"A Vehicle of Symbols and Nothing More." George Romanes, Theory of Mind, Information, and Samuel Butler1
Donald R Forsdyke
History of Psychiatry (2015) 26 (3) 270-287
Original version as submitted prior to
peer-review. The final, definitive version of this paper
is
published by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights
reserved. ©
D. R. Forsdyke
Introductory Video (5 min):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02mw8vf
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Information
The_controversial_role_of_Samuel_Butler
Modern_perspectives
Conclusions
Notes
References
EndNote:_Wittgenstein's_Certainty_is_Uncertain.
EndNote_Jan_2017:_Butler-Williams/Dawkins_Parallels
End_Note_(July_2019)_-_Hoyle's_Echoes_of_Romanes
End_Note_(Jan_2024)
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Today's
"theory of mind" (ToM)
concept is rooted in the distinction of nineteenth century philosopher William
Clifford between "objects" that can be directly perceived, and "ejects," such as
the mind of another person, which are inferred from one's subjective knowledge
of one's own mind. A founder, with Charles Darwin, of the discipline of
comparative psychology, George Romanes considered the minds of animals as
ejects, an idea that could be generalized to "society as eject" and, ultimately,
"the world as an eject" - mind in the universe. Yet, Romanes and Clifford only
vaguely connected mind with the abstraction we call "information," which needs
"a vehicle of symbols" - a material transporting medium. However, Samuel Butler was able to address, in informational terms depleted of theological trappings,
both organic evolution and mind in the universe. This view harmonizes with
insights arising from modern DNA research, the relative immortality of "selfish"
genes, and some startling recent developments in brain research.
Keywords
Brain, DNA as information,
ejective inference, information flow, subjectivity
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Charles Darwin's work impacted
three major areas - evolution in general, neuroscience/psychology, and
philosophy/theology. The demands of the first occupying much of his time, it was
a relief to pass the burden to someone who shared his enthusiasm, like himself
was independently wealthy and, most importantly, was four decades younger. Two
quotations capture this: 'How glad I am you are so young' marked Darwin's first
meeting with George John Romanes in 1874 (Forsdyke, 2001: 204). And when the
German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel dismissed part of Darwin's work as an 'airy
nothing,' Darwin in 1876 quipped that Romanes would some
day, I hope, convert an "airy nothing" into a substantial theory' (Schwartz,
2010: 138). Furthermore, the young man, having trained in neurophysiology at
Cambridge, and having a deep interest in both psychology and
philosophy/theology, was well prepared to address the latter two areas of
Darwin's work.
Thus, apart from his immediate family, during the last eight years of Darwin's
life (1809-1882) it is likely that no one had more opportunity to discuss
evolution with him than Romanes (1848-1894). Indeed, with permission, his
mentor's unpublished manuscripts on brain evolution were incorporated by Romanes
into a major work - Mental
Evolution in Animals (Romanes, 1884; Stauffer, 1975: 463-527). In 1886
The Times of London hailed Romanes as
'the biological investigator upon whom the mantle of Darwin has most
conspicuously descended' (Forsdyke, 2001: 220-222).
But their warm relationship was
shattered at Darwin's death. To cope with his grief, and to feel a way towards
deeper theological issues that resisted clear articulation, Romanes turned to
poetry - a passion that, together with his philosophical/theological writings,
he had either kept from the public, or had contributed anonymously (Romanes,
1889; Turner, 1974; Pleins, 2014). To his friends, he was 'the philosopher,' and
he sometimes signed his letters as such. His friends included the philosopher
William Clifford.
In his 1885 Cambridge Rede
Lecture, Romanes addressed from a neurobiological perspective the perceived
confrontation between evolution and theology engendered by Darwin's work - a
confrontation that endures. But, while the lecture and associated essays
(Romanes, 1882, 1885, 1886) opened up new territory, there was something
missing. Assisted by advances in DNA research, we can today recognize that he -
like most, but not all, of his Victorian contemporaries - did not see that the
issues might become clearer if addressed in informational terms. The Victorian
exception was Samuel Butler who, with Prague neurophysiologist Ewald Hering,
introduced information concepts to biology in the 1870s that would provide
foundations for an understanding of both brains (mental memory) and genomes
(genetic memory).
This paper is in four parts. The
first covers Clifford's idea of ejective inference and Romanes' theoretical
exploration of its scope. The second deals with Hering-Butler information
concepts. The third, extending the seminal studies of Schacter (2001) and Otis
(1994), covers the controversy surrounding Butler's work. Finally, this history
is related to some modern perspectives on science and theology.
Theory of mind as ejective inference
There is much current interest in 'theory of mind,' (ToM;
Premack and Woodruff, 1978; Frith, 2012), a topic dating back to Romanes (Obiols
and Berrios, 2009), who built on earlier work of Clifford. Your knowledge of
mind begins with your subjective understanding of your own thought processes. To
this you attach the word 'mind.' This is the seemingly inescapable frame of
reference through which you view both the world and the minds of others (Tononi
and Koch, 2014). But the way you view the world differs from the way you view
other minds. Since I share numerous attributes with you (e.g. we belong to the
same species) it would seem reasonable to suppose that my thought processes
operate in the same way as yours. So you can
imagine yourself 'in my shoes.' Based
on this ToM, you can make predictions about my behaviour that will generally be
correct (e.g. you would help an old lady across the road, and so would I). But
there remains uncertainty. For example, many in Western societies find it
difficult to conceive mindsets that lead to self-immolation for what are deemed
'terrorist' causes. Thus, my mind - not directly accessible to you - is an
inferred entity. As such it is, in the
word of Clifford, an 'eject' - not an 'object' that can be observed by your
senses, even if assisted by technology (e.g. the microscope and perhaps even
modern brain-scanning devices; but see Carrington and Bailey, 2009. Thus a ToM, relating to
'a subjective order in many
respects analogous to my own,' can be referred to as an ejective hypothesis
(Clifford, 1878: 275). So there are three 'ivities:'
subjectivity, ejectivity and
objectivity, of which the first is one's own, introspective, personal frame
of reference.
Mind as emergent property
Clifford, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at University
College, London, thought that, despite being perceivable by others only
ejectively, your mind (your subjectivity), like their minds (their
subjectivities), would obey the laws of physics and chemistry that applied to
the objective world. Such laws dealt with the two fundamental entities - matter
and motion, the latter often displaced today by the term 'energy.'
These two - matter, and the motion of
that matter - composed what he called 'mind-stuff,' something with the
potential to become constituted into a
form with the property we call 'mind' (i.e. stuff that, at some level of
complexity, could form mind). Thus, 'a moving molecule of inorganic matter does
not possess mind or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff'
(Clifford, 1878: 284). Assuming mind as part of your body, then 'the facts do
very strongly lead us to regard our bodies as merely complicated examples of
practically universal physical rules, and their motions as determined in the
same way as those of the sun and the sea' (Clifford, 1878: 279). So, 'when
matter takes on the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding
mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and
volition' (Clifford, 1878: 284). Mind, circumscribed within an organism, was a
property that could emerge when its mind-stuff had attained a sufficient level
of complexity. Thus: 'Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a
complex which is made up of elements themselves not rational, not intelligent,
not conscious' (Clifford, 1878: 286).
Romanes expanded the scope of ejective inference
Clifford (1878: 277) held
that 'recognition of a kindred consciousness in one's fellow-beings - is clearly
a condition of gregarious action among animals so highly developed as to be
called conscious at all.' Romanes took this further in his three essays
(Romanes, 1882, 1885, 1886). Could we ejectively infer what an animal was
thinking and so predict its behaviour? Conversely, could an animal ejectively
infer what we think and so predict our behaviour? While experimental studies
date the emergence of human ejective powers during childhood (Obiols and
Berrios, 2009; Frith, 2012), the design of such experiments in animals has
proved problematic (Penn
and Povinelli, 2007; Radick, 2007: 70-83). No less problematic are ejective predictions concerning
what appear to be higher levels of complexity than either animals or ourselves.
Romanes (1882: 885)
considered Clifford's 'essay -- the most closely reasoned and profound of all his
philosophical writings.' Like Clifford, he located mind within the brain
(Romanes, 1882: 871):
'Within experience, mind is
found in constant and definite association with that highly complex and
peculiar disposition of living matter called a living brain, the size and
elaboration of which throughout the animal kingdom stands in conspicuous
proportion to the degree of intelligence displayed, and the impairment of
which -- entails corresponding impairment of mental processes.'
Indeed,
in his Rede lecture he offered proofs that 'the grey matter of the cerebral
hemispheres is the exclusive seat of mind' (Romanes, 1885: 77). But he disagreed
with Clifford when it came to the scope of ejective thought being limited only
to individual natural forms. 'Because within the limits of human experience mind
is only known as associated with brain, it clearly does not follow that mind
cannot exist in any other mode' (Romanes 1885: 92). Building on Clifford's
'kindred consciousness,' he pointed to society - the 'social organism' - that
'although composed of innumerable individual personalities, is, with regard to
each of its constituent units, a part of the objective world - just as the human
brain would be, were each of its constituent cells of a construction
sufficiently complex to yield a separate personality' (Romanes, 1886: 51-52).
And it was possible to discern in this social organism some form of
subjectivity:
'Seeing that ideas are often, as
it is said, "in the air" before they are condensed in the mind of individual
genius, we habitually speak of the "Zeitgeist" as a kind of collective
psychology, which is something other than the mere sum of all the individual
minds of a generation. That is to say, we regard Society as an eject -- .
The ejective existence thus ascribed to Society serves as a stepping-stone
to the yet more vague and general ascription of such existence to the
Cosmos.'
The world as eject
Romanes proposed that the subjective individual can
extrapolate ejectively from other individuals he/she knows, to the collective of
individuals we deem as a society and, ultimately, to the inanimate world around
us - universal mind. Yet, according to Romanes in his paper - 'The world as an
eject' - Clifford would exclude the possibility of such a cosmic eject 'unless
we can show in the disposition of the heavenly bodies some morphological
resemblance to the structure of the human brain.' Romanes (1886: 49-50) thought
otherwise:
'For aught that we can know to
the contrary, not merely the highly specialized structure of the human brain,
but even that of nervous matter in general, may only be one of a thousand
possible ways in which the material and dynamic conditions required for the
apparition of self-consciousness can be secured. To imagine that the human brain
of necessity exhausts these possibilities is in the last degree absurd. -- To
take the particular conditions under which alone subjectivity is known to occur
upon a single planet as exhausting the possibilities of its occurrence
elsewhere, is too flagrant a use of the method of simple enumeration to admit of
a moment's countenance. -- Therefore, -- the one exhibition of subjectivity
furnished to human experience, is the proof thus furnished that subjectivity is
possible under some conditions. -- The
macrocosm does furnish amply sufficient opportunity -- for the presence of
subjectivity, even if it be assumed that subjectivity can only be yielded by
an order of complexity analogous to that of a nervous system.'
What form might this cosmic
subjectivity take? In the scheme of things, it is likely that you regard your
mind as at a high level - much higher than, say, a stone, or even your arm
muscle. If there is something higher than your mind, it is an abstraction that
you can imagine, if at all, only by extrapolation from mind. Considering 'that
the world -- is at least as susceptible of an ejective as it is of a objective
interpretation' (Romanes, 1886: 59), then Romanes supposed that, 'just as a
mathematician is able to deal symbolically with space in
n dimensions, while only able to
conceive of space as limited to three dimensions, so I feel that I ought not to
limit the abstract possibilities of mental being by what I may term the
accidental conditions of my own being' (Romanes, 1886: 54). Indeed, borrowing
words from the theological domain,1 concerning his 'world eject'
Romanes (1885: 92) held:
'There is a mode of mind which
is not restricted to brain, but co-extensive with motion, is con-substantial
and co-eternal with all that was, and is, and is to come; have we not at
least a suggestion, that high as the heavens are above the earth, so high
above our thoughts may be the thoughts of such a mind as this?'
Information flows from medium to medium
Like most of their Victorian
contemporaries, Clifford and Romanes never quite connected mind or body to the
abstract concept of 'information.' While not using this word, Clifford (1878:
279-280) recognized that different media could convey the same information. A
given item of information could exist in more than one medium:
'A spoken sentence and the same sentence written, are two utterly unlike
things, but each of them consists of elements; the spoken sentence of the
elementary sounds of the language, the written sentence of its alphabet. --
Or as we should say in mathematics, a sentence spoken is the same function
of the elementary sounds as the same sentence written is of the
corresponding letters.'
And, rather than mental
'information for,' he wrote of a mental 'representation of,' an external object
- a candlestick (Clifford, 1878: 285):
'The cerebral image is an imperfect representation of the candlestick,
corresponding to it point for point in a certain way. Both the candlestick and
the cerebral image are matter; but one material complex
represents the other material complex
in an imperfect way.'
Concerning mind, Romanes (1886: 57) instead of 'information' used abstractions
such as 'inward meaning,' 'spiritual grace,' and a reality that is 'psychic':
'Already we are able to perceive the immense significance of being able to
regard any sequence of natural causation as -- the merely outward manifestation
of an inward meaning. Thus, for example, I am listening to a sonata of
Beethoven's played by Madame Schumann. -- The great reality is the mind of
Beethoven communicating to my mind through the complex intervention of three
different brains with their neuromuscular systems, and an endless variety of
aërial vibrations proceeding from the pianoforte. The method of communication
has nothing more to do with the reality communicated than have the paper and ink
of this essay to do with the ideas which they serve to convey. In each case a
vehicle of symbols [medium] is necessary in order that one mind should
communicate with another; but in both cases this is a vehicle of
symbols, and nothing more. Everywhere,
therefore, the reality may be psychical, and the physical symbolic;
everywhere matter in motion may be the outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace.'
And concerning bodies, when
pondering the relationship between 'germ-plasm' contained in the egg and the
resulting organism, Romanes (1893) again used Clifford's 'representation:'
'The theory -- supposes merely that every part of the future organism is
represented in the egg-cell by corresponding material particles. And this, as
far as I can understand, is exactly what the [Weismann] theory of germ-plasm
supposes; only it calls the particles "molecules," and seemingly attaches more
importance to -- variations in their arrangement or "constitution," whatever
these vague expressions may be intended to signify.'
However, prior to this work, two others - the
Prague neurophysiologist Ewald Hering (1834-1918) and
the ex-sheep-farmer, artist, and satirist, Samuel Butler
(1835-1902) - had already begun to address in informational terms, the evolution
of minds and bodies in the universe (Schacter, 2001: 106-119; Forsdyke: 2006;
2009; 2011a: 7-26).
