Copyright (c) Alwyn Scott 1999.

PSYCHE, 5(33), December 1999
Previously held: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v5/psyche-5-33-scott.html

KEYWORDS: Emergence, intelligence vs. extelligence, mind, consciousness, culture, complicity, contextualism, game theory, biological evolution.

REVIEW OF: Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (1997) Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiii + 325 pp. IBSN 0-521-57155-3. £16.95 (US$24.95) Hbk.

Considering the dozens of books on the nature of consciousness that have descended upon us over the past decade or so, I opened Figments of Reality with some hesitation. Would this study of mind really "break new ground and develop profoundly thought-provoking and novel insights into the nature of evolution, science and humanity" (as promised on the dust-jacket)? Or should it be expected to sink - like Roderick Usher's castle - into the tarn of conflicting claims and counterclaims, leaving no trace on the surface?

Happily, mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen live up to the claims of their promoters. They have given us a book that presents novel ideas in a lively style, which the general scientific reader will be able to appreciate. Focussing attention on a few key issues, the authors dismiss much of the intellectual trivia that confuses current discussions of consciousness, showing little patience with theoretical arguments based on fictitious zombies and attempts to relate studies of consciousness to the vagaries of quantum theory. This book begins at the beginning, recognizing the obvious fact that mind emerged from living organisms and asking the readers to consider how intelligent life developed. Interestingly, almost half of the book is devoted to describing the biological context in which our brains evolved.

Figments opens with complementary critiques of the related concepts of reductionism and a theory of everything, pointing out that both are problematic in the real world of experimental science. Diligently applied to the biological realm, a theory of everything runs afoul of a practically unlimited number of possibilities at higher levels of description. Similarly, current research in high energy physics - for all its intellectual brilliance and excitement - is unlikely to modify the facts of chemistry, upon which biology is based. Thus the biochemist, the cytologist and the physiologist have no professional stake in becoming knowledgeable about (say) quarks or Higgs bosons or string theory or whatever. Such fundamental concepts, as every bioscientist knows in his or her gut, are simply irrelevant to the development of meaningful models of living organisms.

These rather obvious caveats - often blithely ignored by theorists in the physical sciences - are brought home to the readers of this book through an informative and entertaining discussion of game theory. Although some games (uninteresting ones) can be well played using simple strategies, all of the interesting games (chess, bridge, go, and so on) offer so very many possibilities that sure-fire generalizations about strategy are practically impossible. The course of evolution, Stewart and Cohen suggest, is of the second sort, where the rules of the game change over time and the aim is to stay in play. No argument there, but how has nature managed to discern and implement winning strategies in this most interesting of games?

The answer is a phenomenon that the authors call complicity, a complex sort of positive feedback threading through interacting levels of the biosphere, and allowing unexpected causal loops to arise. As a striking example of how intricate complicit phenomena can be, the authors cite a parasitic flatworm that spends part of its life inside an ant, while its reproductive stage is inside a cow. The technique that nature has evolved to allow the worm to transfer from one animal to the other is described as follows.

The parasite infects the ant, and presses on a particular part of its brain. This interferes with the normal behavior of the brain, which causes the ant to climb a grass stem, grasp it with its jaws, and hang there, permanently attached. So when a cow comes along and eats the grass, the parasite enters the cow.

This three-way complicity (among worm, ant and cow) thus generates an emergent phenomenon (the clever reproductive strategy of the flatworm) which hardly seems amenable to reductive analysis.

Over the last four billion years or so, many such phenomena have emerged in the biological realms. Often these are minor explorations away from currently successful strategies, but others are full-fledged inventions, leading to unanticipated explosions of new life forms. Some - like the flatworm's reproductive strategy - are called parochial because they are rather special and of significance to only a few species, while others - like photosynthesis, flight and sex - are termed universal because they have been invented several times in different contexts, and would therefore be expected to emerge again in any rerun of the evolutionary story.

Human intelligence, the authors argue, is a universal emergent phenomenon.

How did human intelligence evolve? Here is where students of the mind will find Figments particularly interesting. "The transition from brains to minds," Stewart and Cohen assert, "can be traced back to the time when animals came up with non-genetic routes to protect their offspring" (p.27). Mammals, they tell us, are the prime providers of such protection, offering a temperature controlled prenatal environment and instant nourishment for the newborn, but why should these amenities encourage the evolution of mind?

In an argument that harks back to Julian Huxley, the authors suggest that parents thereby become not mere tenders of their offspring but teachers, providing a context in which intelligence can develop. No more must survival smarts be either genetically stored or relearned through trial and error by each individual; the parents can pass on useful tricks. Moreover - especially in times of famine - the quicker of the nestlings are rewarded with more food, further increasing the chance of eventual reproduction by the more intelligent offspring.

