ecological optics” differs from scientific optics are issues that would have to be considered at length and in detail in any extensive study of this approach, which we are unable to undertake here. However, what is clearly apparent even on a cursory view is that it must not be confused with any simple-minded naïve realism such as philosophers love to refute.
Gibson’s ecological optics and the rest of his ecological theory of perception is very useful at marking the differences between the mere stimulus response of the lower animals and perception proper of the higher ones. As we have said, this is a clear criterion in establishing the difference between mindless creatures and those that have minds. It is not so useful in establishing the next
Gibson partly obfuscates this difference by extending his theory of affordances to the perception of objects that have uniquely human characteristics and cultural meanings of which animals can have no awareness. Thus Gibson lumps together affordances such as a “tree branch (affording arboreal support for a primate)” and other such purely natural potential animal uses with objects serving uniquely human functions and utilities, such as a hammer, needle, spear or any other tools.58 Clearly, these are not affordances in the same sense, for a hammer no more affords hammering nails or any other of its countless human uses than a car affords driving or its uses. Once we enter the human world of meaning and culture, the whole concept of “affordances” designed for an ecological context ceases to apply.
In his early work Gibson was well aware that different theories of perception are required for the fundamental differences separating the perceptions of animals (including humans qua animals) and humans in their proper roles as meaning seeking and understanding creatures. He shows this in his critique of Köhler’s attempts at a unified theory of form perception, for he remarks that “the effort to determine what happens in the brain when one perceives form-in-general will prove fruitless”. Instead he proposes a differential set of theories for form perception:
At least three separate levels of theory will be required: first, a theory of how we perceive the surfaces of objects – a theory of slant-shape or, in other words, of shape-constancy; second, a theory of how we perceive representations, pictures, displays and diagrams; and third, a theory of how we apprehend symbols. There is no reason to suppose that the physiological concomitants of all these experiences will be the same; in fact, since pictures and symbols presuppose objects, their physiological
explanations will probably have to be found at increasing levels of complexity.59
Gibson is clearly critical of Kőhler’s efforts at discerning the same kinds of electrical circuits in the brain whenever forms of any kind are perceived.
In his own later work Gibson has devoted most of his effort at establishing a theory of how we perceive the surfaces of objects. This is, indeed, his ecological theory of perception with its concept of affordances which applies so well to animal perception. Of the other two types of theories of form perception, which are uniquely human, he has much less to say. Much of what he does say about human forms of perception is contained in his occasional papers on the perception of pictures where he is engaged in aesthetic controversies with the philosopher Nelson Goodman and the art historians Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim. He quite correctly counters the purely conventionalist accounts these thinkers are offering of what it is to see a picture, and refutes their idea that it has to be interpreted or “read” like a written script. Pictures are seen and not deciphered; representations of the pictorial kind directly elicit visual experiences of things and not symbolic readings of meanings. Unfortunately, he does not spell out what bearing this has on the perception of real things in the visible world. Had he done so, he would have realized that seeing pictures tells us a great deal about how human perception differs from animal perception.
Gibson’s notes on aesthetic perception – one cannot call them a theory since they are still so undeveloped – certainly provide vital insights as to what distinguishes human from animal perception, but obviously they do not go far enough. To go further in establishing the separation between the two modes of perceiving we need to turn to rival theories that focus more directly on human perception. Such are the closely related New Look theories developed by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman in America and the cognate approaches of Donald Broadbent and Richard Gregory in England. These theorists collaborated closely with each other and opposed the Gibsonians, just as the latter were critical of them in return.
It is not to our purpose in this contest to argue out the pros and cons of these rival approaches or to adjudicate between them or support one side as against the other, though we will soon show that the differences are not as large as they might appear. Our main aim is merely to assess what each has to offer in describing animal or human perception and thereby accounting for the fundamental differences between them. We shall contend that neither provides a completely comprehensive theory of all perception, but that both are
There is no doubt, however, that there are marked theoretical differences between these opposed approaches and it is not our intent to try to reconcile them, even if such a thing were possible. Nevertheless, the apparent philosophical contradictions that separate them, and that figure in the very heated polemics between their exponents, need to be countered and moderated for the differences are far more relative than absolute. And this is all that we aim to achieve.
Gibson was adamant that perception was direct and unmediated, the eyes can pick-up all that was necessary to see from the environment itself, from the “ambient array of light” and from “invariances” in the ever changing flux of visual sensations. There was no need for any inferences, representations, unconscious hypotheses or models. The New Lookers argued just the converse, they took off from the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and maintained that perception involved “unconscious inferences” and, as Gregory puts it, “human perception is but indirectly related to objects, being inferred from fragmentary and often hardly relevant data signalled by the eyes, so requiring inferences from knowledge of the world to make sense of the sensory signals.”60
Gregory makes a point of emphasizing human perception as against the perception of animals, and restricts the relevance of Gibson’s approach to the latter:
The “affordance” notion might be seen as an extension of the ethologists’ concept of innate “releasers”, which trigger innate behaviour, such as robins responding aggressively to a red patch. This fits Gibson’s “ecological optics”; but how new objects, such as telephones, are recognized without acquired knowledge is far from clear.61
The knowledge in question is such as only human beings can acquire. Hence, there is a sense in which animals cannot see a telephone, though they obviously can see the object which is a telephone. This brings out something of the difference between the two modes of vision. This difference is also brought out by a study of visual illusions. Gregory notes critically that “to maintain that
For Gregory and the other New Lookers, such illusions are the staples of their trade, for it is illusions that bring out the contribution that the mind or brain has to make to perception. The difference between what is there to be seen and what is actually seen is produced by the knowledge and unconscious inferences that the mind or brain has to supply. Gregory’s main argument runs as follows:
Following von Helmholtz’s lead we may say that knowledge is necessary for vision because the retinal images are inherently ambiguous (for example, for size, shape and distance of objects), and because many properties that are vital for behaviour cannot be signalled by the eyes, such as hardness and weight, hot or cold, edible or poisonous. For von Helmholtz, ambiguities are usually resolved, and non-visual object properties inferred, from knowledge by unconscious inductive inference from what is signalled and from knowledge of the object world.63
The qualities that Gregory refers to are precisely such as Gibson terms “affordances” and which animals perceive. Gregory’s view that what we see is determined by the image on the retina is also something that Gibson refutes. What this indicates is that Gregory has simply decided to dispense with Gibson’s work.
However, it is possible to retain Gibson’s findings and yet make Gregory’s point by arguing that knowledge and unconscious inferences make a difference to human perception, as the example of seeing the telephone demonstrates. Over and over again the New Look experiments demonstrated that not
They saw perceptions (and concept learning) as being guided by conscious and unconscious expectancies, hypotheses, or models, and tested by more or less reliable cues. In short, everyday cognition was thought of as an informal version of scientific inferences or reasoning, though with social/personal factors playing a larger role than they do in science … But they’re mostly learned, not innate. And they depend on a person’s values as well as their beliefs.64
As Chris Frith, a former student of Gregory puts it: “My perception is a prediction of what ought to be out there in the world. And this prediction is constantly tested by action.”65 As we shall soon see, the question of who or what agent makes these predictions, hypotheses and test is an issue, for it conjures up the image of a homunculus in the brain, which creates problems for any such view of unconscious inferences. But for the moment we can let this pass.
Whether or not such expectancies, hypotheses, models etc., relying only on slender cues, constitute the whole of perception, they certainly can make a difference to human perception. Whether this also applies to animals is a moot point. But that they do work in humans is demonstrated by the kinds of illusions that humans are fooled by but which animals do not perceive, such as most of the ones that Gregory discusses: Muller-Lyer, Hering, Ponzo, the Penrose impossible triangle, the Kanizsa triangle, hollow face illusion, size-weight illusions, Magritte’s mirror, Mach’s corner and a host of others. Many of these are ambiguous Gestalt-like figures which can be seen in alternate ways according to preference. What they reveal is the kind of knowledge and pre-established experience that shapes human vision. Thus, for example, the Muller-Lyer illusion is very strong for people who live in conventional rectilinear rooms and houses and straight streets, namely city folk, but very weak for rural peasants, such as Zulus, who are everywhere surrounded by round objects, round dwellings and round exterior tracks and paths. This proves that habitual experiences and knowledge do make a difference to human seeing. How big a difference it makes is a matter of psychological investigation. Similar conclusions can be drawn from many other illusions.
The big issue to be resolved is the problem of determining what differences basic human knowledge, in the form of language and culture, makes to human perception in general as compared to animal perception where such knowledge is absent. This is crucial in determining how human mind differs from animal mind in general. This issue is at the heart of the dispute regarding perception between Gibson and Gregory. We can accept Gibson’s view that animal perception is one of “affordances” which are purely “objective” ecological features which have nothing to do with unconscious inferences or background knowledge, which in humans is based on language and culture. Yet, at the same time, grant Gregory his main point that in humans such knowledge determines their mode of perceiving. There could be no human vision without language and culture acting to provide the necessary background knowledge setting. There certainly could be no human artistic vision without it. Seeing a painting depends on it, which does not mean, as so many art critics, such as Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim and most extreme of all the philosopher Nelson Goodman have maintained, that visual artistic representations are purely conventional cyphers or arbitrary symbolic devices. Gibson is surely right in insisting that we see directly what a picture represents, we do not merely “read” it or decode it.