Fundamental to this was the idea
that items of information, abstract in themselves,
could not exist without media that
would preserve and transmit them. Nevertheless, the 'medium is the message'
(McLuhan, 1964: 23-35) is only true when 'message' refers to the
preserving/transporting agency, but not when it refers to the abstract item of
information contained within that
agency.
This distinction was later emphasized by the
influential American biologist George Williams (1926-2010): 'Information can
exist
only as a material pattern, but the
same information can be recorded in a variety of patterns
in many different kinds of material. A message is always coded in some medium,
but the medium really is not the message' (Williams, 1992: 10-13).
Thoughts as information-flows
Your mind manifests itself to you as information-flows that
you call 'thoughts.' In writing the previous sentence, I converted a
thought-information-flow into a textual-information-flow that you can read and
then, hopefully, understand (generate further meaningful
thought-information-flows). 'If I could think to you without words, you would
understand me better' lamented a friend of Samuel Butler, probably Charles Paine
Pauli (Butler, 1878: 84). Instead, Pauli
had to convert his thought-information-flow into a textual-information-flow or
speech-information-flow. Then Butler, having received this form of information,
had, in turn, to convert it back into a thought-information-flow. In an 1887
lecture he observed (Butler 1923: 190):
'The thought is not in the
alphabet, nor in the words into which the letters of the alphabet are
grouped. These are vehicles of thought, and in so far as they are this, they
have made thought more easy, more convenient, more tidy, and have infinitely
extended it; but they are not thought. Thought, and the appliances for
facilitating and extending thought, grow up together as supply and demand
invariably do; supply stimulates demand, and demand stimulates supply; but
neither is the other. So thought stimulates language, and language, thought;
feeling stimulates the nervous system, and the nervous system, feeling; but
the thought lies deeper than speech, and feeling, than the nervous system.'
Thought language preceded spoken language
The word 'language,' as pointed out by Butler in an essay
dated 1890 and 1894 (Butler, 1904: 181), derives from the Latin word for tongue.
This tends to make 'language' synonymous with 'spoken language,' rather than
generically referring to any form of coded information transfer - a transfer
from medium to medium according to some convention (code). Yet, guided by our
modern understanding of protein synthesis (see later), it follows that
thought-information-flow must have a
language (or languages) of its own, that we could refer to as 'mentalese'
(Pinker, 1994: 78-81). Thus, information flowed from Pauli to Butler when
Pauli's mentalese was converted into spoken words, and these words, in turn,
were then converted into Butler's mentalese. In his 1887 lecture Butler (1923:
200, 202) observed:
'As the word has only an
artificial connection with the idea for which it passes current, so the idea
itself has nothing but an arbitrary artificial and conventional connection
with the object which it serves to bring before the mind. -- Why do
Englishmen and Frenchmen attach the same ideas to many external objects but
not to all, and why do they differ so much more widely in language than in
ideas? The reason is because ideas are far earlier things, and are, in fact,
an infinitely older language, than the words which now do duty for them. The
lower animals have no articulated language, but few will say that they have
no ideas. A cat, for example, has very sufficient and definite ideas of a
mouse or of milk. -- Ideas, then, are much older than even the oldest and
least specialized means of formulating and conveying them; and it is because
they are so much older that they are so much more settled and differ so
infinitely less in different nations. -- It is only because language is so
much newer than either ideas or feelings, that we are able with comparative
ease to disinter its past and forecast its future; and if it were as old, it
would be as mysterious as feeling is.'
As with other languages,
mentalese should have syntactic structure. If mentalese evolved before spoken
languages, then this pre-existing mentalese could have influenced the evolution
of those languages, which hence might share common syntactical features. This
viewpoint would appear to differ from Chomsky (1965), who holds that constraints
underlying a 'universal grammar' arose somatically from 'physical or
developmental limitations' that had 'little or nothing to do with communication'
per se. In other words, language is an
exploitation, an 'exaptation,' of something that pre-existed and served some
other, essentially non-communicative, role in brain function (Fitch, 2013).
Perceptual distinctions are arbitrary
Clifford (1878: 285-286) distinguished the
cerebral image of an object from the
ultimate mental
image of that object, but held that both were contained in
'mind-stuff.' While the distinction intrigued Francis Crick in his 'scientific
search for the soul' (1995: 255-263), it is not of primary concern here. But we
can note that, once information in a cerebral image has been assimilated as a
thought, by definition, it has become a mental image. For example, the redness
of something may be conveyed in cerebral image mentalese. The evolutionary
'decision' that the mentalese conveying information on this particular
wavelength of light, would be perceived as 'red' - i.e. its qualia is red - may
be no different from the decision Darwin's parents made that the gurgling infant
from whom information flowed to their senses, would be perceived as 'Charles.'
He had to be called something. He had to be distinguished by some name.
