"Metazoa" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

 Subtitled "Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness" this book, by the author of the brilliant Other Minds, asserts that consciousness is a characteristic of most animal thinking. 

His evidence is his extensive and detailed studies of marine life from sponges and corals to shrimps, fishes and octopuses. All living things, he suggests, sense and use what they sense to modify their actions: “Sensing has its raison d’etre in the control of action.” (Ch 3). Thus bacteria can move towards preferred chemicals, plants sense gravity and grow their roots downwards, animals detect food and move towards it etc. 

Most multicellular animals, he tells us can “modulate the interpretation of sensory information by the animal’s registration of what it is presently doing. ... If an animal does do this, it is now sensing the world in a way that tracks the divide between self and other.” (Ch 4) This is also the prime thesis of Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty; that our consciousness is created by a repeated ‘error correction’ between what we expect to happen and what we sense happening; that dreams are experienced as unreal because they are only our uncorrected expectations.

This has led to the concept of self: “Subjectivity involves feelings and seemings; agency is doing and initiating. All living things (or all living things composed of cells) exhibit something like subjectivity and agency, but these features take a different form in the animal case.” (Ch 5)

It can also be very funny, for example in this description of an octopus fight: “Females quite often throw at males who are pestering them. On one occasion, a video shows a female octopus throwing debris repeatedly at one particular male over a period of a few hours. About half of these throws hit him, and others missed only because the male ducked or was belowdecks. Toward the end, the male who had been on the receiving end seemed to be getting used to these assaults; he began to duck quite early as the thrower began loading up, and the final broadsides went (mostly) over his head.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes

• “A puzzle in front of us seems to resist the usual methods. What we should do in response is build knowledge around it, expecting that as we do this, the puzzle will transform and disappear.” (Ch 1) 
• “A human gut holds our food. In addition, our guts contain countless living bacteria, from which we benefit as long as things stay in balance. This kind of collaboration is extremely common in animals.” (Ch 2) This understanding of an individual human as some sort of ecosystem put me in mind of Turtles All the Way Down by John Green in which the heroine reflects, in chapter one: "Humans are approximately 50 per cent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not you at all. ... If half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate."
• “This is the arthropod way of evolving: when in doubt, add some legs.” (Ch 4)
• “As evolution proceeded, animals became a new kind of intersection point, or nexus, in the world’s networks of causal pathways. When an animal picks up information of various kinds through the sense, it becomes a point at which lines converge. When it is an initiator of action, it becomes a point from which casual lines diverge.” (Ch 5)
• “An ongoing feature of philosophy is its generation of wildly exaggerated theories. ... This is a pathology of the field.” (Ch 5)
• “A lot of octopus conflict looks like ... a giant pillow fight, between pillows.” (Ch 6)

A thought-provoking book. It is sometimes a little heavy-going but some of the descriptions of marine fauna are wonderful.

December 2021; 281 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Box of Birds" by Charles Fernyhough

This is a high concept novel of ideas with some great characters, some fantastic settings, and some beautiful prose.

In this slightly dystopian novel set in the near future in UK-Dthe narrator is a female neuroscientist, Dr Yvonne Churcher, working with humans and animals to discover the secrets of the Lorenzo Circuit, a critical feature of human memory. Her problem, apart from the obligatory failed love affair, is that she has lost her sense of self. From her study she knows that her consciousness is an illusion: there is no control centre in her brain, she is a seething mass of conflicting thoughts; her identity depends on which thought happens to be uppermost at any one time. 'Me' is a body, a single unified encasing shell. Her mind is, as it were, a box of birds (which is an idea derived from Plato's Theaetetus:

• "I’ll be back to being a network of activity, one neural cluster buzzing another neural cluster, one lot of bio-electrical traffic taking the ring-road around the soul; one deluded meat puppet sizing up another deluded meat puppet and wanting to fight it or fuck it or whatever." (1.1)
• "‘I’m empty,’ I say. ‘There’s no “me” to do the thinking. I’m an illusion. The confection of a restless, pattern-seeking brain.’" (1.3)
• "Plato said the mind is like an aviary full of birds, one for every thought or memory you’ve ever had. They’re all there, all these thoughts and bits of knowledge: the problem is catching them." (1.4)
• "Where does your sense of morality come from, if you’re just a bundle of nerves? Why did you want to come here today, if you didn’t have a self to do your wanting with?" (2.10)
• "Consciousness is a confection, the fantasy of a brain obsessed with finding coherence, and I’ve been trained not to trust it." (2.14)

