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On The Human Whole

July 15, 2010 By Thomas A. Shakely Leave a Comment

One of the more frustrating things in the world is the tendency of news media and the scientific community to speak about human beings and of investigations into the brain, cognitive science, etc. in terms of “we did X, man did Y”, as if actions and reactions can tell the story of either Man or Mind — as if they can speak to purpose or meaning, or make judgments on the perennial question of Why?

It’s the tendency to boil down reality to biology, as if, by detailing the processes of chemical and physical reactions in the body, we can infer the reason for that body in the first place, and, more broadly, for the natural world that hosts that body.

John Searle spoke with Reason Magazine in 2000, and in the interview came this gem:

Searle: Behaviorism was the idea that when you do a scientific study of the mind, you don’t actually try to get inside the brain and figure out what’s going on, you just study overt behavior.

Reason: Inputs and outputs?

Searle: Inputs and outputs. And the science of psychology on the behaviorist model was you were going to correlate these stimulus inputs with the behavioral outputs. It’s a ridiculous conception of the mind–the idea is that there’s nothing going on in there, except you have the stimulus input and the behavioral output.

The best comment about behaviorism is the old joke about the two behaviorists after they just had sex. He says to her, “It was great for you, how was it for me?” (Laughter) If behaviorism were right, that ought to make perfectly good sense, because there’s nothing going on in him except his behavior, and she’s in a better position to observe his behavior than he is.

Leon Kass has spoken to the problem of the micro versus macro view of Man:

The science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. Medicine, then and now, has no concept of the human being, of the peculiar and remarkable concretion of psyche and soma that makes us that most strange and wonderful among the creatures. Psychiatry, then and even more now, is so little chagrined by its failure to say what the psyche or soul is that it denies its existence altogether. The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: the word “health” does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent.

We live in an age concerned primarily with dialing down with atomistic focus into the functioning of biological life while typically ignoring the larger question of purpose.

Filed Under: Philosophy

God And Bill Buckley At NPR

July 14, 2010 By Thomas A. Shakely Leave a Comment

William F. Buckley, Jr. penned and read his essay for NPR’s “This I Believe” series in 2005: “How Is It Possible To Believe In A God?”

Buckley’s characteristically erudite and linguistically graceful apologia for belief is important for its articulation of belief as a rational good, as something as motivated by intellectual reason as by religious faith.

I’ve always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, “How is it possible to believe in God?” The imperishable answer was, “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.”

That rhetorical bullet has everything — wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious — indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief — how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration — near infinite — of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature’s molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?

The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable — you see? — by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew’s Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?

This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. …

Since Einstein, scientists have sought a unified field theory, more frequently known as a “theory of everything” that could unite disparate fields of research and reconcile quantum theory with classical physics, in short, explaining all natural phenomena.

What Buckley speaks to in his essay is human faith in a universally intelligent and intelligible reality.

In other words, the believer’s insistence on a universe predicated on order and built by an intelligent Creator would seem a logical conclusion given that the universe is both ordered and intelligible (ie – its parts are discernible and explainable by scientific inquiry).

Another way to put it: a unified field theory for Why Reality Functions may one day be discerned, and a unified field theory for the fundamental question Why Reality Exists To Function is what man has come to call “God”.

Filed Under: Letters & Arts

Journalists And The Objectivity Canard

July 13, 2010 By Thomas A. Shakely Leave a Comment

Walk into almost any news room or journalism class in the country and, if polled, probably a majority will say something about the importance of objectivity in reporting.

It’s not that they think they, as journalists, won’t have biases, but that they believe they will be sufficiently impartial in their reading of events, placement of data, and interviews with sources as to provide an “objective” picture of reality.

But what if the notion of objectivity in journalism were its great weakness?

“Objectivity” presupposes an objective, impartial observer. And a reporter’s mission is to obtain information and synthesize disparate raw materials into a sensible narrative. As a reporter learns more about a subject, cognitive biases will take hold on what information is deemed important or relevant.

Penn State’s Daily Collegian editor, Elizabeth Murphy, wrote on her paper’s recent run-in with the law. In her blog post explaining why she received a court order to remove articles from her paper’s web site, and why they refused to agree, she provided a glimpse into the Objectivity mindset of journalists:

The Daily Collegian will not yield to intimidation.
The Daily Collegian does not answer to the government.
The Daily Collegian reports the truth as it happens, day in and day out.

But what happens when her newspaper reports information that turns out not to be the truth? Or only a partial picture of the truth?

A better standard to adhere to as a journalist would be to acknowledge the mind’s tendency toward bias and proclaim that journalists should be naturally skeptical — rather than claiming the mantle of objectivity and Truth.

Skepticism is a useful tool, for its demand is to question and probe into greater depth in all things. The self-proclaimed objective observer, by comparison, seems more likely to fall prey to blind spots and hubris — the kind that breeds self-congratulatory assertions that one “reports the truth as it happens”.

The idea of objectivity ignores the possibility that central parts of the “truth” were perhaps omitted, maybe due to careless research, lazy interviewing, or simple lack of column inches or word count ceilings.

In doing so, the reporter might be doing greater harm than good, working against the public interest by drumming up trust and faith in a system that isn’t itself objectively Truthful, objectively Right, or even objectivity Relevant.

Jesse Walker at Reason Magazine explained a reason for the myth of objectivity in 2003:

There’s a reason that Fox News, whose very selling point is its reliable slant, would adopt a slogan like “We report, you decide.” And there’s a reason why Ann Coulter and Eric Alterman, scarcely objective writers themselves, would attack the media not merely for being wrong but for being biased. The rhetoric of “objectivity” is far too useful a tool, for denouncing your enemies or for patting yourself on the back, to expect everyone to give it up.

Jack Shafer at Slate took on the notion of the “objective” war correspondent that same year.

Filed Under: Journalism

The End Of Solitude

July 12, 2010 By Thomas A. Shakely Leave a Comment

When Nicholas Carr published his six page cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic earlier this year, he fired the first serious shot in what must become a central discussion of our generation.

Carr’s assertion is anecdotal and introspective. He’s careful to note in his shot-across-the-bow article that we still “await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition”.

His central point is a compelling one: the internet is re-wiring the way we think and relate to facts, friends, and reality. It may even hold the power to change how we perceive human-ness.

William Deresiewicz made a similarly important point in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2009 in The End of Solitude:

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing “in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures,” “bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.” Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

Isolation, intimacy, and proximity remain as important now as in the past, but I wonder how actively thought is given to these things by the youngest generation.

Perhaps Deresiewicz asks it best with his opener: “What does the contemporary self want?”

Pulling from Carr’s Atlantic piece:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

Put another way: are we going to be a people who approach the world with a sort of ruggedness and skepticism informed by an understanding of past and present of a decent depth, or will we be more like sponges, absorbing — but not necessarily processing or placing into a context — minute-to-minute information?

Leon Kass provides greater depth in this respect:

No friend of humanity should trade the accumulated wisdom about human nature and human flourishing for some half-cocked promise to produce a superior human being or human society, never mind a post-human future, before he has taken the trouble to look deeply, with all the help he can get, into the matter of our humanity—what it is, why it matters, and how we can be all that we can be. …

Only a few, a small percentage, of a culture can focus on such questions, on getting into the “matter of our humanity” — an elite, if you will, tasking with the preservation of a culture and its identity.

Solitude, though, is often one of the preconditions for deep thought, and unless we can move beyond a knee-jerk reaction of “change = progress” and a sense of technology as an inherent good, it’s difficult to imagine a return of solitude.

Filed Under: Philosophy