The Real Me and the Real You

My main purpose in my social media is to help you make better sense of the world and your life in it. I do this primarily by sharing my scientific understanding and my personal experiences. My social media (just two blogs, here and here, and video channel) have now had over 900,000 visits. The main traffic is from search engines. This means that most of my readers are not followers but are finding my work because they are searching for insights not about me but about the topics I write about. And that is just the way I like it.

Perhaps the most fundamental question we have about ourselves and the world is, who am I? This question is of interest not just to me, but to whoever might read this essay.

What, exactly, is the real me? There is no easy answer to this question. Each of us consists of at least two general things: the self that we want to be, and the self that we are subconsciously.

Over the first of these we have a measure of control. We can control what we think, the decisions we make, the kinds of interactions we have with people, the things we say. This is generally the self that we present to the world. Some people think this is a false face, merely an image of what we want people to think about us. But we all know it is much more than this. It is the self that we want to be, not just how we want to appear.

Over the second of these we have less control. We can generally control what we say, but sometimes we blurt things out before we have a chance to think about them. Curses, for example, come from a different part of the brain than regular speech. Most of us cannot control our dreams, either. When we experience things that make us angry or lusty, our heartbeats and breathing become more rapid, and there are other physiological responses that I do not need to tell you about, even if we try to calm ourselves down. These things make up the self that we do not want to be, not merely the things we wish to keep hidden.

Over some things, we have an intermediate level of control. For example, my blood sugar is high, enough for me to require medication but not drastic intervention. I cannot completely control it. It is my cell membranes that do not absorb enough of it from my blood. The main thing I can do is to eat less sugar. Medication and eating less sugar has reduced my blood sugar down from the crisis level it used to be. Blood sugar level is the result both of things I can control and things I cannot.

I suggest that the real me, and the real you, are the first of the two. They are the most highly developed systems in our evolutionary history. The second “self” has an ancient origin that goes back at least to the origin of the vertebrates. At least, I think so. Do fishes get angry?

Another way of dividing ourselves up into the selves we want and the selves we hide is to consider the things over which our DNA has direct control. Our DNA does not control everything about our bodies. It controls the structure of our brains, nerves, muscles, bones, and systems such as the digestive system. It controls, basically, everything that is within our epidermis and mucous membranes. But it does not control what is outside of our bodies, which includes the things that are in our digestive system.

The contents of our intestines includes not just the partially-digested things that we have decided to eat (which is under our conscious control) but also trillions of bacteria and other microbes. We cannot control what those microbes do. They metabolize, to get energy and nutrients for themselves, and eject their wastes into our intestines. These wastes include carbon dioxide (odorless), methane (odorless), and hydrogen sulfide (the smell of farts). Though we can to a certain extent influence their timing, neither we nor our DNA can control our farts. The cosmos inside our intestines is a wild world over which we have no control other than diet (yogurt helps) and medicine.

And our digestive system responds not so much to us—our nervous system, or even our DNA—as to the wild world in our intestines. When the bacteria in the food produce a lot of gas, they expand the intestine. Local nerve networks take care of what happens next. Intestinal nerves detect the expansion, then cause the smooth muscles around the intestine to start contracting, which will push the food and the farts along further down the line. One result is that when a fart is on the way, you can’t stop it. Another result is that when you gotta go, you gotta go. Your brain can control the muscles at the end of the line, the sphincter muscles, to try to hold it in, but success is not guaranteed.

So another view of yourself is that the real you is what the DNA controls, and the secret you is what your bacteria do.

So when an honest biographer says, regarding the subject, which might be you or me, “he or she tells the true story, warts and all” (maybe farts and all), this is not really being honest. Warts are caused by viruses, and farts by bacteria. Your honest biography would be what your DNA does, and what you decide to do, rather than by the random, uncontrollable activities of your bacteria or your subconscious mind.

The bacteria and subconscious mind are not always bad. Having written what I just wrote, and living a more relaxed life, both the products of the real me, have an effect on what my subconscious mind and even my bacteria do.

I hope this helps. And tell your bacteria that I said hi.

 

The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski

I just finished reading a pre-publication copy of Timothy Sandefur’s upcoming The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. If even I, a reader of many popular science books, have barely heard of Jacob Bronowski, you can bet that most people have forgotten him. But before there was Neil DeGrasse Tyson, before Stephen Jay Gould, before Carl Sagan, there was Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) whose passion was to open up the minds of non-scientists to the power and beauty of science.

Bronowski’s work was based on a fundamental assertion of faith that I share, but which I sometimes question. It is that most people are smart enough to understand science, at least in its basic outlines, and smart enough to use the scientific mode of thought. This is the basis of my book, to be released in December, ScientificallyThinking. Bronowski’s gospel was to get scientists to speak clearly and simply to non-scientists and open their eyes to science. I believe that most people are smart enough to do this, but relatively few people really want to. Most people would rather sit in their backwater of ignorance and listen only to things that reinforce their lazy prejudices.

Bronowski (known to his friends as Bruno) was the perfect example of a Renaissance Man, that is, someone who is interested in everything. I first learned this term back about 1977 when a friend called me a Renaissance Man. I was a biology major who wrote novels, wrote orchestra music, and studied history and languages. Perhaps only a Renaissance Man (or woman) can make the connections necessary to bring people from all different modes of thought together. This was certainly Bronowski. An English child of eastern European immigrants, he started off as a poet. But he was also interested in mathematics, which led to statistics. (Statistics differs from pure mathematics because pure math deals with the certainties of deduction, while statistics tries to understand the messy reality of the world through induction. At least, that’s my summary of it.) His mathematical expertise got him involved in the effort for the Allies to win World War II, and later to make industrial production more efficient.

This mathematical work did not always lead Bronowski where he might have expected. Yes, he helped the Allies win World War II, but like many other scientists he was deeply disturbed by the effects of atomic bombs. He traveled in Japan after the bombs, and knew that the new power we had unleashed from the atom was completely disproportionate to any legitimate military goals even the best of countries might have. Also, his dedication to industrial efficiency led him on the ultimately quixotic quest to produce Bronowski Bricks from coal dust, sort of a fossil fuel version of charcoal briquets. The briquets reduced coal waste, to be sure, but they were very expensive to produce, and, according to Prince Philip, they looked like turds.

But Bruno’s wide knowledge, and being at the right place at the right time, threw him into the public spotlight in radio and television broadcasting. He produced, one after another, important science documentaries, culminating in his still-famous The Ascent of Man. He dabbled in lots of things at which he was not really skilled, such as writing a light opera libretto that was not very good (the music was by Peter Racine Fricker, who was on the music faculty when I entered the University of California at Santa Barbara). But he tried!

Science and art, said Bronowski, were both creative. Take, for example, Copernicus, who did some of the earliest work that proved the sun to be the center of the solar system, rather than Earth being the center of the universe. Copernicus had to imagine what the planets would do if he were at a central solar vantage point, but as an artist has to imagine what the final work would look like. Both scientists and artists test concepts: scientists, how well the concept explains the natural world, and poets, how well the poem expands our experience.

Another idea he had was that animals need intelligence in order to have free will. You have to be able to visualize possible futures before you can choose among them. Only humans can do this. I do not know if Bronowski actually solved the problem of free will, but he clarified it, at least for non-philosophers like me. He helped lay the foundation for the study of language acquisition. He said that only humans can make a sentence out of separate words, and then isolate one word and generalize about that one concept.

When he helped to start the Salk Institute, Bronowski moved to La Jolla, California. He would host scholars for discussions in his living room (where he also filed the final episode of Ascent). He was an inspiring partner for dialogue. While he knew everything about everything, he could make you feel brilliant even when he was saying you were wrong, according to more than one of his acquaintances.

Jacob Bronowski inspired us to think big, to see all human thought as a single fabric rather than as a collage of specialties. And he was an early inspiration for what we now call citizen science. They didn’t have the internet back then, but on his televised shows he encouraged viewers to send in postcards with their own scientific thoughts on them.