Likewise, if it were evolutionarily advantageous to distinguish colours, each
wavelength would have been 'assigned' by natural selection an appropriate
perceptual 'name' (colour). And if there were no advantage in associating a
particular colour with a particular wavelength, then the assignment would have
been random. But even if arbitrary, there
had to be an assignment. The wavelength
had to be 'called' something. The
mechanistic basis by which 'mind-stuff' achieves this still eludes us. In 1887
the arbitrariness of the assignment of a feeling as 'pain' was noted by Butler
(1923: 198-199):
'The feeling of which we are
aware on being pricked by a pin has no primordial inherent inevitable connection
with our being pricked, either by a pin or by anything else, but it is an
arbitrary convention, invented and adopted for the purpose of enabling us more
certainly and easily to recognize the combination of things and circumstances
with which we have associated it, in exactly the same way as the word stone is a
conventional arrangement of certain sounds, -- by means of which the idea of
a stone is more rapidly and certainly
conveyed, though the word has no essential inherent connection with, nor
resemblance to, a stone itself.'
Genes and instincts as information
Erwin
Schrodinger's
What is Life?
(1944) inspired those who gave us DNA structure and associated informational
concepts in the 'classical period' of molecular biology (1945-1966; Chargaff,
1978: 85; Olby, 2009: 65-66; Forsdyke, 2011a: 18; Cobb, 2013; Battail, 2014:
148-151). Indeed, in Mind and Matter he touched on many of the issues raised here
(Schrodinger, 1958). But where did this famous physicist (born 1887 in Vienna)
get these ideas? Although there were various mid-twentieth century influences
(Sloan and Fogel, 2011: 1-35), in essays dated 1925 and 1960 - published as
My View of the World
- Schrodinger (1964) repeatedly cited the
Mneme books of Richard Semon, who had studied with Haeckel in Jena. English
translations appeared in the 1920s (Schacter, 2001). We can now trace the path
of fundamental informational ideas - oscillating between German and English -
from Hering/Butler to Semon (1904), to Schrodinger, and then on to Francis Crick
and others.
From the outset Butler saw the
inheritance of parental characters by offspring in informational terms and the
word 'information' was used in appropriate context (Butler 1880: 252):
'Does the offspring act as if it remembered? The answer to this
question is not only that it does so act, but that it is not
possible to account for either its development or its early
instinctive actions upon any other hypothesis that that of its
remembering, and remembering exceedingly well. The only alternative
is to declare -- that a living being may display a vast and varied
information concerning all
manner of details, and be able to perform most intricate
operations, independently of experience and practice.' [My italics]
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Traces
of this view are in his satirical Erewhon
(Butler, 1872). When Darwin's son Francis told Butler that Hering (1870) had
been thinking similarly (Forsdyke, 2006), Butler set about learning German, and
a translation of Hering was in the third of his major works on evolution -
Unconscious Memory (Butler, 1880). Butler held that the information
passed from generation to generation, be it related to bodily function, or to
brain function (instincts), was a 'hereditary memory.' He used 'memory,' not as
a process of recall (e.g. 'she's got a good memory'), but as
stored information - a usage familiar
today as computer memory. Butler's view was opposed by Romanes, who pointed out
that Charles Kingsley (1867) had described bird migration likewise:
'Yon woodwren -- essayed the
British Channel, and was blown back, -- [yet] he felt, nevertheless, that "that
was water he must cross," he knew not why: but something told him that his
mother had done it before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life,
and had inherited her "instinct" (as we call hereditary memory, in order to
avoid the trouble of finding out what it is, and how it comes).'
Yet, in Evolution, Old
and New, Butler (1879: 315-324) had already noted an ascription (1831) by
Patrick Matthew, the Scottish landowner acknowledged by Darwin as having
proposed evolution by natural selection decades earlier than himself ( Schacter,
2001: 115):
'The continuation of family
type [heredity], -- is mental as well as corporeal, and is exemplified in
many of the dispositions or instincts of particular races of men. These
innate or continuous ideas or habits seem proportionally greater in the
insect tribes, and in those especially of shorter revolution [lifespan]; and
forming an abiding memory, may resolve much of the enigma of instinct, and
the foreknowledge which these tribes have of what is necessary to completing
their round of life, reducing this to knowledge or impressions and habits
acquired by a long experience.'
In his 1838 Notebook M
Charles Darwin wrote likewise: 'Now if memory of a tune and words can thus lie
dormant, during a whole life time, quite unconsciously of it, surely memory from
one generation to another, also without consciousness, as instincts are, is not
so very wonderful' (Barrett et al., 1987: 521). In modern terminology, our minds
do not begin as 'blank slates.' Some specific 'softwares' come
'factory-installed.' Butler was defended (anonymously) by Cambridge philosopher
James Ward (1884), who accused Romanes of
improperly attacking, while at the same time silently adopting, Butler's
arguments (Pauly, 1982).
Hering's essay approved by Bateson's mentor
Although Hering's work was mentioned in a
Nature review of an essay by Haeckel
(Lankester, 1876), it seemed to have little impact. Writing to Romanes in 1876,
Darwin thought the essay 'clever and striking' and noted the 'stress on
inheritance being a form of unconscious memory,' but was otherwise dismissive
(Schwartz, 2010: 138-151). However, a Johns Hopkins University professor,
William K. Brooks (1848-1908), quoted Haeckel extensively. There was 'a profound
truth' in the view of Hering that 'Heredity is Memory,' (Brooks, 1883: 33-41):
'It is plain that this power [to
adjust to the environment] depends upon experience, but experience depends upon
"memory." So we may state, with truth, that in a certain sense, life is
memory. -- We know memory, however, only in connection with organization,
and if it is true that heredity, the power of an organism to reproduce its
like, is simply the memory, by the ovum, of the experience of its ancestors,
we must believe that there exists in the ovum an organization of some kind
to correspond to each of these past experiences.'
In 1883 and 1884 Brooks
was visited by a young Cambridge zoologist, William Bateson (1861-1926), who in
1886 would be much impressed by a paper of Romanes on the origin of species
(Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 131-132). In 1900 Bateson would also be much impressed
by an earlier paper of Gregor Mendel that he brought to the attention of the
English-speaking world (Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 198-220). Echoing Brooks,
Bateson refered to genetic factors, not as conveying 'information for,' but as
possessing 'the power to produce,' parental characters in their children (Cock
and Forsdyke, 2008: 325). And, echoing Romanes (1893), in an address in 1914
(Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 410-411) he supposed that:
'The elements upon which --
[parental characters] depend -- [are not] in any simple or literal sense
material particles. I suspect rather that their properties depend on some
phenomenon of arrangement. -- By the re-arrangement of a very moderate
number of things we soon reach a number of possibilities practically
infinite.'
Richard Semon
The
Hering/Butler viewpoint, and Butler's extensive elaborations thereof, were
adopted in Germany by Richard Semon (1859-1918), who coined a complex new
terminology. But Semon
considered Butler's work 'rather a retrogression than an advance' (Schacter,
2001: 122). Indeed, Francis Darwin praised Semon, while according Butler
perfunctory acknowledgment (Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 544). At the Darwin
Centenary celebration, Bateson (1909) praised Butler, but concerning the
'Mneme-theory of Semon,' the latter's mentor, Haeckel (1909), was ecstatic:
'The
most important advance that evolution has made since Darwin and the most
valuable amplification of his theory of selection is -- the work of Richard
Semon -- . He offers a psychological explanation of the facts of heredity by
reducing them to a process of (unconscious) memory. The physiologist Ewald
Hering had shown in 1870 that memory [stored information] must be regarded
as a general function of organic matter, and that we are quite unable to
explain -- reproduction and inheritance, unless we admit this unconscious
memory.'
Others, no less ecstatically,
later recalled the appearance of Die Mneme
as 'a comet, glowing and trailing a long tail' (Goldschmidt, 1956). Writing in
German in 1925,
Schrodinger ranked Semon with
Spinoza and Schopenhauer, as one with whose writings he had been 'deeply
involved' in his youth (Schrodinger, 1964: viii). However, by this
time Butler's work had won some recognition in the English-speaking world and
Semon was accused of improperly attacking, while at the same time silently
adopting, Butler's arguments (Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 549-553).
Sigmund Freud's writings on the
unconscious mind were then gaining attention, but he acknowledged a debt neither
to Butler
(Parkin-Gounelas, 2007), nor to Semon. In 1884 Hering had invited
the young Freud to become his assistant (Freud 1984: 211-212). In a book -
The Unconscious - An
Introduction to Freudian Psychology - philosopher Israel Levine
(1923: 39-42) portrayed Butler as representative of 'Pre-Freudian views of the
Unconscious,' linking him to Leibniz (1646-1716). However, in Anna Freud's
translation into German of Levine's book, Freud himself chose to translate the
Butler section, adding a footnote: 'German readers, familiar with this lecture
of Hering's and regarding it as a masterpiece, would not, of course, be inclined
to bring into the foreground the considerations based on it by Butler.' At a
1906 meeting of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, Freud had been critical of
Semon's
Die Mneme (Otis. 1994: 187-188):
'[I] learned from Semon's book
only that the Greek word for memory is
mneme. The book is characteristic of those pseudo scientists who imitate
exactitude merely by operating with numbers and concepts, and then feel they
have accomplished something. Hering's idea, which is Semon's point of departure,
is ingenious and subtle, but only the opposite can be said of Semon's work. Only
he who has new things to say is entitled to coin new terms.'