Another way in which art demonstrates the role of knowledge and the experienced mind in human perception is through the ability of artists to train their perceptual powers to see things differently from the way they are usually and “naturally” seen. The experienced painter can see the landscape unfolding before his gaze as a series of flat colour patches and converging perspectival lines. In other words, the artist can perceive it as a visual field, which an untrained eye cannot do, for people are very strongly habituated to see distance and depth and all the other veridical visual features that objects in fact possess; including their real colours, as against the colours in a given illumination that, say, an Impressionist painter can see. It is in this sense that everything we see can also be seen differently, either because of unusual conditions which deceive veridical perception and create an illusion or because we have trained ourselves to see differently. Mostly, however, we see what there is to be seen for we have been so habituated; namely, in the vast majority of cases we see veridically and not in an illusory way, though this is always potentially possible. Suggestions playing on imagination can also determine what is seen, as Polonius under Hamlet’s instigation, sees alternatively a camel, weasel and whale in a nondescript cloud.
According to Gregory, visual illusions which he calls “cognitive illusions”, are “due to misapplied knowledge employed by the brain to interpret or read
My brain discovers what is out there in the world by constructing models of that world. These models are not arbitrary. They are adjusted to give the best possible predictions of my sensations as I act upon the world. But I am not aware of this complex mechanism.67
Apart from all the well-known philosophical problems created by Frith’s contention that we can never directly know the world, only models of the world in the brain, there is the added difficulty of determining who or what does this discovering and knowing: is it the “I” who acts upon the world, which would seem to be the body, or is it the brain that “discovers” and “constructs” and “adjusts” and so on? If the latter, then surely it must be a homunculus in the brain, since neurologically considered the brain is nothing but neural processes. But if it is all a “complex mechanism” of which I am not aware, then how can such a mechanism carry out the activities of a homunculus? One standard way of resolving these difficulties is to argue, as the Cognitivist psychologists do, that it is all “computations” in the brain or information processing. But in that case, there is no “I” and no “sensations” either. We shall return to this “solution” in Chapter 7 and show that it solves nothing. In the meantime we must attempt another way of resolving these problems.
If we are to avoid any suggestion of a homunculus in the brain, yet still retain Helmholtzian talk of “unconscious” inferences, hypotheses, models, etc. then we should resort to a Neo-Freudian vocabulary. Experimentalists like Gregory and Frith would be totally averse to Freud, far more so than the New Lookers like Bruner and Postman, as Boden reports:
Bruner and Postman had posited “perceptual defence” in “normal” subjects as well as neurotics, to explain why people fail to perceive emotionally threatening stimuli. Their subjects would register at some unconscious level (measured by galvanic skin response) but conscious
perception was delayed or prevented … (prompting an explosion of work on “subliminal” perceptions).68
Such work on subliminal perception as well as the whole idea of unconscious operations of the mind in perception prompts the view that there is a perceptual unconscious parallel to that of an appetitive-emotive unconscious promoted by Freud. Rather than any homunculus or mechanism in the brain, we should refer to the unconscious operations and activities of the mind. Perhaps there are many close parallels in the working of the perceptual and Freudian unconscious, so that, for example, the Ames illusion can be explained as arising out of a kind of “defence” mechanism according to which the unconscious mind finds it easier to accommodate the perception of people of different sizes rather than distorted rooms.
The idea that the human mind has an unconscious as well as conscious side to it is the fundamental fact that serves to distinguish it from animal mind where no such distinction is to be drawn. It obviously depends on language and culture, as psychoanalysts, such as not only Freud himself but also Jacques Lacan and many others, have sought to establish. For experimental psychologists, exploring the various facets of the unconscious has, indeed, become of late a basic task, as we shall see in the next chapter. For perceptual experimental psychologists, plumbing the perceptual unconscious has not as yet been made as explicit as it ought to be. In a way, Gregory showed the way, for if Freud declared that dreams are the royal road to the Freudian unconscious, Gregory might be taken as saying that illusions are the royal road to the perceptual unconscious.
There is no doubt that there is an unconscious dimension to human perception. But whether that is relevant to animal perception of affordances, such as Gibson studies, is what is in question. In so far as humans also perceive affordances in an animal way, they do so without reference to the unconscious factors that Gregory identifies. Reacting to a flying missile by ducking is obviously exercising that kind of perception to which Gregory’s strictures do not apply. On the other hand, seeing a telephone is not perceiving an affordance in Gibson’s sense.
It seems, then, that both kinds of theories are necessary to account for the full range of perception from animal to human. It is true that expressed in philosophic terms the two types of theories stand in a contradictory relation to each other, the one being a kind of naïve realism and the other
This difference is largely offset by the fact that each theory relies on very different experimental conditions and amasses its evidence accordingly. Gibson relies on as realistic perceptual settings as possible where the observer can move freely and take in the whole scene or context in which the specific object to be seen is situated. Gregory relies on highly restricted settings where the visual information is tightly controlled and the object is perceived from the one immobile perspectival orientation. In fact, Gregory relies for his experimental data on visual illusions where much less that the whole object of perception is present. Little wonder that they reach such opposed conclusions.
But perhaps both theories are correct in relation to their experimental conditions. When confronted with illusions, it is obviously the case that it is the brain or unconscious mind that has to interpret the few cues or visual indicators and do so by means of something approximating to “hypotheses”, such as expectancies based on experience and learning from previous perceptions. On the other hand, when a huge wealth of visual data is available through head and ambulatory movement in relation to a situated object in a complete scene, the role of the brain is very different, for hypotheses no longer enter into it. Hence, to establish the relation between visual information and the brain and to assess which contributes more in different experimental settings will be the endeavour of further experimental work, and the conclusions arrived at are subject to empirical findings. No a priori philosophical issues are relevant in settling such differences between psychological theories.
As we have already indicated, the crucial area of perception where the differences between animal and human mind show up most clearly is that of aesthetic perception, such as the seeing of pictures. What a human can see in a picture is far more and very different in kind to what an animal can see, that is, if the animal can see anything at all. However, we know that many species of animals, and not just apes, but birds as well, can be trained to see various things in pictures. But what such animals see is not what humans see, even ones who have had no artistic education previously. And this is true not just of pictures but all other types of art, such as music where animals cannot appreciate such basic features as rhythm. The emergence of the human mind, since the very earliest separation of hominins from their nearest ape relatives, can be traced by reference to the origin of the arts. To do so we must turn to the palaeoanthropologists.
3 Donald and Deacon on Culture and Language
Art and the aesthetic sensibility in general is certainly a key place to look for what differentiates the human from the animal mind. This idea was first presented by Friedrich Schiller in his celebrated work On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, published in 1794.69 Basing himself on Kant’s third critique, Critique of Judgement, Schiller went on to elaborate a view of mankind as creatures who engage in play in the aesthetic sense: “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.”70 Aesthetic play distinguishes the human not only from the animal, but also from what he inappropriately called the savage: “it is the same in all races who have escaped the slavery of the animal state: a delight in appearance, a disposition toward ornament and play.”71 Schiller’s views were extremely influential and passed over into those of his friend, the philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as to Hegel. In England they exercised a profound effect on Coleridge and the Romantic poets. They were equally influential in America on the Transcendentalists and eventually on the Pragmatist philosopher Dewey. It is to Dewey that we “owe the important insight that it is primarily in the aesthetic dimension of experience that we encounter consummated human meaning”, as Mark Johnson puts it.72 Huizinga, the author on whom we first called to expound this aesthetic side of Homo Ludens, is also a late exponent of this tradition.
Of course, the human aesthetic sensibility and its propensity to artistic creativity do not emerge out of nowhere, it has its evolutionary preconditions in animals. Thus, for example, the impulse to engage in play is found in many species of mammals, especially among the young where it serves the purpose of learning by mock practice that which as mature adults they will have to do in earnest, as it were. Play serves the same ends in human children; but that is where the resemblance ends, for what children enact in games are the symbolic encounters and roles they will perform when they grow up. Animals do not engage in symbolic play, nor do they have symbolic objects such as dolls or toy cars. Animals also do not mime adult activities or mimic each other. All
The author who has taken art as the index of humanity the furthest is Donald. Like Gibson, he, too, focuses on seeing pictures and drawings as a way of differentiating what animals and humans can perceive. He has also taken issue with Goodman’s purely conventionalist account of seeing pictures. He goes on to ask some crucial questions:
As Goodman [The Language of Art (1968)] has pointed out, the pictorial image is essentially symbolic; it is a referential device for the user of the image. But where, in the representational architecture of the oral-mythical mind, is the referential system for visual-pictorial images?73
The oral-mythical mind is the consummate human mind, and in that mind there are no such referential systems for decoding pictorial images. Such images are seen and not read or interpreted, or if they are interpreted then this is itself a way of seeing. Donald points out that some animals, such as the higher apes, can to a certain limited extent also see pictures, which is also indicative of their non-conventional nature:
Some pictorial images can be accurately perceived by apes: a gorilla can respond appropriately to certain quite subtle pictorial images; these pictorial images, on one level, must possess episodic reference. Thus far we know of no animals other than apes that can interpret drawn images, that is, see them in terms of their referents; however, this question probably has not been explored as thoroughly as it might be.74
Donald is correct in his assessment, it is only through exploration of what various kinds of animals can or cannot see in pictures that the full extent of the differences between human and animal perception will be revealed. But as we shall see, Donald does not take full account of pictures in the making of the oral-mythic mind.
