Darwin's Dangerous Idea (4 page)

3. LOCKE'S "PROOF" OF THE PRIMACY OF MIND

Let us suppose any parcel of Matter eternal, great or small, we shall find it, in itself, able to produce nothing___ Matter then, by its own strength,
John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it
cannot produce in itself so much as Motion: the Motion it has, must also be
ever since!

from Eternity, or else be produced, and added to Matter by some other

—BERTRAND RL'SSEU.2

Being more powerful than Matter __ But let us suppose Motion eternal too: yet Matter, incogitative Matter and Motion, whatever changes it might John Locke, a contemporary of "the incomparable Mr. Newton," was one produce of Figure and Bulk, could never produce Thought: Knowledge of the founding fathers of British Empiricism, and, as befits an Empiricist, he will still be as far beyond the power of Motion and Matter to produce, as was not much given to deductive arguments of the rationalist sort, but one of Matter is beyond the power of nothing or nonentity to produce. And I his uncharacteristic forays into "proof deserves to be quoted in full, since it appeal to everyone's own thoughts, whether he cannot as easily conceive perfectly illustrates the blockade to imagination that was in place before the Matter produced by nothing, as Thought produced by pure Matter, when Darwinian Revolution. The argument may seem strange and stilted to before there was no such thing as Thought, or an intelligent Being exist-modern minds, but bear with it—consider it a sign of how far we have come ing. ...

since then. Locke himself thought that he was just reminding people of something obvious! In this passage from his
Essay Concerning Human
It is interesting to note that Locke decides he may safely "appeal to
Understanding
(1690, IV, x, 10), Locke wanted to
prove
something that he everyone's own thoughts" to secure this "conclusion." He was sure that
his
thought all people knew in their hearts in any case: that "in the beginning"

"common sense" was truly
common
sense. Don't we see how obvious it is there was Mind. He began by asking himself what, if anything, was eternal: that whereas matter and motion could produce changes of "Figure and Bulk,"

they could
never
produce "Thought"? Wouldn't this rule out the prospect of If, then, there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of Being it robots—or at least robots that would claim to have genuine Thoughts among must be. And to that it is very obvious to Reason, that it must necessarily the motions in their material heads? Certainly in Locke's day—which was be a cogitative Being. For it is as impossible to conceive that ever bare also Descartes's day—the very idea of Artificial Intelligence was so close to incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that unthinkable that Locke could confidently expect unanimous endorsement of nothing should of itself produce Matter....

this appeal to his audience, an appeal that would risk hoots of derision today.3 And as we shall see, the field of Artificial Intelligence is a quite Locke begins his proof by alluding to one of philosophy's most ancient direct descendant of Darwin's idea. Its birth, which was all but prophesied by and oft-used maxims,
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
nothing can come from nothing.

Darwin himself, was attended by one of the first truly impressive Since this is to be a deductive argument, he must set his sights high: it is not demonstrations of the formal power of natural selection (Art Samuel's just unlikely or implausible or hard to fathom but
impossible to conceive
that legendary checkers-playing program, which will be described in some detail

"bare incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being." The later). And both evolution and AI inspire the same loathing in many people argument proceeds by a series of mounting steps-.

who should know better, as we shall see in later chapters. But back to Locke's conclusion:

So if we will suppose nothing first, or eternal: Matter can never begin to be: If we suppose bare Matter, without Motion, eternal: Motion can never 2. Gilbert Ryle recounted this typical bit of Russellian hyperbole to me. In spite of Ryle's own distinguished career as Waynflete Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, he and Russell begin to be: If we suppose only Matter and Motion first, or eternal: Thought had seldom met, he told me, in large measure because Russell steered clear of academic can never begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that Matter either philosophy after the Second World War. Once, however, Ryle found himself sharing a with or without Motion could have originally in and from itself Sense, compartment with Russell on a tedious train journey, and, trying desperately to make conversation with his world-famous fellow traveler, Ryle asked him why he thought Locke, who was neither as original nor as good a writer as Berkeley, Hume, or Reid, had been so much more influential than they in the English-speaking philosophical world.

3. Descartes's inability to think of Thought as Matter in Motion is discussed at length in This had been his reply, and the beginning of the only good conversation, Ryle said, that my book
Consciousness Explained
(1991a). John Haugeland's aptly titled book,
Artificial
he ever had with Russell.

Intelligence: The Very Idea
( 1985 ), is a fine introduction to the philosophical paths that make this idea thinkable after all.

28 TELL ME WHY

Hume's Close Encounter
29

Such an argument can be seen as an attempt at an alternate route to Locke's Perception, and Knowledge, as is evident from hence, that then Sense, Perception, and Knowledge must be a property eternally inseparable from conclusion, a route that will take us through somewhat more empirical detail Matter and every particle of it.

instead of relying so bluntly and directly on what is deemed inconceivable.

