Regulars of this blog (Here I always
insert the by now somewhat tired cliché “all two or three of them”) know I have
a thing for reading books I thoroughly, consistently, deeply, unambiguously and
exhaustively do not enjoy. I do it
frequently enough as to consider it is not just lack of attention when choosing
what to read, or bad luck (the “I thought it would be good but more than
halfway through it I realized it was not just mediocre, but downright atrocious…
having already devoted so much time to it I just trundled along thinking it
would be better to see it through” excuse), but an active courting of works
that I won’t a) like, b) agree with and c) have any use for.
As I brief aside, I know there are
people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a book they don’t like, exemplified
by Tyler Cowen (whom I quote frequently and approvingly on so many other
issues): Tyler reads a bunch of books, but not many pages of each. All I can say is a feel sorry for
them, as they are missing in one of the most important teaching and character
formation tools of this time and age. The ability to read unpleasant writings,
to soldier through them no matter how unsatisfying, is highly trainable, and
not only does it spill over other, more practical areas of life (like the
uber-lauded feature of grit, with much media exposure of late), but helps
immeasurably in some more mundane applications, like making it much easier to
learn foreign languages (something I already recounted in this post recent post:
Unexpected uses of Philosophy). So, regardless of what Tyler
says, I strongly encourage my readers to persevere when caught in the midst of
a dreadful, dreary book, as it is more conductive to a life well lived than the
perpetual surrender to the thrill of novelty seeking, with its concomitant
rejection of effort and toughness and indulging in instant gratification that
are so damaging to the formation of a resilient, well-rounded character.
Back to my quirky habit of reading
books that bore me or anger me or somehow disappoint me, I recently finished a
doorstopper (well over 700 pages) from Robert Sapolsky aptly titled Behave. The Biology of Humans at our Best
and Worst, and extravagantly praised by a number of figures of the
scientific establishment, and by the New
York Times’ Richard Wrangham, who on his July, 6th review
describes the book as a “quirky,
opinionated and magisterial synthesis of psychology and neurobiology that
integrates this complex subject more accessibly and completely than ever”. That I bought the book after
reading such description already denotes a masochistic streak on my part, as
the integration of psychology and neurobiology sounds as appealing to me as the
integration of astrology and XIIth century Chinese ceramics (I have only the
slightest interest in the latter, and utterly despise the former and for the
same reasons I despise psychology: both disciplines’ unsubstantiated claims to
some sort of “scientific validity”). I’ll devote this post to comment on it,
not specifically on the more scientific claims (which, not being an expert on
the field, I found well informed and crisply stated, if a bit discombobulated
and lacking a logical structure at times; just too many things seemed to be
written in the spirit of “this is really cool and fascinates me to no end, so
whether it really belongs here or not, whether it really helps drive home
whatever point I’m trying to make or not, I’m going to describe it in some
detail no matter what”), but on the metaphysical ones.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” - I can hear my readers saying. “Hold your
horses here for a minute! Metaphysical claims? On a book about the brain, and
hormones, and the genetic origins of behavior? Are you sure?” – Well, I very
much am, and as scientifically inclined, and surely devoted of empiricism and
all that as the author professes to be, he argues from a very strongly felt
metaphysical position about what the ultimate components of reality are, and
what the realness of such components tell us about how we should think about
our behavior, what we should praise and condemn, and how we should punish
deviations (with the unavoidable foray in trolleyology… man, I endlessly wonder
what kind of fixation Anglo-Saxon casual readers of philosophy have with
electric cars on rails that they simply can not stop drawing them to any
discussion of ethics, cursory and circumstantial as it may be).
