I like to think of human beings as wonderful liars. We all do the things we have been genetically endowed to want to do, and we all construct reasons for our actions after the fact. The seat of these desires, the brain, is in cycles reviled and revered for variations of this characterization of human existence. Because of these cycles, the brain has been painted as many different things. It was once thought that the brain was a blank slate upon which experience engraved a human intellect, and at other times it was imagined to be an unyielding taskmaster that forced humans to act and allowed them the pittance of thinking they were actually in control. In reality it seems to fit somewhere in the middle. My favorite ideas on the subject come from Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, and his work “The Blank Slate.”
Pinker is a psychodarwinist, a scientist that believes the human brain consists of parts that came about through natural selection. Pinker describes the brain not as something more than the sum of its parts, but rather as a highly interconnected unit composed of almost entirely separate modules (a Swiss-army brain, to use one popular characterization). There are parts that compile stimuli into a visual image, parts that allow children to “soak” up language, and regions that enable us to feel emotions. It may not sound controversial to the college-educated individual, but there is nothing a human being has ever done that has not been afforded to that individual by his or her brain. Yet Pinker realizes this idea still manages to offend some: “Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?”
The reason human beings are even able to debate this issue provides us with a way out of this quandary – the human brain can do things it wasn’t “designed” to do. Pinker writes that this is because our “minds are packed with combinatorial software that can generate an unlimited set of thoughts and behavior.” There is no limit to our behavior, despite this physically limited set-up. This does not mean brains can do anything, though, and one sort of evidence that the brain is more suited to doing some tasks as opposed to others is that math is hard. We must train our brain to marshal disparate systems to solve mathematical dilemmas, but have no trouble deciding which individuals with whom we would most like to mate. This is because the latter requires an expedient answer, while the former has only the loosest of connections to the evolution of the human brain in a natural setting. Finding the meaning of life, a problem we have spent all of recorded history exploring, has also been met with little success. In Pinker’s view, this is because our brains are not equipped with tools suitable to the task. Such questions are quite literally outside the scope of our minds.
This examination of philosophy’s relevance puts an interesting spin on the exalted position human beings like to cast themselves as holding in the animal kingdom. While this anthropocentrism can be artfully defended, it ultimately rests upon some reason why human beings are “better” than other animals. But where does this reasoning leave us now that cognitive science indicates each of the modules underlying our intelligence were created to perform certain tasks, can be fooled in specific (if subtle) manners, and are forever unable to provide us with answers to certain questions?
Understanding our place in the world is unlikely to diminish the relative value we as individuals assign to our lives. Pinker explains this point more artfully than I would ever be able to in such a short space, but I will let it suffice to say that scientific understanding need not equal proof of the meaninglessness of life. Pinker asserts that the careful parsing and elucidation of superficial understandings of our brain and our world should not make us fear human nature, but rather “make us appreciate the complexity of the human mind, which we are apt to take for granted precisely because it works so well.” Understanding the human animal and using that information to make our lives better is anything but meaningless.
Joshua is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor.