Ty Renshaw

“Long before self-awareness, memory, foresight, powers of conscious deliberation and so on emerged to give a supposed advantage, there is a more promising alternative to consciousness at every step of the way: more efficient unconscious mechanisms, which, what is more, seem equally or more likely to be thrown up by spontaneous variation.

…

If we assume the materialist viewpoint and, unlike many evolutionary biologists, adhere to it consistently, if we escape from an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees the entire evolutionary process as something that was always leading up to us or creatures like us, it seems highly implausible that, in an unconscious biosphere, consciousness, even if it were on offer, would seem like a good option.

…

Yes, my genes would have a better chance of replicating than yours if I had better memory or more foresight than you. But when we start at the right place, at the beginning in other words, and ask by what disastrous processes did conscious, especially complex conscious, species emerge so that there are errors to be avoided or matter that can make errors—or where there are errors to be avoided or corrected—and memory and foresight are needed, we can only wonder, unavailingly at how evolution took this unfortunate turn. After all, at the fundamental level mechanisms do not make ‘mistakes’ with the same frequency as conscious intentions aimed at a goal. A deliberating creature that has increased capacity to get things right does so only because it has a propensity to get things wrong. A fully adapted organism would not have to deliberate at all.”

— Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (2011, p. 175-177)

“So even if consciousness really did bring survival advantage, it is not clear how it could become available to genes via the material organisms that are the vehicles ensuring their replication. This question arises irrespective of whether we are considering the putative consciousness of a single photosensitive cell, or that of a human eye, or of a human being aware of her fellows in a shared world built up out of pooled experience. The explanatory gap—the jump from (material) energy exchanges to (proto-mental) awareness—just happens to be more clearly evident in the case of single energy-sensitive cells, which lie at the putative beginning of consciousness. It doesn’t help to imagine that the single cell has only a ‘teeny-weeny’ bit of consciousness that can somehow be smuggled into the material world without the latter’s laws being bent or broken. So the question still remains: how is it that certain configurations of matter should be aware, should suffer, fear, enjoy and so on? There is nothing in the properties of matter that would lead you to expect that eventually certain configurations of it (human bodies) would pool that experience and live in a public world.

— Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (2011, p. 174-175)

“A model is a presentation which we use to refer to another presentation. To say that the brain constructs models relies on the possibility of a model which has no presentation to begin with. It means that our every experience, including your sitting in that chair reading these words, is made of ‘representation-ness’, which stands in for the Homunculus to perform this invisible and logically redundant alchemical transformation from perfectly useful neurological signals into some weird orgy of improbable identities.

It doesn’t hold up. It is a de-presentation of the world in order to justify our failure to locate consciousness inside the tissue of the brain. Consciousness isn’t ‘in’ anything, and it’s not produced by anything. It’s a story which produces brains, bodies, planets, etc. They are parts of consciousness that are modeled as the world. They are representations made of condensed, externalized, temporally imploded presentations of sense.”

— Craig Weinberg, “Will the Real Model Please Stand Down” (Sense, Essence, and Existence, 2012)

“For a variety of reasons, then, human inquiry needs a synthesis, in which history and anthropology and literature and art play their parts. But there is still a deeper reason for the enduring importance of the humanities. Many scientists and commentators on science have been led to view the sciences as a value-free zone, and it is easy to understand why. When the researcher enters the lab, many features of the social world seem to have been left behind. The day’s work goes on without the need for confronting large questions about how human lives can or should go. Research is insulated because the lab is a purpose-built place, within which the rules of operation are relatively clear and well-known. Yet on a broader view, which explores the purposes and their origins, it becomes clear that judgments of the significance of particular questions profoundly affect the work done and the environments in which it is done. Behind the complex and often strikingly successful practices of contemporary science stands a history of selecting specific aspects of the world for investigation. Bits of nature do not shout out “Examine me!” Throughout history, instead, innovative scientists have built a number of lampposts under which their successors can look. It is always worth considering whether the questions that now seem most significant demand looking elsewhere for new sources of illumination.

