Prof. Eva Jablonka, a philosopher of science at Tel Aviv University, discusses her forthcoming book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul. Can we establish the development of conscience within the evolution process? And if so, how?
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Professor Jablonka, is talking in terms of the very heart of the Information Paradox.
The locus of consciousness.
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1. Self awareness as pause.
Shortly after the 2016 election an exhausted Mark Sheilds, as commentator on PBS Newshour, began to answer a question on his regular Friday political commentary slot. He spoke nonsense; you could see in his eyes he knew he was. Judy, the anchor, went to David Brooks, the other regular who, with an evident worried look in his eyes, took the stage. Shields’ mic was not off; you could hear him say “it won’t happen again.” But it did. When asked another question, nonsense returned, he faltered, stopped. Judy took over, asking detailed questions requiring brief replies; he got through the segment. He returned next week, that and since his old self, although only very occasionally I see a slight confusion or redundancy in his speech.
He knew what was happening, could stop, but not correct. Where was Shields? In the nonsense spoken, or in the worried, confused eyes over those lips, that stopped them, promised recalibration, startled when second try failed? We differentiate Shields here: his nonsense talk was medical, a small pathology, his overseeing eyes, his pause, his second order talk of his own talk, “it won’t happen again”–that is Shields.
I was in the kitchen with a 90 year old woman who began to call the stove a “rock.” “What?” “A rock,” she repeated, pointing, with a few short nonsensical sentences. “You’re not making any sense.” Bighting her lip, “I know.” I got her to sit down and eat something; she was fine thereafter. (This was likely a temporary ischemic attack restricting blood flow in the brain but quickly dissolving.) Until two or so years later. Again in the kitchen, she began speaking in what I have to call a dense, uninterpretable American Southern dialect I might have heard only once before. After my shock, I realized that although she never spoke so, she must, as young girl, been regularly exposed to it; I realized the distance age has. I again told her she wasn’t making sense, as before. This time she refused the statement and continued so talking. Upon my insistence, she became confused and allowed me to take her to sit down. Just an hour later she smiled and said “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” While this event was probably an indication of stage four (unknown) cancer migration, no such event recurred.
In the rock episode she was fully self aware; she could pause and ask what was happening and allow a very mild intervention in acknowledgement of what she saw. In the dialect episode, not, and I feared briefly she would resist, but with the dialect came confusion. The ability to pause returned soon: “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” As with Shields, she was not her verbal behavior but the pause in that behavior.
I find that when I speak I am not really that speech. Yes, when the mouth opens there is some sort of paragraph or topic feeling of what will come out, but when the mouth closes I cannot say I knew before hand what would be said. Same in writing, as here. Indeed, I now realize that writing is a partial abandoning of control, of oversight, just enough to not shackle verbal behavior to an indefinite self referential loop of examination. I do not write; something writes through me, I the locus of reflection during and after it is done. When we defend our writing, we are in some part defending a construct of an “I” so writing; social response defines the writing as agent by forcing self reflection or pause. If that pause is examined in introspection, it is either silent, an expectation; or it is another flow of words never heard by others. Human consciousness is trapped, or as well made, by words. These words, I think, can be our own or others’. Consider Shields: he recognized something wrong but verified it through the anchor Judy when he said “it won’t happen again.” Are we, then, independent, a soul unto each self? No–I think that the Cartesian error, “I think therefore I am,” absent all else.
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2. Dominance, coordination, and self act.
In game theory there is always a first move. Being first, it must, one presumes, be made independent of all else. Once a first move is made, as with one’s game opponent or, to be nice, partner, one can respond to its first move, developing a contingent sequence. But the first move need not be independent of the partner. An external event can signal to each that they play a specific move in such a way that each thereby also knows what the partner will do. (The idea, called a “correlated strategy,” was developed independently at the same publication date by two economist, both Jewish, one Israeli, this latter with a Nobel Prize, Robert Aumann). Both individuals play the same strategy but diverge because of this externally defined first move; in result, the strategy’s value crosses the skin boundary: its value is calculated by simultaneous play in both parties (or more). The strategy is not an individual strategy as such. One can show this crossing skin shifts the competitive logic of the strategy to the group, combined partners, playing it; the group employs people, differentiates them, for the strategy’s sake.
This view can completely recolor dominance. Dominance is generally seen as a measure of competitive prowess–I dominate because I can beat you, you submitted for fear of further consequence. This can readily generalize to institutions–so the police, a police, dominates a suspect or perpetrator not just through herself but through those she can call in, or will come later without her direct call. Dominance seems tidy, red in tooth and claw, restrained either through law or calculus that further resistance would devastate. But correlated strategies offer a different possibility. Bear with an example from social insects.
The social wasp Mischocyttarus drewseni has one queen per nest. As females eclose–break out of their pupae or cell–they are ritually dominated by this queen, say pressed down, head bopped about by the queen’s front legs (that’s kind of a guess from memory). Then the newly emerged female becomes a worker; she forages, does not mate, nor lay eggs. What if the queen is removed, which must sometimes happen in nature by death or predation? The adults on the nest do not fight to replace her; they remain workers, even though they could go mate and contest for the position. Instead, the first two or three females that next eclose, come out of the birth cell, fight among one another until one becomes queen, the others workers; thereafter this new queen ritually dominates newly emerging females, the society again stable. It is not personal prowess which determines the new queen, for adult, already present workers could ritually dominate those just emerging, just like the original queen did, having the essential advantage of prior presence. They do not; they do not leave their assigned role, a role derived from their own ritual domination although that dominant is now gone. “Competitive ability” does not in itself drive the system. Rather, behavior coordinated across individuals determines permanent position. Such coordination stabilizes the colony, enhancing efficiency. Since subordinate workers are related to the queen either as daughter or niece (all wasp workers are female) or more such distant, there is a role for genetic relatedness. But absolute, isolate competitive value is absent. Ritualized dominance coordinates behavior across individuals for colony efficiency. Self act is indeterminate without such ritual. When this works, when it survives cheaters or refusers on dominance, is the subject of evolutionary game models. An isolate individual may emerge; it is the business of the model to show how it can succeed and destroy the social structure which is to say as well when it fails. Such failure is the basis of evolutionary stability in Mischocyttarus drewseni.
The example is provided to show that self may have no clear definition without the social structure of others. We see an aggressive act, a domination, and think it imposed by the superior against the inferior, but there need be no such evaluation at all. There probably is when those never dominated emerging females fight to become queen, but the act of aggression as such need not necessarily map directly onto self value; rather, there may be no such value without social structure.
I see language use, and self definition, in this way as well.
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3. Where do we get our pause?
Return to the examples of section 1. In the Shields case there is an internal, introspective pause confirmed by the anchor Judy. In the old woman case the pause is induced by her social structure–me. In this latter case there is no evidence that her consciousness is revealed solely through her (by the way, there was little evidence for dementia as such). She recognized the misuse of “rock” through me. I was her pause. She was undergoing coordination from without, through me. Shields recognized on his own, but embedded in a social setting, a ritual of televised commentary. Was his, unlike the latter, truly singleton? Or rather did he employ a lifetime of response to words spoken, written, read to induce the same response I provided? Was his consciousness or awareness of himself before all else or imported into him through text written and oral?
I recall, only through movie memory, a (true) case of a woman whose guardian died while she still a young girl; they isolate, the girl matured on her own. When discovered, with some vocabulary but many noises which had meaning for her alone, she eventually got across that she conversed with the wind, with the trees moving in breeze, with the animals about her, with the rain. She had no choice. The coordination mechanism of language had to play out; become isolate, she took regular yet changing events as the external signals for further language creation. Moving with the wind was speaking to the wind, listening, answering. Poets do this; painters; musicians. We feel this as liberating because it is partially outside of our instilled and developed coordination mechanisms which require much dominance and routinization. But they are not fully outside these mechanisms, for, if so, we could neither speak through them or about them. Art mimics language coordination. I think this why twelve tone and atonal music never found much of an audience.
Consciousness then is neither inside nor outside us; it is the pause induced in us, usually by pausing in language transmission. We are not our verbiage but the pauses in that verbiage, pauses which can be induced unto us or self generated. The latter give us the feeling of autonomy, but that is illusory in so far as language, text, or now movie, vid, is employed to induce pause. Nor does this pause necessarily imply freedom to act. Pain is a pause, a blockage: we are denied movement with a broken bone, self suddenly the impossibility of what used to flow without consideration. So all bodily pain. We are most singleton when least free; that is the lesson of pain. Empathy of pain is, then, a coordination mechanism, let me speak, move, for you, one which become pathological when, say we watch someone slowly die in coma. The point of empathy is to speak the pain. When speaking becomes impossible or irrelevant, the coordination across individuals becomes a trap, perhaps for both, pained and not.
Text frees us from or social surround, releasing us from the words we encounter in other mouths. But this is purchased via language in the text which can only be communicated, well, via entry into other communities. Freedom is not so much isolate in the individual as that phase of escape then entry into somewhere else. And, mostly, we do not want escape overlong; it is very taxing, and humans are not designed to live isolate in a world of electronics. Even monks tend to congregate in their solitude. But in a world of texts one can repeat escape/entry to give the illusion of absolute freedom. But freedom is the crossing of boundaries, and we must all lay down for the night somewhere. What humans have done is create multiple, overlapping to near isolate competitive worlds all around them at such present density that the world momentarily walked becomes unfocused background to the woman walking these many lands. But the more restricted one’s life, the less escape from a lived competitive world. This, I think, is one of the great contentions between globalism (which not just one thing in this competitive sense) and local populist rebellion. Most people cannot break their worlds, nor wish to. The freedom they want is freedom away from those who do.
The interviewed in this piece speaks of “back engineering” consciousness to find its evolutionary trajectory nearing ourselves. I think this right as strategy. If consciousness is pause, to get to us we need pause to be corrective. That I think is possible through dominance, absolute or ritual, and language, which I consider in the child joyful acceptance of subordination. The locus of pause will be both inside and outside the individual, and with text we as species create alternative worlds into which escape can sometimes come. But only as a species. Most of us are the fixed positions of competitive worlds others can leap into, out, and over.
I am a materialist. Pause lets us say something else, to diverge from what we were doing, to go set down after babble, say. But the pause perforce remains silent. After the I of pause comes the flow of words and actions, and we as I are gone yet again. Because the I is pause we can, I think, surmount the mind/body problem, for in this pause, this silence, there is no mental I to be found. We say others have minds because their behavior is as ours when it comes to pauses. When this similarities is absent, we become uneasy, say in the unending talk of the manic or schizophrenic or the potential implicit in the three cases with which I began. When pause fails we say we are losing them, which is to say the self we know is gone. Panpsychism, that the mental or consciousness is everywhere, is an attempt to make the silence of pause into sounding thing. But a pause is only meaningful when relieved by flow, so the mind becomes nothing but talk to avoid the pause which is its core. Materialism, however, can accept a stop in flow with no dilemma. So our deaths, our final pause, are indeed a black hole for meaning. We are nothing there, yet an essential nothing there, as pause, so material creation via evolution can expand.
This is my final position. I now pause.