Chapter 5.                         (conclusion) 

My last few paragraphs describe only the dead ends that have been hit in AI. Other sciences searching for this same holy grail – a clear, evidence-backed model of human thinking – haven’t fared any better. Neurophysiology and Behavioural Psychology also keep striking out.

 

If a neurophysiologist could set up an MRI or similar imaging device and use his model of thinking to predict which networks of neurons in his brain would be active when he turned the device on and studied pictures of his own current brain activities, then he could say he had set down a reliable working model of what consciousness is. ("Those are my thoughts: those neuron firings right there.") But neuroscience is not even close to being that complete.

 

Patterns of neuron firings mapped on one occasion when a subject performs even a simple task can’t be counted on. We find different patterns every time we look. A human brain contains a hundred billion neurons, each one capable of connecting to as many as ten thousand others. Infinite possibilities. And the patterns of firings in that brain are changing all the time. Philosophers who seek a base for Empiricism strike out if they look for it in Neurophysiology.⁸

 

                                 

 

                      Diagram of a Skinner Box (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Problems similar to those in AI and Neurophysiology also beset Behavioral Psychology. Researchers can train rats, pigeons, or other animals and predict what they will do in controlled experiments, but when a behaviorist tries to give behaviorist explanations for what humans do, many exceptions have to be made. A claim like: "There's the mind: a set of behaviors we can replicate at any time." isn't even close for Behavioral Psychology yet. 

 

In a simple example, alcoholics who say they truly want to get sober for good can be given a drug that makes them violently ill if they imbibe even small amounts of alcohol, but that does not affect them as long as they do not drink alcohol. This would seem to be a behaviorist’s solution to alcoholism, one of society’s most painful problems. But it doesn’t work. Thousands of alcoholics in early studies kept their self-destructive ways while on disulfiram.⁹ What is going on in these cases is obviously much more complex than Behaviorism can account for. And this is but one commonplace example.

 

At present, it appears that Science can’t provide a rationale for itself in theory and can’t demonstrate the reliability of its methods in practice. Could it be another set of temporarily effective illusions, like Medieval Christianity, Communism, or Nazism once were? Personally, I don’t think so. The number of Science’s achievements and their profound effects on our society argue powerfully that Science works in some fundamental way, even though it can’t explain itself.

 

Do Science’s laws sometimes fail glaringly in the real world? Yes. Absolutely. Newton’s Laws of Motion turned out to be inadequate for explaining data drawn from more advanced observations of reality. The mid-1800s brought better views of the universe provided by better telescopes. These led Physics past Newton’s laws, and on to the Theory of Relativity. Newton’s picture turned out to be too simple, though it was useful on the everyday scale.

 

Thus, considering how revered Newton’s model of the cosmos once was and knowing that it gives only a partial, inadequate picture of the universe can cause philosophers – and ordinary folk – to doubt Science. We then question whether Empiricism can be trusted as a base to help us design a new moral code.  Our survival is at stake. Science can’t even explain its own thinking.

 

As we seek to build a moral system we can all live by, we must look for a way of thinking about thinking based on stronger logic, a way of thinking about thinking that we can believe in. We need a new model, built around a core philosophy that is different from Empiricism, not just in degree but in kind.

 

Empiricism’s disciples have achieved some impressive results in the practical sphere, but then again, for a while in their heydays, so did Christianity, Communism, and Nazism. They even had their own “sciences,” dictating in detail what their scientists should study and what they should conclude.

 

Perhaps the most disturbing example of a worldview that seemed to work very well for a while is Nazism. The Nazis claimed to base their ideology on Empiricism and Science. In their propaganda films and in all academic and public discourse, they preached a warped form of Darwinian evolution that enjoined and exhorted all nations, German or non-German, to go to war, seize territory, and exterminate or enslave all competitors – if they could. The Nazis claimed this was the way of the real world. Hitler and his cronies were gambling confidently that in this struggle, those that they called the “Aryans” – with the Germans in the front ranks – would win.  

 

                        

                                                   Nazi leader Adolf Hitler 

                                  (credit: Bundesarchiv, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

“In eternal warfare, mankind has become great; in eternal peace, mankind would be ruined.”                    (Mein Kampf)

 

 

Such a view of human existence, they claimed, was not cruel or cynical. It was a mature, realistic acceptance of the truth. If people calmly and clearly look at the evidence of History, they can see that war always comes. Mature, realistic adults, the Nazis claimed, learn and practice the arts of war, assiduously in times of peace and ruthlessly in times of war. According to the Nazis, this was merely a logical consequence of accepting that the survival-of-the-fittest rule governs all life, including human life.

 

Hitler’s ideas about race and about how Darwinian evolution could be applied to humans, were, in the real science of Genetics, unsupported. Hitler’s views of “race” were silly. But in the Third Reich, this was never acknowledged.

 

 

                                        

                                       

                                 Werner Heisenberg (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

And for a while, Nazism worked. The Nazi regime rebuilt what had been a shattered Germany. The sad thing about smart men like physicist Werner Heisenberg, biologist Ernst Lehmann, and chemist Otto Hahn is not that they became the tools of Nazism, but that their worldviews as scientists did not equip them to break free of the Nazis’ distorted version of Science. As I pointed out earlier, their religion failed them. But Science failed them too.

 

 

                                         

                                    

                                 Otto Hahn (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

There is certainly evidence in human history that the consequences of Science being misused can be horrible. Nazism became humanity’s nightmare. Some of its worst atrocities were committed in the name of Science.¹⁰ Under Nazism, medical experiments surpassed all nightmares.

 

For practical, evidence-based reasons, then, as well as for theoretical ones, millions of people around the world today have become deeply skeptical about all systems of thought and, in moral matters, about the moral usefulness of Science in particular. At deep levels, we are driven to wonder: Should we trust something as critical as the survival of our culture and our grandchildren, even our Science itself, to a way of thinking that, first, can’t explain itself, and second, has had horrible, practical failures in the past? Science can put men on the moon, grow bigger crops, and cure diseases. But as a moral guide, even for its own activities, so far it looks very unreliable.  

 

As a base for a comprehensive moral guide, Empiricism looks doubtful. Is there something else to which we might turn?

 

Notes

 

 

1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Glasgow: William Collins, Sons and Co., 1964), p. 90.

 

2. Donelson E. Delany, “What Should Be the Roles of Conscious States and Brain States in Theories of Mental Activity?” PMC Mens Sana Monographs 9, No. 1 (2011): 93–112.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115306/.

 

3. Antti Revonsuo, “Prospects for a Scientific Research Program on Consciousness,” in Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, ed. Thomas Metzinger (Cambridge, MA, & London, UK: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 57–76.

 

4. William Baum, Understanding Behaviorism: Behavior, Culture, and Evolution (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

 

5. Tom Meltzer, “Alan Turing’s Legacy: How Close Are We to ‘Thinking’ Machines?” The Guardian, June 17, 2012.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/17/alan-turings-legacy-thinking-machines.

 

6. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999).

 

7. “Halting Problem,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 1, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem.

 

8. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson, “Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, No. 1 (2004), pp. 3–28.

http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ccs/NoeThompson2004AreThereNccs.pdf.

 

9. Richard K. Fuller and Enoch Gordis, “Does Disulfiram Have a Role in Alcoholism Treatment Today?”Addiction 99, No. 1 (Jan. 2004), pp. 21–24. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2004.00597.x/full.

 

10. “Nazi Human Experimentation,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.

Accessed April 1, 2015.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation.