IDEAS / Bill Meacham : The Human Virtue

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The human virtue

We humans have an ability that goes well beyond what any other animal can do: we can turn our attention to ourselves.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2012

So far we have seen that humans are like other animals, but amplified significantly. We have greater intelligence and hence greater technology, greater culture, and greater ability to keep track of and get along with others of our species.

We’ve seen how cognition and emotion work, and what intelligence consists of; and it is certainly plausible to think that other animals have rudimentary forms of the same. Our primate cousins, chimps and bonobos, resemble us in many ways. But we are more than just super-apes.

We humans have an ability that goes well beyond what any other animal can do: we can turn our attention to ourselves. Even more than our vast intelligence, the capacity for self-reflection -- that we are able to turn our attention to our own experience, to take ourselves as an object of thought and perception -- is what makes us uniquely human.

We have seen that humans have far greater intelligence than other animals, that we are the species that makes plans, that imagines states of affairs not immediately present, and targets our behavior to reach envisaged goals.

When this intelligence is directed at affairs in the world, I call it first-order mentation. This can range from the very simple, such as jotting down a grocery list, to the very complex, such as planning a multi-year project encompassing thousands of interrelated tasks. Not only do we make plans, we execute them and accomplish our goals, making corrections along the way to overcome obstacles and take into account changing circumstances.

When this kind of observation, planning, and execution is directed at ourselves, I call it second-order mentation. Others have called it self-consciousness, self-knowledge, or self-reflection (as one examines one’s reflected image in a mirror).

By “mentation” I mean mental -- that is, private or subjective -- acts of all kinds: thought, imagination, desire, aversion, volition (planning and acting on your plans), direct perception, and so forth. Second-order mentation occurs when we direct these activities toward ourselves. This and previous blog posts are an example: human beings thinking about being human.

Another example is self-knowledge, for example knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Another is paying attention to yourself, whether that be in the awkwardness of social embarrassment or in the focus of learning a new skill. Another is remembering how you interacted with others or mentally rehearsing how you will interact with them in the future.

In these and many other ways we take ourselves as objects of our own cognition.

These forms of self-reflection enable self-transcendence. By this I mean that in “seeing” ourselves as an object, we take a position, as it were, outside of ourselves, and that enables us to alter the self that is “seen.”(1) Of course the self that is “seen” is not different from the self that “sees,” in that both are the interior of the same physical body.

But in another sense, the self that “sees” is different. It has a larger vantage point and is not caught up, or at least not entirely caught up, in the life of the self that is “seen.” By taking a position outside yourself, you can alter yourself.

Harry Frankfurt describes this self-reflective structure of the self in his essay “Freedom of the Will.”(2) Humans, along with all other living beings, have first-order desires, desires to do or to have something. Some animals -- chimps and bonobos are good examples, and possibly dolphins and whales -- even appear to have the rudimentary ability to anticipate the future and make decisions based on prior thought. But only humans have “the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires,”(3) desires to have certain desires.

The second-order self wants the first-order self to want something, typically something different from what the first-order self actually wants. For example, suppose you have a craving for a certain food -- something sweet and sugary, say, or full of fat and salt -- that tastes good but is not healthy. Realizing that, you may feel bad about the craving and want to want something else to eat. That is a second-order desire.

An even stronger form is second order volition, where you want a certain desire to be your will. By will Frankfurt means a desire that is strong enough to move you to action.(4) In this example, you would not only want to eat something healthy and want not to want the unhealthy food, but would also want the desire to eat healthily to overrule the craving, to be the desire that actually results in action so that you end up eating the healthy food.

Frankfurt regards the capacity for second-order volition to be the essential characteristic of being a person.(5) I regard it as an aspect of the second-order mentation that is uniquely human.(6) For Frankfurt, freedom of the will consists in being able to make second-order volitions effective; that is, to have the second-order volition actually govern the first order such that the preferred first-order desire is what results in action. When that happens we judge that our will is free. “It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions... that a person exercises freedom of the will... The unwilling addict’s will is not free.”(7)

Having a free will in this sense is an example of our second-order mentation functioning well. Like any human activity, second-order mentation can be done poorly or skillfully. When we are unable to see the whole picture, when we have false ideas about ourselves, distorted by ignorance or painful emotion, we are doing it poorly. When we are able to observe ourselves carefully over time, identifying and removing preconceptions, we are doing it better.

When we have true ideas about ourselves but are unable to act on them, we are doing it poorly. (This is Frankfurt’s unfree will.) When we are able to use what we find out about ourselves to change for the better how we behave and hence what kind of person we become, we are doing it excellently.

Our capacity for second-order mentation is subject to excess and deficiency. It is excessive when we are too embarrassed to function well socially or too self-conscious to be able to, for instance, swing a golf club properly or do some other task that takes physical skill. It is deficient when we fail to learn from experience. It is deficient when we lose ourselves in what Heidegger calls “the publicness of the ‘they,’”(8) when we just go along with the crowd without thinking about what we are doing. It is deficient in quite a brutal way when we see that we are caught in a repetitive and painful pattern of behavior but lack the skill to get out of it.

But we always have the possibility of doing better. A failure of second-order mentation is a case of failure of intelligence generally, and there are ways to overcome such failures. That, however, is a topic for another time.

What I am suggesting is this: Second-order mentation is the peculiarly human virtue, what we do that other beings don’t. We are all capable of it, and when we do it well we function optimally and are most fulfilled. It is what enables us to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. Second-order mentation gives us mastery, because it enables us to tune the instrument, so to speak, by means of which we exert first-order influence on the world.

Second-order mentation gives us the peculiar sense of self that is expressed in the poem Invictus: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”(9) The I to which the poet refers is the coherence of interiority of second-order mentation, the ongoing inner life of how it feels to be operating at that second-order level.

We each (unless we are damaged) have a first-order sense of ourselves as continuous and ongoing entities, as being the same person through time, which comes from familiarity with a point of view, from being within that point of view and seeing the world from it. Within our interior landscape, so to speak, there are certain familiar features -- habitual thoughts, feelings, emotions, attitudes, and ways of behaving -- that are present all or most of the time. These comprise a sense of how it feels to be oneself.

Much of the self-sense no doubt comes from the experience of being in our body, a particular body that has a particular vantage point on the world. The body changes over time, but gradually enough that we have a sense of continuity. The sense of self is the unity over time of interior background feeling tone; and the sense of self arising from second-order mentation is the same, except it seems more vivid, somehow more real or efficacious. That is because it is more efficacious: you exert control not only over your world but over yourself as well.

And the point of philosophical inquiry to be able to do exactly that: command yourself so as to live well.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) “See” and its variants are in quotes because the experience is not entirely and not merely visual. We experience ourselves in many modalities.
(2) Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 11-25.
(3) Ibid., p. 12.
(4) Ibid., p. 14.
(5) Ibid., p. 16.
(6) The distinction between “human” and “person” is just terminological at this point, but if we discover that some non-humans -- whales, say, or beings from another planet -- have the same capacity for second-order mentation that we do, then, with Frankfurt, we should speak of persons rather than humans.
(7) Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 20-21.
(8) Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 220.
(9) Henley, Invictus.

References
Frankfurt, Harry. The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. Macquarrie, John, and Robinson, Edward. New York: Harper and Row HarperSanFrancisco, 1962.
Henley, William Ernest. Invictus. Available online, URL = http://www.bartleby.com/103/7.html as of 12 March 2010.

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IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Intelligence

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Intelligence

Cognition is how we acquire knowledge. Intelligence is what we do with it.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2012

Cognition, which I talked about last time, is how we acquire knowledge. Intelligence is what we do with it. Human intelligence -- and, I assume, the intelligence of some other species such as apes, dolphins and whales -- consists in the ability to entertain in thought something that is not happening at the moment and consequently to tailor behavior to the specific features and nuances of a particular situation. Less intelligent animals have far less flexibility.

A gazelle on the plains of Africa has, we can imagine, quite a vivid appreciation of its surroundings. What looks to us like uniform grasslands is to it a rich tapestry of differentiated food patches. In this sense its visual cognition is rich. But it has only a limited repertoire of what to do with that richness, a repertoire evolved to be universal to the species and applicable uniformly across the environment in which it lives.

By contrast a bushman hunting the gazelle uses arrows that are tipped with a poison found only on the larvae of a certain beetle. Cosmides and Tooby say, “Whatever the neural adaptations that underlie this behavior, they were not designed specifically for beetles and arrows, but exploit these local, contingent facts as part of a computational structure that treats them as instances of a more general class.”(1)

In contrast to non-human animals, we have the ability to improvise our behavior in response to local, contingent facts, facts most likely not true for all humans and in all the environments in which humans find themselves. Eskimos hunting seals have no knowledge of poisonous beetles.

The capacity of other animals to process information is limited. It has evolved to handle features of the world that were true across the species’ range and throughout many generations, enough that they selected for the adaptations we find in such animals today. “These constraints narrowly limit the kinds of information that such adaptations can be designed to use: the set of properties that had a predictable relationship to features of the species’ world that held widely in space and time is a very restricted one.”(2)

We humans, in contrast, can recognize and respond to a far greater set of environmental cues. We can envision far more possibilities and are far more flexible in our behavior. In short, humans can plan. Humans, say Tooby and Cosmides, are “intelligent, cultural, conscious, planning animals.”(3)

By planning, we mean creating cognitive representations of past, present and future states of the world, evaluating alternative courses of action by representing consequences and matching these against goals...(4)

More succinctly, psychologist Steven Pinker gives this definition of intelligence:

...the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules.(5)

Intelligence requires three things:

• A goal or goals to be obtained.
• Knowledge about how the world works, beliefs that turn out to be true and workable in practice. These provide rules of inference that guide thinking.
• The ability to apply the knowledge in flexible ways, depending on circumstances, to reach the goals.

Planning -- the application of intelligence -- is an evolved adaptation for improvising novel sequences of behavior to reach targeted goals. Human intelligence widens the range of environments in which we can survive and reproduce.


The scope problem

Planning involves imagining different scenarios and, importantly, the ability to distinguish imagined, remembered, and anticipated scenarios from what is actually happening in the present situation. Cosmides and Tooby call this the “scope problem,” how to distinguish facts and valid inferences that are true within a certain imagined scenario from those that are true in other scenarios or in the actual world.(6) In the language of computation, this means

the capacity to carry out inferential operations on... suppositions or propositions of conditionally unevaluated truth value, while keeping their computational products isolated from other knowledge stores until the truth or utility of the suppositions is decided, and the outputs are either integrated or discarded.(7)

Our ability to keep things separate in this way enables all sorts of advanced behavior:

This capacity is essential to planning, interpreting communication, employing the information communication brings, evaluating others’ claims, mind-reading [the ability to understand others’ beliefs, intentions and desires], pretence, detecting or perpetrating deception, using inference to triangulate information about past or hidden causal relations, and much else that makes the human mind so distinctive.(8)

Cosmides and Tooby postulate a capacity they call “scope representation,” the ability to identify under what conditions information can be treated as accurate and inferences as valid.(9) Because we can represent their scope independently, we do not confuse our considerations of possible strategies, memories of past situations, anticipations of the future, imaginings of possible scenarios and the actual conditions we find ourselves in.

