A prominent group of scientists signs a document stating that animals are just as “conscious and aware” as humans are. This is a big deal.
Actually, it is not a big deal, nor in any way news, and the really interesting thing about this story is how completely uninteresting it is. Animals are conscious? Anyone who has ever owned a pet, or been to the zoo, or indeed just knows what an animal is, knows that.
OK, almost anyone. Descartes notoriously denied it, for reasons tied to his brand of dualism. And perhaps that is one reason someone might think animal consciousness remarkable. It might be supposed that if you regard the human mind as something immaterial, you have to regard animals as devoid of consciousness, so that evidence of animal consciousness is evidence against the immateriality of the mind and thus a “big deal.” This is not what the article says, mind you, but it is one way to make sense of why it presents the evidence of animal consciousness as if it were noteworthy.
The trouble is that there is simply no essential connection whatsoever between affirming the immateriality of the human mind and denying that animals are conscious. Aristotelians, for example, have always insisted both that animals are sentient -- indeed, that is part of what makes them animals in the first place -- and that human intellectual activity is at least partly immaterial (for reasons I’ve discussed in many places, most recently here). Descartes’ reasons for denying animal consciousness have to do with assumptions peculiar to his own brand of dualism, assumptions Aristotelians reject. And they have to do especially with assumptions Descartes made about the nature of matter as much or more than they have to do with his assumptions about the nature of mind -- assumptions about matter that materialists (no doubt including at least some among those scientists cited in the Discovery News article) share.
I’ve discussed the modern, post-Cartesian conception of matter and the role it played in generating the so-called “mind-body problem” many times in many places (including hereand here). The key point for present purposes is that in characterizing matter in purely quantitative, mathematical terms, Descartes left no place in it for qualitative features like color, odor, taste, sound, smell, heat and cold as common sense understands them. Accordingly, he treated these qualitative features -- as Galileo before him and Locke, Boyle, and countless others after him did -- as entirely mind-dependent, existing only in our conscious experience of the world but not in the world itself. They are analogous to the redness you see when you literally look at the world through rose-colored glasses -- not really “out there” but only in the eye of the beholder. What really exists “out there,” on this sort of view, is only color, sound, heart, cold, etc. as redefined in terms of physics -- surface reflectance properties, compression waves, molecular motion, etc.
Now, if these qualitative features as common sense understands them exist only in the mind and not in the material world, it follows that these features cannot themselves be material. A kind of dualism follows, then, precisely from the conception of matter to which modern philosophers -- including materialists-- are generally committed. Indeed, as I have also noted before (most recently here), early modern writers like Malebranche and Cudworth saw in this new conception of matter such an argument for dualism, as have contemporary dualists like Richard Swinburne. The so-called “qualia problem” that contemporary philosophers of mind fret over has (contrary to what some of the materialists among them seem to assume) nothing whatsoever to do with an unwillingness to follow out the implications of modern science, but on the contrary is the inevitable result of the conception of matter to which modern scientists in their philosophical moments have wedded themselves.
In any event, if we say that these qualitative features -- redness, coolness, etc. as we know them from introspection -- exist only in a mind-dependent way, only in conscious experience, that raises the question of what a mind is. And for Descartes, a mind is just the sort of thing whose existence he is left with when everything else has been doubted away by the end of the first of his Meditations -- the sort of thing which can think to itself “I think, therefore I am,” and which can know that it and its conscious experiences of the world exist even if the external material world itself does not.
This gives us Descartes’ novel form of dualism. The human body, as he understood it, is just one entirely mathematically definable bit of the material world among others, entirely devoid of qualitative features and thus of the consciousness that, as he saw it, is presupposed by them. What makes a human being more than a mere unconscious mechanism is that conjoined with this body is a res cogitans in which alone consciousness resides. Apart from that, a human being would be no more conscious than a toaster oven, even if it acted like it was conscious -- which is precisely why the post-Cartesian understanding of matter and mind has given rise to the notion of a “zombie,” in the technical sensefamiliar from contemporary philosophy of mind. This notion of a “zombie” -- and thus the “hard problem of consciousness” which has gotten so much attention in recent years and which many philosophers and scientists falsely suppose is a scientific problem susceptible of a scientific solution -- are artifacts of an entirely philosophical, historically contingent, and eminently challengeable (indeed, I would say clearly false) conception of matter.