The differences in seeing pictures is a much more difficult issue to settle than making pictures, for there is little doubt that animals have not the least capacity for any kind of pictorial representation, such as even young children evince. At best, chimpanzees can be trained to splash paint on canvas, but that is about as far as their artistic talents go. To explain the reason for this inability
I have argued that art is an inevitable by-product of mimesis – a primordial and truly human, cognitive adaptation that occurred very early in hominid prehistory and became the signature feature of the human mind. Mimesis had enormous cognitive consequences on the group level, resulting in a characteristically human form of communicative culture that later increased its influence with the emergence of language.75
Thus, according to Donald, it is not so much language, a late arrival on the evolutionary stage, but mimesis that constitutes an original pre-linguistic start to human mind, one that separates it irrevocably from animal mind. But whether art is “an inevitable by-product of mimesis” is a further matter with which we shall take issue later. He holds that “mimesis describes a cluster of capacities that were made possible by a single neuro-cognitive adaptation. They go together historically because they share certain key neural components.”76 The four central abilities that arise out of mimesis are mime, imitation, gesture and the rehearsal of skills. Animals are lacking in all these capacities, though there are some rudimentary indications of them in apes, which suggests that they evolved from these beginnings in early hominid species.
Donald holds that the evolutionary emergence of this cognitive faculty was coupled to “a redistribution of frontal-cortical influence during the early stage of the evolution of the species Homo, when the prefrontal and parts of the premotor cortex expanded enormously in relative size and connectivity.”77 This generated a new kind of self-aware mind which is peculiarly human:
The expansion of the prefrontal cortex was crucial in improving conscious self-regulation and metacognition. This created a new metacognitive field, a greatly expanded and differentiated working memory, in which hominids could observe themselves as actors and rehearse and refine whatever they were doing. This also gave them some ability to reflect on the cognitive process itself, and the option of deliberately reflecting on, and shaping, their own actions.78
Animals have no such reflective and reflexive powers; it is as if they concentrate completely on the objective external world and are incapable of attending to their own inner world of subjectivity. Only humans can do that.
All this inevitably raises the question of which came first, the expanded brain or these cognitive capacities? This is, of course, a chicken-and-egg question. Since a relation of emergent coupling obtains between them, it is not possible to say that the one precedes the other, for they are both aspects of the one system. There is an indissoluble bond between them, yet they are not identical for the one cannot be reduced to the other. But, as in all such cases of emergence, we can adopt different causal perspectives on this relation: from some points of view and scientific purposes it is possible to say that the new cognitive capacities cause the brain to grow in size; just as from other perspectives and in other scientific contexts we say that the enlarged brain causes new cognitive powers. We shall consider this reversibility of cause-effect relations in emergent contexts more fully and explicitly in Chapter 5, where we shall also explain how emergence involves an indissoluble non-identity between two entities.
When we look at the matter from an evolutionary point of view, the causes of the expanded brain size and its new internal structural rearrangements are to be found in the evolutionary pressures resulting from social and cultural developments in early hominin species. It is society and culture that shape the brain, as well as vice-versa. This is even more apparent once language starts to develop. If one takes an evolutionary perspective on this matter, one can explain the size, form and structure of the human brain by reference to the demands on it made by the new social and cultural practice of linguistic communication. This is, indeed, the argument propounded by Terrence Deacon:
The evolutionary miracle is the human brain. And what makes this extraordinary is not just that a flesh and blood computer is capable of producing a phenomenon as remarkable as a human mind, but that the
changes in this organ responsible for the miracle were a direct consequences of the use of words. And I don’t mean this in a figurative sense, I mean that the major structural and functional innovations that make the human brain capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the power of words. Or, to put this miracle in simple terms, I suggest that an idea changed the brain.79
“An idea changed the brain” – Deacon explains what he means by this enigmatic phrase, which he insists he does “not mean in a figurative sense”. It is not a piece of poetry but a down to earth scientific truth. But it does take him nearly a hundred pages of print to explain the idea behind it. He realizes that it “inverts our common sense notion of causality that physical changes required physical causes.”80 But, actually, this is only a very doctrinaire scientistic assumption that any serious consideration of emergence can disabuse. In an emergence coupling, cause and effect can easily be inverted. In evolutionary emergence this happens continually. Thus, as Deacon explains, “the first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changes how natural selection processes have affected hominid brain evolution ever since. So in a very real sense I mean that the physical changes that make us human are the incarnations, so to speak, of the process of using words.”81
To make this case, Deacon appeals to a variant of the Darwinian theory of natural selection called “Baldwinian evolution”, after the American psychologist Mark Baldwin who first proposed it in 1895. According to this theory: “by temporarily adjusting behaviours or physiological responses during its lifespan, in response to novel conditions, an animal could produce irreversible changes in the adaptive context of future generations.”82 Deacon applies this approach to what he calls “the co-evolution of language and the brain”, the subtitle of his book. He argues that “once symbolic communication became even slightly elaborated in early hominid societies, its unique use for representational functions and open-ended flexibility would have led to its use for innumerable purposes with equally powerful reproductive consequences.”83 These consequences played themselves out in human bodies in evolutionary changes that produced what he calls “the architecture of modern human
Speculations regarding the evolutionary origin of language and how this relates to that of the modern mind, as Donald calls it, have abounded. They change drastically every generation or so, as new technological instruments of detection are applied; as new approaches deriving from other areas of science come into play; and as new discoveries are made which completely throw out all previous evolutionary continuities because wholly new intermediate species are found, or our view of the known ones has to be revised. In the last decade or so incredible new discoveries have put the whole field of palaeoanthropology into turmoil and put in question many of our previous assumptions about the origin of our own species and its close relatives now extinct. The latest evidence shows that Neanderthals shared the human propensity for symbolic art and that they made outline pictures on cave walls in Europe at least 65,000 years ago, which is 20,000 years before our species arrived there. This seems to indicate that a propensity to art might have already been present in an ancestor of both Neanderthals and homo sapiens as early as half a million years ago. Such facts, if substantiated, open up speculative conclusions of various kinds, including ones like those Donald hazards on the score of human prehistory.
Donald’s approach to the problem of the origin of the human mind is the converse of that of Deacon and all other palaeoanthropologists who focus on language as the key component. According to Donald, language is a latecomer to the evolutionary game. Donald makes the bold and unprecedented move that culture takes precedence over language. Instead of arguing, as others do, that culture derives from language, he maintains, to the contrary, that language derives from culture:
The great divide in human evolution was not language but the formation of cognitive communities in the first place. Symbolic cognition could not spontaneously self-generate until those communities were a reality. This
reverses the standard order of succession, placing cultural evolution first and language second… This makes the mechanism of language highly dependent on culture. This may be said of all symbolic processing.86
Accordingly, there must have been a pre-linguistic culture among early hominins, for without that evolutionary background language could not have arisen. He calls this archaic culture mimetic.
Mimetic culture is what we have already encountered in Donald’s account of the origins of art. As he puts it:
In short, art is the expressive culmination of the most ancient domain of the human mind, as manifested in rituals, public actions, and gestures that characterize any human society. It is woven into the deepest layer of meaning that can be called uniquely human… Viewed in an evolutionary context, art originated in the earliest stages of hominid evolution, the so-called Mimetic phase. Newer forms have been scaffolded onto older ones, and as human beings have evolved complex languages and technologies, artists have developed new forms that contain within them all the elements of evolutionary history.87
Art thus acts as a kind of Grand Canyon of the evolutionary history of the human mind in which archaeologists can discover ever deeper strata of humanoid species going right down to the original rock foundations, the animal mind of a creature like the chimpanzees. The main aim is to explore the intermediate layers, the so-called missing gap of evolutionary pre-history of the mind. Donald believes he can span that abyss by unearthing a so-called mimetic culture, to which task he devotes a large part of his first book, Origins of the Modern Mind.88 As he puts it in his second book A Mind so Rare:
What we are trying to do is establish a set of logical intermediate stages, or pre-adaptations that could have bridged the huge evolutionary distances between the minds of modern humans and those of our distant ancestors. Mimesis is my best guess at the nature of the first step… Mimetic expression can be shown to function independently of language in children and certain people with language disabilities. People who lack language because they were born deaf and never learned to sign can
nevertheless manage the purely mimetic aspects of human culture with ease.89
There is no doubt that the evolution of mimetic abilities such as Donald describes was a crucial component of the origin of the human mind. But doubt still remains as to whether this constituted a stage prior to any language whatever or whether it was the accompaniment of an early stage of language commonly known as a protolanguage.