However, before we dive into the
arguments of the book, I’d like to share something I find quite puzzling about
the whole “neuromania” (I term I borrow from Raymond Tallis, if you haven’t
already read him, specially the excellent Aping
Mankind, go and do it ASAP). Let’s consider the following two descriptions
of the same behavior (Young Rick knows he should study for next day’s biology
exam, but he just can’t gather enough willpower, so he spends the evening
watching TV instead):
·
Description
1: when Rick starts considering what to do (while conveniently having his head
inside a fMRI) his frontal lobe lights up, which tells us the parts of his
brain in charge of executive control and long term planning are being
activated. Unfortunately for him, his orbitofrontal complex is not fully
developed, and due to neglect and inadequate parental supervision during his
early childhood (or maybe because when walking down the university hall to the
fMRI he crossed paths with an attractive research assistant who reminded him of
a day care nurse that had been mean to him that many years ago, or because he
had been primed to be more attuned to earthly pleasures by being made to
unconsciously smell of freshly baked bread when entering the room) the
metabolic capacity for sustaining the heightened glucosamine demand of that sensitive
part of his neural tissue is not up to par, and can not counteract the activity
of the medial PFC (somehow the PFC -Pre Frontal Cortex- is always involved in
anything having to do either with emotion and expectations of pleasure or with
rationality and delayed gratification), or of the limbic system (don’t even
ask: lots of neurotransmitters, more Latin-themed brain topology and a bunch of
enzymes produced in exotic and distant parts of the body), or the surge in
dopamine caused by the prospect of some good ol’ procrastination. To make
things worse, we can appreciate that both Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in his
parietotemporal lobe are also lighting up, and them being neural correlates (we
don’t know exactly what a neural correlate is yet, at least regarding to the
subjective feeling of consciousness, but bear with me) of language processing
we can only conclude that he is rationalizing his rascally behavior, and
talking himself into it. Indeed, his nucleus accumbens (just above his septum
pellucidum, if we are going to use funny Latin names let’s use them to the
end!) is also showing signs of enhanced activity, surely as he contemplates the
pleasures of just doing nothing, while the insula (which in theory evolved to
warn us of the dangers of rotting fruit) remains muted, meaning that our moral
sense (a form of disgust, typically geared towards outgroups, but potentially
useful to direct that disgust towards non-adaptive behaviors of our own) is
similarly muted and has nothing to contribute to the final decision on what to
do.
·
Description
2: the guy is lazy. Probably not entirely his fault (but more on that in a
moment).
Any self-respecting neuro maniac (or
neuro babbler) will tell you that only the first description is “informative”,
“scientific”, “information-rich” and constitutes true understanding of the
human nature and the aspects of personality involved in the observed behavior.
On the contrary, what I contend is that both descriptions have exactly the same informative content.
Whilst the former is doubtlessly more florid, and definitely longer, it doesn’t
provide any additional understanding of what is going on, and it is not really
giving us any additional insight. Specifically (and we’ll come back to that in
a moment) it doesn’t provide us with a iota of additional, “useful” information
about what the subject exhibiting the behavior may do or may not do in the
future (the ability to predict the future being one of the defining features of
scientific knowledge).
On a side note, such unkind critique
reminds me what R. Wright Mills did, in the
Sociological Imagination, with Talcott Parson’s The Social System: he transcribed super long paragraphs of the
latter and then “translated” them into much shorter, simpler, more elegant and
concise ones, contending that they really meant the same thing, and thus
exposing Parson’s magnum opus as a
lot of unnecessary, inflated and somewhat pompous babble. I think I was lucky
of reading both books in the “right” order (first Wright Mills’ with his
scathing critique, and afterwards the
one by Parsons), which allowed me to better appreciate the aspects properly
deserving criticism, and to separate them from those where the long-winded
sentences and the convoluted reasoning were called for (at this point, no
reader of mine will be surprised to find me sympathizing with other writers
prone to the use and abuse of long-winded sentences and convoluted arguments).
And I find it amusing that I may now level such criticism against a work that
on many levels is quite well-written, engaging and even witty and downright
funny… such are the foibles of the world.
But back to Sapolsky now, the whole
book is really not much more than a masterly, exhaustive enumeration of all the
aspects of mental life we have found to correspond with the illumination of
different parts of the brain when seen inside an fMRI, or different
concentrations of neurotransmitters and enzymes in the subjects’ blood (measured
in different moments of experiencing some contrived experimental situation or
other), or different waves as picked up by and EEG, along with the minutiae of
the experiments that purportedly settled such correspondence. And, man, is
there a lot to enumerate! Abstract thinking, volition, desire (of different
types and kinds), moral evaluation, affects, emotion, reasoning, memory,
feelings, broad categorization, narrow categorization, adscription of agency,
prediction, anticipation, delayed gratification, succumbing to impulses, visual
perception, purposeful meditation… you may think that whatever may happen in
your mind Mr. Sapolsky has it covered and pithily conveys the biological basis
of it, which means identifying it with the firing of some neurons (or at least
the distinct oxygen consumption of some broad areas of the brain) and the variation
in the concentration in the blood of some chemicals.