We are finite beings, and so our investigations have to be selective, and the broadest frameworks of today’s science reflect the selections of the past. What we discover depends on the questions taken to be significant, and the selection of those questions, as well as the decision of which factors to set aside in seeking answers to them, presupposes judgments about what is valuable. Those are not only, or mainly, scientific judgments. In their turn, new discoveries modify the landscape in which further investigations will take place, and because what we learn affects how evidence is assessed, discovery shapes the evolution of our standards of evidence. Judgments of value thus pervade the environment in which scientific work is done. If they are made, as they should be, in light of the broadest and deepest reflections on human life and its possibilities, then good science depends on contributions from the humanities and the arts. Perhaps there is even a place for philosophy.

Healthy relationships between the sciences and the humanities should aspire to the condition of the best marriages—to a partnership in which different strengths and styles are acknowledged and appreciated, in which a fruitful division of labor constantly evolves, in which constructive criticism is given and received, in which neither party can ever make a plausible claim to absolute authority, and in which the ultimate goal is nothing less than the furtherance of the human good.”

— Philip Kitcher, “The Trouble with Scientism” (The New Republic, 2012)

“Since the conclusions reached in analyses of human behavior will be socially consequential—they may result in actual policies—the evidence for them deserves to be closely scrutinized.”

— Phillip Kitcher, “The Trouble with Scientism” (The New Republic, 2012)

“The problem with scientism—which is of course not the same thing as science—is owed to a number of sources, and they deserve critical scrutiny. The enthusiasm for natural scientific imperialism rests on five observations. First, there is the sense that the humanities and social sciences are doomed to deliver a seemingly directionless sequence of theories and explanations, with no promise of additive progress. Second, there is the contrasting record of extraordinary success in some areas of natural science. Third, there is the explicit articulation of technique and method in the natural sciences, which fosters the conviction that natural scientists are able to acquire and combine evidence in particularly rigorous ways. Fourth, there is the perception that humanists and social scientists are only able to reason cogently when they confine themselves to conclusions of limited generality: insofar as they aim at significant—general—conclusions, their methods and their evidence are unrigorous. Finally, there is the commonplace perception that the humanities and social sciences have been dominated, for long periods of their histories, by spectacularly false theories, grand doctrines that enjoy enormous popularity until fashion changes, as their glaring shortcomings are disclosed.”

— Phillip Kitcher, “The Trouble with Scientism” (The New Republic, 2012)

“Popular reports often do not make clear the limited value of a journalistically exciting result. Good headlines can make for bad reporting.”

— Gary Gutting, “How Reliable are the Social Sciences” (The Stone, 2012)

“Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy. At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.”

— Gary Gutting, “How Reliable are the Social Sciences” (The Stone, 2012)

“Taking a broader view, it would seem preferable to keep healthy by a method that is simple, reliable and doesn’t require constant revision and fine-tuning. We do, after all, have such a method available: simply follow the humdrum standard advice we’ve heard all our lives about eating sensibly, exercising regularly, and having recommended medical tests and exams. Doing this and foregoing the endless calibration of our behavior to the latest research results will be far less stressful, make it more likely that we’ll stick to the method, and allow more time for fulfilling pursuits. From this point of view, the media’s constant updates on the latest observational studies are counterproductive.

We are all going to die sometime, from something. Even if I find just the right blend of exercise, diet and herbs that saves me from a heart attack at 60, I may have merely ensured that I will die of cancer at 70. Saving myself from cancer at 70 may mean I end with 10 agonizing years of dementia. When all is said and done, how we die is a crap-shoot, and, short of avoiding obvious risks such as smoking and poor diet, there’s little we can do to load the dice.”

— Gary Gutting, “Trying to Live Forever” (The Stone, 2012)