Donald’s arguments from the capacities for people who are handicapped, such as those born deaf and dumb, who can nevertheless function in society is not altogether convincing about the course that evolution took. That people with genetically “modern” human brains can learn and adapt to a human society in the ways that animals, even the most intelligent chimpanzees, cannot do is no proof that there must have been a speechless mimetic stage between animal culture and human culture which is based on language. The capacity of handicapped individuals to function with the support of normal people in a social context does not mean that such people could constitute a society of their own or that they reflect some earlier cultural stage in which genetically human beings did not yet exist. A kind of “Planet of the Apes” scenario cannot be constituted with deaf and dumb people. So the question still remains of whether an early form of language must have been there from the very start.
We are now in a better position to frame the fundamental opposition between two anthropological approaches to the emergence of human mind from animal mind, that of Donald versus that of Deacon, which we referred to earlier. Deacon takes the more conventional approach and holds that the evolution of language is the key to the emergence of mind and the growth and restructuration of the brain. Donald, as we have shown, adopts the heterodox view that it is not language but what he calls culture that is crucial to the emergence of what he calls the modern mind. There is much at stake in this confrontation, which unfortunately the two authors do not actually engage in explicitly. In their extant publications there is barely a reference of the one in the other: Donald makes a few passing mentions of Deacon’s neurological ideas; Deacon makes no reference to Donald at all, despite his commendation of Donald’s first book. Since they do not engage directly with each other, the debate between them has to be constructed as it does not exist in print.
According to Deacon the key to understanding language and the human mind is symbolic reference. He puts it unequivocally that “theories of language and mind that fail to address this issue head on, or suggest that it needs no
According to Deacon, the evolution of language began with simple languages or protolanguages: “though simple languages exist in no society found today, they almost certainly existed at some point in our prehistory.”92 However, once the symbolic process began, once “despite their cognitive limitations, our ancestors found a way to create and reproduce a simple system of symbols”, then the evolution of the brain followed suit, as “the brains that originally struggle to support simple languages were replaced by brains better suited to this awkward adaptation.”93 This “inversion of cause and effect has enormous consequences … [for] our unique mentality must also be understood in these terms.”94 And “the implications for brain evolution are also profound”, since the evolution of language “created selection pressures to reshape our lineage’s ape brains to fit this new function.”95 This fits in well with our main thesis that cause and effect relations in emergent phenomena can always be inverted for different purposes in different scientific contexts, as we shall go on to argue in Chapter 5.
Having thus briefly outlined Deacon’s main thesis of where the essential differences between human and animal mind is to be found, we turn to Donald’s contrary point of view. According to Donald, the key transition from animal mind to human is that from the episodic culture of apes to the mimetic culture of species of early homo. Language is, apparently, not involved at all since mimetic culture is completely pre-linguistic. Episodic culture spans the whole gamut of ape abilities, including the potential of chimpanzees, such as the celebrated Kanzi, to use symbols, as Donald states: “his symbol use was more spontaneous than that found in any previous trained ape…”96 Thus, according to Donald, Kanzi and presumably other chimpanzees as well are capable of
Despite the brilliant efforts of modern primate researchers, apes still use symbols for traditional primate agenda. If symbols alone had been enough, many apes would presumably be much further down the human road by now, moving rapidly toward collective representational systems, like the denizens of Planet of the Apes. But they are not. While individuals have made great advances, collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic culture, not even on the small scale of small working or family groups… This negates any notion that symbols have any immediate transformative power to generate culture.97
But it also negates something of Donald’s own arguments in his earlier book that the performance of individual apes, under human tuition, is any indication of what apes can achieve collectively or what might be the next stage in their evolutionary development.
Donald’s main argument as to what separates apes and humans might, nevertheless, be correct, namely, that there might be a stage prior to language which he calls mimetic, and that apes are incapable of reaching it:
But perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from the neuropsychological literature is that human intelligence without language has properties that set it apart from ape intelligence, just as Darwin predicted. Among the uniquely human capacities found in the absence of language are a capacity for spontaneous gesture and mime, which can be returned to after language loss; toolmaking and praxis in general; emotional expression and social intelligence, including an ability to comprehend complex events and remember roles, customs and appropriate behaviour.98
According to Donald, it is not language which is the source of culture, but culture which is the source of language. Hence, language cannot exist where the above cultural capacities are lacking. As he goes on to argue:
We cannot dismiss the possibility that language itself, especially some of its most esoteric semantic and grammatical features, might be just
another product of culture, drawn by our expanded level-3 conscious capacity.99
Consequently, Donald denies any animal access to language, since no animal is capable of the kind of consciousness necessary to give it the relevant cultural capacity. This holds even for such an intelligent animal as Kanzi, trained in the use of symbols by his keeper Savage-Rumbaugh, because, as he states, “it will become clear that Kanzi remains several steps removed from human linguistic ability”, but he does so on other grounds than any such as stipulated by Deacon. Clearly they disagree on what is essential and fundamental to human language.
According to Donald, apes, even the cleverest of them, are incapable of language because they are still stuck in the evolutionary stage of episodic culture, that of animal mind. They are capable of event perception, such as that of seeing “a passing car … a kick, or a threatening grimace, or the lifting of a spear, or a hand sign”100; “yet this level of event perception obviously does not suffice for language.”101 We are reminded here of J.J. Gibson’s theory of the perception of “affordances” which also does not suffice for language and cannot account for human perceptual abilities. Episodic mind, that of animals, is limited:
…the limitations of episodic culture are in the realm of representation. Animals excel at situational analysis and recall but cannot re-present a situation to reflect on it, either individually or collectively… The cognitive evolution of human culture is, on one level, largely the story of the development of various semantic representational systems.102
Donald goes on to quote David Premack who “argued that language should not necessarily be seen as the human adaptation. Consciousness, pedagogy, social attribution, and aesthetics are also uniquely human.”103 Clearly, this runs contrary to all of Deacon’s later work which is focused on languages.
Deacon, in common with other palaeolinguists, propounds the thesis that prior to our fully developed language there must have been an earlier stage in the evolution of language. This is usually designated as a protolanguage, a grammarless speech like that of a two year old child. This is frequently conceived of
Donald’s attitude to the evolution of language is very different from that of the above thinkers and has itself gone through considerable variation. At an earlier stage he was more in accord with the common view, shared by Deacon and many others, that there was a protolanguage as a distinct evolutionary stage, but in his late work he has resiled from this view quite sharply. His initial position closer to the received view is set out as follows:
The earliest human languages would have gone through a “protolinguistic” phase, and the form of the protolanguage might well have resembled Bickerton’s protolinguistic, grammarless speech acts, but it seems to have arrived much later than he suggested, originating during the past 300,000 years, rather than a million years earlier, and only after the principle of voluntary self-cued memory retrieval had been formally established in the human brain. Grammatical invention appears to be just another product of a general capacity for lexical invention but there is some neurophysiological evidence supporting Bickerton’s view that grammatical invention was the “second phase” of language emergence, requiring different brain adaptation from lexical invention.106
However, in his later work he goes against any such idea that grammatical invention required any “different brain adaptation from lexical invention.” He is particularly averse to Chomskian notions of Universal Grammar or any such linguistic acquisition module in the brain. He has called this the phlogiston of the late twentieth century. Instead he has strongly favoured a socio-cultural view of the whole of linguistic development, as he puts it:
The integration of morphological addresses into a larger descriptive system is an inherently social activity, and one is tempted to predict that this process could not be confined within the isolated brain: that is, one should not expect to find the “language acquisition device” that Chomsky predicted entirely inside the individual brain. Rather, the emergence of language depends on a community of brains in interaction. There is not yet any viable computational model of this process, and neural network models have not yet reached the point where anything so complex could be simulated.107
Whether such “network models” will ever reach that point is a matter we leave till Chapter 7.
According to Donald, the sole strictly biological precondition for language was the adaptation that generated mimetic culture, that which separated the hominin species from their nearest hominid relatives, the chimpanzees. As he puts it:
Mimetic skill was necessary for the later evolution of language because the evolution of mimetic skill made it possible to tamper with the morphology of action… To invent a primitive lexicon, even in the halting, grammarless manner of a two-year-old, one must be capable of a considerable degree of mimetic invention and refinement.108
This view of the origin of language is firmly asserted in a late paper of 2017 where he states that “language is, in this sense, not a feature of the brain, per se… It is the child of an interactive cultural imagination, that is, of groups of brains in collusion.”109 In other words, language is purely a social product.
Thus there is no special language module in the brain; the evolution of language did not have to wait for any such thing to arise. It was an extremely long term development of over 3 million years which depended on two preconditions: “the first was the emergence of a general supra-modal capacity to rehearse and refine skills, and the second was the emergence of material culture as a major force shaping the direction of human cognitive evolution.”110 It
However, it is odd, in view of Donald’s emphasis on mimetic culture as a precondition for the evolution of language, that he has paid so little attention to the one form of material culture that is fully symbolic and cognate with language – the making of pictures. It points to a general bias that Donald shares with almost all other palaeoanthropologists in favour of language as the uniquely essential factor in the constitution of what he calls the “modern” mind. Thus he calls the second cultural stage in the formation of this mind linguistic-mythic and defines it with almost no reference to symbolic objects or imagery. When he does take cognisance of graphic symbols or pictures it is only as the precursors to writing, which he sees as the basis for literacy and theory, the third of his stages in the development of mind.