Those who do confuse these things we readily identify as aberrant. Schizophrenia can be interpreted as a failure of mental boundaries in which, for example, a person experiences their desire to do something as a command to do it.(10)

The capacity to represent the scope of our plans, perceptions and imaginations separately is at the foundation of literature, and story-telling generally. Humans in all cultures love stories. In stories we can mentally rehearse or represent various social situations without having to actually encounter them. We can find out how others -- the characters in the stories -- handle these situations and hence learn successful and unsuccessful strategies for ourselves.

As Cosmides and Tooby put it, “individuals are no longer limited by the slow and erratic flow of actual experience compared to the rapid rate of vicarious, contrived, or imagined experience.”(11)

This ability to decouple various scope representations enables quite a number of human faculties, including the following:

• Theory of mind [see below] and prediction of behavior, the ability to guess with some accuracy what another person is thinking or feeling and to anticipate correctly what they will do. Motives, feelings, beliefs and perceptions imputed to the other are decoupled from our own.(12)
• Representation of goals. The goal state is decoupled from the present state of affairs.(13)
• Making plans to accomplish goals. Plans for the future are decoupled from the present.(14)
• Simulating the physical world. Simulations are decoupled from the actual world.(15)
• Creating and enjoying fiction. The fictional world is decoupled from the real world.(16)
• Remembering episodes of our own past and maintaining a sense of our identity through time. Memories are decoupled from our present experience of the actual world, and personal memories are decoupled from general knowledge gained through other means.(17)

Theory of Mind

Of these, theory of mind is one of the most interesting, because it entails much that is strikingly human. Humans have been called “ultrasocial”(18) and “obligatorily gregarious.”(19) We live in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of people enjoy the benefits of division of labor. We must have ongoing and extensive contact with our fellows in order to survive and thrive.

To succeed at this we must understand our fellow humans as having subjectivity like our own. The term “Theory of Mind” refers to the ability to attribute mental states -- beliefs, intentions, desires, pretense, knowledge, etc. -- to ourselves and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from our own.(20)

We do this all the time. We see someone striding purposefully and assume they are going somewhere to do something they consider important. We see a smile and assume the person is pleased, or a scowl and assume they are displeased. We see someone cross the street to avoid a barking dog, and we understand that they do so precisely in order to avoid the dog.

We assume that the salesperson in the store will sell us the goods we want, and that other people walking on the sidewalk with us will generally stay on the sidewalk. Depending on context, we view the offer of candy as friendly or a threat.

Philosophers may ponder how we can have knowledge of other people’s mental states, to which we have no direct access, but in fact we assume such knowledge all the time and life together would be impossible without it. Of course we can be mistaken or deceived, but mistakes and deception would not be possible without familiar assumptions that most often turn out to be correct.

Researchers have found several stages in the development of theory of mind in infants and young children as well as animals.(21)

• If something appears to move on its own, our minds interpret it as an agent.
• If it appears to move toward something, we take that thing to be its goal.
• If it changes direction flexibly in response to what is happening in its environment, we take it to have some degree of rationality or intention (in the sense of intending to accomplish something).
• If its action is followed closely in time by another object’s action, we take the second action to be a socially-contingent response to the first.
• And if something is a goal-directed agent that shows some degree of flexible response, then we know that it can cause harm or comfort to other agents and possibly to ourselves.

These judgments are automatic, a form of hot cognition, not something we stop to think about. They form the basis of our well-developed ability to get along in groups of others like us. We, like all social animals, have the skills to detect who cooperates and who cheats, who is kind and who is dangerous, who is dominant and who is submissive. Humans have these skills to a greater degree and have the ability to fine-tune them with greater precision than other animals.

Where chimps and bonobos can understand that individual A knows where some food is hidden and individual B doesn’t and consequently expect different behavior from the two,(22) humans can easily grasp much more complicated scenarios. We quite understand that when Hermia loves Lysander but has been commanded to wed Demetrius; and Demetrius wants Hermia; and Helena, Hermia’s friend, wants Demetrius; but a magic potion causes Lysander to fall in love with Helena rather than Hermia, then much hilarious confusion can ensue.(23) No ape could possibly keep up.

(To be continued …)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
1) Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the source,” pp. 53-54.
(2) Ibid., p. 54
(3) Tooby and Cosmides, “The Past Explains the Present”, p. 420.
(4) Ibid. p. 406.
(5) Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 62.
(6) Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the source,” pp. 57-58.
(7) Ibid., pp. 59-60.
(8) Idem.
(9) Ibid., p. 64.
(10) Ibid., p. 80.
(11) Ibid., p. 74.
(12) Ibid., pp. 74 ff.
(13) Ibid., pp. 79 ff.
(14) Ibid., pp. 82 ff.
(15) Ibid., pp. 85 ff.
(16) Ibid., pp. 89 ff.
(17) Ibid., pp. 93 ff.
(18) Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 47 ff.
(19) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 4.
(20) Wikipedia, “Theory of Mind.”
(21) Hauser, Moral Minds, pp. 313-322. Also Steen, “Theory of Mind."
(22) Hauser, Moral Minds, pp. 337-341.
(23) Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Plot summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night’s_Dream as of 30 Nov. 2010.

References
Cosmides, Leda, and Tooby, John. “Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation” in Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, pp. 53-115, ed. Sperber, Dan. New York: Oxford Press, 2000. Also available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/metarep.html as of 25 May 2009.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Hauser, Marc D. Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Steen, Francis F. “Theory of Mind: A Model of Mental-state Attribution”. On-line publication, URL = http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/ToMM.html as of 25 August 2009.
Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. “The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments.” In Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375-424. New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1990. Available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/publist.htm as of 26 May 2009.
Wikipedia. “Theory of Mind.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind as of 25 August 2009.

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IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Ways of Knowing

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Ways of Knowing

The whole thing is about life perpetuating itself, about what we will do, how we will act, in different situations.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2012

Each age has a metaphor for how humans work. In the 17th century it was mechanical: the heart was a pump, the lungs were bellows, the muscles and bones were like pulleys and levers. In the 21st century the metaphor is electronic computing: the brain is a computer, and our minds are composed of mental modules, much like software modules, each of which does a job and interacts with others to get things done.

There is some truth to these metaphors. The heart really does pump liquid, and the lungs really do draw in and expel air. Similarly, brain research has discovered portions of the brain that are active when we discriminate colors and shapes or think about a mathematical problem or respond to moral problems.

The convergence of brain research, information theory, cognitive science, and behavioral psychology provides insights into how our minds work. In particular, cognitive science explains how thought and emotion work in terms of information and computation, and evolutionary biology explains the complex design of living things as the product of evolutionary selection. Evolutionary psychology combines the two.


Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology takes the mind to be an organ, a bit like the kidney or the stomach, and provides a theory of how our minds evolved to have the functions that they do.(1) It does not so much discover facts about human nature as provide a framework within which to understand facts found experimentally by other branches of psychology. It also suggests experimentally-verifiable hypotheses about how the mind works. Many such hypotheses have been corroborated, thus lending credence to the concepts.(2)

Evolutionary psychology explains how the various mental modules evolved in response to challenges humans encountered in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), the environment in which our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years.(3) Between the invention of writing, agriculture, and cities to the present (early twenty-first century A.D.) humans lived about 500 generations.

The time before that, the Pleistocene epoch, when proto-humans evolved into the humans we know today, was about 80,000 generations, 160 times as long. Although human culture has advanced significantly in the past 500 generations, it is built on mental capacities that are evolutionarily designed for a much different environment.

This ancestral environment varied physically, but much of it was probably open savannah, with rolling hills and occasional forest. People all over the world are drawn to images of that type of landscape regardless of the environment they actually live in.(4)

More important was the social environment: small bands of humans numbering from 20 up to a maximum of about 150 in which each person had to cooperate with the others to provide sustenance and survival, but also had to compete with others to acquire food, status and sexual mates. These early bands of humans were probably much like the hunter-gatherers found today in the remote forests of the Amazon or the jungles of Africa or Indonesia.

Today such bands have been pushed to the margins of habitable lands by the advance of industrial society, but in the past our ancestors lived, no doubt, in much richer and more lush surroundings. Their lifestyle has been called “a camping trip that lasts a lifetime.”(5)

The mental abilities we find today in humans all over the world evolved to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Those mental abilities, oriented toward action in the world, are both cognitive and emotional.


Cognition

The central premise of evolutionary psychology is that the human mind is a system of mental modules -- “organs of computation”(6) -- that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the EEA. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, pioneers in the field, point out that the single resource most limiting to reproduction is not food or safety or access to mates, but information, the information required for making behavioral choices that lead to survival and reproduction.(7) The mind as we know it today is the result of a long series of cognitive successes, successes in acquiring and processing information.

The mind, embodied in the circuitry of the brain and nervous system, is not a single organ but is composed of many faculties that solve different adaptive problems. An adaptive problem is a cluster of conditions that recurred over evolutionary time and that constituted either an opportunity for or an obstacle to reproduction.(8)

For example, the arrival of a potential mate -- which happened countless times over 80,000 generations -- is an opportunity for reproduction. How the mind recognizes and responds to a person of the opposite sex is a function of algorithms embedded in the mind as a result of how successfully our ancestors responded to similar situations.

In order to recognize a person of the opposite sex, of course, you must first perceive that person. On a level closer to physical as opposed to social reality, how human visual perception works is in part a function of mental algorithms evolved to respond to the properties of reflected light. (Another part is the structure of the eye itself.)

Examples of obstacles to reproduction are such things as the speed of a prey animal and the actions of a sexual rival. In these cases and many others the way the human mind processes information is a result of how our ancestors solved such adaptive problems and survived to pass on their abilities to their offspring.

We can view the current state of the mind as the result of a very long process of testing randomly-generated alternative designs for coping with the physical and social environment -- each of which embodied different assumptions about the nature of the world -- and retaining those that succeeded most effectively; that is, those that reflected most closely the actual structure of the ancestral world.

Cognition in this sense is not necessarily or even primarily a conscious process, one available to introspective attention. Conscious, voluntary and deliberative thinking -- called “cold cognition” by Cosmides and Tooby,(9) the kind of thinking we do when we work out a math problem, for instance -- is only one kind. Much more prevalent is the information processing that takes place unreflectively in everyday life, in perceptual judgments, in forming immediate responses to situations, and guiding our activities.

When a child gauges the intensity of his or her parents’ annoyance or approval, the child is not going through a conscious thought process. Instead the child is using an algorithm or computer-like program that is built in to the mind, a capability or faculty that is already available for use.

The mind is not a blank slate, written upon by experience. It is a collection of modules capable of solving specific problems. When a problem for which it is suited arises, the relevant modules are activated and guide our responses, immediately and intuitively.

On this model, the mind is a set of capabilities for problem-solving and for guiding behavior. The capabilities are a result of the evolution of the human race, but the specific content of how the problems are solved or how the behavior is manifested depends on the circumstances of your life.

For instance, all humans have the capacity for language, but which language or languages you speak depends on the culture and community in which you are raised. Similarly, all humans have the capacity for moral intuition regarding how one should behave in a social context, but the specific set of moral rules you find compelling depends on the society in which you live.


Emotion

Cosmides and Tooby call the mind “multimodular,” composed of “domain-specific expert systems.” The human mind is “a diverse collection of inference systems, including specializations for reasoning about objects, physical causality, number, language, the biological world, the beliefs and motivations of other individuals, and social interactions...”(10) These inference systems get coordinated through emotion.

Domain-specific expert systems such as those for regulation of sleep or detection of predators need a context in which to operate. If it is dark and you are tired, you should sleep; but if a predator is nearby you should stay alert in case you need to flee or fight. (By “should” I mean merely that these are the typical activating conditions for the expert systems.)

What causes an individual organism to activate alertness when danger might be nearby at night? The answer is emotion, in this example the emotion of fear. Cosmides and Tooby assert that emotions are actually a type of cognition, cognitions writ large as it were. They are high-level programs that orchestrate the activation of many subordinate programs:

Each emotion entrains various other adaptive programs -- deactivating some, activating others, and adjusting the modifiable parameters of still others -- so that the whole system operates in a particularly harmonious and efficacious way when the individual is confronting certain kinds of triggering conditions or situations.(11)

Psychologist Steven Pinker says it more succinctly:

The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals. Once triggered by a propitious moment, an emotion triggers the cascade of subgoals and sub-subgoals that we call thinking and acting.(12)

That’s not what we usually think of when we think of emotion. We usually think of a felt quality such as fear or anger or elation. Evolutionary psychology says these are indeed aspects of emotion, but not their defining characteristic. What defines an emotion -- in fact, what defines any evolved capacity -- is its function. And the function of emotion is to coordinate multiple subsystems such that an organism reacts appropriately to a stimulus, where “appropriately” means in a way that caused its ancestors to survive in the presence of similar stimuli. It is instructive to look at Cosmides and Tooby’s specific examples of emotion:

cooperation, sexual attraction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship, romantic love, the aesthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional aggression, incest avoidance, disgust, predator avoidance, kinship and family relations, grief, playfulness, fascination, guilt, depression, feeling triumphant, disgust, sexual jealousy, fear of predators, rage, grief, happiness, joy, sadness, excitement, anxiety, playfulness, homesickness, anger, hunger, being worried, loneliness, predatoriness (an emotion pertaining to hunting), gratitude, fear, boredom, approval, disapproval, shame(13)

Not all of these are what common usage calls emotion. Some of them -- fear, anger, joy, guilt and the like -- certainly are, in the sense of being felt qualities or states. Others, such as coalitional aggression and predator avoidance, seem like strategies rather than emotions.

Many, such as fear of predators, being worried about something, and sexual attraction, are primarily ways of being oriented to an external object or person, to something or someone other than oneself. Others, such as guilt, shame, and pride, are oriented to ourselves as we imagine others feel about us. All of them have in common that they coordinate a large number of separate cognitive subsystems. Cosmides and Tooby provide an extensive list:

perception; attention; inference; learning; memory; goal choice; motivational priorities; categorization and conceptual frameworks; physiological reactions (such as heart rate, endocrine function, immune function, gamete release); reflexes; behavioral decision rules; motor systems; communication processes; energy level and effort allocation; affective coloration of events and stimuli; recalibration of probability estimates, situation assessments, values, and regulatory variables (e.g., self-esteem, estimations of relative formidability, relative value of alternative goal states, efficacy discount rate); and so on.(14)

Every emotion has four aspects:(15)

• Physiology -- what happens in our bodies when we are feeling or are under the influence of the emotion.
• Behavioral inclination -- what the emotion disposes us to do.
• Cognitive appraisal -- what the emotion tells us about what it is directed towards.
• Feeling state -- how the emotion feels to us.

An emotion is not reducible to any one of these four; it includes them all. Pinker says “[N]o sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa...”(16)

Of these four, the most fundamental is behavioral inclination. The whole thing is about life perpetuating itself, about what we will do, how we will act, in different situations.


Implications 

Several things are interesting philosophically about this view of cognition and emotions:

• Despite a long history of thinking of ourselves as the “rational animal,” much of our cognition is not rational, in the sense of being thought through as we might think through a proof in geometry. Only a small part of our thinking is cold cognition. Most of it is hot cognition: quick, intuitive flashes of judgment.
• These intuitive flashes of judgment are also emotional. The emotional component impels us to action.
• We can feel or be under the influence of an emotion without knowing it.
• Emotions (in the sense of feeling state) have a cognitive component. All emotion has some element of judgment or interpretation. Emotions are ways we know ourselves and our world.
• All emotions have an intentional structure.(17) They are oriented toward something; they have an object. The broader emotions, which we call moods, are oriented toward the world in general; specific emotions such as fear are focused on specific real or imagined things or events. Some of the specific emotions -- fear and disgust, for example -- are about the physical world. Others, such as trust, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, anger, and humor, pertain to the social and moral worlds.(18)
• Every emotion has implications for action and has an effect on our readiness for or actual undertaking of an activity or a course of action.

These assertions about emotion can be verified by phenomenological analysis. Existential philosopher Robert Solomon, coming at the issue from an entirely different perspective, says that “emotions [are] our own judgments” and “the very source of our interests and our purposes.”(19) You can, if you like, corroborate this by examination of your own experience.

In sum: There is a lot going on in our lives to which we mostly don’t pay attention, and we are far less rational than we like to think.

(To be continued...)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes

(1) Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 23.
(2) There are numerous examples of experimental verification. See, for example, Griskevicius et. al., “Blatant Benevolence and Conspicuous Consumption: When Romantic Motives Elicit Costly Signals.” Trivers, in “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” cites many instances of experimental evidence for hypotheses arising from evolutionary psychological theory. See Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 505, for elegant anthropological verification of hypotheses regarding reciprocal altruism.
(3) The EEA is not a single place but a statistical composite of the properties of the ancestral environment that exerted selective effects on human ancestors. Tooby and Cosmides, “The Past Explains the Present”, p. 386.
(4) Dutton, The Art Instinct, pp. 14, 19 – 22.
(5) Orians and Heerwagen, “Evolved Responses to Landscapes,” p 556.
(6) Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 21. See also Cosmides and Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions”, p. 98.
(7) Cosmides and Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions”, p. 99.
(8) Ibid., p. 96.
(9) Ibid., p. 98.
(10) Ibid., p. 99.
(11) Ibid., p. 92.
(12) Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 373.
(13) Cosmides and Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions”, throughout. (14) Ibid., p. 93.
(15) Idem.
(16) Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 373.
(17) By “intentional” I do not mean the ordinary usage of planning to make something happen. “Intentionality” is a technical term meaning the “ofness” or “aboutness” inherent in experience. Being conscious always entails being conscious of something; you are never just conscious without an object. The term comes from a Latin phrase, intendere arcum in, which means to aim a bow and arrow at (something). This image of aiming or directedness is central in most philosophical discussions of consciousness.
(18) Pinker, “So How Does the Mind Work?”, p. 4.
(19) Solomon, The Passions, p. xvii.

References

Cosmides, Leda, and Tooby, John. “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions” in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd Edition, pp. 91-115, ed. Lewis, Michael and Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M. New York: Guilford Press, 2000. Available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/publist.htm as of 26 May 2009.
Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Griskevicius, Vladas, et. al. “Blatant Benevolence and Conspicuous Consumption: When Romantic Motives Elicit Costly Signals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 93, No. 1, pp. 85-102.
Orians, Gordon H., and Heerwagen, Judith H. “Evolved Responses to Landscapes.” In Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, The Adapted Mind, pp. 555 – 579.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Pinker, Steven. “So How Does the Mind Work?” Mind and Language, 20(1), 1-24. Available as an on-line publication, URL = http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ as of 23 June 2009.
Solomon, Robert. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. “The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments.” In Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375-424. New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1990. Available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/publist.htm as of 26 May 2009.
Trivers, Robert L. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol 46, No. 1 (March 1971), pp. 35-57. Available as an on-line publication, http://education.ucsb.edu/janeconoley/ed197/documents/triversTheevolutionofreciprocalaltruism.pdf URL = as of 3 November 2009.

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Bill Meacham : Considering the Philosophy of Ayn Rand

Russian-born philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand.
A compelling but flawed philosophy:
Considering Ayn Rand

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2011

Ayn Rand advocates a promising methodology for ethical thinking, but has a deeply flawed vision of human nature, so her enterprise doesn’t quite pan out.(1) That’s too bad, because the methodology -- to base ethical values on what is objectively and verifiably true about the world -- is a good one, better than basing them on moral intuition or uncritically-accepted social norms or someone’s authority.

Moral intuition seems compelling, but different people have different intuitions, so how do you decide among them? Social norms seem as evident as sunlight, but different societies have different norms, so again how do you decide among them? The same goes for authority: how do you decide which authority is worth obeying, particularly if you suspect (often with good reason) that they are really trying to get you to behave for their benefit, not yours?

The answer goes all the way back to the Classical Greeks. We all want a fulfilling life, and we find out what that is by examining who and what we are. Knowing that, we have very good clues to two things: what we are good for or good at, and what is good for us. When we are doing what we are good at and getting what is good for us, then we are functioning well. And the internal experience of functioning well is fulfillment, a fulfilling life, in short: happiness. Aristotle sums it up:

[A clearer account of happiness] might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the "well" is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function.(2)

What is good for us as human beings is to do well the uniquely human function.

And what is that? Rand follows Aristotle closely here. She says the essential function of the human being is to be rational. Unlike plants, which do not move and only react automatically to stimuli, and animals, which move around and act instinctively, humans think and reason.

Common to all three is the urge to survive and thrive. How humans do that is by the use of reason: “For man, the basic means of survival is reason.”(3) And “that which is proper to the life of a rational being [i.e. the exercise of reason] is the good [for that being]...”(4) So the ethical imperative for human beings is to exercise reason, to be rational.

So far, so good. We can quibble about whether the distinctions between plants, animals and humans are really so hard and fast, but as a first approximation the account is sound. But what shall we reason about? Certainly prudential calculation of risks and benefits in the economic sphere is a big part of it, as is scientific discovery and applied engineering to produce the means of sustenance.

By reasoning we figure out how to acquire what we need in order to survive. In large part that entails being productive, actively working to grow and manufacture the goods we require. For Rand, the ideal person is the one who thinks accurately and acts productively. She rails against thugs and dictators who steal from others without doing the work to produce what is stolen. (No doubt that is a big part of her appeal, because we have all been victims or fear being victims, or both.)

And all of this reasoning is to one end: our own survival and welfare. The goal is to “hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose...”(5) She combatively calls this “the virtue of selfishness,” although a better characterization would be the virtue of rational self-interest. Thinking rationally about our own welfare is, according to this view, what humans do best and hence what we should do in order to survive, thrive and be fulfilled.

I have no argument with that, and in fact have discussed it before in my blog. What I find problematic is how this plays out in the social sphere. Her ideal is a society of rational actors, each out to satisfy his or her own interests, who trade goods and services with each other to maximize their wealth.

Each of us, in this view, is a homo economicus who seeks to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself or herself given available information about opportunities and constraints. Consequently, for Rand, the ideal human relationship is trade for mutual benefit, entered into freely and without coercion. She says so quite unambiguously:

The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material.(6)

Well, that works fine for economic relationships, but does it make sense for personal relationships? I know someone who bases friendship on this principle. He openly looks for how others can be of use to him, and in turn he is willing to be used by them. Many people find this distasteful. Few entrust their deepest feelings and concerns to him.

Imagine a group in which loyalty is a must for survival. This is not implausible, because for hundreds of thousands of years that was exactly the case for all humans. Today as an extreme example we might think of a platoon of soldiers in battle, but to some degree it applies to any in-group.

In order to survive as a member of such a group you need the cooperation and help of others, and in order to secure such cooperation and help you need to be seen as cooperative and helpful yourself. Others need to recognize that you are loyal and reliable. And the best way to be perceived as loyal and reliable is actually to be loyal and reliable.

It is precisely not to act as Rand would have you act, coldly calculating whether to continue to be loyal. Instead you need to act in the interests of the group unhesitatingly, to act swiftly and automatically on your intuition that loyalty is obligatory and disloyalty is so hideous as to be almost unthinkable.

Those whom the group suspects of being purely self-interested are less likely to become trusted members of the group than those whose loyalty is immediate and unquestioned. As group membership is crucial for survival, by her own criteria Rand’s recommendation is anti-life.

What I am talking about here is a moral emotion, an emotion that has been ingrained in us through hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution as beings who are ultra-social, obligatorily gregarious. We need each other, constantly and thoroughly. Rand sneers at morality based on instinct, intuition or feeling, but the instinct for affiliation is what has enabled humans to survive.

Atlas shrugging: New York City sculpture by Lee Lawrie.
Human societies are support systems within which individual weakness does not automatically spell death. Mutual dependence is key to our success. The moral emotion of loyalty is crucial for our survival. And so are others, such as willingness to devote resources to group welfare, cooperation, honesty, and many more.

We have two kinds of rationality, but Rand recognizes only one. We can think carefully and attentively, reasoning step by step from premises to conclusions. And we can react in the blink of an eye, assessing probabilities and choosing what to do without conscious thought. More often than not it is the latter that we employ.

Our minds do most of their work by automatic pattern matching. We do not pay attention, for instance, to how our visual systems translate excitation of receptor cells on the back of the eyes to recognition of objects and people; instead we just recognize things. Similarly, most of our social cognition occurs rapidly and automatically. We very quickly appraise people we meet as attractive or not, friendly or threatening, male or female, higher or lower in status than we are, etc.

Moral intuitions are a form of social cognition. Human beings come equipped with an intuitive ethics, an innate preparedness to feel flashes of approval or disapproval toward certain patterns of events involving other human beings.

But this is what Rand decries, instead praising a rationality that entails “a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours,” a process of thought that is “precise,” “scrupulous, ” and “ruthlessly strict.”(7) Someone who actually acted that way would not last very long at all.

Rand overlooks two things: the role of what cognitive scientists call “hot cognition,” which I have been describing, and the essentially social nature of human reality. Nowhere in her essay is the word “compassion” to be found. Nowhere does she speak of empathy. She does mention love. She calls it a “spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.”(8) Love as payment? If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Rand appears to be from Jupiter.

Despite the inadequacies of Rand’s theory of human nature, however, there is something to be learned from her theory of ethics. As humans we do have the ability to reflect on ourselves and our situation, to exercise second-order mentation. We have the opportunity to judge whether the moral intuitions provided to us by our evolutionary heritage actually make sense in the present.

The feeling of loyalty to the group, crucial to the survival of small bands of hunters and gatherers, may not make sense when directed to sports teams or, less harmlessly, to governments that oppress portions of their populace and wage wars for the enrichment of the elites. We may not be able to fully divest ourselves of such feelings, but we can intervene when they arise and decide whether and in what manner to act on them.

And, more realistically, we can intervene ahead of time. We can cultivate habits of character that enable us to act in the heat of the moment as we have chosen in times of cool reflection.

Consider someone, perhaps a follower of Ayn Rand, who realizes that his excessively calculating attitude toward others is self-defeating. To overcome this deficiency he could deliberately cultivate habits of emotional openness, generosity and helpfulness. He could look for opportunities to speak the truth about what he is feeling, to be helpful to others, to give freely instead of hoarding.

At first, acting in these ways would feel uncomfortable and alien, but with time they would become second nature. And people would respond to him in kind.

And that is the real power of Ayn Rand’s ethics. Applied to a more accurate view of human nature, it encourages us, not to cogitate excessively over each situation, but to decide what kind of person we want to be. In true Aristotelian fashion it encourages us to cultivate virtues that enable us to live fulfilling lives in the company of others.

Notes

(1) I base this assessment on Rand’s essay “The Objectivist Ethics,” which seems to sum up her essential argument nicely and is certainly a quicker read than her monumental works of fiction.
(2) Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, I.7 1097b 22-29.
(3) Rand, pp. 22-23.
(4) Ibid., p. 25.
(5) Ibid., p. 32.
(6) Ibid., p. 34. Italics in the original.
(7) Ibid., p. 28.
(8) Ibid., p. 35.