The actual features of the observed designs may be analyzed, for instance, to So, if Locke is right, Mind must come first—or at least tied for first. It secure the grounds for our appreciation of the wisdom of the Designer, and could not come into existence at some later date, as an effect of some our conviction that mere chance could not be responsible for these marvels.

confluence of more modest, mindless phenomena. This purports to be an In Hume's
Dialogues,
three fictional characters pursue the debate with entirely secular, logical—one might almost say mathematical—vindication consummate wit and vigor. Cleanthes defends the Argument from Design, of a central aspect of Judeo-Christian ( and also Islamic ) cosmogony: in the and gives it one of its most eloquent expressions.4 Here is his opening beginning was something with Mind—"a cogitative Being," as Locke says.

statement of it:

The traditional idea that God is a rational, thinking agent, a Designer and Builder of the world, is here given the highest stamp of scientific approval: Look round the world. Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You like a mathematical theorem, its denial is supposedly impossible to conceive.

will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree And so it seemed to many brilliant and skeptical thinkers before Darwin.

beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these Almost a hundred years after Locke, another great British Empiricist, David various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each Hume, confronted the issue again, in one of the masterpieces of Western other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have philosophy, his
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(1779).

ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles, exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance—of human design, thought, wisdom, and 4. HUME'S CLOSE ENCOUNTER

intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble, and that the Natural religion, in Hume's day, meant a religion that was supported by the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though pos-natural sciences, as opposed to a "revealed" religion, which would depend on sessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work revelation—on mystical experience or some other uncheckable source of which he has executed. By this argument
a posteriori,
and by this argu-conviction. If your only grounds for your religious belief is "God told me so ment alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity and his similarity to human mind and intelligence. [Pt. II]

in a dream," your religion is not natural religion. The distinction would not have made much sense before the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century, when science created a new, and competitive, standard of evidence Philo, a skeptical challenger to Cleanthes, elaborates the argument, setting for all belief. It opened up the question:

it up for demolition. Anticipating Paley's famous example, Philo notes:

"Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will Can you give us any
scientific
grounds for your religious beliefs?

never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch."5 He goes on: "Stone, and mortar, and wood, without an architect, never erect a house. But the Many religious thinkers, appreciating that the prestige of scientific thought was—other things being equal—a worthy aspiration, took up the challenge. It is hard to see why anybody would want to shun scientific confirmation of one's creed, if it were there to be had. The overwhelming favorite among 4. William Paley carried the Argument from Design into much greater biological detail in his purportedly scientific arguments for religious conclusions, then and now, was 1803 book,
Natural Theology,
adding many ingenious flourishes. Paley's influential version was the actual inspiration and target of Darwin's rebuttal, but Hume's Cleanthes one version or another of the Argument from Design: among the effects we catches all of the argument's logical and rhetorical force.

can objectively observe in the world, there are many that are not (cannot be, for various reasons ) mere accidents; they must have been designed to be as 5. Gjertsen points out that two millennia earlier, Cicero used the same example for the same purpose: "When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by they are, and there cannot be design without a Designer; therefore, a design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is Designer, God, must exist (or have existed), as the source of all these devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these arti-wonderful effects.

facts themselves and their artificers?" (Gjertsen 1989, p. 199).

Hume's Close Encounter
31

30 TELL ME WHY

been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable economy, struck out: Much labour lost: Many fruitless trials made: And a slow, arrange themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or house. Experience, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages of world-therefore, proves, that there is an original principle of order in mind, not in making. (Pt. V.]

matter" (Pt. II).

Note that the Argument from Design depends on an inductive inference: When Philo presents this fanciful alternative, with its breathtaking anticipa-where there's smoke, there's fire; and where there's design, there's mind. But tions of Darwin's insight, he doesn't take it seriously except as a debating foil this is a dubious inference, Philo observes: human intelligence is to Cleanthes' vision of an all-wise Artificer. Hume uses it only to make a point about what he saw as the limitations on our knowledge: "In such no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others, which fall the probability, lies; amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be under daily observation__ But can a conclusion, with any propriety, be proposed, and a still greater number which may be imagined" (Pt. V).

transferred from parts to the whole?... From observing the growth of a Imagination runs riot, and, exploiting that fecundity, Philo ties Cleanthes up hair, can we learn any thing concerning the generation of a man?...

What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we in knots, devising weird and comical variations on Cleanthes' own hy-call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole potheses, defying Cleanthes to show why his own version should be pre-universe?... Admirable conclusion! Stone, wood, brick, iron, brass have ferred. "Why may not several Deities combine in contriving and framing a not, at this time, in this minute globe of earth, an order or arrangement world?... And why not become a perfect anthropomorphite? Why not assert without human art and contrivance: Therefore the universe could not the Deity or Deities to be corporeal, and to have eyes, a nose, mouth, ears, originally attain its order and arrangement, without something similar to etc.?" (Pt. V). At one point, Philo anticipates the Gaia hypothesis: the human art. [Pt. II.]

universe

Besides, Philo observes, if we put mind as the first cause, with its "unknown, bears a great resemblance to an animal or organized body, and seems inexplicable economy," this only postpones the problem: actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual circulation of

We are still obliged to mount higher, in order to find the cause of this matter in it produces no disorder ___The world, therefore, I infer, is an cause, which you had assigned as satisfactory and conclusive ___ How animal, and the Deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it and actuated therefore shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being, by it. [Pt. VI.]

whom you suppose the Author of nature, or, according to your system of anthropomorphism, the ideal world, into which you trace the material?