This bias towards language as the defining characteristic of the human mind is very widespread and is fundamentally inherent in Western thinking from the very start. We must tackle it first before we can proceed any further with Donald’s account of the evolution of the mind, which is the most complex, complete and far-reaching theory that we currently possess. However, it suffers from some shortcomings which we will attempt to address, beginning with language.
4 An Appreciation and Critique of Donald
It has been a fundamental and age-old assumption, at least in the West, that what distinguishes Man from beast is the possession of language. Man has been called the speaking animal, or as Aristotle put it, the zoon logon echon.
It was the same in the complementary Hebraic tradition that Christianity took over, which also maintained that in the beginning was the Word. According to the Bible, God created the world by means of His Word: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light”. Adam, made in God’s image, did something similar when he took possession of the creatures by naming them: “and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and the fowl of the air, and to every beast in the field.” Theologians and poets have been speculating ever since as to what was this original Adamic language, supposedly the most perfect language of all where word and thing fit perfectly. Philosophers in the Jewish tradition, such as Philo of Alexandria, made the bold Platonic move of identifying God’s Word with the Greek logos, thereby linking the two traditions of language. The early Christians followed suit; St John, the presumed author of the fourth Gospel, began it with the memorable line “In the beginning was the Logos”; thereby announcing the new Logos as the Word of God in pronouncing a renewed creation with the coming of Christ.
Modern philosophy and science from Descartes onwards have gone along similar lines in seeing language as the essential difference between Man and beast or mind and machine. Anthropologists have not escaped this fixation on language, considering it alone to be the defining characteristic of the human mind. Thus much effort in experimental psychology has been expended in demonstrating that animals cannot master language-like communication. Even though it has been shown by ethologists, such as David Premack and Sue Savage-Rumbough, that chimpanzees can be taught to communicate by means of gestures and tokens, yet this is disallowed as proof of language mastery since they cannot go on to learn the trick of grammar, to combine elementary symbols into sentences that convey propositional meaning. Chomsky and his followers have been particularly intent on turning grammar into a shibboleth for the absolute separation of human and animal minds. This is one of their motives in postulating a Universal Grammar language acquisition module in the human brain. And even though critics, such as Deacon, have denounced this on sound evolutionary grounds, yet they, too, have adhered to the primacy of language and postulated instead the idea of a protolanguage as the initial evolutionary departure of humanity.
It is to his great credit that Donald escapes from this trap of language by postulating instead his pre-linguistic mimetic stage of evolutionary development which separates the original hominin culture from the episodic culture
However, before we do so, we must consider another reason for the prevalent preference in popular, philosophic and evolutionary thinking for language as that which alone makes for the crucial difference that constitutes the human mind. It is an obvious observation that children begin to speak almost before they learn to do anything else. Even when infants are too weak and immature to stand and walk upright and can barely handle objects, they are already capable of uttering sounds and communicating. Much of the effort in child rearing is in teaching them to speak in ever more complex ways; utilizing peculiarly human methods of teaching by means of instruction which we shall consider in the next chapter. These pedagogic techniques are successful in almost all cases except for autistic children, or perhaps geniuses, such as the young Einstein, who according to his mother did not speak till he was four years of age.
It is very tempting and hard to resist transferring this sequence of learning in children to the earliest humans, that is, of assuming that evolution goes through analogous stages to those of child maturation. This is the old fallacy that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny first enunciated by Ernst Haeckel in the late nineteenth century and never quite banished ever since. That it is mistaken is quite evident from the simple fact that babies cannot do very much except use their voice – to cry, wail, babble and eventually speak – whereas the ancestral hominins could already manufacture tools and kindle fires perhaps even before they could utter intelligible sounds; though evidence concerning the origins of vocal capacities is extremely equivocal, since apart from dna there is little in skeletal remains to go by.
Evidence for the evolution of language is scant and mainly inferential, but evidence for the evolution of art is direct and by now almost overwhelming. This need not necessarily lead to the conclusion that art came before language, as Donald is inclined to imply, but rather that art, in the full and proper sense,
When Donald wrote his major works little was as yet known about Neanderthal symbolism and nothing about their art; however, there was already a wealth of knowledge about human prehistoric art. Yet Donald makes almost nothing of this in his account of the linguistic-mythic culture, the first stage of fully human development and the clear manifestation of human mind. If he does refer to pictorial representation, it is only as the preparatory prelude of his next stage of human development, that of literacy and theory; graphic symbols and depictions only prepare the ground for the later much more culturally significant origins of writing, according to Donald. In a paper of 1993 he puts it as follows:
A partial list of devices mastered by humans along the way to full symbolic literacy includes (in rough historical order) iconography, maps, emblems, totems, pictorial representations, pictographs, sequence-markers like knotted cords or prayer beads, various types of tokens, currencies, property markers, ideographic writing systems, counting systems, mathematical notations, schematic and geometric diagrams, lists, syllabaries and alphabets, scrolls, books … computing languages, and a variety of modern multimedia storage devices that employ virtually all of the above.114
It is not clear what he means by iconography in this context, but he cannot be referring to art since he places it next to maps in his order of historical succession and so presumably earlier than pictorial representations which are placed later in his list. Maps, as we know, were a late historical development which does not predate the early civilizations. Similar listings in more or less the same order in his later works do not alter this impression that he has not taken count of prehistoric art, which consequently does not figure in his account of linguistic-mythic culture.
Where Donald does consider pictorial art he holds it to pertain to the stage prior to language, the purely mimetic stage. As he states, “I have argued that art is an inevitable by-product of mimesis – a primordial and truly human, cognitive adaptation that occurred very early in hominin prehistory and became the signature feature of a human mind.”115 On this view, pictorial art and graphic symbolism came prior to language and is not a coeval symbolic form that arose coextensive with language. But if the latter is in fact the case, then art is certainly not an “inevitable by-product of mimesis”. It is true, as he puts it elsewhere, that “mimetic capacity is one of the basic building blocks of language, and must have preceded its evolution in hominid prehistory.”116 But this is equally true of symbolic pictorial art, for which mimesis was also only the preparatory evolutionary stage.
It seems that Donald is mistaken in treating art together with simple mimetic activities, such as primitive imitative performances and expressive gestures, as the one “mimetic dimension of culture … [which] extends beyond art, to encompass other non-verbal aspects of cultural life, including such things as public spectacle, athletic events, body language, and the non-verbal transmission of skills.”117 Pictorial art might be non-verbal, but it is certainly symbolic though in a purely visual way where meaning is seen. In cognitive terms, it is way beyond the kinds of bodily skills and performances, such as “athletic events, body language and the non-verbal transmission of skills”, with which Donald brackets it together. Cognitively considered, art is fully on par with language, and just as crucial for Donald’s linguistic-mythic stage, for without it religion and the higher cultural activities inherent in myths are inconceivable, as we shall presently show.
As a corrective to Donald, we might designate this specifically human stage of evolution as linguistic-graphic-mythic; and venture the evolutionary hypothesis, for which there is overwhelming evidence, that language was not alone in constituting the fully human mind, but that art, too, in the form of pictorial imagery and other graphic symbolism, was equally indispensable. Human meaning and communication evolved in parallel along two lines: through vocal utterances as speech to constitute language, and through graphic markings and symbolic objects to form art and material culture in general. Both evolved together in close symbiosis, the one supporting the other and the two ratcheting each other up to ever higher stages. What these stages were and how this took place, we can now reconstruct purely conjecturally, since almost nothing of the development of language is now known; though we might infer it partially from the development of art, which in graphic material form has survived, and with which language was closely linked throughout the whole evolutionary process.
Thus we might surmise that myth – such as the narratives of origin which Australian Aborigines assign to Dreamtime – could not have arisen and developed except through the conjoined confluence of both language and art. Language alone can only rely on memory to pass on stories from one mind to another and from one generation to its successors. But memory is very variable, labile, and distorting; extraordinary techniques of mnemonic art had to be invented much later to enable texts to be reasonably accurately passes on by oral means alone, as for example the Vedic hymns in India. The effort necessary to learn off by heart extended stories is prodigious; and prior to writing it is frequently done by distributing parts of a complex myth to different clans or moieties, as is the case among Australian Aborigines.
