carpe decorum

Cogito Ergo ?

The concept of the human mind studying itself is incredibly intriguing. And in one of my various forays into learning more about neuroscience and brain development, a number of years ago I watched a local PBS forum. One scientist, in response to the nature vs. nuture question, responded that genes and the environment interact from the moment of conception, the two are always entwined. Matt Ridley has provided a fluent expression of how this works, and why knowing more about genes is freeing. Here's an excerpt:

WHEN genes came along, late in the second millennium of the Christian era, they found a place already prepared for them at the table of philosophy. They were the fates of ancient myth, the entrails of oracular prediction. They were destiny and predetermination, the enemies of choice. They were constraints on human freedom. They were the gods. The very phrase "genetic determinism" has come to be synonymous with inevitability.

This is a false picture. Now that we have lifted the lid on the human genome and peered inside at what genes actually do, a more liberating vision is emerging. Human nature is indeed a product of genes in every particular, but so is human nurture, because genes spend just as much of their time responding to our actions as they do causing them. Genes do not constrain human freedom, they enable it.

The New Scientist comments are good conversation bits bridging the gap between how we (non-scientists) generally perceive science and the current state of knowledge and debate among scientists. Arguably, we are not so much dizzied by the rate at which science is uncovering new understandings of the world, as many of us are held up by a lack of context for the work. So, a new discovery sticks out, tripping us up or we take it too seriously without looking more closely on how it fits into what is already known.

One of the pieces argues yes, we have free will, even if all our thoughts are chemical processes derived from genes. In fact that very construct may be essential to free will:

It is the very reliability of deterministic worlds that makes it possible for organisms to extract information from the world so that they can look ahead and avoid disasters that they see coming. In a truly random world everything really would be inevitable. It is just the opposite of what people often think a world of randomness would be a world where everything was inevitable and nothing was evitable.

Still I wish someone had pointed out that the whole is sometimes more than the sum of its parts. Which is why complex systems are so useful and difficult to understand.

Posted at June 17, 2003 06:24 PM