References

Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics, tr. W.D. Ross. In McKeon, Richard, ed., Introduction to Aristotle. New York: Random House Modern Library, 1947. Also available as an on-line publication, URL = http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/nicomachaen.html as of 17 April 2011.

Rand, Ayn. “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 13-39. New York: Signet Books, 1964. Also available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics as of 3 July 2011.

Wikipedia. “Homo economicus.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus as of 16 July 2011.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60's underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at BillMeacham.com, where this article first appeared.]

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BOOKS / Dick J. Reavis on 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains'

A worrisome message from Nicholas Carr:
What The Shallows means for the left

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / July 10, 2010

[The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (Norton, 2010; Hardcover, 276 pp, $26.95).]

Literature students in American universities no longer see any point in reading whole novels. Instead, they want to scrutinize a work’s most pregnant passages, scanning or overlooking the balance of the texts. This is the most startling notice I encountered among dozens of disconcerting reports in The Shallows, a June book subtitled What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

Much has been made in the mainstream press about the warnings advanced by the book’s author, Nicholas Carr, a journalist best known for a 2009 tome about Google. Most reviewers of his present volume have focused on his predictions of doom for libraries and the printed word, though as a careful author, he doesn’t quite predict anything so dire, perhaps for a reason any long-form journalist knows well: publications that don’t preach hope don’t sell as well as those that do.

Carr draws his arguments from reports of recent, but still pioneering, studies of brain physiology, and from psychological experiments. His book got a boost in late May when researcher Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan presented a paper before a Boston meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, claiming that empathy levels among college student had dropped 40 percentage points over the last 25 years. Konrath and other researchers blamed the decline on webification and computerized social networks. It was as if she had gone to Boston to confirm the predictions Carr had made.

His text, without help from Konrath, carries a worrisome message, especially for oldsters with the ideological biases of those who click to this blog. The message is that the death of ideology and activism may finally be upon us.

Carr’s chief point is that computerized search engines, Tweets and the like, as books originally did, have reduced the value of memory and cogitation, while boosting the lures of immediacy and statistical citation. Today we can get decision-making data faster than ever. We need not, or we come to believe they that we need not, meditate, ponder, or even sleep upon what we’ve absorbed -- let alone bring first-hand experience to our tasks.

The prevalence of this attitude, whose venerable genealogy Carr traces, came home to me a couple of months ago in a conversation with a student editorialist who, as a budgetary measure, seriously advocated that university bureaucrats be sent packing and students be hired, at lower salaries, to take their places. Though as a professor I am naturally no fan of university administrators, the proposal struck me as foolish.

“But if you do that,” I told the student, “we will lose institutional memory.”

“No we won’t,” he insisted. “We now have databases!”

The error of mistaking Google links for judgment, I might add, is not new to today’s college generation. A cohort of Mexico correspondents saw the same sort of unseasoned judgment in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s, while the NAFTA agreement was being debated. From what reporters in Mexico could see, economists and pundits were tapping macro statistics about the Mexican economy and concluding that it was on the cusp of joining the developed world. We looked around, at the problems of daily life in Mexico, and said to each other -- though rarely in print -- “Huh? Somebody who doesn’t know this country has got it all wrong!”

The subsequent development of the web has put a similar capacity for error at the fingertips of every literate American, as is evident in today’s proliferation of well-sourced bloggers who are bereft of personal experience. People in home offices in Iowa opine about the measures Pakistanis should take to quiet the Taliban -- or about the need to “secure our border” with Mexico. In the past, such opportunities for error were reserved to the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and think tanks with outsized endowments. Every fool with a web browser can now regard himself as a legislator and editorialize about what he or she “supports” or “opposes” -- as if someone with clout were heeding.

Carr’s warnings are practically an obituary for those of us who, largely as a fruit of the turmoil of the ‘60’s, developed dissident world views. Pacifism, socialism, Pan-Africanism: ideologies like these cannot be formed without the careful study of whole works of thought, because they draw a systemic picture of life that differs from prevailing “pragmatism,” i.e., the philosophy of adjustment to “democratic” capitalism.

The tools of the declining Left -- newspapers, heavy tomes, study sessions -- have little appeal today. Bits of information dropped into the world view of “pragmatic” common sense spur political action, in the rare instances when any is in the cards. When one Arizona rancher is murdered, presumably by Mexican immigrants, national outrage takes root within days: nobody feels a need to live on the border or to study the history of Mexican-American affairs.

Not all of Carr’s news is disheartening when read from the Left, however. He says that the emerging mentality is collective and that it quickly forms a consensus. He sees this as endangering an individualism and a literary heritage that he treasures, but he contradicts himself by reporting a finding, common to dozens of observers, that what the web does is heighten individualism through what scholars call the “fragmentation” of personal tastes and interests. Andy Warhol may have said that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, but what fragmentation means is that in many senses, everyone will be an eccentric for life.

As an old socialist, I of course have faith that people will regain empathy and that their movements will someday reinvigorate systemic critiques and visions -- or concoct new ones -- and will improve the world in qualitative ways: history can’t be over yet! But in the United States, no movement has done as much in the past two generations, and Carr and Kornath give little reason for hope. The upshot of The Shallows is that whatever happens in our nation, risings like the ‘60’s are at least a couple of generations away.

[Dick J. Reavis is a professor in the English department at North Carolina State University. He may be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

• Find The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, on Amazon.com.

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