Modern neuroscience was revolutionised in the second half of the twentieth century, with progress in molecular biology, electrophysiology, and computational neuroscience. The interdisciplinary use of electron microscopy, computer science, electronics, neuroimaging and genetics have enabled mathematical models and computer simulation that can give simplified analytical results, which can later be generalised into theories of how the brain works.
Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris are two such theorists related to this field, who have used the outcomes of this field to present theories about the working of the brain that are in line with their atheistic, naturalist, God-less worldview.
Dennett insists that human brains are just ‘machines’, "We're not just robots, we're robots, made of robots, made of robots". And conscience is the "user illusion" akin to what we see on our cell-phone screens, when we really don’t know anything that’s really happening inside the machine. Taking from that he identifies human intuition with ‘simply knowing something without knowing how you got there’, hence dragging human free-will into something also like the ‘user illusion’.
For Dennett, humans began with a purely Darwinian mental state, of no comprehension, no language and only random search, and that in some thousands of years of cultural evolution we have brought ourselves to an era of intelligent design, wherein we are the intelligent designers!
The controversies in this line of thought are obvious. It simply takes ‘life’ as an essentially ‘emergent’ property, meaning once enough carbon-based elements are stacked together for enough time, life will simply emerge. Therefore, what is the most complex, unexplainable and most amazing substance of reality, is being deemed as the most tending-to-negligibility, unworthy of explanation part of existence if you want to call it one. Dennett’s simpleton comparison of humans and all other lifeforms for that matter, with ‘robot, made of robot’ and human intuition with a mere ‘user’s illusion’, and then his overgeneralisation that humas are direct descendants of Eukaryotes – is quite ‘illusionary’ thinking itself – considering the amount of complexity, diversity and organisation in living cells of higher forms of life and humans! It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dennett’s scientific enterprise and popularity is based upon his skill of putting all the difficult questions into oblivion.
Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris is of the idea that the study of the brain in modern times has shown that morality is actually a completely natural consequence of our neurology. To come to such a conclusion, he surmises that like all our other organs, our brain functions only through chemical, electrical and physical processes, which determine our brain state, and that good or bad feelings are brain states induced by the regulation of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. In his book ‘the Moral Landscape’, Sam bases his argument on the premise that ‘human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it.’ He then concludes that ‘morality’ can be generalised as the idea of ‘minimising unnecessary suffering’ and increasing ‘well-being’, and there’s nothing mystical about them, they are universally intelligible ideas that can be traced back to the working of the brain.
Interestingly, Sam doesn’t believe in free-will either. He says ‘we don’t really decide what actions to take, but rather a myriad of unconscious processes in our brains result in a “decision” that our conscious mind becomes aware of later on’.
Clearly, Sam has overrated dopamine and serotine, the two neurotransmitters are chemicals released by neurons, nerve cells of the brain, to send signals to other nerve cells of the body and back. They both have some distinct functions; dopamine controls body movements and coordination; serotonin helps regulate bowel function and appetite. So, dopamine is associated with feeling of hunger and serotonin with happiness and depression. The question still remains if when the electrochemical signals received by the brain, is it not that the signals are interpreted by the brain and it is the brain that decides to feel good or bad about it, and that the conscious thought shares these feelings from its subconscious linkage with the biological activities going on in the body, and the ‘thought’, whenever it finds a signal of depression, knows that something is bad in the body and focuses upon finding help from the outside environment. This should not, on the other hand, mean that serotine or dopamine signals may have caused Johannes Kepler (1630) into making strides in astronomy, mathematics, astrology, philosophy and music – these are all purely domains of the thought – the ‘thought’ is definitely affected by internal bodily sicknesses, and by the health of the brain, it is something that feeds upon the energy of the brain, but it is a faculty above the mere material components of the brain.
The fact is that neither the brain nor the thought can survive without the other, life starts in a material base, it starts thinking within the confines of the body, and it ends, along with its thought-process, from the body, resulting in the decay of the body and its being eaten up by the soil, and the escape of the thought to an unknowingness. So, as far as the brain is material, and the mind is the sublime, it is a non-matter – perhaps a force just like gravity that has no material content like the assumed ‘graviton’; or like magnetic fields generated by a base magnet, but whose existence is non-material and whose function is completely disjoint and incommensurable from the functions situated withing the material confines of the magnet.
What Sam wants us to believe, is that humans are ‘only’ chemical structures, that are special only because they are the product of millions of years of blind chemical and structural evolution, that we are just another ‘accident’ in the ongoing evolutionary process upon which we have no real control. And morality, is the aggregate of millions of years of blind hit-and-trial acts of dopamine and serotonin, that has now come upon some sets of right and wrongs, which are not really rights and wrongs, but just the way evolution has allowed us to think as yet.
For Sam, humans are biochemical puppets, and free will is ‘incoherent’, as it ‘cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality’. So, just to negate a morality-code unveiled by a Divine Being, Sam concludes a moral structure completely ‘determined’ by neurology which is in turn ‘determined’ by evolution. Ironically, Sam beats the very idea behind the enlightenment that rejected western religious dogma, the idea that reason and logic are the prime deciders, and that humanity needs to be ‘free’ to exercise its rights and freedoms – but if there are no such ‘freedoms’ at the root of human will and reason, then it remains a matter of ‘controlling’ an illusion-stricken, zombie-like species, with at least some reason – that it is not by itself capable of. And the question then become whether this control is coming from the ever-present ‘evolutionary’ force or from the delusional species itself, who now wants to think of itself as the god-product of evolution!