Be that as it may, Descartes’ strange view about animals pretty naturally falls out of this set of assumptions. If the entire material world, including the human body, is utterly devoid of anything like the qualitative features we know from conscious experience, and consciousness resides only in a res cogitans, then whatever lacks a res cogitanscannot be conscious. But the mark of a res cogitans is the sort of higher cognitive activity represented by fancy philosophical thoughts like “I think, therefore I am,” and (more generally) expressible in language. Whatever gives every sign of being devoid of the sort of intellectual activity associated with language accordingly gives every sign of being devoid of consciousness. Hence we have (again, given the assumptions in question) every reason to conclude that non-human animals are essentially “zombies” -- they act like they are conscious, but they are not.
Now, this crazy outcome is, certainly for us Aristotelians, a clear reductio ad absurdum of the premises that led to it, and just one of the many evidences that the moderns were wrong to abandon the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature (which is, of course, not to say that they were wrong to abandon the erroneous scientific ideas that had gotten entangled with that philosophy of nature). But there is nevertheless a kind of logic to Descartes’ position. One sometimes hears stupid remarks about Descartes to the effect that his views about animals reflected mere anthropocentric prejudice or the like. (See this golden oldie from the long-defunct Conservative Philosopher group blog, wherein I criticized one such attack.) Descartes was wrong, but no one who shares his basic assumptions about the nature of matter -- which probably includes most contemporary philosophers and scientists, albeit they share those assumptions unreflectively and only in broad outlines (namely Descartes’ emphasis on quantitative and mathematically definable features) rather than in the details (e.g. Descartes’ commitment to plenum theory, which no one accepts any longer) -- has any business dismissing his views out of hand. For it is precisely those essentially anti-Aristotelian, anti-Scholastic assumptions that led to his bizarre views about animals.
Another reason some might think animal consciousness is noteworthy is that they might think it supports materialism. In particular, they might suppose that given that animals are purely material and yet are conscious, that gives us reason to think that the human mind in its entirely is material. But this is just a non sequitur, and once again presupposes an essentially Cartesian understanding of the relevant issues. Because he took all consciousness to reside in the res cogitans and regarded the res cogitans as immaterial, Descartes’ position implies that sensation and imagination are immaterial. Hence if sensation and imagination turn out to be material after all, the post-Cartesian philosopher understandably concludes that the remaining operations of the res cogitans, and higher cognitive activities in particular, might be susceptible of materialist explanation as well.
But the Aristotelian tradition has in the first place always regarded sensation and imagination as corporeal faculties, and as having nothing essentially to do with the reasons why our distinctively intellectual activities are incorporeal. It is only because they take for granted the desiccated, purely quantitative post-Cartesian conception of matter that contemporary philosophers and scientists regard sensation and imagination as at least philosophically problematic and are impressed by any evidence for the essentially bodily character of sensation and imagination. The Aristotelian finds himself stifling a yawn. “Big whoop. We’ve been saying that for centuries.”
In any event, merely to insinuate that evidence for the corporeal nature of conscious awareness is evidence for the corporeal nature of abstract thought would just be to beg the question against the Aristotelian tradition, which maintains that strictly intellectual activity on the one hand and sensation and imagination on the other differ in kind and not merely degree, so that to establish the corporeal nature of the latter is irrelevant to the question of whether the former is corporeal. (I’ve addressed this issue many times as well, once again most recently here.) Hence, to establish that animals have conscious awareness of a sensory and imaginative sort -- something the Aristotelian not only has never denied but has insisted upon -- simply does nothing to show that the distinctively intellectual powers of human beings might be given a materialist explanation. (Though in fairness, the Discovery News article doesn’t say otherwise. I’m merely speculating about why anyone might find remarkable the inherently unremarkable claim that non-human animals are conscious.)
So, Discovery News, Discovery Shnews. For the reallyinteresting developments in animal psychology, you’ve got to rely on The Onion:
Published on: 20:24 by patience4q9beatty38 - No comments
As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).
That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. The thesis is either explicitly or implicitly denied by modern empiricists and by ancients like Democritus; as I noted in an earlier post, the various bizarre metaphysical conclusions defended by writers like Berkeley and Hume largely rest on the conflation of intellect and imagination. But the irreducibility of intellect to imagination is for all that undeniable, for several reasons.