But, while
Butler lies buried as 'a classical crank,' Semon lives on
(Schacter, 2001: 196)! Happily, the Clifford/Romanes
version of ToM, as developed by James Baldwin (1861-1934) and Jean Piaget
(1896-1980), also lives on (Obiols and Berrios, 2009; Frith, 2012), but seldom
in the informational sense dealt with here and elsewhere (Tononi and Koch,
2014).2
Hereditary-information-flow
For present purposes our understanding, in exquisite molecular
detail, how Clifford's 'matter in motion' corresponds to the transfer of
information through the generations, is largely irrelevant. But it does help us
clarify the notion of information as an
abstraction. At face value, a DNA sequence appears as a random sequence of
its four base 'symbols' or
'letters,' - A, C, G and T. For example: TTCAGCCTCGTGGGGGACAAG. This sequence
can be nothing more than what you see. So the molecule is but a vehicle for the
bases of which it is composed. But it also, by virtue of the particular order
and type of its base letters, contains
information, just as the sentence you are now reading
contains information. This abstract
entity - the 'message' within a sequence - is
extracted from the DNA by the cellular transcribing apparatus which
assembles a corresponding RNA sequence without destroying the originating DNA
(i.e. the latter's information is copied). The information
within the resulting 'messenger RNA' is then
extracted by the cellular decoding apparatus, which uses it to
assemble a sequence of amino acid 'letters' - say FSPVGDK. Here the first
'letter' is F, but it could have been any one of the other nineteen amino acids.
This is a part of a protein, and is encoded by the above DNA sequence and its
messenger RNA copy. Thus, information
flows from medium to medium, and if the flow is faithful, we can say that
each medium has accurately received, preserved, and transmitted, it.
A protein folds into a structure
determined by the order and type of its amino acid letters. It can then play
some specific role. It may 'tell' a cell to accelerate a certain chemical
process, or to build more membrane. Thus, in less discrete (analog) form, the
information in the original message flows onward (Noll, 2003). While the details
need not detain us, we can clearly recognize the initial flow of digital
coded information from DNA to RNA and to protein, with each step of this
flow being entirely dependent on the chemistry of, and energy provided by, the
cell. There is no step wherein the
information is free of a medium. But the information itself is an
abstraction. The information is not the medium, but it is medium-based. In
terminology that antedates modern biochemistry (Clifford, 1878: 278), the
'motion of matter' brings hereditary information to serve our practical,
day-to-day, needs.
Permanency and independence of 'selfish' information
Apart from this, hereditary information is preserved and
passed through the generations. The medium - parental DNA - is replicated to
produce DNA-bearing gametes. Here information flows from one DNA molecule to a
structurally identical DNA molecule. The parents with the DNA they contain may
then perish. Each new generation is defined by the information that is passed to
it. Segments of DNA encoding information for cat characters, confer catness on
offspring.
Such segments, of which the best
understood are the genes, can be seen as independent entities. The essence of a
gene is its information - its informational message - not the transient medium
that contains it. This immortality of genes, which are preserved and transported
by the mortal organisms that host them, was noted by Wilhelm Johanssen in 1923
(Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 504-507), and by Hans Kalmus (1950), who remarked:
'A gene -- is a message, which
can survive the death of the individual and can thus be received repeatedly
by several organisms of different [successive] generations. A gene may
reproduce itself faithfully and in fact we do not know of any gene which can
survive without doing so. -- The permanency of [brain] memory as popularly
understood has often been stressed -
"the elephant never forgets" - but it is
certainly surpassed by the permanency of the genes, which carry their
messages through the generations.'
Here, of course, it is the
medium - DNA - that 'may reproduce
itself faithfully,' but the abstract informational message it contains does not
just come along for the ride. The presence of the
proper informational message ensures that DNA reproduction will be
sustained. Genic messages endowing offspring with more advantageous characters
will ensure, not only the survival of their hosts, but also their own survival,
and thus, the future replication of the media that happen to contain them
(Forsdyke, 2011b).
Macrocosmic information
Kalmus's theme was taken up by Williams (1966: 22-25) and,
more popularly, by Richard Dawkins (1976: 205-206),3 who considered
such 'selfish' genes as examples of universal 'replicators' that, along the
lines of Romanes (1886: 49-50), could serve as models for macrocosmic forms of
information:
'What -- is so special about
genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are
supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any
principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity?
When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect
to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there
anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever
the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based
on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures
are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of
life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic
reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is
true of all life? -- I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This
is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating
entities. The gene -- happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on
our own planet.'
Thus, matter in motion would have varied until
it happened to acquire both the ability to self-replicate, and the stability to
sustain a chain-reaction, so allowing production of more of its kind. There was
random variation in the material world until a form arose that 'made sense'
informationally, such that differential survival was possible. The material
world would have preceded the informational world. Natural selection's culling
of these randomly generated different informational forms would have followed.
The limits of DNA
Darwin came close to modern gene concepts when postulating
fundamental units named 'gemmules' (Forsdyke 2001: 151), and Butler (1878: 187)
supposed 'a memory to "run" each gemmule.' In 1923 the words 'memory' and 'hereditary continuity'
entered Johannsen's discussion of genes (Cock and Forsdyke, 2008: 504-507), but
'memory' (i.e. stored information) did not acquired regular usage in this
context until the 'information revolution' of the 1940s (Kalmus, 1950; Noll,
2003). However, the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (1950: 102, 182) went no
further than noting:
'The biological individuality of an organism seems to lie
in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the
effects of its past development. This appears to hold also of its mental
development. In terms of the computing machine, the individuality of mind
lies in the retention of earlier tapings and memories, and in its continued
development along lines already laid out.'