This brings humanity upon an essential choice; religion, especially Islam, calls upon humanity’s free will to ‘chose’ good upon evil, and to understand the consequences of their choices and take responsibility of them; while Sam asks of humanity to just do what feels good! Sam ‘believes’ that people will generally make the good choices. And he conveniently turns a blind eye to how it feels good to make wars and bomb other people’s homes; how it feels good to accumulate wealth and make the poor poorer by doing that; how it feels good to legalise prostitution, gambling, drinking and same-sex, and ban second-marriage and head-scarfs — is all this coming from dopamine? And should we just let the assumed dopamine-god do its will?
Moreover, Sam declares the moral compass set by dopamine as ‘fickle’, he wants ‘objective science’, like study of the working of dopamine and serotonin, to answer moral questions. And then he comes to the conclusion that there are no absolute answers, rather there are many right answers to moral questions. Thus, pushing humanity into ‘moral relativism’, which again throw the ball into the court of ‘what people want’ by their ‘free will’, something that can change all the time… Unlike religion, that wants us to believe in the Divine, and frightens us with punishment in afterlife, so that what we do in this lifetime is altruistic in the worldly context, Sam wants us to ‘make selfless good choices’ based on the ‘selfish’ act of ‘survival of the fittest’ undertaken by the eons-long evolutionary process.
Another amazing researcher in neuroendocrinology and human behavior biology, Professor Robert Sapolsky, is also a proponent of the idea that there is no God, no purpose and no free-will!
Sapolsky explains that plain reductionism does not work in resolving the matters of the brain. He believes that human genetics and behavior cannot be reduced like we reduce the parts of a ‘clock’, where we can find out which part of the clock is bad and then mend it; rather brains are like clouds, which even if broken down to the last molecule, will not tell why it did not rain! So, he rejects Richard Dawkins’ reductionist Selfish-Gene Theory and instead tends towards multi-level selection and features of ‘emergence’ at the genome level in genetics and the group level in human behavior. He explains that because of the reason that the number of brain cells, over 265billion, is simply too less for a point-to-point linear reduction for the bulk of information the brain has to store and interact with in order to perform its daily functions, therefore we need to take the approach of neural networks, wherein complex information is not coded for in a single protein, a single synapse, a single neuron, rather its coded for in patterns of activation across hundreds of thousands of interacting neurons networks.
Sapolsky explains that natural systems are not boring, linear, point-to-point, rather they are set upon simple rules that produce complex, chaotic, aperiodic patterns. For instance, the circulatory system has an extreme level of complexity, even when it is set on the simple rule of bifurcation, something that is factoid, continuous and scale-free. For this reason, Sapolsky says, no cell in the body is more than five cells away from a blood vessel, and yet the circulatory system comprises less than 5% of the body mass.
Again, the examples of ants and bees, demonstrate the same bifurcation rule in their movement, along with ‘nearest neighbor rule’ and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ formula, that keeps them approximating towards the right goals. Following the examples of ants and bees, Sapolsky asserts that like their neural systems, the neurons of the human brain follow the rules of swarm-intelligence and make and follow patterns. So, the neurons don’t have to be more and more complex, rather they can be simple, following simple rules, and only because humans have more of them, they have more swarm-intelligence and therefore show more emergent feature. Moreover, once the human species have evolved, and they have made large enough groups, they start evolving culturally, so that swarm-intelligence at the societal and civilisational level has led to the creation of complex tools like cars, planes and computers.
What Sapolsky emphasises is that intelligence of a single mind, a single ant, a single neuron, does not matter when it comes to developing natural systems, rather it is the chaotic, random, aperiodic, indeterministic (deterministic within a range) movements of sensory responses of maybe billions of neurons that will at the aggregate produce patterns and network responses that do not get extinct or are the best, most-survivalist motions or responses. Meaning that nature has no blueprints of how or to what goal it has to evolve, rather it acts without nay blueprint and out of its un-intention sprout out the best possible scenarios, as the rest keep hitting the wall and getting extinct.
So, for Sapolsky, a small number of initial conditions and a small number of very simple local rules are capable of producing interesting, lively, animated, dynamic living systems – and that is the way evolution of different living systems has proceeded.
Though at another place the Professor admits that all this does not make the working of the brain simple to understand. He reiterates that social behaviors of humans depend on a myriad of factors from ones’ genetic makeup, fetal environment, childhood experiences, culture, endocrine levels, brain levels and so on, to what the person ate or encountered that particular day. With all this, the Professor remains a staunch believer of humans being nothing but beast-machines, evolved via evolutionary accidents – and that ideas such as of ‘God’ are produced by the brain because humans like explanations, causality chains, especially during periods of stress and anxiety, where a sense of control and predictivity are psychologically protective.
Aneela Shahzad is a geopolitical analyst who tweets @AneelaShahzad. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author