If for no other reason but to serve as aides mémoire, symbolic objects such as graphic signs, sculptures and paintings, play an essential role in the rituals and ceremonies whereby myths are enacted and learned, and thereby conserved and maintained relatively unchanged over the generations. How this takes place varies from culture to culture. Among Australian Aborigines such objects feature in corroborees and are specially made for the occasion and often discarded soon after; though we know from surviving cave art and other glyphs that the techniques of making more permanent art and the practices associated with it were current until very recent times. We can assume that prehistoric cave art in Europe was utilized for tens of thousands of years in some such way as enduring records in the transmission of what might be called primitive religion, and that myths were faithfully conserved by these means. This would mean that what Donald calls “external memory” is nothing new, but as art goes back to the origin of language itself, and is, perhaps, coextensive
Language and art are both means of communication which function in different ways for correlative purposes. Language works by voice and ear and generally serves for the rapid transmissions essential for practical purposes, as in giving orders, making demands, asking and answering questions, and many other such speech acts. Art works through hand and eye by the slow and laborious processes of marking – by means of scraping, carving, applying pigments and so on – which once made can be very rapidly perceived at a glance and their meaning grasped. Marking in all its forms serves to communicate ideas that are intended to endure within the one group, or to convey messages from one group to another. Cultural values and religious beliefs are relayed and conserved in this way.
Speaking and marking, language and art, convey meaning in quite different ways. It is a fundamental semiotic error to conceive of the one as if it was like the other: to take art as language or language as art. The former misconception is common among aestheticians and art critics, as we have already noted in our critique of the conventionalist reading of art by Goodman, Gombrich and Arnheim. According to these thinkers, art is like a text, it is to be decoded and read according to rules of syntax and semantics. What they fail to realize is that meaning in pictorial art inheres in perception not in conception.
The opposite error of thinking of language as like art is to be found among both poets and philosophers. The old Latin saw ut pictura poesis – derived from Simonides of Kos and quoted in Horace’s Ars Poetica – has played havoc in aesthetic theory throughout the ages, especially in the contemporary period of Modernist poetry. At all times it has had its defenders as well as critics; among the latter Lessing was one of the most notable. We side with Lessing in arguing that it has led to confusion in our understanding of the arts. A similar confused idea was utilized by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus where he presented a theory of linguistic meaning as picturing, taking the Satz, a propositional sentence, as a logical depiction of a Tatsache, a fact. Much philosophical ink has been spilled in both elucidating and refuting this idea.
Given that there are two such opposed but parallel systems of meaning making that together govern human culture and constitute the human mind, it is somewhat odd that this has been but rarely recognized by palaeoanthropologists. One possible exception is André Leroi-Gourhan, and as an extended quotation reveals, he came close to realizing the inherent interrelation between language and art:
Throughout animal evolution, especially that of the higher species, the motor nervous system of the face and that of the hand are closely
coordinated – a coordination indispensable for feeding. In the case of man, this coordination attains to a high degree, that of verbal expression; the facial muscles are so organized that both sign language and articulate language become possible. The links between language and the hand remain close, and down to our day gestures unconsciously accompany words. But the gesture does not raise to the height of language until it becomes drawing and writing: then thought can avail itself of two vectors, the facial organs and the hand; it rediscovers, in a sublimated form, the initial biological balance. Man certainly acquired language long before the Upper Palaeolithic period, but the development of tools most likely went hand in hand with the increasing capacity for abstract thinking and the beginning of graphic skills.118
Whatever the merits of Leroi-Gourhan’s physiological account, which might be questionable, it is certainly the case that tool making capacity is also the beginning of the graphic arts, starting with the most elementary scratching and markings. Later during the Upper Palaeolithic both graphic abstract symbols and pictorial images are present together, as Leroi-Gourhan points out:
From the aesthetic and philosophical point of view, the existence of a system of symbolic representations in the Upper Palaeolithic is highly instructive…This system of abbreviated representation is not a secondary phenomenon of Palaeolithic art: the symbolic signs make their appearance at the outset, and the earliest were still in use during the last period.119
Leroi-Gourhan’s book provides a comprehensive listing of the huge variety of such semi-abstract and fully abstract signs and symbols, whose meanings are now largely inscrutable; though he makes a determined effort to decipher them according to what he takes to be the “Palaeolithic religion of Man”. As to what this is about, he admits himself baffled:” I found myself in the end confronted with a system of unexpected complexity – the skeleton of a religious thought, as impervious to my understanding, as a comparative iconography of sixty cathedrals would be to a Martian”.120
However, it is in such symbolic signs that we find the very first propensity towards writing, which marks the next major stage in Donald’s evolutionary
Alphabetic writing was the next stage in the confluence between language and art. Invented by the Semitic people of the ancient Near East and perfected by the Greeks, the alphabet could link totally abstract signs to single phonemic sounds in any language whatever. This freed writing from being tied to the words and ideas of any specific language or culture and enabled it to be transferred from any one culture and language to any other; this eventually made universal communication across the whole globe possible. Few cultures or languages have been able to do without alphabetic script; the only major exception has been China and its close neighbour Japan, where Chinese characters arrived together with Chinese culture but not the language itself. But it has proved to be next to impossible to universalize those characters so as to make them function independently of Chinese culture; they are firmly rooted in their original cultural context. Not so with the alphabet, for its letters could be varied and adapted to suit different languages and cultures across the whole globe.
To what extent the alphabet was essential in the great transition towards the higher civilizations known as the Axial Age (roughly from 700 to 300 bc) is a much debated issue dealt with at length in our previous works.121 That it was not absolutely indispensable is demonstrated by the history of China. However, China has always been to some degree handicapped in not having an easy to learn script, and writing was confined to a narrow elite stratum of scholar-gentlemen or shih. The alphabet promotes a much higher degree of literacy and a much greater range of texts; in that limited sense it democratizes culture and enables books to circulate more widely.
This is relevant to Donald’s questionable contention that literacy together with theory constitute a new stage in human cognitive development, one
We are equipped with basically the same brain we had 50,000 years ago, and it might be argued that the shift to external memory was purely cultural, and therefore not as fundamental a change as the two previous ones. However, using the same criteria used to evaluate earlier major cognitive changes, recent changes constitute strong evidence for a third major breakthrough in our cognitive evolution. Like the two previous ones, the physical medium as well as the functional architecture of human memory have changed, and new kinds of representation have become possible. External symbols have radically changed the medium of storage. In this they constitute a real hardware change in memory, albeit a change in technological rather than in biological hardware.122
We might allow that what occurred in Greece during the Axial Age was, indeed, exceptional, it has rightly been called the “Greek miracle”, but was it all that different from the Axial Age cultural changes that took place elsewhere? And was it that much more momentous than comparable transformations that occurred both before and after the Axial Age, such as the Neolithic Revolution, the rise of civilizations, or the onset of the age of Modernity in Western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards? In what follows we shall argue as against Donald, that the Neolithic Revolution and perhaps also Modernity, as the prelude to the present stage of technological globalization, have even better claims to be considered fundamentally new stages in human culture, and in that sense transformative of the human mind.
However, there is an even more fundamental objection against Donald’s contention of a third major cognitive transformation of the human mind, the theoretic stage; it is that the criteria he has used to evaluate earlier evolutionary changes do not apply to such purely historical developments as those previously referred to. Evolution and history move along different time lines. They are, in fact, incommensurate with each other and there are no common criteria or standards along which they can be compared. Donald holds that memory is one such standard; but, as we shall argue in what follows, he has invoked a purely metaphoric conception of “external memory” which is highly questionable in a scientific context. This is, of course, also a philosophical issue and not a purely empirical one, and it shows once again that philosophy has a crucial role to play in science; just as science, in this case palaeoanthropology, is indispensable for philosophy of mind.
But apart from the philosophic case for the incommensurability of evolution and history, it can be shown on purely historical grounds that the move to theory, first achieved in Greek philosophy, was not as crucial a transformation in culture as the earlier one of the Neolithic Revolution; or perhaps even that which is being brought about by our present technological age of globalization. Starting in the Middle East around 13000 years ago and repeating itself independently around the world in other continents involving different varieties of crops and animals, the Neolithic Revolution has a much better claim to be considered a major turning point in the history of mankind than Greek philosophy. This original historical departure transformed scattered bands of hunter gatherers into settled populations of farmer and herders, which in turn rapidly gave rise to cities. Until very recently up to 95 per cent of the human race on the planet remained as peasants not all that much removed from the Neolithic state. The cultural manifestations of this revolution were also remarkable in that it gave rise to organized religion based on monuments and temple architecture; and in due course also to a priesthood, whereas previously there had only been shamans or witch doctors.
The Neolithic Revolution was a much more decisive break through in development than anything that came after for it fundamentally altered Man’s relation to Nature. The distinguished palaeoarchaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef considers it “the most crucial revolution of humankind after 2.5 million years of cultural evolution.”123. The Neolithic Revolution led to Man taking control of Nature and thereby entering into History. Hunter-gatherers are in thrall to Nature in that they can only hunt or gather what their environment provides. They have
This need not be seen in Marxist terms as a purely material development, as many of the early palaeoanthropologists, such as V. Gordon Childe, were prone to see it. It was equally revolutionary in transforming the mentality of the people involved and in that limited sense also the human mind. In fact, there is some indication that it began as a cultural change before it assumed its transformative material outcomes. According to the latest finds at Gőbekli Tepe in Southern Turkey, dated to around 9600 bc, there was a temple-complex there before any villages and land cultivation. According to Klaus Schmidt, one of the archaeologists on site, “the construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization”.124 Together with temple architecture there was also a change in symbolic pictorial representations pointing to a new stage in human social consciousness.