There is the mandatory (for a book
that aspires to fairly represent the “state of the art” of neuroscientific
investigation) mountain of notes and copious bibliography pointing to the
apparently insurmountable mountain of (impeccably “scientific”, of course)
evidence supporting its claims, but it is a pity no mention is made to the
dubious replicability recently noted of many of those experiments. Which is
surprising, given that the book has been published this very same year (2017)
and Brian Nosek important paper “Estimating the reproducibility of
Psychological science”, which kicked off what has been termed the “crisis of
replication” in most social fields was published in Aug 2015. So Sapolky’s still
using experiments from John Bargh and the like (when I read Social Psychology and the Unconscious I was left with the clear and distinct feeling
that the whole field was completely, utterly bunk, and I didn’t need
sophisticated resources and a failed attempt at replication to conclude that
they were either trivial or false; non surprisingly the field of “social
psychology” has been one of the worst hit by the replication crisis…) as
evidence without mentioning their dubious epistemic status is at best a bit
careless, and at worst disingenuous.
Unfortunately (or fortunately,
depending on your previous metaphysical commitments) I came out with the idea
that the book fails spectacularly in its declared intent of “explaining” in any
meaningful way why we humans act as we do. Maybe it has to resort to too many
causal chains (in very different timescales, which make them mightily difficult
to integrate with one another). Maybe I read these things to gauge to what
extent the advances in medicine and biology should make me question my belief
in (or commitment to) free will, and given my prejudices and biases it is not
surprising that I come out of such exercises reassured, rather than shaken or
converted. There are many intelligent, considered and thoughtful arguments
against the existence of such mythical beast (freedom of the will), made since
the time of the Classical Greeks, but I’m afraid you won’t find any of them in Behave.
Let’s start with how the author
proposes to tackle it head-on, appealing to the somewhat worn out and
belittling homunculus argument (after that, don’t ever accuse me again of
strawmanning!). I’ll need to quote in some length to capture the rhetoric in
all its gloriousness. This is how Mr. Sapolsky presents his understanding of
what he calls “mitigated free will”:
There’s the brain – neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors,
brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions
during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s
prenatal environment, genes and hormones, whether their parents were
authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in
childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book.
And, then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the
brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus, at
a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum
tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing
voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not
squishy biological brain yuck.
And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some
things outside its purview – seizures blow the homunculus fuses, requiring it
to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol,
Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock.
There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have
worked out a détente – for example, biology is usually automatically regulating
your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in
which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot.
But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes
careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your
hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement,
and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus
in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of
the universe that constitute modern science.
At this point the author may think
he has gone a bit overboard, after all polls suggest (although it’s a slippery
concept that may arguably not be all that well understood by people answering
that kind of question) that consistent majorities in all countries do believe
people is endowed with free will, mitigated or not, in our very scientific and
deterministic age, when the dominant reason has been hammering them at least
since the mid-eighteenth century that this “voluntariness” thing is but a
fiction, the sooner to be discarded the better (to work more towards
accumulating more material goods, mindless as such accumulation may look like
to a dispassionate observer). So Mr. Sapolsky digs deeper, trying to excuse
ourselves for our unenlightened foolishness (but not much):
That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people
recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture
rather than accept its basic validity: “You are setting up a straw homunculus,
suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain
injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much
softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which
socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts
itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically
determined (in the broadest sense of this book) and it is only once in a decade
that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left
to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating
outside the rules of science.
Well, I´m not sure Mr. Sapolsky
would consider me “incredibly smart” (I’m a theist, maybe even a Deist, after
all, which in his book is surely a giant letdown), so it is just par for the
course that I do not recoil from “this” at all, and wouldn’t even attempt to
argue against the “extremity” of such picture, a picture the belief on which is
shared by obvious morons like Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Kant and arguably
even Hume, but hey!, who were they to know? They didn’t have fMRI’s,
microscopes, EEG’s and the like… bunch of intellectual midgets, that’s who).
I’ll apply Sapolsky’s rhetoric to his own position (“no homunculus at all, just
the neurons, hormones, genes and that’s it”) towards the end of this post and
we’ll see what seems more ridiculous, or looks like being more “extreme” if we
dwell for a moment on where that dispassionate, seemingly objective and
scientific alternative that he champions
leads us.