Another important idea is that promulgated by James and his friends in the squat where he lives. They are mimicking Christ's disciples, all being intended suicides rescued at the apical moment by 'David Overstrand' a semi-mythical figure whose death has (perhaps) been faked. They are named after the places they were rescued, for example 'Level Ten' was on the top floor of a multi-storey car park from which he intended to jump. They believe that what is important is the story that you tell and that there are many possible stories for the same evidence. Thus their animal rights group is called Conscience, Con-Science, because they believe (like certain post-modernist social scientists) that science privileges only the scientific method as a way of arriving at the truth and there are many more.

• "‘Reality?’ Level Ten says. ‘The objective truth about the world that only science can deliver? Nice one, Yvonne: you just told a really good story.’" (2.9)

But the novel is also a fast moving thriller with a number of exotic locations, such as Yvonne's  lab where she experiments on genetically modified mice and her treehouse home, the squat where James and his animal rights activists live, a conference hotel in Florida, a tea hut on the moors, the underground tunnels of an old lead mine,  and a church in Verona. The three principal characters are:

• Yvonne: a neuroscientist haunted by the thought that there is no 'she' in command of her consciousness but only a dynamic ragbag of thoughts and impressions which are scarcely under control. She is recovering from a failed relationship with fellow neuroscientist Marius and now really, really fancies her student James: "The light from his bedside lamp is gilding the arches of his insteps." (2.10) was a line I found utterly original, conjuring up a hauntingly beautiful and even sexy image.
• James: a member of a group of animal rights activists who were each on the point of suicide before being rescued by their semi-divine guru 'David Overstrand'. James copes with his box of birds by telling stories to himself and acting out a variety of different roles so that it hard for Yvonne (or perhaps James himself) to know who he really is ("It’s not what’s beneath the layers, it’s the fact that the layers are there at all. He’s like me, in that respect. The layers are what he is."; 2.16; "Sometimes you can get a better idea of who you are by being someone else. The gods have always known that. The avatars, the incarnations: anyone but who they really are."; 2.24) in particular whether he is her ally or systematically betraying her to the enemy.
• Gareth: a young prodigy computer hacker who insists on calling Yvonne, his tutor, 'Miss'. Gareth wants to recreate consciousness and steals Yvonne's work on the Lorenzo Circuit. This makes him a target for Sansom and he has to go into hiding, where he remains for most of the story.

I found the overall setting of the book a little problematic. When is is set? An eighty-five year old lady remembers the Shadows: "She’s twenty-four again. England is new. The Shadows cruise down the dual carriageway under our window, quiffs a-tremble, Strats zinging in the breeze. And on the back seat of their convertible Rolls, a young immigrant bride cannot think about dying, can’t see into that distance, cannot even frame the thought." (2.9) This suggests a dating of around 2016. The university town is described as mediaeval and there is a football riot, all very modern day, but the undergraduates are called 'betas' which conjures up images of Brave New World and there are other images which suggest a little higher tech than I am expecting. There is a mixture of fictionalised locations and real locations which threw me. Perhaps this muddle is deliberate and meant to unbalance me, as when Gareth insists on calling his university teacher 'Miss', a title more often reserved for teachers at primary school.

This book is therefore a sort of James Bond thrillers with a wreck of a car, some truly exciting but realistic locations, a convincing reason for the baddies to be bad (they are searching for a cure for Alzheimers which would be fantastically profitable) ,some realistically flawed characters, and some great prose:

• "James has scented it, the doubt that’s at the heart of me. It’s like I’ve thrown open a door onto a party you can hear from the street, only to show that there’s nothing there." (1.1)
• "Rain scores the windows, etching obscure diagrams onto the glass, cross-hatching areas of substance and uncertainty." (1.3)
• "Fixed in oils on the walls, long-dead churchmen avoid each other’s stares." (1.3)
• "Owl-hoots lob back and forwards in the moonlight." (1.5)
• "A fierce burning breaks out on my neck, metastasizes to my armpits, and then fades to a fizzy calm." (1.5)
• "A car is not a self-portrait. Just because my vehicle is falling apart, it doesn’t mean my life is." (1.6)
• "I want to imagine her in an impossible bikini, busty and lithe, the talk of the subcontinent. Now, at eighty-five, her skin has the powdery wrinklings of a nutmeg." (2.9)
• "A thin mouth that looks as though it’s tasting tin." (2.9)
• "A river is the only true absence in a city. You can’t build on it, fill it with rubbish, park your car there. You need that connection with nothingness in the midst of all the chaos." (2.9)
• "Most of the time he’s just another well-spoken beta, with that flat way of talking which is a sure sign that there’s something he’s trying to hide: a privileged background, a dad with a title, one of those bonuses of birth that do so much to smooth the transition into Lycee life." (2.10)
• "He’s too gauche and playground-fresh, too certain that he’s already conquered the world, to pick a fight with." (2.10)
• "He’d bought me two pints of some medal-winning beer, and I was well past my irretrievable blab point." (2.10)
• "College was getting me down. It was full of really safe people who just wanted the dream home and the dream holidays and the whole vacuous affluence deal. They thought having money would give them freedom to make choices. Yeah, choices between this kind of soulless shit and that kind of soulless shit." (2.10)
• "America. When I was a kid and it only existed on TV, I thought it was made of a different substance to the world I knew." (2.11)
• "The shower is so powerful that I come out expecting to see hail-damage on my skin." (2.11)
• "There is a hell specifically for academics, that you can spend your whole life banging away at a problem and there can be people on the other side, banging away at the same rock." (2.11)
• "Around one corner I come across a toy-sized Latino going at the floor with a carpet-sweeper. There is no dirt to sweep up. It feels like a terrible injustice, that this harmless man should be made to waste his time on an utterly clean corridor. He’s the human slave in some apocalyptic future’s robot world, dwarfed by space-station architecture. I want to talk to him, ask how you can have your pointless tasks set out for you in the minutest detail and still manage to go about them with dignity." (2.11)
• "A minibar is a beautiful thing. It gives you no anxiety of choice. You start with the ready-mixed cocktails, move on to the beer and macadamia nuts, and finish with Toblerone and whisky." (2.11)
• "His dog collar is a wonky Möbius strip." (2.13)
• "There’s a bruised looseness under his eyes, signs of sleeplessness." (2.14)
• "Sometimes he has the face of a hassled executive, a kind of clammy, bloated frazzlement. I wonder what happened to the face he deserves." (2.14)
• "Her real name’s Stephanie. Needless to say, she hates her real name." (2.16)
• "It’s one thing getting lost in the fog. But getting lost on a clear blue day, when you can see for twenty miles and still have no idea where you’re going — that’s a whole different kind of lostness." (2.16) Nice metaphor. Gareth has told her that he has given her a clue and it is in plain sight but she just can't see it. Also a metaphor for Yvonne herself, lost in trying to make sense of her box of birds.
• "Every terrifying thing you can possibly imagine can take shape in that darkness. The brain works overtime, making its hypotheses, and they’re never proved wrong. And forests are noisy places." (2.16)
• "I consume it like a shredder." (2.17)
• "I’m the decided, not the decider." (2.19)
• "Your cortex has only got a part-time interest in the truth. For the rest of the time it’s a deceitful egotist, just wanting to suit its own needs." (2.19)
• "When the big stuff happens you feel it directly in your body, opening taps and setting hormonal fires, squeezing the gut like nicotine." (2.21)
• "With their dinner parties and the whole sick rigmarole of suburban fakery; they’d made it so that being alive was no different to not being alive." (2.24)
• "You can’t be bigger than your own story." (2.24) Is this another version of the Godel Incompleteness Theorem?
• "Graceful dying is just the proof of it. She’s going out as she came in, a bundle of automatic routines that can cope perfectly well without the buzz of being here." (2.27)

This is one of those books which I will remember for a while. It has some brilliant characters and some powerful ideas. I am not sure that the thriller genre is best suited to it. It is a novel of ideas and that sits ill with the fast pace and conventions of a thriller. I loved the locations and the luxuriousness of the prose nudge it towards the genre of literary fiction. 

A novel in which the author has attempted a great deal. It may not have been perfectly realised but it is still powerful and haunting. April 2020

The author is a genuine scientist whose research into the voices we hear in our heads is summarised in the very readable book: The Voices Within.

"Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

This is a beautifully written book about the intelligence of octopi and cuttlefish which are cephalopods. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is ... because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p 9) Along the way it becomes an enquiry into what it means to have a consciousness. “For some animals, there's something it feels like to be such an animal. there is a self, of some kind, that experiences what goes on.” (p 10)

It starts tracing the evolution of the nervous system. After all, even bacteria can react to stimuli and therefore may be said to have some version of sentience:

• “The bacterium will swim in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it sensed a moment ago. If not, it’s preferable to change course.” (p 17)

The crucial factor is that the bacteria can in some sense detect the actions they themselves take. This feedback loop between sensory input and action and sensory input is the beginning of self awareness. And because one bacterium can detect things that other bacteria do it is the beginning of communication and socialisation. So when cells begin to get together in multicellular organisms we have the rudimentary mechanisms for a nervous system.

• “The receptors on the surfaces of bacterial cells are sensitive to many things, and these include chemicals that bacteria themselves tend to excrete” (p 18)
• “If a chemical is both produced and sensed by a particular kind of bacteria, it can be used by those bacteria to assess how many individuals of the same kind are around.” (p 18)
• “Chemicals that are made because they'll be perceived and responded to by others ... brings us to the threshold of signalling and communication.” (p 19)

At this stage I was getting excited. After all, Andy Clark in Surfing Uncertainty, working in the world of artificial intelligence, suggests that a computationally frugal solution for intelligence involves an organism making an expectation and comparing the sensory data with the expectation so that a simple error reduction algorithm can improve the expectation. This involves a feedback loop and here we see something similar being evolved from the simplest forms of cellular life.

G-S gives an example in technology developed to aid the blind. There is a system that uses a camera to change vision into tactile sensations on the skin of a blind person. The person soon learns to experience “objects located in space” BUT “only when the wearer is able to control the camera.” (p 80)

Of course, multicellular life had to evolve before cell specialisation could start developing proper nervous systems. But this wasn't as difficult as it might at first look. It has evolved independently more than once. “The transition to a multicellular form of life occurred many times, leading once to animals, once to plants, on other occasions to fungi, various seaweeds, and less conspicuous organisms.” (p 20)

And once predation begins (probably in the Cambrian) each organism must be aware of the others which adds further urgency to the evolution of sensory-action feedback loops. “From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.” (p 36)

The only thing that makes animals different is that they have greater capacity to take actions and so need to be even faster at sensing their own actions. “All living things affect their environment by making and transforming chemicals, and also by growing and sometimes by moving, but it is muscle that gives rise to rapid, coherent action on large spatial scales. It makes possible the manipulation of objects, the deliberate and rapid transformation of what is around us.” (p 82) This “interaction between perception and action” is critical. (p 83)

And the next stage for feedback loops is our own thoughts. G-S suggests that the internalization of language, “Vygotsky’s transition ... was also an important evolutionary event.” (p 152) He spends some time on inner speech:

• “When we look inside, most people find a flow of inner speech, a monologue that accompanies much of our conscious life.” (p 138)
• “Ordinary speech functions both as input and output ... We both speak and hear, and we can hear what we say. Even talking to yourself out loud can be a useful way of approaching a problem.” (p 144)
• “In speech, the creation of an efference copy enables you to compare your spoken words to an inner image of them; this can be used to work out whether the sound ‘came out right’.” (p 145)
• This then means that we can “put together sentences that we don't intend to say, sentences and fragments of language that have a purely internal role. ... We can put things in order, bring possibilities together, can list and instruct and exhort.” (p 147) This is particularly useful for Kahneman’s [ref Thinking, Fast and Slow] “System 2” thinking, the “slow, deliberate style of thinking we engage in when we encounter novel situations ... [which] tries to follow proper rules of reasoning, and tries to look at things from more than one side.” (p 147)
• This resonates with the “workspace theory of consciousness” (p 149)
• Inner speech is especially prominent when “we bring attention to bear on our own thought processes, reflect on them, and experience them as our own.” (p 152)
• “When you write something for yourself to read ... it is a communication between your present self and a future self.” (p 155)

There is also an interesting argument about ageing. Why do species age at different rates: trees last hundreds of years, humans perhaps a hundred, cephalopods mostly two? The idea is that “When molecular accidents put mutations into the population ... the late-acting mutations will be cleaned out less efficiently than early-acting ones.” (p 166) “So mutations with good effects early in life and the bad effects later in life will accumulate; natural selection will favour them.” (p 167) Therefore some populations have evolved such that the bad mutations tend to affect them later in life ... and it seems like spontaneous ageing. The life-span is thus partly a matter of evolutionary chance and partly governed by the balance of reproduction and predation. When the octopus lost its hard shell it became much more susceptible to predation which meant that it had to live its life a lot quicker because, sooner or later, a sharp-toothed fish would eat it. Presumably humans are mostly prey to diseases which, sooner or later, will get them, so they are able to evolve genes which allow then to fight the diseases for a while even at the cost of dying later.

Other thoughts from this brilliant book:

• Cuttlefish sometimes deeply ignore visitors to their watery world. “Being ignored so deeply makes you wonder if you are entirely real in their watery world, as if you are one of those ghosts who does not realise they are against.” (p 118)
• “When animals did crawl onto the dry land, they took the sea with them. All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.” (p 200)

A readable and intensely thought-provoking book. March 2018; 204 pages

The author has now written a sequel: Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Seven brief lessons on Physics" by Carlo Ravelli

This was the last book read by my dad before he died. He was an electronics engineer all his life. He worked on radar during World War II. Later he worked on the very first computers, meeting Alan Turing and Norbert Weiner. After that he researched radiocarbon dating, discovering that a fragment of wood found on Mount Ararat wasn't old enough to come from the Ark, and finally he worked as part of the team that created radio-controlled clocks.

In fewer than 80 pages, Rovelli talks about General Relativity, Quantum Physics, Cosmology, Particle Physics, Loop Quantum Physics, Thermodynamics and the nature of time, and Ourselves; I have taught Physics for 33 years and I have been a human for even longer and yet I still, repeatedly, learned fascinating things from this brilliant book. Plus it is superbly written and it tells so eloquently of the joys and challenges of being a scientist.

Just some of the brilliant insights from this wonderful little book.

• "the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself." (p 6) This is a triumph of Descartes over Newton: a vortex space rather than one filled with action-at-a-distance. Space undulates. :
• light curves round heavy objects
• time goes more quickly at altitude
• black holes exist
• "space cannot stand still; it must be expanding" (p 8)
• "space moves like the surface of the sea" (p 9)
• "Why does the periodic table have this particular structure, with these periods, and with the elements having these particular properties? The answer is that each element corresponds to one solution of the main equation of quantum mechanics." (p 15)
• "an electron is a series of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any particular place. It is not in a 'place' at all." (p 15)
• Loop Quantum Gravity proposes that space is quantised in very small linked rings: "Space is created by the linking of these individual quanta of gravity" (p 41) 
• "The passage of time ... is born in the world itself in the relationship between the quantum events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time." (p 42). 
• "Our universe may have been born from a bounce in a prior phase, passing through an intermediate stage in which there was neither space nor time." (p 47)
• "How the gravitational field behaves when it heats up is still an unsolved problem. ... when heat is diffused to the gravitational field, time and space themselves must vibrate ... what is a vibrating time?" (p 56)
• "There is a detectable difference between the past and the future only when there is flow of heat. Heat is linked to probability; and probability in turn is linked to the fact that our interactions with the rest of the world do not register the fine details of reality ... due to the limitations of our consciousness we only perceive a blurred vision of the world, and live in time." (p 60)
• "The heat of black holes is a quantum effect upon an object, the black hole, which is gravitational in nature. ... The heat of black holes is like a Rosetta Stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages - Quantum, Gravitational and Thermodynamic - still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time." (p 62)
• "We are like an only child who on growing up realizes that the world does not revolve around them alone, as they thought when little. They must learn to be one among others. Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are." (p 65)
• "All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other." (p 68)
• "It would be absurd to ask whether 'I' can do something different from what the whole complex of my neurons has decided: the two things ... are the same." (p 71)
• "Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past which haunts us and serenity." (p 74)
• "We are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions." (p 74)
• 
  
• "And to the very last: doubt." (p 19)

What a way for my dad to end his reading career.

Magnificent. July 2017, 79 pages

"Consilience" by Edward O Wilson

This far-ranging and brilliantly written book pleads the cause that science should be united with the social sciences, and the humanities, and the arts, and even ethics and religion, on the basis of the scientific method. The thesis is that biology, which accepts that is is linked to chemistry and physics, is the basis for psychology through the evolution by natural selection within the human brain of epigenetic rules, and that scientific psychology is (or should be) the basis for sociology, anthropology and economics. Wilson is predominantly a socio-biologist and presents compelling evidence for his point of view. This book thus complements, supports and is supported by Steven Pinker's brilliant book The Blank Slate.