These findings are fully in accord with Jacques Cauvin’s thesis that a cognitive revolution preceded an economic one in the constitution of the Neolithic stage of human development.125 Cauvin calls it expressly a “revolution of symbols.” It is to this fundamental change in mentality that we owe organized religion based on the divine personifications we call gods. This differs from the shamanistic religions of the hunter-gatherers based on spirits and changes of state from one animal form to another. According to Cauvin, the first divinities were an earth-fertility Goddess and her bull son-consort. It began as a “change in collective psychology which must have preceded and engendered all the others in the matter of the process of neolithization”.126 There is an obvious symbolic relation between agriculture, domestication and the woman-bull cult in that it represents virile Man taking possession of the earth and its products. This marked the start of a Neolithic way of life which persisted with but few adaptations for most people till almost now. Later historical developments, even such crucial ones as the invention of writing and the rise of philosophy in Greece and elsewhere, concerned only small elites in a few civilizations.
Donald pays little heed to the Neolithic Revolution which he scarcely mentions, and neither do any of the palaeoanthropologists who discuss his work, with the partial exception of Colin Renfrew. Renfrew does not question Donald’s periodization in the evolution of the human mind but charges him with omitting a crucial intermediate stage between the linguistic-mythic and the literate-theoretic: “while noting the origins of visuographic invention in the pictorial representation of the Upper Palaeolithic cave art, his attention then shifts directly to early writing systems in Mesopotamia, and the only systems of External Symbolic Storage to which he gives careful consideration are writing systems.”127 Renfrew goes on to propose an intermediate stage between Donald’s two major stages, and locates it in the Neolithic Revolution: “it may be a valid approximation to suggest that the third transition here may often be equated with the so-called ‘Neolithic revolution’ of the Old World.”128
Renfrew is surely right in highlighting the importance of the Neolithic Revolution, and the reasons he gives for its significance are also the correct ones: it introduces “External Symbolic Storage employing symbolic material culture, characteristic of early agrarian societies with permanent settlements, monuments and valuables.”129 However, what he fails to note is that this development of an unprecedented new mode of production, the very first truly human one, and its accompanying cultural manifestations – such as Renfrew notes “in the field of religion, where the distinction made between deities” first arises – casts in the shade such limited advances as the invention of writing coming with the early civilizations or philosophy with the Greeks. Once the Neolithic changes occurred, it almost seems as if all that followed was more or less inevitable. Once reliable means of subsistence were developed, there were no longer any limits to the size of human population. Hence, as populations grew, cities became an inescapable consequence; and where ecological conditions were favourable, to intensive agriculture, as in river valleys, so, too, were civilizations. Writing then emerged as a simple practical necessity in order to keep accounts of transactions in produce and other goods; and from there it was extended to take stock of everything else in a society. First wisdom literature and then philosophy were the next steps in the growth of literacy, which at first
Renfrew does not take issue with Donald’s periodization of the stages of culture and mind, merely adding as a qualification to it an intermediate stage. And neither does he take issue with Donald’s concept of “external memory” on which Donald bases the importance of writing as constituting another kind of memory in contrast to what he calls “internal memory”. Renfrew follows Donald in speaking of “External Symbolic Storage”, which he also tries to link to memory:
It should be born in mind, in the present context, that monuments are built for remembrance. They are often memorials. It is the role of a memorial to serve the memory, often the collective memory… All this is very relevant to our central theme of ‘external symbolic storage’.130
Thus Renfrew does not question Donald’s concept of “external memory”, he merely backdates it from writing to the monuments characteristic of the Neolithic age. But one might go on to ask, if monuments qualify as “external memory”, why not the much earlier cave art; and if that qualifies, why not the very first pictorial outlines and graphic symbols, which, as recent discoveries have shown are already in evidence among the Neanderthals? Are not all these graphic stages forms of “external symbolic storage”? If so, then “external memory” might go back to the very origins of humanity and might be almost as old as “internal memory”.
If there is something odd with this line of reasoning in taking “external memory” to be primordial, this is because there is something odd with Donald’s concept of “external memory”. What is questionable about it is pointed to by the philosopher E.J. Lowe, another contributor to the volume in which Renfrew’s article features, when he notes its similarities and obvious derivation from computer jargon:
…we should be extremely wary of Donald’s heady talk of “the emergence of visual symbolism and external memory as major factors in cognitive architecture” (Donald 1991, 17). The notion of “external memory” and “cognitive architecture” that are being invoked here are ones drawn from
computer science and the related computational conception of the mind.131
He points out that the computer notion of “information storage” is the obvious model for Donald’s “external symbolic storage”. According to Lowe, this is a mere metaphor which should not be taken too seriously: “precisely because a page of a book, like the hard disk of a computer, ‘store information’ in a sense which is radically different from the sense in which human beings possess knowledge or beliefs…”132 Furthermore, human groups can possess knowledge or beliefs in common, and in that sense collective knowledge or beliefs, in a way that they cannot be said to possess collective memories. Memory is an individualized psychological concept, like perception or thought or feeling, which does not readily transfer to groups, unlike knowledge and belief which are far more interpersonal, and can be shared by many people at once. Mathematical knowledge or religious beliefs have little do to with memory; and though group memorials or practices can be called “collective memories” this term can hardly be applied to geometric theorems or religious dogmas.
However, according to Donald, once they are set down in writing geometric theorems and religious dogmas become “external memory”, which he also calls “collective memory”. It is a nice poetic conceit to regard all the books of mankind as its “collective memory”; and perhaps to add to this store of memory all the customs, traditions, rites and everything else of culture passed down from generation to generation. But this is an expanded concept of “memory” which is far removed from memory as this is understood in its psychological sense, where it pertains to what individuals are able to recall. Why is it that Donald feels the need to extend the concept of “memory” way past its logically accepted bounds in coining the expression “external memory”?
Partly because he is inspired by the computer metaphor, to which he is otherwise utterly opposed as a model for the mind, but much more so because he needs a contrasting term to what he calls “internal memory”, which is what is ordinarily meant by memory. Donald is quite correct and theoretically inspired in proposing that the evolution of voluntary memory recall is the key to the distinctively human capacities of mind. Donald makes this clear in a late and very important paper in which he states his case at the very start:
Human memory is special in many of its superficial manifestations, but, from an evolutionary standpoint, its major distinguishing feature is the
ease with which its contents are made accessible to consciousness. The evolution of voluntary conscious access to memory may account for many, if not most, of the distinguishing characteristics of human memory. The unique capacity for accessing our memory banks provided a platform on which the spiralling co-evolution of human cognition and culture could be constructed.133
By contrast, as he goes on to state, “animal memory lacks any capacity for self-initiated recall… Passive episodic memories – that is, detailed involuntary memories of specific events in their past lives – are found in many animal species … [but only] humans have an option to initiate a search-and-retrieval process, whereas nonhuman animals do not.”134
Having thus established autobiographical memory or “internal memory” as the crucial evolutionary transition underlying the first mimetic stage in human development, Donald feels impelled to postulate something of analogous magnitude, an “external memory”, in order to be able to assert that there is a development that occurred much later – though this time purely cultural and not biological – that underlies a transition of equal importance, that from language and mythical culture to literacy and theoretic culture. It is this preconceived need to postulate two such stages in human evolution and to regard writing and theory as of equal standing to language and myth that has led Donald to postulate two forms of memory, internal and external. On this view, just as the origins of language are to be sought in the evolution of “internal” or “autobiographical” memory, so the origins of writing are to be sought in the development of something he calls “external memory”. But once it is apparent what role it is meant to serve, external memory becomes very questionable; for the two stages on which Donald’s theory is based, language and myth versus writing and theory, are not parallel as he suggests. And, furthermore, memory cannot serve as a common criterion on which they can be compared.
In the 1998 paper in the Renfrew edited volume Donald makes it amply apparent that, whatever its precursors in earlier graphic signs, it is writing that is the preeminent carrier of external memory. “The transition from preliterate to symbolically literate societies … has been marked by a radically new development: the externalization of memory storage. External memory (as opposed to internal or ‘biological memory’) involves completely new memory media with
But Donald requires books and brains to be placed on a common footing, supposedly that of memory, for this alone enables him to claim that the cognitive revolution brought about by “external memory” as script is as great and significant as the biological evolution brought about by voluntarily accessible memory in early species of hominins that gave rise to mimetic culture, the major departure from animal to human mind. If the concept of “external memory” is shown not to be memory at all but simply knowledge storage, this would make Donald’s case far less persuasive. As we have previously argued, the Neolithic Revolution has a far better claim to such a role than literacy or even theory. But our fundamental philosophical contention is that such far removed processes are incommensurable, that biological evolution cannot be compared to cultural revolution for there is no common basis or standard according to which they can be compared and that memory does not provide this.