But before we get there I think it’s
worthy to consider the super duper, bold, brave and at the end quite empty
calls for radical overhaul of the penal system (if all the world is indistinguishable
from a prison, where nobody has any freedom at all, but just the blind
obedience to material forces that were put in play in the big bang and have
been playing out necessarily ever since, what does jailing criminals even
mean?) in light of the non-existence of that vaunted free-will. At various
points the author admonishes us that given what we know of what makes people
tick we absolutely must reconsider all our laws and, most markedly,
punishments. But when it comes to actually define how such reconsideration
should look like, he is maddeningly vague. All he does is point that concepts
like “guilt”, “intent” and even “recidivism” lack any real meaning, as all and
every action that any of us performs is preordained, is overdetermined by an
overlap of evolution (that shaped our species), individual genetics (that
shaped our capabilities and dispositions) and the individual circumstances in
which we find ourselves (which trigger the evolved responses finely tuned by
our genetic endowment and previous history) and so does not merit to be praised
or blamed, rewarded or punished any more than the actions performed by animals
(donkeys, pigs, cows) that, in past and unenlightened centuries were similarly
judged and on which silly verdicts were given. Very bold and brave, indeed,
until we try to apply it to the real world.
Let’s remember than in penal theory
punishments pursue at least three objectives: we deem it acceptable to harm the
perpetrator of a crime because a) it has a deterrent effect on other people
(who see that committing crimes is punished and would thus become less likely
to do it themselves) b) it makes it more difficult or impossible for the
criminal to repeat his bad deeds (from killing him to imprisoning him to
depriving him of the material means necessary for recidivism) and d) it
compensates the victim (either materially, giving her the proceeds of the fine
imposed on the evildoer, or morally, signaling the rejection of society towards
what her tormentor had done). You may notice that all three objectives are
quite independent of the assumption of free agency on either the criminal or
the rest of society. Even if we accept we are all mindless robots, we would
still need to levy fines, temporarily imprison wrongdoers and, for some extreme
cases, either imprison for life or kill those individuals dangerous and prone
to violence that we can not afford to let loose between their fellow beings. We
may use a bit of less shaming, and more consequentialist reasoning, but I don’t
see the actual penalties of any modern, progressive penal system (like the one
you can find in most advanced parts of the world, the USA not included)
changing much, or at all. Which doesn’t mean our current system is maximally
humane or maximally just, as it already considers to a great extent the
criminals as somehow mentally defective, and such condescension may be a harder
punishment than granting them independence and recognizing their moral agency,
even if that means a harsher punishment (finely illustrated in Henrik
Stangerup’s The Man Who Wanted to be
Guilty).
Regardless of the consequences of
admitting the fictitious nature of free will, that at the same time are
presented as unimaginably bold, revolutionary and requiring we let current
norms, laws and institutions essentially unchanged, I’m afraid the animosity of
Mr. Sapolsky towards the possibility of such fiction not being a fiction at all
lies in a misunderstanding, the misunderstanding of how the freedom worth
having in an (in)determinist universe would look like. His confusion reproduces
almost verbatim an argument from Daniel Dennett (which I’ve read both in Consciousness Explained and in Freedom evolves): even if the universe
were at heart strictly indeterministic, that wouldn’t threaten his
understanding of all behavior following necessarily, within a causal chain with
no slack, from material causes that were essentially set in stone at the moment
of the Big Bang, because A) the indeterministic nature of reality applies only
at very small scales (the quantum realm, for particles smaller than a proton or
a neutron) and when it comes to “big” stuff, noticeable by our senses such
indeterminism vanishes, so we can entirely ignore it; and B) even if there were
truly “uncaused” macroscopic events, events for which we could really and
ultimately never find a material “cause”, such events would never constitute
the basis of a “freedom worth having”, as we traditionally consider a “free”
action (free in the sense of being valuable, morally worthy, deserving praise
or blame, etc.) one that is consistent with the “personality”, the “character”,
the “true self” of the agent, and such action could never come out of the blue,
or be entirely random, it could never be supported (or be made to appear more
likely) by the fact that the universe is finally not ”causally closed” if we
understand such lack of causal closure only to entail the possibility of
entirely stochastic, uncaused events.