He starts by celebrating the power of science:  "The idea of the unity of science ... has been tested in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At least not yet." (p 3). To those who fear the 'mad scientist', variously mythologised as Frankenstein, the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden, and Icarus, the ultimate in hubris, Wilson responds: "Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings." (p 5)

He believes that the romantics led the reaction against the Enlightenment ideal of consilience, the unit of knowledge, when  Rousseau "invented the deadly abstraction of the 'general will' ... the rule of justice agreed upon by assemblies of free people whose interest is only to serve the welfare of the society and of each person in it ... Those who do not conform to the general will ... are deviants subject to necessary force by the assembly. There is no other way to achieve a truly egalitarian democracy." (p 14) but he points out that  "The Enlightenment ... was less a determined swift river than a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels" (p 21) and reminds us that "What counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment." (p 22) "Reductionism, given its unbroken strong of successes ... may seem today the obvious best way to have constructed knowledge of the physical world." (p 31) "The cutting edge of science is reductionism ... It is the research strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems." (p 58) The present situation is one in which the "natural sciences have expanded to reach the borders of the social sciences and humanities" (p 71)

Wilson is at one with Dennett is his claims that "Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imaginations of sensory impressions." (p 119) and that "Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of" networks of neurons. These "create scenarios that flow back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality." (p 120) He thus denies the Cartesian theatre: "Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. ... There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. ... The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity." (p 120)

I think therefore I am? Wilson questions the identity of the Self, seeing it as an actor improvising: "The self, an actor in a perpetually changing drama, lacks full command of its actions." (p 131) Free will is an illusion: "We make decisions for reasons we can sense only vaguely, and seldom if ever understand fully. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured. An omniscient mind with total commitment to pure reason and fixed goals would lack free will." (p 131): this implies that an omniscient God could not have free will; this is a fascinating theological restriction on God that I need to think about.

He revisits the nature-nurture debate, accepting that culture affects us but claiming that culture is an amalgam of the evolution of epigenetic rules which are prescribed by genes. "We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact." (p 138) "Culture is reconstructed each generation collectively in the minds of individuals ... culture can grow indefinitely large ... But the fundamental biasing influence of the epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stays constant." (p 139). This creates an unchangeable human nature. He has a great example showing how nature and nurture interact in the arrowleaf plant which has arrowhead leaves on land, lily-pad leaves in shallow water, grass-like ribbon leaves in deep water. Similarly, humans genetically predisposed to be fat can be thin with a significant dieting regime and "Later-borns, who identify least with the roles and beliefs of their parents, tend to become more innovative and accepting of political and scientific revolutions than do first-borns. As a result they have, on average, contributed more than first-borns have to cultural change throughout history." (p 152)

Culture itself evolves and Wilson suggests that this is because cultural evolution can facilitate survival faster than genetic evolution, thus enabling faster adaptation to environmental change and potentially explaining the success of our species. "The more successful epigenetic rules have spread through the population along with the genes that prescribe the rules. As a consequence the human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behaviour. ... Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms ... Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations." (p 140) Culture exists in other species: "Wild chimps regularly invent and use tools. And the particular kinds of artifacts they invent, just as in human culture, are often limited to local populations." (p 145). 

He casts a new light on rationality itself! "I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules." (p 199) But epigenetic rules ("rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment") (p 213) are "typically emotion driven" (p 214) so "Rational calculation is based on surges of competing emotions." (p 227)#

He is fascinating on a wide range of topics including pre-verbal communication which is probably "our primate heritage" and includes:

• "a male pheromone concentrated in perspiration and fresh urine. Perceived variously as musk or sandalwood, it changes sexual attraction and warmth of mood during social contacts." (p 174)
• Touching: strangers: arms only; other parts of body for more familiar acquaintances; more familiarity with opposite sex (p 174)
• "Dilation of the pupils": greater in women (p 174)
• "Pushing the tongue out and spitting are aggressive displays of rejection; flicking the tongue around the lips is a social invitation, used most commonly during flirtation" (p 174)
• Close eyes & wrinkle nose: rejection (p 174)
• "Opening the mouth while pulling down the corners of the mouth to expose the lower teeth is to threaten with contempt." (p 175)