Thinking versus imagining
First, the concepts that are the constituents of intellectual activity are universal while mental images and sensations are always essentially particular. Any mental image I can form of a man is always going to be of a man of a particular sort -- tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, redheaded, bald, or what have you. It will fit at most many men, but not all. But my concept man applies to every single man without exception. Or to use my stock example, any mental image I can form of a triangle will be an image of an isosceles , scalene, or equilateral triangle, of a black, blue, or green triangle, etc. But the abstract concept triangularity applies to all triangles without exception. And so forth.
Second, mental images are always to some extent vagueor indeterminate, while concepts are at least often precise and determinate. To use Descartes’ famous example, a mental image of a chiliagon (a 1,000-sided figure) cannot be clearly distinguished from a mental image of a 1,002-sided figure, or even from a mental image of a circle. But the concept of a chiliagon is clearly distinct from the concept of a 1,002-sided figure or the concept of a circle. I cannot clearly differentiate a mental image of a crowd of one million people from a mental image of a crowd of 900,000 people. But the intellect easily understands the difference between the concept of a crowd of one million people and the concept of a crowd of 900,000 people. And so on.
Third, we have many concepts that are so abstract that they do not have even the loose sort of connection with mental imagery that concepts like man, triangle, and crowd have. You cannot visualize triangularity or humannessper se, but you can at least visualize a particular triangle or a particular human being. But we also have concepts -- such as the concepts law, square root, logical consistency, collapse of the wave function, and innumerably many others -- that can strictly be associated with no mental image at all. You might form a visual or auditory image of the English word “law” when you think about law, but the concept lawobviously has no essential connection whatsoever with that word, since ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Indians had the concept without using that specific word to name it. You might form a mental image of a certain logician when you contemplate what it is for a theory to be logically consistent, or a mental image of someone observing something when you contemplate the collapse of the wave function, but there is no essential connection whatsoever between (say) the way Alonzo Church looked and the concept logical consistency or (say) what someone looks like when he’s observing a dead cat and the concept wave function collapse.
The impossibility of materialism
Now, the reason why intellectual activity cannot in principle be reduced to sensation or imagination is, as it happens, related to the reason why intellectual activity cannot in principle be reduced to, or entirely supervenient upon, or in any other way explicable in terms of material processes of any sort. For like mental images, the symbols postulated by cognitive scientists (“sentences in the head,” “maps,” or what have you), and any other possible purported material embodiments of thought, (a) necessarily lack the universality that concepts have, (b) necessarily lack the determinacy that concepts have, and (c) generally have exactly the loose and non-essential connection to the concepts they purportedly embody that the word “law” has to the concept law or a mental image of Alonzo Church has to the concept logical consistency.
There is no way the materialist is ever going to square this circle. To “explain” intellectual activity entirely in terms of material processes is inevitably at least implicitly to deny the existence of the former, or of some essential aspect of the former. For instance, if you identify thought with material processes, you are necessarily committed to denying, implicitly or explicitly, that our thoughts ever really have any determinate content. A number of materialists have seen this -- Quine, Dennett, and Bernard Williams are three examples -- and have decided to bite the bullet and accept that the content of all thought and language is inherently indeterminate. (This is, for instance, the upshot of Quine’s famous “indeterminacy of translation” and “inscrutability of reference” theses and of Dennett’s “two-bitser” example.)
But such claims are indefensible, for reasons James Ross has trenchantly spelled out. First, if you deny the determinacy of thought, there is no way you will be able to make sense of the vast body of knowledge embodied in mathematics and logic, all of which presupposes that we have determinate concepts. And there will in that case be no way you will be able to make sense of empirical science, which presupposes mathematics and logic, and in the name of which these materialists endorse their indeterminacy theses. Second, if you deny the determinacy of thought, then you are committed to denying that we ever determinately think in accordance with valid forms of inference -- modus ponens, modus tollens, etc. -- or that we ever really add, subtract, multiply, etc. You have to hold that we only seem to do so. But that entails that we never in fact reason logically or in mathematically sound ways. This not only (once again) makes science unintelligible, but it also undermines absolutely every argument anyone has ever given, including every argument for materialism. Third, even to deny that our thoughts ever have a determinate content -- for example, to deny that we ever determinately employ addition as opposed to Saul Kripke’s notion of “quaddition” -- you first have to grasp what addition is and then go on to deny that we ever do it. But that means that you must have a thought with a certain determinate content even to deny that you ever have thoughts with that specific content.