When individuals began to band together - in wolf packs, families of chimpanzees or early tribes of humanoids - the young could learn from several adults, and again the best learners would tend to become the best survivors. In this manner, culture provides a context in which intelligence can develop, and once evolution started down this road, things got ever better for the brainy. The subsequent development of language and rites of passage allowed yet more of a tribe's experience to be transmitted, while placing growing demands on the memories of the elders. Eventually, these mnemonic burdens were eased by the invention of writing, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Do you get the picture? Intelligence and culture comprise a complicit pair, the corresponding positive feedback loop (growth of intelligence stimulating culture and growth of culture inducing intelligence) leading to the emergence of mind. The authors refer to their general perspective as contextualism, which is not intended to replace reductionism but to complement it. Refreshingly, this book extends our understanding beyond the standard notion that: (i) in response to competitive pressures our brains somehow evolved, (ii) these enlarged brains somehow managed to invent language and became conscious, and (iii) our task as students of the mind is to discover where consciousness is located in the machinery of the brain. A formulation is thus provided that emphasizes the context in which mental processes emerge over merely looking at the neural components of the brain and trying to figure out how they might be interacting.

As Stewart and Cohen put it: "Language and intelligence evolved together, both being inextricably linked to culture" (p.10). To comprehend a human mind, they argue, we must study brains in context, as biological organs and component of culture.

Well, that is the gist of Figments of Reality - according to my reading of it - but the book includes much more that will be of interest to the general reader. Every chapter begins with a provocative story or account that is deftly woven into the subsequent discussion. In addition, each chapter features an amusing fictional perspective presented by the inhabitants of some distant planet. (Although these latter features may be appealing to sci-fi mavens, I found them somewhat distracting, as the meat-and-potatoes discussions seem clear enough on their own.)

While there is relatively little about the brain itself in this book, the authors do consider the importance of symmetries in neural processing. Thus, a discussion of the recognition of male and female faces takes advantage of an eigenvector (or eigenface) that embodies the difference between an average him and her. (Enthusiasts of the quantum mind approach to consciousness studies should note that such ideas are the coin of modern nonlinear science, and not at all dependent upon the extrapolation of quantum theory to the macroscopic world: a point that was clearly made by Niels Bohr back in 1933.) Unfortunatly, there is no mention of recent research by Hermann Haken and his colleagues in connection with this work, although this sort of eigenvector analysis is closely related to ideas presented in his book Principles of Brain Functioning (1996).

A short chapter on free will is interesting but ultimately somewhat disappointing because the authors seem to be sitting on both sides of the philosophical fence. Recognizing that the assumption of free will is necessary for the orderly functioning of any culture and scornful of the inflated claims of genetic determinists, they note that theoretical reasons can be imagined for anything that occurs. To me, at least, this is as true as it is unconvincing. It is always possible to cobble together some sort of explanation of whatever transpires after the fact. Does this imply that the future is determined by the present? What might such an assertion mean? This chapter ends with the statement: "Therefore free will is not just an illusion: it is a figment rendered real by the evolutionary complicity of mind and culture" (p.241). Maybe I am dense, but this doesn't mean much to me. Perhaps the authors would have been wiser to omit this chapter, admitting that they do not know what free will is.

Two final chapters deal with some of the details of our many interactions with the surrounding culture, noting that a very large amount of knowledge is presently available to us all through libraries, schools, theater, television, and more recently the World Wide Web. The first of these chapters, entitled Extelligence, considers in some detail the ever increasing pool of information in which we are embedded in by our technological culture. The authors consider their notion of extelligence to be somewhat different from (say) Karl Popper's World 3, because it involves complicit interactions with individuals in a culture. This is, in my view, such an extremely important aspect of the overall subject of consciousness studies, that it deserves a book of its own. Perhaps the authors will team up with an informed and imaginative ethnologist in the not too distant future and work on such a project. The last chapter - entitled "Simplex, Complex, Multiplex" - describes the relationships between the organization of biological cells and human social systems. From this perspective, the village is analogous to a bacterium, whereas a town is compared to an eukaryote, and a city to a multi-celled organism. The chapter title alludes to increasingly sophisticated ways that individuals have of perceiving the intricacy of their social environments in a human culture.

Why does Figments work so well? In part, of course, because both of the authors are skilled and thoughtful writers, but that is not alone sufficient as several recent books on the nature of mind by science journalists have clearly shown. In addition to demonstrating the necessary writing ability, the authors stem from appropriate professional backgrounds. One (Stewart) is a respected mathematician with a deep knowledge of current physical science, and the other (Cohen) is a biologist with wide appreciation for the varieties of living creatures. As one learns from this book, a thorough familiarity with both of these scientific realms is necessary for achieving an understanding of the nature of consciousness.

If you are seriously interested in the scientific study of consciousness, buy Figments of Reality. And read it!

References

Haken, H. (1996). Principles of brain functioning: A synergetic approach to brain activity, behavior and cognition. Berlin: Springer Verlag.