On The Nature of Philosophy and The Principle of Continuity In Godfrey-Smith

It's possible to progress...by charting the evolution of the senses, bodies, and behavior. Somewhere in that process lies the evolution of the mind. So this is a philosophy book, as well as a book about animals and evolution. That it's a philosophy book does not place it in some arcane and inaccessible realm. Doing philosophy is largely a mater of trying to put things together, trying to to get the pieces of very large puzzles to make some sense. Good philosophy is opportunistic; it uses whatever information and whatever tools look useful. I hope that as the book goes along, it will move in and out of philosophy through seams that you won't much notice. Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016) Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life, p. 12. [Emphasis in original--ES]

I warmly recommend Godfrey-Smith's book, which revisits and extends the best from the tradition of natural philosophy. It's accessible and insightful at once. It has that rare quality of articulating features of reality that seem obvious once stated (my favorite: the "dual role" of light as a source of energy and a source of information), but that surely eluded your recognition before reading it.

Other Minds is a masterful introduction to three different topics: octopus and squid cognition; human cognition; and modern understanding of evolution by natural selection.* Mercifully, it avoids the pitfall of much popular science writing, which tends to teach us more about the author (and his view of himself), or some privileged interlocutor, than the subject matter. This is not to deny we get a below the surface, as it were, peak of how science works: we hear, en passant, about scientists switching research topics and withholding papers from each other until publication; we learn about prestige hierarchy in science and how the significance of neglected papers can be discovered much later; the non-trivial role of non-scientists in marine biology; the ways in which background theory informs interpretations of experiments, and the ways philosophers can be constructive participants in science, etc.

When I first read the passage quoted above, I mistakenly thought Godfrey-Smith (hereafter PGS) was promoting a Kuhnian puzzle-solving image for philosophy. But while PGS certainly is working within a Darwinian paradigm, he is really doing something different than normal science in two ways: first, he is not, in fact, solving micro-puzzles within the paradigm, but rather bringing different elements together to create a coherent whole. The puzzle he is solving is, as it were, at the macro-level. Second, while, along the way, PGS draws on existing mechanisms and various strands of Darwinian argument, he is, as he is saying, opportunistic about the tools he uses and the evidence he calls attention to. It's not really conceptual analysis, but it is scientifically informed philosophy that brings together a wide diversity of scientific findings that cohere, not so much with PGS's armchair, but his own experience under water.

Now, interestingly enough, Other Minds has an epigraph from William James:

The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.--William James The Principles of Psychology

PGS interprets James as saying that "we need a theory [of consciousness] based on continuities and comprehensible transitions; no sudden entrances or jumps." (11) That is, PGS understands James as agreeing with, and anticipating, Dennett's methodological demand for cranes, not sky-hooks (recall Darwin's Dangerous Ideas--PGS does not use this tterminology, but he does graciously acknowledges his debt to Daniel Dennett.)

But PGS may also have something further in mind, "like James, I want to understand the relationship between mind and matter, and assume a story of gradualism is the story that has to be told." (11) Here gradualism can also be understood as a rejection of, say, Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium. And, in fact, PGS's story is one of deep time, longue durée, where many of the key moves take places hundreds of millions of years ago and accumulate slowly over time. While PGS's story is, in principle compatible with the Baldwin effect and other evolutionary cranes that accelerate evolution, on the whole he is not much interested in such moves (that connect human intelligence to environmental pressures and learned evolution).**

Now, PGS recognizes explicitly, in a note, that his own theory of consciousness is not like James's. But he does not explore the details of James's Darwinian theory. (That's okay, of course.) I am no James scholar, but if one reads the chapter from which PGS quotes, it's clear James ends up with a theory that looks a bit like Spinoza's, and, especially Leibniz's--where consciousness is a natural correlate of matter from the start of deep time.+ That is to say, there are two ways to understand the denial of irruption: (i) one is, in the explanation of X, to demand a gradual growth of X from bits of Ys (with only cranes doing the work); the other (ii) is to build X into the nature of Y, or a permanent byproduct of Y, in some sense or another. James finds the nineteenth century theories of the former (i) unpersuasive and so opts for the latter (ii). Godfrey-Smith can be understood as providing the framework to make (i) seem less mysterious and so as to avoid having to adopt (ii).*

One final thought, James is explicitly echoing Leibniz's principle of continuity, “Nothing takes place suddenly, and it is one of my great and best confirmed maxims that nature never makes leaps.” (A VI vi 56/RB 56) As Branden Look comments, this law or principle implies that any change passes through some intermediate change and that there is an actual infinity in things." This is, in fact, a Platonic principle (creatively re-interpreted by Leibniz) that in the nineteenth century got reinterpreted, in turn, that every possible species niche would be occupied (Nietzsche has a version of this in his treatment of the will to power). It is an image of boundless (even infinite) nature with endless possibility. I don't think that's Godfrey-Smith's image of nature, but since he treats the body of the octopus "as pure possibility," it's clear he is tempted by it.

*The book is, thus, a kind of indirect, elegant response to Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. (Nagel is mentioned but not this book.) For it shows that complex intelligence evolved multiple times from many intersecting mechanisms in evolutionary history along different branches and with at least two very distinct Baupläne. It shows that within a broadly scientific framework one can, in fact, talk say quite a bit about the nature of consciousness (rather than (recall) being hampered by the so-called Absolute Conception, which entails that very success that science may have had is intrinsically tied to subtracting mind).

** Other Minds presents, in fact, quite a bit of material that may be suggestive of such mechanisms, including the behavior of octopuses in captivity and recent discovery of social behavior among octopuses in Octopolis.

+James explicitly nods to "Leibniz, Herbart, and Lotze" by treating the following as a "Monad Theory:"

Every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about, all individual consciousness being 'ejective' to each other. There is, however, among the cells one central or pontifical one to which our consciousness is attached. But the events of all the other cells physically influence this arch-cell; and through producing their joint effects on it, these other cells may be said to 'combine.'

Comments

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Just FYI, the google book links don't, at least for me, go to any passages, but just the general page for the book, with no connection to the material you're referencing. I'm not sure if that's a problem w/ the links, my browser, or something else, but it might be worth a look.

Posted by: Matt | 09/25/2017 at 03:05 PM

Thank you for alerting me. I am unsure how to resolve it at this moment.

Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 09/25/2017 at 03:09 PM

I'm not sure how you got the URL's for your links, but they're all screwed up. Here's an example of one that should work (works for me, anyway):

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZ8sDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA17&q=dual%20role#v=onepage

Yours had a whole bunch of stuff from other searches, also has lpg=PA12 instead of pg=PA17. I changed google.nl to google.com because the blog post is in English, so I guess you want the page you point to be in English.

Posted by: Abestone | 09/26/2017 at 06:45 PM