So, anyone who thinks that thought can even in principle be entirely material hasn’t thought carefully enough about the nature of thought. The materialist refutes materialism every time he so much as tries to argue for it. Or so I would argue, and have argued at length elsewhere (e.g. in chapter 7 of Philosophy of Mind, chapter 4 of Aquinas, and at greatest length in my forthcoming American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought”). But I’m not going to say anything more about that subject here, because it’s not relevant to the point I do want to make in this post. So, if you want to insist that intellectual activity is material, then fine, that’s another subject. The point for present purposes is that thinking in the strict sense -- grasping abstract concepts, formulating propositions, reasoning from one proposition to another -- is different from forming mental images or the like (even if it is somehow material in some other way).
Science is an essentially intellectual activity
Now everyone knows that this is true where physics and mathematics are concerned. Of course, we do find it useful to form mental images when we try to grasp the abstractions of these disciplines, at least initially. We draw geometrical figures on paper, think of points as little dots and of lines as the sort of thing you might draw with a ruler, imagine particles as little round objects moving about and of the structure of spacetime as like a rubber sheet we might twist around in different shapes. But none of this is strictly correct, and the deeper we understand the concepts involved, the more we see that these visual images are just crude approximations. That’s why physicists prefer to put things in mathematical terms. They are not trying to show off or to be difficult for the sake of difficulty. It is rather that it is precisely those aspects of nature which can be modeled mathematically that they are interested in as physicists. Hence to put their ideas in non-mathematical terms simply fails to get at the essence of what it is they are trying to describe. (The mistake some of them make is in assuming that a mathematical description exhausts nature, as opposed to capturing merely an aspect of nature. But that’s a different subject, which I have addressed here, here, and here.)
This was part of the point of Descartes’ consideration of the possibility that he might be dreaming when he thinks he’s awake, or that the world of his senses might be a hallucination put into his consciousness by an evil spirit. He was not interesting in providing fodder for college dorm room bull sessions or science-fiction screenwriters. Nor was he merely interested in raising and responding to the problem of epistemological skepticism. What he was trying to do was reinforce the idea that physics as he wanted to (re)define it -- and he was one of the fathers of modern science, as well as being the father of modern philosophy -- is something that can be understood only via the intellect, and not via the senses or the imagination. Even if physical theory must be tested via empirical observation, its content is something that is expressible only in highly abstract terms that we must grasp with the intellect rather in terms of what we can imagine or perceive. As with the concepts law and logical consistency (to cite some examples given above), any mental imagery we associate with the concepts we learn from a physics textbook are bound to be misleading and will have little or no essential connection to the realities to which the concepts correspond. That is precisely why modern physics is so hard -- it requires a degree of abstraction of which few are capable.
Philosophy and theology are also essentially intellectual activities
Now the key concepts of the great systems of metaphysics -- whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic or other Scholastic systems, or modern rationalist systems like those of Descartes and Leibniz -- are also of the sort that can be grasped only via a high degree of intellectual abstraction, with little or nothing in the way of assistance by mental imagery. Indeed these concepts are if anything of an even higher degree of abstraction than those dealt with by the physicist. For many of them concern not just material being, nor even the most abstract aspects of material being, but being as such. When the metaphysician inquires into the nature of existence, or essence, or causation, he wants to know not merely what it is for this or that material thing to exist or have a nature or have a cause, nor even merely what it would be for some particular immaterial thing to exist or to have a nature or a cause. He also wants to know what existence as such is, what causation as such is, and so forth. His enterprise requires taking the mind as far from mental imagery -- as far from what we can visualize, for example -- as it can possibly go. Thus, while metaphysics does not involve complex calculations or the like, it is in another respect even more difficult than physics insofar as it requires an even greater sustained effort of abstraction.
Hence, when it is said by the Scholastic philosopher or theologian that God is pure actuality, subsistent being itself, and absolutely simple, or that the human soul is the substantial form of a living human being, you are going to misunderstand these concepts completely if you think of them as literally having anything to do with what you can visualize in your mind’s eye. For example, if you think of an explosion (say) when you think of God qua Actus purus actualizing the world, or of a tiny marble-like object when you think of absolute simplicity, or the dotted-line outline of a body when you think of substantial form, you will be misunderstanding these concepts as badly as -- indeed, far worse than -- you would be misunderstanding molecules if you thought of them as literally being little balls held together by sticks, or of spacetime as if it were literally a kind if sheet with indentations in it. Similarly, if you think of Descartes’ notion of res cogitans on the model of “ectoplasm,” or goo of the sort you’d see in Ghostbusters only invisible and intangible, or as “bits of non-clockwork” (as Gilbert Ryle described it), then you will be taking it to be nearly the oppositeof what Descartes actually had in mind. For these are all quasi-material kinds of thing insofar as they imply extension and/or composition. And Descartes’ whole point was that a res cogitans is neither extended nor composed of parts. It is precisely the sort of thing you cannot visualize, nor model on the workings of any kind of material system whatsoever, even the most ethereal.
