The human piece of the puzzle

Why is it so hard for other people to be reasonable?  Perhaps you’re confident that you yourself are an eminently reasonable person and that it is other people who consistently and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what is plainly and obviously true.  In that case, it might be useful to discover what it is in their nature that explains this persistently unreasonable behavior.  Why, for example, do others seem to believe that they are among the select reasonable few, when they clearly are not?  Why do they keep choosing such terrible political candidates.  (And why are they all convinced that they are better-than-average drivers?)  Perhaps we will find that others just can’t help being so damned unreasonable.  And maybe we will decide to be a little more forgiving.  We may even find that we too share a few of their all-too-human quirks.

If you are willing to concede that the citizens of our Big Society are all members of the same human species, and that they are likely to bring their inherited nature into their social and political interactions, then you may agree it is worth asking what it means in practice to possess a human nature.  Suppose for a moment that you were an extraterrestrial observer, an intelligent being with no biological affinity to our species but possessed of an extraordinary scientific curiosity.  How would you describe the behavior of these curious beings called homo sapiens?  What explanations would you offer for why they behave so predictably as they do?

An alien species with a profoundly different biology to our own (perhaps crystalline in nature), encountering our species for the first time, might start with the observation that human beings are mobile electrochemical baggies.  Indeed, human bodies are made mostly of water, assembled by procedures encoded in complex carbon-based molecules and maintained by various electrochemical processes.  Most of the human genetic structure (as with other terrestrial species) consists of instructions for turning organic molecules into proteins, manufacturing chemicals, generating biopower, and endlessly cloning cells.  Human beings are fundamentally self-replicating biological machines, semi-liquid problem-solving computers.  And not just below the neck but in the more sophisticated parts of their nervous systems—their brains.  And if their brains are electrochemical devices, then their thoughts and minds, their drives and ambitions, even their reasoning faculties and intellectual capacities, are to some degree products of whatever these chemicals happen to be doing in any particular moment.  These brains are likewise mostly water, neither hardware nor software but astonishing pieces of wetware.

We all understand at least some of this, whatever our metaphysical commitments.  We feel a headache coming on.  What do we do?  Take a pill, of course.  Why do we think that such a little pill will banish this distracting pain from our head?  Probably magic!  But we also suspect that the tiny capsule contains some very specific molecules that interact with other molecules already in our nervous system, mitigating the sensation of pain.  We know it has something to do with our body chemistry.  If we continue to feel unwell, we see our doctor.  She orders a blood test because her experience of human biology makes her suspect that our ill-feeling is a consequence of some electrochemical imbalance or anomaly in our routine bodily processes.  Upon seeing the results of these tests, she nods her head and hums, then prescribes a more expensive course of drugs to counteract the suspected imbalance.  These drugs are also molecules that interact with our native body chemistry.  Modern medical science is largely founded on the study of these electrochemical systems and interactions.  We even understand that by taking drugs (prescription or otherwise) we can alter our thoughts, moods and behaviors—because these too have electrochemical foundations.  The pleasures and pitfalls of alcohol are derived from interactions with our nervous system.  Those who suffer depression, manic mood swings and schizophrenia are treated, sometimes quite successfully, with complex molecules embedded in drugs.  Even the infamous shock-therapies of the 1950s (still widely used, though with less advertising, to treat persistent depression) suggest that thought patterns can be redirected or disrupted by powerful electrical currents.  Even the talk in talk-therapy is designed to refashion and provoke the formation of new pathways in our neural wetware.  Talk is a consequence of brain processes but also influences the underlying chemistry.  Aging subtly alters bodies and minds.  Menopausal women suffer abrupt declines in levels of estrogen and other hormones that lead to sleeplessness, mood swings, anxiety and various cognitive alterations.  Hormone therapy can produce measurable relief, and in surprisingly short order.  Patients who suffer Alzheimer’s can be shown (usually post-mortem) to have experienced quantitative deterioration—a literal hollowing out—of their physical brains.  Others who have survived traumatic brain injuries (such as the famous nineteenth-century American Phineas Gage) have been observed to exhibit bizarrely different behaviors and personalities.  It is as if their familiar identities had never really strayed much beyond the physical structures of their brains.  What we call our thoughts are likewise tied to specific electro-chemical events.  But are they more than such events?  We can’t really be sure.  We can clearly demonstrate that mental activities—thoughts—correspond quite reliably to specific physical events in the brain, but we cannot (by definition) observe if there are also corresponding non-physical events.  The mind evidently has a close relationship with the specific activities of the brain.  Whether or not the mind is more than such electro-chemical activities is largely speculation and fancy.  We have no evidence beyond our own perceptions and behaviors, which are the very things under scrutiny.

Unsurprisingly, our brain-baggies are liable to damage.  It happens more often than we realize.  Brain damage is frequently discovered in children from abusive households, in professional athletes, in adolescent males behaving like themselves.  It can also happen in an everyday fall.  But brain injuries are especially common in those convicted of crimes or struggling with substance abuse.  Brain injuries are both the cause and the consequence of these other phenomena, and frequently amplify aggressive and impulsive behavior.  Those with existing brain injuries are more likely than the population at large to be incarcerated and to suffer addiction.  Those who are incarcerated or addicted are much more likely to receive further brain injuries.  These well-documented associations have clear implications for criminal justice and public policy, not least because they impair the capacity of sufferers to be responsible for their own behavior.  More broadly, our natural human vulnerability to brain damage, not to mention ordinary deterioration, means that our ability to think clearly and make good decisions together in our civil society is likewise vulnerable.

So how much do physical processes in our brains affect our individual desires, our ambitions, our social interactions, our commitments, our capacities, our political beliefs?  It may turn out that these familiar manifestations of human behavior are indistinguishable from the physical functioning of our specifically human brains.  The observable facts concerning the physical foundation of our thinking processes compel us to consider just how much freedom of will we are able to exercise, individually or collectively.  Our ability to socialize successfully and to modify our civilized behavior depends a great deal on the rude health of our brains.