You can get a taste for the kind of spellbinding quality Bruno had by seeing this short YouTube clip from one of the Ascent episodes. Apparently when the BBC was filming this segment, they did not expect Bruno to walk out into the pond; this was extemporized.

I have a lot of different kinds of creative and intellectual output. I am not equally good at all of them, and am not world-class at any of them, as far as I can tell. But I can still do a lot of good with them. Bruno is my guiding light in this respect.

Are We All Deluded?

Sam Kean’s new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain As Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery, is a gold mine of stories about the weird things that our brains can make us do, everything from cortical blindness to alien hand and walking dead syndromes. In people with cortical blindness, the eyes and optic nerves work fine, but the portion of the brain that consciously interprets vision is impaired. The brain has a whole separate set of nerves that process the emotional response to vision, however; people with cortical blindness can therefore smile in response to another person’s smile even though they cannot consciously see it. In alien hand syndrome, a person cannot recognize their own hand—usually the left one—as being part of his or her own body; and in walking dead syndrome, the person cannot recognize the body itself as his or her own.

Perhaps most important, although not the most interesting story in the book, was the experiment that demonstrated that our brain’s conscious decision to do something occurred after the subjects had begun to do the action. That is, the brain’s decision was actually a post-hoc rationalization. This calls into question the entire concept of free will. It appears that we choose to do something only after our subconscious minds have decided to do that thing. Of course, this does not mean we have no conscious control over ourselves. Our conscious minds can prevent us from doing the things we have started to do; that is, however much free will is called into question, self-control is certainly real. As the author says, we may not have free will, but we have free won’t. Also, our conscious minds can create a general pattern of thought that, while it may not control every individual action, certainly influences our general behavior.

The main point of all these fascinating stories is, in the author’s own words: “But if the history of neuroscience proves anything, it’s that any circuit for any mental attribute—up to and including our sense of being alive—can fail, if just the right spots [of the brain] suffer damage…your actions, your desires to act, and your conviction of having acted can all be decoupled and manipulated.”

I have, through reading this book, come to understand myself better. Temporal lobe epilepsy includes the experience of auras that are religious in their effects and intensity—religious delusions. While religion does not consist only of delusion, it has been stimulated by delusion. Famous religious figures, such as the Apostle Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc, and writers such as Dostoevsky to whom religion was of overwhelming importance, showed symptoms of epilepsy. Though I do not have epilepsy, I have some symptoms that suggest my right temporal lobe might be hyperactive in something of the same way as certain epileptics. For example, throughout my life I have had experiences of religious ecstasy. I also have to take an anticonvulsant medication that is prescribed, in higher dosage, to epileptics. And I have a mild case of polygraphia—the compulsion to write everything down, all day every day—that some epileptics also have. Finally, there might be a genetic basis for this; my paternal grandfather was religiously crazy. Somehow just knowing this makes me feel more comfortable inside my skin.

Kean’s book, like the books of Mary Roach, show that the best modern science writing is based on stories and are written to be fun. Filled with fragments and imprecise language, this book would make some science editors howl, but is exactly the kind of book that would make anyone want to learn more about science. This is the kind of science book that I have not yet written myself.

The feeling I bring away from Kean’s book is liberation. I feel no need to blame myself for feeling or believing things that may be outrageous, nor do I have to blame others for theirs. What we need to do is to override anything outrageous that our minds manufacture. The idea that we choose our beliefs rationally seems to be entirely wrong, even though reasoning is a contributing factor. As a scientist and educator, I feel liberation, because I do not need to actually convince or convert anyone to my way of thinking. What I need to continue doing is to provide information and opportunity that will allow my students and my readers to convert their thinking, should that prove possible. If I continue to provide information about the world and its history, humans and their history, and continue provoking new thoughts, I have done my entire job.

Science and Philosophy

(My struggle with computer and biological viruses continues, hence the delay.)

In an earlier entry, I wrote about why I do not read philosophy books. The main reason was that philosophers tend to think they can answer every question by just thinking about it hard enough with our modified ape-brains, a concept I found unacceptable.