Double standard
And this is where so many New Atheist types come to grief. (As I find I keep having to reassure the hypersensitive reader, no, I don’t mean all atheists. I mean the kind of atheist who seriously thinks a Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or Laurence Krauss deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with J. L. Mackie, J. Howard Sobel, or Quentin Smith.) Those among them who actually know something about science (and not merely how to shout “Science!”) are well aware that you are not going to understand physics properly if you take too seriously the mental images we tend to form when we hear terms like “spacetime,” “particle,” “energy,” and the like. They are well aware that physics requires us to abstract from ordinary experience, to move away from what we can visualize or otherwise imagine. The man on the street may think that whatever is real must be something you could in principle see, hear, touch, smell, or taste, but the more scientifically savvy sort of New Atheist knows that this is a vulgar prejudice, and that it is with the intellect rather than the senses that we truly understand the world.
And yet, when dealing with metaphysical or theological concepts New Atheist types suddenly become complete Philistines, feigning an inability to grasp anything but the most crude and literal physical descriptions. Hence if you claim that the human mind is immaterial, they suppose that you simply mustbe committed to the existence of a sort of magical goop that floats above the brain; and if you say that the universe has a cause they will insist that you must believe in a kind of super-Edison who draws up blueprints, gets out his tools, and sets to work. And when you object to these preposterous straw men, they will pretend that they cannot understand your language in any other way, that it is mere empty verbiage unless read in such a crassly mundane fashion. Of course, if they held physics to the same narrow, literalistic standard, they would have to dismiss wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, gravity wells, electric fields, centers of gravity, and on and on. (I’ve discussed this double standard before, here and here.)
It is no good to object that the predictive and technological successes of physics justify this double standard, for two reasons. First, the predictive and technological successes of physics are relevant only to the epistemic credentials of physics, but not to its intelligibility. In other words, that such-and-such a theory in physics has been confirmed experimentally and/or had various practical applications is relevant to showing that it is correct, but it is not necessarily relevant to interpreting the content of the theory. Physicists knew well enough what Einstein was claiming before tests like the 1919 and 1922 eclipse experiments provided evidence that he was right. Similarly, though string theory has proved notoriously difficult to test, we know well enough what the theory means; the trouble is just finding out whether it’s true. (No one would make the asinine claim that string theory simply must be committed to the existence of literal microscopic shoelaces unless and until some experimental test of the theory is devised.)
So, even if it were correct to say that metaphysical and theological claims cannot be rationally justified, it simply wouldn’t follow that such claims must be given the crude readings New Atheists often foist upon them, on pain of being empty verbiage. But it is, in any case, not correct to say that they cannot be rationally justified, which brings us to the second problem. That the methods of empirical science are rational does not entail that they are the onlymethods that are rational. In particular, and as I have pointed out many times, it is simply a blatant non sequitur to claim that science’s success in discovering those aspects of reality that are susceptible of strict prediction and control shows that those aspects exhaust reality. This is like a drunk’s insisting that because it is only under the streetlamp that there is light to look for his keys, it follows that the keys cannot be elsewhere and/or that there cannot be methods by which they might be sought elsewhere.
As I have also pointed out many times, the premises from which the historically most important arguments for God’s existence proceed derive, not from natural science, but from metaphysics and the philosophy of nature. They are, that is to say, premises that any possible natural science must take for granted, and are thus more secure than the claims of natural science, not less -- or so many natural theologians would claim. Obviously such claims are controversial, but the point is that to insist that metaphysical and theological assertions must be justified via the methods of natural science if they are to be worthy of attention is not to refute the metaphysician or theologian, but merely to beg the question against the metaphysician or theologian. Philosophical arguments are different from empirical scientific arguments, but they are no less rational than empirical scientific arguments.
