The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [150]
YOU’VE GOT TO STOP
TAKING YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY
Freaky Friday was made in 1976, remade in 1995, and again in 2003, each time by Disney. If you missed any of these, there is a 2010 remake. In addition, there are variations in which a boy and his dad trade places (Vice Versa) and about 100 other such films and TV programs listed under “Body swaps” on Wikipedia. Conceptually, the worst of these films is Being John Malkovich, worst because it is about the best illustration of the homunculus problem ever made into a major motion picture.
It was David Hume who first figured out why there is no enduring self. He was so disconcerted by the discovery that he had to distract himself: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” Now we know why he had to do so. Blame Darwin, or rather the process he uncovered.
Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens (1999) came out for three selves. His Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010) develops the neuroscience of this ever-so-useful illusion further. But nothing the brain produces qualifies as one or more selves numerically identical over time.
Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat” (1974) is available online. There is a wonderful modernized translation of Leibniz’s Monadology at the Early Modern Philosophy website (www.earlymoderntexts.com) by Jonathan Bennett, the great historian of philosophy and analytical philosopher.
The best antidotes to these subversive texts are in a series of books by Vilaynur S. Ramachandran, including The Emerging Mind (2003), his Reith lectures on the BBC, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers (2004), and (with Sandra Blakeslee) Phantoms in the Brain (1998). Ramachandran’s latest book, The Tell-Tale Brain (2011), is also good on blindsight, mother’s face neurons, and confabulations of consciousness.
HISTORY DEBUNKED
Arms races started in the genome and have accelerated ever since. Even if human affairs were not the domain of Darwinian adaptation, it would still be the area of ever-lasting arms races. The beginning of the story is given in Austin Burt and Robert Trivers’s Genes in Conflict (2006). The last chapter in the history of arms races will probably end with human extinction.
At its outset, human history might have been predictable just because the arms races were mainly biological. That’s what enabled Jared Diamond to figure out how and why western Europeans came to dominate the globe over a period that lasted 8,000 years or so in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999). Though he doesn’t acknowledge it, Diamond is only applying an approach to human history made explicit by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in On Human Nature more than 30 years ago (1978) and more recently by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd in Not By Genes Alone (2006). For an illuminating example of the process of gene/culture coevolution that they identify, read Gregory Clark’s explanation for why the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Britain in A Farewell to Alms (2007).
Once human culture and human accumulation began to depend on technological change, its unpredictability made telling the future scientifically as difficult as reading tea leaves—for Darwinian theories as well as all others. The refusal of economics as a science to deal with the impact of technological change is detailed in David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (2006). What he doesn’t realize is that it can’t be done, even if you try.
The outrageous notion that humans