Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [18]
I looked to the history of biology for answers. I went back to English philosopher Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Bacon started by critiquing ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who claimed that everything in nature behaves to achieve a goal. For Bacon achieving goals is a specifically human activity, and attributing goals to nature misrepresents it as humanlike. Humans fall into the trap known as teleology (from the Greek telos, meaning end, or aim), because, Bacon argued, we have a misleading tendency to project ourselves onto the world. This is known as anthropomorphism, a term derived from two Greek words for human and form, and meaning the attribution of humanness to the nonhuman. After Bacon it appeared contrary to the scientific method to attribute subjectivity to nature, because scienceâs task is to objectify the natural world. Anthropomorphism became a âcardinal sinâ for scientists.
French philosopher René Descartes went on to claim that animals are machines. In his 1637 book Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences, Descartes wrote: âThis will not seem strange to those who know how many different automata or moving machines can be made by the industry of man, without employing in so doing more than a few parts in comparison with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, or all the other parts that are in the body of each animal. They will consider the body as a machine which, having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better arranged, and possesses in itself movements which are much more admirable, than any of those which can be invented by manâ¦. It is also a very remarkable fact that although there are many animals which exhibit more industry than we do in some of their actions, we at the same time observe that they do not manifest any industry at all in many others. Hence the fact that they do better than we do, does not prove that they are endowed with mind, for in this case they would have more mind than any of us, and would surpass us in all other things. It rather shows that they have no mind at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, just as a clock, which is only composed of wheels and weights, is able to tell the hours and measure the time more correctly than we can do with all our wisdom.â
Descartes wrote in French, and to refer to what animals lacked he used the word esprit, meaning both mind and spirit. Descartes believed that only humans have souls, and thus did not believe that animals âreallyâ feel pain. He pioneered the practice of vivisection, or the dissection of living animals.
Descartesâ perspective seemed incredible to me. How could anyone seriously believe that a howling animal does not experience pain? But I felt sympathy for Descartes. He wrote in a period when religious authorities executed numerous people on suspicions of âwitchcraftâ and âunorthodoxâ thinking. Descartes courageously contributed to wrestling knowledge from the Church and laid the grounds for rationalism. Four centuries later I was free to think what I wanted and use the different advances of science and other forms of knowledge to construct my own understanding of the world. Had Descartes visited me in my cabin, however, I would have argued with him into the night that it makes no sense to view animals as machines devoid of sentience.
Over the last centuries many Western thinkers disagreed with Descartes on this question. English philosopher John Locke thought animals have perception, memory, and reason, but lack abstraction (âBrutes abstract not,â he wrote). Scottish philosopher David Hume thought that animals can reason and learn from experience, just as humans do. And German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that animals have understanding and free will. But it took