Thinking abstractly
Some readers might wonder how what I am saying here squares with what I said in a recent post about the danger of reifying abstractions. But there is no inconsistency. Naturally, I was not saying in the earlier post that abstraction per se is bad; indeed, I said the opposite. What I was criticizing was treating as substances (in the Aristotelian sense of that term) things which of their nature cannot be substances. Mathematical features of reality, for example, are aspects of substances and of relations between substances, rather than substances in their own right. Hence it is an error to treat the mathematical description of nature that physics gives us as if it were a complete description. Bodily organs like brains are also not substances but rather components of substances (namely of certain kinds of organisms) and intelligible only by reference to the complete organisms of which they form integral parts. Hence it is a category mistake -- deriving from a tendency first to abstract the brain from the organism and then fallaciously to treat it as a substance in its own right -- to speak (as some neuroscientists and philosophers do) of the brain or its components as if they “see,” “interpret,” etc., or to conclude that since free choice, purpose, etc. are not to be found at the neurological level of description, it follows that they don’t exist at all. These concepts apply in the first place only to the organism as a whole, and not to its parts.
The arguments of natural theology that I am defending do not commit errors like this. They abstract from experience, but they do not fallaciously treat accidents as if they were substances or parts as if they were wholes.
In any event, it is only by learning to think abstractly -- to engage in rational thought in its highest and purest form -- that you are ever going to understand metaphysical and theological arguments well enough to earn the right to criticize them. “New Atheists” -- by which, again, I do not mean all atheists, but rather the likes of Dawkins, Coyne, Myers and their innumerable online clones -- have not earned this right, precisely because they do not think at this high level. Indeed, they do very little thinking at all where metaphysics and theology are concerned, unless you count smartass remarks aimed at straw men followed by mutual high fives “thinking.” When dealing with one of these brainiacs, you might as well meet him where he’s at and channel Biff Tannen:
Published on: 12:50 by patience4q9beatty38 - No comments
Take a look at the classic title sequenceof The Six Million Dollar Man. Oscar Goldman (the bionic man’s superior in the Office of Scientific Intelligence) says the following in the famous voiceover:
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.
Now that raises an interesting philosophical question. Aquinas holds that:
[T]here exists in everything the natural desire of preserving its own nature; which would not be preserved were it to be changed into another nature. Consequently, no creature of a lower order can ever covet the grade of a higher nature; just as an ass does not desire to be a horse: for were it to be so upraised, it would cease to be itself. (Summa Theologiae I.63.3)
Now, Steve Austin loses an arm, an eye, and his legs. They are replaced with artificial parts which allow him to surpass his previous levels of strength, speed, and visual distance perception. Still, they are artificial. His normal human organs are not restored; instead, he becomes a cyborg. We might even suppose that he likes being one -- certainly to every teenage boy, and to some of us middle-aged types, the idea sure seems pretty cool. So, is the bionic man a counterexample to Aquinas’s claim? For isn’t a cyborg -- being “stronger, faster” than an ordinary human being -- also “better” than an ordinary human being? And doesn’t the fact that someone might plausibly desire to be a cyborg show that a thing could desire to be another kind of thing?
No, it doesn’t. Let’s see why not. (The uninitiated reader is asked to keep in mind that, as with so much else on this blog, what follows presupposes certain Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas that I have developed and defended elsewhere, such as in my book Aquinas. My earlier post on “The Metaphysics of The Fly” is also relevant.)
For one thing, Aquinas is well aware that people have all sorts of conscious desires that are contrary to the ends inherent in their nature -- to take only the most obvious example, some people are suicidal. But when Aquinas says that “there exists in everything the natural desire of preserving its own nature,” he isn’t engaging in a kind of easily refutable armchair psychology. He isn’t saying “Absolutely every singleperson always consciously wants to preserve his nature.” That should be obvious from the example he gives of the ass which does not desire to be a horse. An ass, of course, doesn’t consciously think “I always want to be an ass; I’d never want to become a horse,” precisely because it doesn’t think in first place. And when Aquinas says that the ass doesn’t desire to be a horse, he isn’t making the trivial point that the ass doesn’t consciously entertain the thought that it would be good to become a horse.
What he is talking about is what a thing will naturally tend toward. Even a suicidal person tends naturally to preserve his life. If, after he tells you he is suicidal, you stick his head under water and hold it there, he will very likely reflexively start to struggle, and not only because drowning is unpleasant. Of course, deciding that dying is what he wants to do anyway, he might soon stop struggling, but if so he will have to resist his natural tendency to try to fight you off. And even if he had no tendency whatsoever to resist, it wouldn’t follow that such a tendency wasn’t natural to him, any more than someone’s being born without eyeballs would show that having eyeballs isn’t natural to such a person. In either case, what we’d have is damage or deformity -- bodily deformity in the latter case, psychological deformity in the former. Having eyeballs is natural to human beings, even those human beings who, due to some injury or defect, do not have them. And a tendency toward self-preservation is natural to us in that same sense. What Aquinas is talking about, then, is what a thing will tend toward when it has not been damaged or deformed in some way, and (in the case of an intelligent creature) when it is not laboring under some form of irrationality or error.