"The optimum sexual instinct of men ... is to be assertive and ruttish, while that of women is to be coy and selective. Men are expected to be more drawn than women to pornography and prostitution. And in courtship, men are expected to stress exclusive sexual access and guarantees of paternity, while women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security." (p 187)

The theory of the family: "The basic assumption is evolution by natural selection" (p 214)
"Families are basically unstable, but the least so in those controlling high-quality resources. Dynasties ... arise in territories permanently rich in resources." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationships of the family members .. the higher the degree of cooperation." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, the lower the frequency of sexual conflict." (p 215)
"Breeding males invest less in offspring when paternity is uncertain. If the family consists of a single conjugal pair, and one of the parents is lost, the opposite-sex offspring compete with the surviving parent for breeder status. When the father dies, for example, a still fecund mother is likely to enter into conflict with a son over the status of a mate he may newly acquire, and a son is likely to discourage his mother from establishing a new sexual relationship." (p 215)
"Stepfamilies are less stable than biologically intact families." (p 215)
"Reproduction within a family ... is increasingly shared when there is an improvement in the alternative option for subordinate members to disperse and start families of their own. Such forbearance is greatest of all when the members are genetically very close and when the cooperating individuals are siblings rather than parents and offspring." (p 215)

Economists tend to use "folk psychology" (p 223) Their "principle of rational choice" assumes "narrow self-interest" but people are also "variously altruistic, loyal, spiteful, and masochistic." (p 224)

"The arts are not solely shaped by errant genius out of historical circumstances and idiosyncratic personal experience. The roots of that inspiration date back in deep history to the genetic origins of the human brain, and are permanent." (p 242)

"Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions." (p 265) But if ethical rules "increased the survival and reproductive success of those who conformed" then epigenetic ethical rules could have evolved. (p 275)

"Rarely do you see an argument that opens with the simple statement: This is my starting point and it could be wrong." (p 268)

Pascal's wager: I might as well believe: if I am right I get eternity in heaven, if I am wrong I lose nothing. This could be turned around: "If fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other." (p 274)

The naturalistic fallacy (to go from is to ought) is itself a fallacy: "To translate is into ought makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts ... they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates, the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are willing to accept themselves for the common good." (p 278)

"One hunter considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide ... But he knows from experience that his chances of success alone are very low ... In addition ... he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their own prospects." (p 281) therefore those humans who cooperate have greater reproductive success and cooperation evolves. Therefore the prisoner's dilemma can be solved if "Honor does exist among thieves" (p 281)

"I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago." (p 4)

At then end he offers two warnings. 

First: we are destroying our environment. "At best an environmental bottleneck is coming in the twenty-first century." (p 320) "Economic miracles ... occur most often when countries consume not only their own material resources, including oil, timber, water, and agricultural produce, but those of other countries as well." (p 325) Life is becoming increasingly fragile:
"The more knowledge people acquire, the more they are able to increase their numbers and to alter the environment, whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive." (p 302)
"Greed demands an explanation." (p 302)

Secondly, we are about to become in charge of our own evolution.
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. ... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. Our childhood having ended, we will hear the true voice of Mephistopheles." (p 309)

This is an amazing book. July 2016; 333 pages 

"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett

What is consciousness? Is it Gilbert Ryle's "Ghost in the Machine"? Is it our spirit or soul, entirely distinct from our body?

When we think it certainly seems that there is a Ghost watching a television inside our heads. Is mind entirely distinct from body?

Dennett seeks to debunk this mind-body duality that originated with Descartes and the Cartesian Theatre that goes with it. Mind cannot be separate from body and still be able to interact with it, yet I seem to be able to move my body by thinking. Instead, we are just evolved networks of neurons. Dennett disucsses psychological illusions that cannot be explained by the Cartesian Theatre; he uses the Multiple Drafts model to explain them in which a pandemonium of neural circuits is always responding to sensory inputs; the resulting conflict between different drafts is resolved by paying attention to whichever demon is presently shouting loudest. Even ourselves, suggest Dennett, are not single entities (our guts are ecosystems for bacteria, our boundaries are porous and multiple personality disorder suggests that our sense of self  is illusory).

This is a very important book. It is difficult to understand its arguments and compelling and logical. It is a work of philosophy that appeals to common sense (whilst demolishing a huge common illusion) and as such deserves a place on the bookshelf of every serious thinker.

He writes well too, so that this is an accessible text.

October 2015; 455 pages

Another brilliant philosophical work from a modern thinker is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God