However, it is possible that in the far distant future a fundamental transformation of human nature will take place, such that we will no longer remain human beings in an individual sense, and that this metamorphosis will be comparable to our original emergence as individual minds. In a very recent
Cognitive evolution seems to be moving from the personal to the social level, indeed, to a level of hybridized social networking with smart machines. This situation constitutes a very basic change in our traditional cognitive governance … just as basic a change as the previous ten-thousand year transition period (the third transition mediated by a series of exographic revolutions)…137
Donald’s fourth transition in the evolution of the human mind, if it ever took place, would correspond to a sixth stage of emergence in our terms, which means that the title of this work would have to be amended to Sextessence of Dust. However, at this point of time it seems a too speculative lunge into the unforeseeable future. One might be sceptical about such predictions preferring instead to exercise epochḗ in the ancient sense of suspending judgement. Moreover, it is not clear whether what is being promised is a transcendence of the human mind or its annihilation. Donald himself wavers on this point:
Moreover, smart technology might well bypass the previous constraint imposed by the natural limits of the brain, leaving humans out of the loop… If smart technology becomes much more autonomous and human beings lose what limited control they have enjoyed over their cognitive and social governance, the locus of control will move to the machine domain.138
Once more, to be or not to be, that is the question, this time not for the individual alone but for our species as a whole. Will we knowingly embark on a course of development the end of which might well be our collective suicide?
Whatever one makes of Donald’s last quest in forecasting the future of the human mind, there is no doubt that his previous expeditions into its past have yielded some of the most remarkable insights that the science of palaeoanthropology has so far afforded. He must be given credit for redirecting the whole course of this science away from its standard preoccupation with
Even though he is not as preoccupied with material remains as most palaeoanthropologists, and perhaps less so with pictures than he might be, Donald does not resile from all the other material or social aspects of human evolution. He asserts unequivocally that “a satisfactory theory of human cognitive evolution should begin with this realization: cognition did not evolve in isolation of these other dimensions [viz. anatomy, diet, mating behaviour etc.].”139 In his own comprehensive theory “the central thrust was both social and cognitive. Human beings evolved a cognitive survival strategy that gradually made the species better able to perform cognitive work in groups…”140 In developing such a multi-factored theory – for as he puts it, “there is no variable that can be said to constitute the irreducible cognitive ‘atom’ of a uniquely human mental substance”141 – Donald draws on his extensive knowledge and expertise in a remarkable range of sciences and humanities. Perhaps it is this breadth of mind more than anything else that makes his approach so outstanding.
Having completed our account of the origin of the human mind and how it differs from animal mind, we can now proceed to study its inner workings Thus we shift gear from having been largely intent on anthropology and evolution to being mainly concerned with psychology and pedagogy. In this exploration of the human psyche our initial guide is Freud, the founder of the aptly named science of psychoanalysis, but our analyses of the psyche will also go beyond Freud to other reaches of the mind with which he was less concerned.
Harry Redner, The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 2015), Chapter 5.
Donald A. Griffin, Animal Minds, op. cit, Chapter 9.
Ibid, 192.
Ibid, 192.
Ibid, 194.
Ibid, 193.
Ibid, 194.
Ibid, 139.
Ibid, 104–5
Ibid, 171–3.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 121.
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, op. cit, 208.
P.S. Churchland, Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002) 81.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 114.
Donald A. Griffin, Animal Minds, op. cit, 136.
Jerome Bruner, “Will Cognitive Revolutions ever Stop”, in David Martel Jackson and Christine E. Eveling, eds. The Future of the Cognitive Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 281.
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, op. cit, passim.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 88.
Ibid, 88.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 98.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History, (London: Bodley Head, 2016), 191.
Quoted in John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind, (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 20.
Ibid, 40.
Quoted in ibid, 37.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 159.
Ibid, 159.
Ibid, 159.
Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present, op. cit.
Ibid, 92.
Ibid, 92.
Ibid, 97.
Ibid, 101.
Ibid, 110.
Ibid, 110.
Ibid, 110.
Ibid, 103.
Ibid, 103.
Ibid, 22.
Ibid, 22.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 124.
Ibid, 124.
Merlin Donald, Origin of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 253.
Ibid, 53.
Ibid, 154.
J.J. Gibson, “What is Form?” Psychological Review, 1951, 58, 403–13, in Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones, eds. Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of J.J. Gibson, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum,1982), 307.
Ibid, 307.
Ibid, 304.
J.J. Gibson, “Information contained in Light”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 58.
J.J. Gibson, “Direct Perception and Indirect Apprehension”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 292.
Ibid, 292.
J.J. Gibson, “Affordances”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 404.
Ibid, 404.
J.J. Gibson, “On Theories for Visual Space Perception”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 89.
J.J. Gibson, “Affordances”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 411.
J.J. Gibson, “Ecological Optics”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 61.
Ibid, 61.
Gunnar Johansson, “A Letter to Gibson”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 77.
J.J. Gibson, “Affordances”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit, 405.
J.J. Gibson, “What is form?”, in Reed and Jones, op. cit. p. 314.
Richard L. Gregory, “Knowledge in Perception and Illusion”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1997), 352: 1121–8.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine, vol. i, op. cit, 298.
Chris Frith, Making up the Mind: How the Brain creates our Mental World, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 132.
R.L. Gregory, “Knowledge in Perception and Illusion”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 352 (1997), 1122.
Chris Frith, Making up the Mind, op. cit, 132.
Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine, vol. i, op. cit, 304.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, trans. and ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A Willoughby, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Letter xv, op. cit.
Ibid.
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), x.
Merlin Donald, The Origins of the Modern Mind, op. cit, 283.
Ibid, 283.
Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution”, ed. Mark Turner, The Artful Mind and the Riddle of Human Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14.
Ibid.
Ibid, 15.
Ibid, 16.
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, op. cit, 322.
Ibid, 322.
Ibid, 322.
Ibid, 322–3.
Ibid, 349.
Ibid, 346–50.
Ibid, 351.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 254.
Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution”, op. cit, 19.
Merlin Donald, The Origins of the Modern Mind, op. cit.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 268.
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, op. cit, 43.
Ibid, 44.
Ibid, 44.
Ibid, 45.
Ibid, 45.
Ibid, 45.
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, op. cit, 136.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 204.
Merlin Donald, Origin of the Modern Mind, op. cit, 93.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, op. cit, 204.
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, op. cit, 153.
Ibid, 154.
Ibid, 160.
Ibid, 161.
See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and the Mind, (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
Interview with Robin McKie, The Observer, April 8, 2018.
Merlin Donald, “Human Cognitive Evolution: What We Were, What We Are Becoming”, Social Research, vol. 60, no. 1 (Spring 1993), 157.
Merlin Donald, “Preconditions for the evolution of protolanguage”, in Michael Corballis and Stephen E.G. Lea, The Descent of Man: Psychological Perspectives on Human Evolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 150.
Ibid, 148.
Merlin Donald, “Key Cognitive Preconditions for the Evolution of Language”, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 24, no. 1, February 2017, 204.
Ibid, 204.
Ibid, 205.
Ibid, 205.
Report by Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 23 Feb. 2018.
Merlin Donald, “Human Cognitive Evolution: What We Were, What We Are Becoming”, Social Research, vol. 60, no. 1, (Spring 1993),160–73.
Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution”, op. cit, 14.
Merlin Donald, “The roots of art and religion in ancient material culture”, in Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley, eds. Becoming Human, Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 96.
Ibid, 96.
André Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art, trans. Norbert Guterman, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 43.
Ibid, 80.
Ibid, 144.
See Harry Redner, A New Science of Representation: Towards a Unified Theory of Representation in Science, Politics and Art, (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994); and Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalization, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013).
Merlin Donald, “Human Cognitive Evolution: What we Were, What we Are Becoming”, op. cit, 161.
Ofer Bar-Yosef, “ppnb Interaction Sphere”, Review Feature, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 11:1 (2001), 117.
Quoted in Harry Redner, Beyond Civilization op. cit, p. 34.
Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, trans. Trevor Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Ibid, 23.
Colin Renfrew, “Mind and Matter: Cognitive Archaeology and External Symbolic Storage”, in Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, eds. Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbols, (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 198), 2.
Ibid, 4.
Ibid, 4.
Op. cit, 5.
E.J. Lowe, “Personal Experience and Belief”, in Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, op. cit, 95.
Ibid. p. 94.
Merlin Donald, “Evolutionary origins of autobiographical memory: a retrieval hypothesis”, in Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin, Understanding Autobiographical Memory: Theories and Approaches, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 269.
Ibid, 275.
Merlin Donald,” Hominid Enculturation and Cognitive Evolution”, in Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, Cognition and Material Culture, op. cit, 15.
Ibid, 15.
Merlin Donald, “Self-Programming and Self-Domestication of the Human Species: Are We Approaching a Fourth Transition?” in Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Gilhus, I.S., Martin, L.A., Jensen, J.S. and Sorensen, J., eds. Evolution, Cognition and the History of Religion: a New Synthesis, (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 170.
Ibid, 171.
Merlin Donald, “Mimesis Theory Re-examined, Twenty Years After the Fact” in Gary Hatfield and Holly Pittman, eds. Evolution of Mind, Brain and Culture, (Philadelphia: Penn Museum International Research Conferences, 2013), 170.
Ibid, 172–3.
Ibid, 173.