So that is one point. Another is that we need to be cautious before attributing to someone a desire contrary to his nature. After all, the typical suicidal person doesn’t want death per se; rather, he wants (say) release from bodily or psychological suffering and sees death as the only way to achieve that. Similarly, if we are tempted to attribute to someone a desire to be other than the kind of thing he is, we might find on more careful consideration that it is really something else that is desired. As Aquinas says immediately following the lines quoted above:
But herein the imagination plays us false; for one is liable to think that, because a man seeks to occupy a higher grade as to accidentals, which can increase without the destruction of the subject, he can also seek a higher grade of nature, to which he could not attain without ceasing to exist.
Thus, for someone to wish to have greater intelligence or strength is not of itself to wish to have a different nature -- to be a different kind of thing -- as opposed to being the same kind of thing but merely with a higher degree of some perfection of which that kind of thing is capable. Accordingly, to desire to have Steve Austin’s strength, speed, and eyesight does not by itself amount to desiring to be a different kind of thing.
But suppose someone said: “No, I don’t merelywant to have Steve Austin’s strength, speed, and eyesight; I want to have it the way he has it, via artificial organs of the robotic sort he has. And I don’t want to have it in this artificial way merely because that’s the only way I could realistically achieve the greater strength, etc.; I want the artificial parts for their ownsake, for the sake of being a cyborg.” Would this be a counterexample to Aquinas’s claim?
It would not, for two reasons. First, a cyborg would, in fact, not be in the relevant sense a different kind of thing than a human being is. And second, someone who really wanted to be a cyborg in the relevant sense would not be willing rationally, but contrary to his natural tendencies.
After all, what is a cyborg (or “cybernetic organism”)? The notion is, it turns out, less well defined -- and, I think, less metaphysicallyinteresting -- than meets the eye. Normally we think of a human being with built-in mechanical parts, as in the case of Steve Austin, or RoboCop, or Deathlok. But of course, by that definition, anyone with a pacemaker would count as a cyborg. And what’s so special about having the parts built in? If Steve Austin’s artificial legs make him a cyborg, why don’t carbon-fiber prosthetic legs -- which some have argued give runners who use them an unfair advantage -- make their wearers into cyborgs?
As it happens, there are those who would more or less stretch the concept this far. In his book Natural-Born Cyborgs, philosopher Andy Clark suggests that recent steps in the direction of science-fiction style cyborg technology -- “wearable computers”(pioneered by people like Steve Mann and perhaps soon to be mass marketed by Google), thought-controlled prosthetics, and the like -- are really just an extension of a “human-technology symbiosis” that has more or less always existed. Cell phones, computers, even just books, pencil and paper, and ordinary tools differ in Clark’s view only in degree and not in kind from the sort of thing we see in the cyborgs of the movies. In fact we human beings always have in Clark’s view been what he says we are in his title -- “natural born” cyborgs.
It would seem, then, that my one-year old daughter counts as a cyborg, given that she sports a “wearable toilet” (commercially available, if you’re interested in acquiring this technology, under the generic label “diaper”). If that makes Clark’s thesis sound anticlimactic, that’s because it is. For like other startling identity claims, this one can be read in two directions. And if Clark establishes anything, it’s not the bold and sexy claim that We’re all really cyborgs! but really only the rather unexciting and indeed deflationary conclusion that Cyborgs are just human beings who use technology. In particular, Steve Austin is not a different kind of thing from a human being. Rather, he’s simply a guy with some unusual prosthetics. Not entirely uninteresting, to be sure, but in no way metaphysically earth-shattering.
Clark thinks otherwise at least in part because of his commitment to the “Extended Mind Thesis” (EMT), which holds that aids to our cognitive endeavors like notebooks, iPhones, and the like are literally parts of the mind. (And it is technologies that enhance our mental lives, specifically, that Clark has primarily in view.) But the EMT is, for reasons noted by Jerry Fodor, itself no more plausible than the (bold interpretation of the) claim that we’re all cyborgs. (That is not to deny that Clark makes some important points, both in the cyborg book and in his work on the EMT. On the contrary, Clark is a prominent advocate of the thesis that human thought is of its nature embodied -- a thesis with which any Aristotelian is bound to sympathize. And as I noted in an earlier post, there is also, from the Aristotelian point of view, a kernel of truth in the EMT.)