That is indeed hefty metaphysical
stuff, and reading Behave has just
reinforced my original hunch that such stuff is but very lightly illuminated by
what we learn from neurology and biology. Without needing to resort to so much neurobabble
Ted Honderich expressed it better and more nuancedly in his (alas! Quite
difficult to find) Theory of Determinism (1990),
which was wrong for the same reasons Dennett’s and Sapolsky’s are wrong, namely:
A) their understanding of physics is between 50 and 80 years out of whack, the
old debate between Heisenberg and Laplace was decisively won by the former, and
appeals to hidden variables to causally explain quantum effects have so far
been shown to be not only unsubstantiated, but probably incongruous (the best
explanations of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle I’ve seen are entirely
apodictic, relaying not on any particular experimental result but on the nature
of reality and mathematics themselves); the consensus position between
physicists is that nature is fundamentally non-deterministic, that there are
really, deeply, entirely uncaused events, and that those events, microscopic as
they may be individually, may aggregate to have macroscopic, entirely
observable effects (from the disintegration of a radioactive particle to
certain phase changes), due to the non-linearity of the equations governing
complex systems (that would demand a potentially infinite precision in the
measurement of the initial conditions to get even to an estimation of the order
of magnitude of the end state of a given system… but HUP puts a hard limit on
the precision with which we can measure such initial state, seriously limiting
what we can know of such end state, regardless of how macroscopic we find it to
be). But wait, it gets worse, because B) you don’t even need to appeal to
quantum indeterminism to accept the possibility of a freedom worth having, once
you recognize that classical mechanics provides a fairly limited description of
a fairly limited percentage of reality (the behavior of “reduced” number of
“big” solid bodies moving “slow” -no need to get too technical about the
precise meaning of each term between quotes), and that sadly classical
mechanics is the only realm where the determinism our authors propound holds
sway. What Honderich, and Dennett, and finally Sapolsky are doing is taking the
neatly defined (albeit, as I just mentioned, woefully incomplete) concept of
causality taken from classical mechanics and applying it to the field of
chemistry (mostly a valid extension, for big enough compounds), then extending
it again to the field of biology (sneaky, and attending to the results, a not
entirely legitimate extension) and finally extending it again to the field of
human behavior, forgetting the entirely different meaning a “cause” may have
for creatures possessing a symbolic language, culture and a complex neural
system that translates into sophisticated motivational structures. Then, they
look back as if such chain of extensions of the original concept were entirely
uncomplicated and immediate and claim -“see, as the only valid causes are big
bodies gravitationally attracted to one another, or imparting momentum to one
another through physical contact, or heating one another or exchanging atoms
and molecules with one another… there can be no free will, as it would require
a weird stuff -a homunculus, that has no way to gravitationally attract, impart
momentum, heat or exchange atoms or molecules with normal, everyday,
honest-to-God, measurable matter” (that’s the “Casper argument” from Dennett,
that I’ve criticized elsewhere, in a nutshell). But it’s them who have
beforehand (and somewhat arbitrarily, as we are about to see) limited what can
be validly considered a cause, so their whole argument is circular and lacks
validity!
Indeed, someone with impeccable
empiricist credentials as John Stuart Mill, in his A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (first published in
1843), already noted (although he hid it in a footnote) that the very same
concept of what a “cause” is had significantly evolved from the times of
classical Greece, when its paradigmatic model was precisely… mental intention!
(their main example of a cause was me thinking on moving my arm and my arm
dutifully moving as intended) to his own time, when the paradigmatic model had
become the billiard ball being moved mechanically by the clash of another
billiard ball. That’s why in Aristotle canonical model we find listed as causes
not just material causes, but formal causes and end causes, that are entirely
lacking of our modern concept of what a cause consists in. Add Descartes and
his distinction between res cogitans and res
extensa and you may start to understand why the idea of mind as something
outright distinct (metaphysically distinct, I dare to say) from matter has
become more and more alien to our sensibilities (a somewhat more garrulous and
blockheaded example of such strangeness would be the abominable Descartes Error, by Antonio Damasio, but
I refuse to devote much attention to such claptrap).
