Posts Tagged ‘Materialism’
“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero”*…
To the extent that evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist Robert Trivers has been in the news over the last decade, it has been for his entanglement with and highly-questionable defense of Jeffrey Epstein. But as Lionel Page reminds us, two decades before that– well before he could have known the execrable “financier”– Trivers made hugely important contributions to his field…
Steve Stewart-Williams announced… that Robert Trivers passed away.
Trivers was one of the most—perhaps the most—influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His work should be much more widely known in social and behavioural sciences, in particular in economics, as Trivers’ intellectual approach is very much in line with a game theoretic understanding of social interactions.
It is hard to overstate the importance of his work. Einstein famously published four groundbreaking papers in 1905, a year often referred to as his “Annus mirabilis”, during which he revolutionised physics. Trivers might be said to have had a “Quinquennium Mirabile” for the five years between 1971 and 1976, during which he produced a series of ideas that revolutionised evolutionary biology…
[Page unpacks four of those contributions: Reciprocal Alturism, Parental Investment, Parental Offspring Conflict, and Self-Deception, each fascinating…]
… Trivers has been one of the most influential evolutionary biologists, and his papers are still worth reading today. His insights, published more than 50 years ago, are fascinating. They often align very well with economic theories of behaviour, and it is therefore regrettable that his ideas are not more well-known in economics, and in particular in behavioural economics.
A key feature of Trivers’ take across these contributions was to see that beneath the world of social interactions we observe, there are deep structures in terms of incentives that shape the game we play. Understanding these games and their structures helps us make sense of the seemingly endless complexity of human psychology and social dynamics. In several key contributions, Trivers helped lift the veil on the underlying logic of human behaviour…
From cooperation to conflict: the evolutionary grammar of social interactions: “The fascinating insights of Robert Trivers” from @lionelpage.bsky.social.
For more on Trivers and the controversies in his life (Epstein, but also the Black Panthers and a Rutgers set-to), all of which followed the burst of productivity described above, see here.
And for some thoughts on how one might reconcile appreciation for a scientist’s work with abhorence of his later sins, see “Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us. We Can Put Them to Rest.“
* Bertolt Brecht (through the mouth of Galileo, in The Life of Galileo)
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As we linger over legacies, we might send material birthday greetings to a man who helped lay the groundwork for the field to which Trivers contributed, Ludwig Büchner; he was born on this date in 1824. A philosopher, physiologist, and physician, he became one of the leading exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism. Büchner was an early champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, endorsing it within a decade of its first issuance, then did much to spread it by citing and building on it in his own books.
As far as we know, Büchner’s life was free of the scandal and conflict that plagued Trivers. He taught at the University of Tübingen and published dozens of books and papers. Later in his life he founded he “German Freethinkers League” (“Deutsche Freidenkerbund”) and served as a member of the second chamber of the Landstände of the Grand Duchy of Hesse as a representative of the German Free-minded Party from 1884 to 1890. He was the younger brother of Georg Büchner, a famous revolutionary playwright, and Luise Büchner, a women’s rights advocate; and he was the uncle of Ernst Büchner, inventor of the Büchner flask.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it”*…
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
– Richard Wilbur
Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ they proclaim. That position seems reasonable and sober in light of neuroscience’s advances, with brilliant images of brains lighting up like Christmas trees while test subjects eat apples, watch movies or dream. And aren’t all the underlying physical laws already known?
From this seemly hard-nosed vantage, the problem of consciousness seems to be just one of wiring, as the American physicist Michio Kaku argued in The Future of the Mind (2014). In the very public version of the debate over consciousness, those who advocate that understanding the mind might require something other than a ‘nothing but matter’ position are often painted as victims of wishful thinking, imprecise reasoning or, worst of all, an adherence to a mystical ‘woo.’
It’s hard not to feel the intuitional weight of today’s metaphysical sobriety. Like Pickett’s Charge up the hill at Gettysburg, who wants to argue with the superior position of those armed with ever more precise fMRIs, EEGs and the other material artefacts of the materialist position? There is, however, a significant weakness hiding in the imposing-looking materialist redoubt. It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself…
The closer you look, the more the materialist explanation of consciousness (and physics) appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground: “Minding matter.”
Pair with the two parts of Tim Park‘s conversation with Riccardo Manzotti: “Am I the Apple?” and “The Mind in the Whirlwind.”
* Albert Einstein, riffing on his friend Kurt Gödel
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As we think about thinking, we might spare a thought for Frederick Winslow Taylor; he died on this date in 1915. An engineer and inventor (42 patents), he’s best remembered as the father of “Scientific Management,” the discipline rooted in efficiency studies and standardization. Quoth Peter Drucker:
Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years.
Taylor’s work encouraged many followers (including Frank “Cheaper by the Dozen” Gilbreth) and effectively spawned the field of management consulting. But Taylor practiced what he preached, and found time to become a champion tennis player as well: he won the first doubles tournament (1881) in U.S. National Championships, the precursor of the U.S. Open (with partner Clarence Clark).
Ye shall know them by the bumps on their heads…
In 1902, L.A. Vaught published Vaught’s Practical Character Reader. Writing at the beginning of a revival of interest in phrenology (which originally flourished in the early 19th century; was discredited; then rose again, encouraged by theories emerging at the turn of the 20th century in evolution, criminology, and anthropology), the author explains in his preface…
The purpose of this book is to acquaint all with the elements of human nature and enable them to read these elements in all men, women and children in all countries. At least fifty thousand careful examinations have been made to prove the truthfulness of the nature and location of these elements. More than a million observations have been made to confirm the examinations. Therefore, it is given the world to be depended upon. Taken in its entirety it is absolutely reliable. Its facts can be completely demonstrated by all who will take the unprejudiced pains to do so. It is ready for use. It is practical. Use it.
Via the wonderful Public Domain Review. Full text and illustrations available at The Internet Archive, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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As we consume the “applied” findings of modern neuroscience with more than one grain of salt, we might pause to recall Pierre Jean George Cabanis; he died on this date in 1808. Trained as a physician, Cabanis concentrated on physiology, on which he became something of an authority– and of which, something of a philosopher. He is remembered as the French Enlightenment’s most ardent Materialists, as exemplified in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802; “Relations of the Physical and the Moral in Man”), which undertook to explain the whole of reality, including the psychic, mental, and moral aspects of man, in terms of a mechanistic Materialism. Building on the thinking of La Mettrie, Cabanis argued that “to have an accurate idea of the operations from which thought results, it is necessary to consider the brain as a special organ designed especially to produce it, as the stomach and the intestines are designed to operate the digestion, (and) the liver to filter bile…”
… And in so doing, Cabanis contributed a few stones to the foundation on which the pseudoscience of phrenology was built.
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