Artifacts are if anything even less plausibly regarded as part of us the more we try literally to insert them into our bodies. It is precisely because the parts of the body function together as an organic unity -- rather than being no more essentially connected to each other than to what lies outside of the “biological skin-bag” (to use Clark’s charming expression) -- that the body will tend to reject prosthetics as foreign to it. (E. Paul Zehr’s recent book Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine discusses not only the prospects for, but also the serious biological difficulties involved in, the integration of man and machine.)
So, wanting to be a “bionic man” is no more wanting to have a different nature, wanting to be a different kind of thing, than wanting to own a pair of binoculars is. The man with binoculars is, like Steve Austin, “better” than other men with respect to long-distance vision. But that is only because he’s got a certain tool, not because he has somehow transformed (or would want to transform) his nature. The change is in both cases an accidental rather than substantial change (to use the Scholastic jargon) even if the accidental change is more dramatic in the case of Steve Austin than in the case of the purchaser of binoculars.
Nor is it plausible to suppose that a normal person would prefer the benefits of bionic implants if he could get them without loss of his natural bodily organs. Would Steve Austin, all things considered, prefer artificial legs with which he could have normal sensations, as well as run at super speed? Surely he would. But such legs would as a matter of anatomical-cum-technological fact have to be so close to actual human legs that there would be no reason to prefer artificial legs to natural ones ifthe latter could somehow be enhanced so as to provide the greater speed, durability, etc. that the artificial ones could provide. In other words, all things being equal a normal person would prefer becoming Superman -- having enhanced strength and the like without sacrificing the natural integrity of the body and its organs -- to becoming Steve Austin.
Nor is it clear that the normal person would tolerate even less invasive enhancements for very long. We comic books geeks are usually too busy thinking about how cool it would be to wear Iron Man’s armor to consider how utterly claustrophobic it would be. According to Zehr, astronauts who have to wear spacesuits for prolonged periods report that their tasks require continual intense concentration -- rather than the smooth and casual integration of man and suit that we see in the comics and movies -- and that they are very happy to get out of the suit as soon as they can. Even if this were not the case, though, there is no more reason to think that a willingness to stay within such a suit for a long period constitutes a desire to be a different kind of thing than a willingness continually to wear eyeglasses or a wristwatch does.
Of course, there may for all that be the odd person here or there who really does consciously desire to have some of his body parts replaced by artificial ones. But again, the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher has always allowed that people occasionally have various odd desires that are contrary to what is good for them given their nature. In this case we would have a variation on what has come to be called “Body integrity identity disorder.” This reflects psychological deformity or irrational belief, and is no more a counterexample to Aquinas’s claim, properly understood, than the existence of polydactyly and blindness are counterexamples to the claim that it is natural for human beings to be sighted and to have ten fingers and toes.
In sum, then, the bodily modifications characteristic of cyborgs are (in the Aristotelian sense) accidental rather than substantial changes, and also changes that, all things considered, the normal person would prefer not to have. This is evidenced by the fact that the more invasive such a prosthetic modification is, the more difficult it is for the prosthesis to be successfully integrated into the body and/or for a person to function with it in a prolonged way, and the less likely it is in fact that people would want to have it. As I have noted before, what people in fact tend viscerally to be drawn to or repelled by is by no means an infallible guide to what is natural for them -- in the technical Aristotelian-Thomistic sense of “natural” -- but it is at least a very rough indicator. In the case at hand, if Aquinas’s claim about what is natural for us were true we would expect that in fact people would at least in general be repelled by the loss of their bodily integrity, and that is indeed what we do find. The existence of the occasional person who is not repelled by this can be accounted for in terms of psychological defect or irrationality.
So, The Six Million Dollar Man does not constitute a falsification of Aquinas’s thesis. (Of course, someone who rejects Aristotelian-Thomistic claims about substances, essences, natural objects versus artifacts, the natural end of our rational powers, etc. would have a different take on the example. But the point of the foregoing was not to argue for the metaphysical claims in question -- again, I have done that elsewhere -- but rather to indicate how this example would be interpreted in light of them, and why it does not constitute a counterexample to the claims.)
