From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Apr 18 1999 - 08:24:34 MDT
At 07:19 PM 17/04/99 -0700, Lyle cited:
>In _New Scientist_, 3 April 1999, page 48
>> Damien Broderick's _The Last Mortal Generation_ is a robust,
>> determinedly cheerful survey of death: what it is,
>> where it comes from and how to make it go away.
The book got a condescending notice in the Melbourne *Age* this weekend
from hotshot young Oz novelist James Bradley. Much of what he attributes
to the book is, oddly enough, refuted by the text itself, but I was struck
by one typical component of his review:
" Scientists consistently claim science can answer everything (and
Broderick's enthusiastic barracking for sociobiology is a good example of
the latest attempts to `unify' human knowledge). But science can't explain
everything. Not because there are ghosts or spirits or souls, but because
its whole frame of reference excludes much of what we actually worry about.
" Neither atomic analysis of the paint nor any amount of sociobiological
mumbo-jumbo can tell us in any meaningful way why we respond to a da Vinci
the way we do. Nor, despite the inflated claims of scientists, should we
expect them to: science is a specialised discourse about the physical
world, and notions such as right and wrong, beautiful and repulsive have no
place in this discourse. " (Age Extra, p. 7, 17 April 1999)
There is a number of quite distinct assertions and implications there. The
most obviously false one, it seems to me, is that `Scientists consistently
claim science can answer everything'. In my experience, scientists are
very wary about treading outside the limited domain of their specialties.
What exercises Bradley is that a few scientists, away from their benches,
now and then do try to forge large-scale accounts of our experience that
conflict or compete with the accounts traditionally provided by religion,
the arts, `tradition' itself. Even so, I have never heard of any scientist
who held that atomic analysis of Leonadado's paint would add to our
understanding of aesthetic response. (Indeed, in my book I specifically
disavow such laughable ambition: `Not even the most optimistic reductionist
has ever supposed, after all, that we interpret Shakespeare best by
assiduously tracking the quantum states of each atom in each copy of
Hamlet, or tallying the alphanumerics in King Lear.')
Sociobiology, of course, was an ambitious program that has been replaced by
a more modest evolutionary psychology, a field I do watch with great
interest for the light its hypotheses seem to cast on human morality, the
substrates of our aesthetic choices, etc. Its promise is exactly that we
humans *are* part of the `physical world', and subject to formation by
selective pressures. On the other hand, the levels of explanation salient
to ethics and aesthetics are often detached, in effect, from those
operating on genes. But the link remains, and it is a harrowing one for
our self-esteem. Again, as I say in my book: `The only item in Darwinism's
favour is that it's infinitely preferable to believing that some divine
creator deliberately built the vicious ecologies we inhabit. Its
strategies, as Dawkins has eloquently explained, are founded on the single
fact that each of us is the end result of a long line of ancestors, beings
who all successfully passed on their genes. Happily, not every product of
random mutation and natural selection is vile. Such a filter can employ
many strategies and tactics, including love, kindness, generosity, honour,
artistic and scientific genius.'
Which brings me to the topic of a different thread, the question of `soul'.
It seems to me that science is good at providing satisfactory solutions
only to questions that can be well-framed, questions for which we can hope
to find an answer. Its starting point might be the one I. I. Rabi blurted
out when he learned of the meson: `Who ordered that?' That is: what's the
role this phenomenon plays in the wider scheme of things known to us from
all our joint efforts to know and comprehend the world? So: Who ordered
the soul? People who were puzzled by the gap between brute, unliving
matter and complex living critters, and by the gap between brute matter and
the rich inward qualia of consciousness. When some foolish, misguided
positivists tried to rule out subjective qualities in the name of a
sanitized science, they were making a tragic category error that redounds
to the discredit of science to this day. Which is what my critic has in
the back of his mind. But increasingly, the public investigative methods
of the sciences *are* approaching an adequate account of how mind is the
brained body in action. We can't yet explain the allure of the Mona Lisa
(I'd bet learnig to copy the avowed responses of others has a lot to do
with it), but cognitive science and evolutionary psychology offer a better
chance of a good account than gesturing at a supposed `soul' that has no
limits or characteristics distinguishing it from its absence.
Damien Broderick
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