But apparently there was a group of philosophers that I did not know about. It was with some excitement that I discovered, while reading a recent issue of Science, the existence of the field known as experimental philosophy. No, not the philosophy of doing experiments, a la Karl Popper; but using experiments to study philosophy. The author, Shaun Nichols, had my attention.

Nichols addressed one of the most difficult philosophical topics, the question of free will. If there is such a thing as free will, then humans have a soul, or at least a self, that can make decisions independently of the chemical reactions that occur inside the brain. If there is no free will (if determinism is correct), then everything we do can be traced by a network of cause and effect to our genes and our environments (prenatal, developmental, recent, and immediate). Now, in actual practice, it may be impossible to disentangle the causation; and so, just for the efficient operation of society, we have to assume free well (we cannot let murderers roam free just because they have a mutant version of a brain protein). But this does not answer the philosophical question.

Nichols admitted that the problem of free will was, from the viewpoint of philosophy, intractable. But he addressed the question of why people believe in free will vs. determinism. And this question can be addressed using psychological data. He pointed out that most people actually believe both viewpoints. When they are calm and discussing general principles, many people accept determinism; but when they are confronted with details of, for example, a gruesome crime, these same people will claim the perpetrator had free will and deserves punishment.

This is where the experiment comes in. The researchers studied the responses of experimental subjects (as usual, university undergraduates, the most thoroughly studied group of people in the world) to stories about realistic events: did the subjects blame the perpetrators of bad deeds (thus displaying a belief in free will), or did they not (determinism)? In one experiment, the students tended to blame the perpetrators for emotionally appalling deeds, but not for minor infractions. This demonstrated that their belief in free will was determined by the emotional impact of the deed. But prior to administering the questions, the researchers had presented them with one of two introductions. One introduction suggested that the universe is indeterminist (that people have free will); the other suggested a determinist universe. Students who had been experimentally preconditioned by the indeterminist introduction attributed moral responsibility to all of the infractions, whether minor or appalling. Students who had been experimentally preconditioned by the determinist introduction were less likely to lay blame for minor infractions—but they usually blamed the perpetrators of appalling deeds for what they did. This is an experimental affirmation of the hypothesis that people are more likely to believe in free will in circumstances in which an emotionally significant deed has been done.

If, in fact, our brains cannot know the truth, then philosophers seem destined to frustration—unless they take a new approach, such as experimental philosophy, which brings psychology, and thus science, into the realm of philosophical inquiry.

Reference: Nichols, Shaun. “Experimental philosophy and the problem of free will.” Science 331 (2011) (March 18): 1401-1403.

The Evolved Capacity for Evil, Part Four

In previous entries, I have explored the idea that good and evil are both part of the human brain; in particular, there is genetic variability for the impulses that underlie goodness (e.g., altruism) and evil (e.g., psychopathic violence) in human populations. Natural selection may favor altruism in some demes, and violence in other demes, of the same population at the same time.

I have one further speculation to make. Ever since scientists began to discover that the things that people think, feel, and do are determined in large measure by brain chemistry and structure, and the genes that underlie them, the idea of free will has come under attack. How can the people we call evil be held accountable for their actions, if their actions result inevitably from the interaction of their genes and their environments? This may not be an important question, since humans help to create their own environments, and since we have to control evil people even if they are not spiritually culpable. But modern brain science discoveries do raise an important question: what about free will?

Every human behavior is an interaction of genes and environment. It is always both. In some people, genetic abnormalities are so severe that their behavior is almost a stereotypical script; for them, genes are more important than environment. For most people, genes influence feelings and attitudes, while environment (including their current capacity to make decisions) is much more important. It is a sliding scale from the overwhelming importance of genes to the overwhelming importance of environment.

Perhaps the same thing is true of free will. It is perhaps nonsensical to ask whether humans have free will or not. All humans have free will, but some humans have very little of it, while most of us have a great deal of it. It, too, may be a sliding scale.

I propose this possibility for your consideration. Please comment on it if you like.