Okay, let’s take stock then of where
we stand: We’ve found that Bob Sapolsky’s idea of what constitutes a cause may
be not all there is to it when it comes to explaining human (or, for what it’s
worth, animal) behavior. We’ve based such finding in the previous (probably
unknown to him, that’s the problem of doing metaphysics without enough training
in basic philosophy, only partially excusable if you think what you are doing
is biology, or neurology, or psychology) and unjustified commitment of what
constitutes a valid explanation, that leaves out enormous tracts of reality
that are as able to have an empirically verifiable effect on the material
evolution of the universe as any legit neutron star or black hole or lump of atoms
you may think of. And before anybody accuses me of magical thinking and just
attempting to open the causal closure of the material world to sneak in it
fairies and old bearded guys in robes inhabiting the skies (not that I would
care, really), I will clarify that identifying the insufficiency of matter as
universal explanation does not require any kind of previous commitment to
revealed religion, the existence of immortal souls or anything like it. I’ve
already pointed to one of the fiercest critics of what he terms “neuromania”,
Raymond Tallis, an avowed and proud atheist. Another recent critic of the view
that there is only and can only be matter, interacting according to the laws
revealed by the scientific method so far: Thomas Nagel (similarly open about
his atheism). Want a recent criticism of Dennett that doesn’t rely at all in
any supernaturalism? Look no further: The Illusionist
The way I see it, there could only
be one redeeming feature of Behave’s
underlying thesis: that it worked, and all the hullabaloo about Latin-named
regions of the brain and chemical compounds and genes and evolutionary just-so
stories (being a bit harsh here, I know) served the purpose of actually being
able to predict how people… well, behaved. But alas! Per the author’s own
admission, it’s not yet to be:
…my stance has a major problem, one that causes Morse to conclude that
the contributions of neuroscience to the legal system “are modest at best, and
neuroscience poses no genuine, radical challenge to concepts of personhood,
responsibility and competence.” The problem can be summarized in a hypothetical
exchange:
Prosecutor: So, professor, you’ve told us about the extensive damage
that the defendant sustained to his frontal cortex when he was a child, Has
every person who has sustained such damage become a multiple murderer, like the
defendant?
Neuroscientist: No
Prosecutor: Has every such person at least engaged in some sort of
serious criminal behavior?
Neuroscientist: No
Prosecutor: Can brain science explain why the same amount of damage
produced murderous behavior in the defendant?
Neuroscientist: No
The problem is that, even amid all these biological insights that allow
us to be snitty about those silly homunculi, we still can’t predict much about
behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to
individuals.
Indeed. As he titles the following
subchapter, the whole discipline “explains a lot, but predicts little”. IF you
restrict explanation to certain very limited terms, I would add (because if
not, it doesn’t even explain that much to begin with). Which is mighty honest
from the author, and deserves great kudos for its humility and realism. Humility
and realism somewhat sullied when he explains that such lack of predictive
power is caused by the relative youth of the discipline (supported by very
tricky and fishy graphs showing how many articles containing a number of trendy
terms have been published in the last years, compared with how many were
published a century ago, when there were all of five medical journals in the
whole planet Earth), and if we wait a bit they will tease out all the
contributing causes and finally start making brilliant, honest to God
predictions that will hold up to scrutiny and allow for the vaunted overhaul of
the legal system (predictably in the direction foreshadowed in Minority Report, when we will detain and
even execute potential criminals before they
can commit their evil deeds).Sorry, but that reminds me of the baseless hope in
some mysterious hidden variables that will end up allowing to predict
everything. Didn’t work in physics, won’t work in psychology.
But if you are not all that
demanding about what you consider scientific (remembering Feynman, most of the
curios within Behave are more akin to
stamp classification and collection than to physics, or whatever your model of
hard science is), or are happy to roll with good ol’ Collingwood and accept as
scientific any discipline that searches systematically for the answers to certain
questions, and is willing to share the data and methods used to arrive to such
answers (even if those data and methods end up demonstrating the opposite of
what they were marshaled to prove), then I can not recommend this book highly
enough. It is comprehensive, witty, not very well structured but full of silly
experiments that will amuse and entertain you, and give you an edge in
otherwise dreary conversations (you can follow “the latest science conclusively
proves that humans…” with whatever folly conceit you wish and you probably can
find some supporting “evidence” within its pages). Best of all (or not,
depending on what makes you tick), don’t expect it to question your previous
assumptions about what moves us to act or how the mind works (as opposed to the
brain), as it is woefully short in those departments…
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