We
now know that a DNA sequence can simultaneously contain many, sometimes
overlapping, informational messages. These can convey both genic and non-genic
information that, given limited channel capacity, must compete with each other
for genome space
(Shadrin and Parkhomchuk, 2014;
Battail, 2014). So far, there is no
evidence that DNA can sustain the transfer of instinctual information between
generations (Forsdyke, 2011a: 3-26).
Thus the informational bases of nervous systems (mental memory) and genomes
(genetic memory) differ (Forsdyke, 2006, 2009).
The mental realm
Romanes and Butler were sons of clergymen and went to Cambridge with the
intention of taking holy orders. Romanes switched to the biological sciences at
an early stage. Butler completed the Classical Tripos and worked in a London
parish in 1858 to prepare for ordination. However, increasingly doubting earlier
religious teachings - such as are described in
The Fair Haven (Butler, 1873a) and
The Way of All Flesh (Butler, 1903) - he switched to practical
biology, reading Darwin's Origin of
Species and Justus Liebig's
Agricultural Chemistry while
profitably sheep farming in New Zealand (Forsdyke, 2006).
Confronted by dual variables
- matter/motion and mind -
Romanes pondered whether mind ('Spiritualism') was 'the ultimate Reality' that
anteceded matter and motion ('Materialism'), or vice versa. He concluded by
equating them (Romanes, 1886). This non-dualist 'theory of Monism' is described
in his Mind, Motion and Monism. Thus,
'mental phenomena and physical phenomena, although apparently diverse, are
really identical' (Romanes, 1895: 83). Yet, his other poetic,
philosophical and religious works (Romanes, 1889, 1895; Turner, 1974: 134-163;
Pleins, 2014) suggest that monism did not satisfy his deep theological doubts.
A
century later, Williams (1992: 3-4) also had doubts. He advised 'an open mind --
especially for neural phenomena. -- I have no inclination to deny the mental
realm or belittle its philosophical importance. I am inclined merely to delete
it from biological explanation.' Thus, he declared himself not an atheist, but
preferred to define atheism out of existence (Williams, 1997: 152-153):
'Whatever entity or complex of entities is responsible for the universe being as
we find it, rather than some other way or not there at all, can be called
God.'
Romanes (1882: 881-882) had distinguished two processes, those 'taking place in
a something which is without extension or physical properties of any kind, and
the other taking place in a something which -- we recognize as having extension
and other antithetical properties which we together class as physical.'
Likewise, Williams (1997: 164-166) categorized three distinct 'domains' for
processes: the material, the informational ('codical'), and the mental. A
segment of DNA was in the material domain. The abstract potentially immortal
gene that it might convey was in the informational domain. The mental domain
was, somehow, separate from these.
As
example, Williams gave the word 'guilt' that either 'can be a feeling (mental)
about oneself or a public judgment (codical), perhaps as a result of a jury
trial.' However, mental guilt can be seen as a mentalese-information-flow within
the accused that may, or may not, be externalized in speech or text. Likewise,
judicial guilt can be seen as mentalese-information-flow within a judge - an
opinion (thought) that becomes action when it is externalized as a spoken or
textual verdict. It seems unnecessary to disassociate informational and mental
domains merely because one information-flow tends to remain internalized as a
'feeling,' whereas the other is converted into action.
This was essentially the point made by Butler in his colourful 1887 lecture 'On
the genesis of feeling' (Butler, 1923: 193): 'But reflection will show that
opinion and feeling row in the same boat, and that as we form opinion so also we
form the feeling on which the opinion is based and from which it springs -
feeling being only opinion writ small.' He held that a 'grammar of feeling' had
evolved early, in much the same way that a grammar of language had evolved
(Butler, 1923: 205-206):
'Even our most well defined and hereditary instinctive feelings were in the
outset formed -- by long and arduous development of an originally conventional
arrangement of sensation and perception - symbols - caught hold of in the first
instance as the only things we could grasp, and applied with as little rhyme or
reason as children learning to speak apply the strange and uncouth sounds which
are all they can then utter. -- When I say "we," I mean, of course, our remote
invertebrate ancestors, -- [who] attached some of the few and vague sensations,
which were all they could then command, to such motions of outside things as
echoed within themselves, and used them to feel; hence, presently, by repetition
of the same process, they invented a second conventional arrangement of ideas -
symbols - to think the things with which they connected them, so as to docket
them and recognize them with greater force, certainty, and clearness; much
as we use words to help us docket and grasp our ideas and feelings, or
written characters to help us docket and grasp our words. Having once
established the connection they stuck to it, not probably without much
wrangling -- , nor yet without the growing up of many different languages,
as it were, of feeling, some of which doubtless still prevail among the --
lower existing forms of life. -- On this, the development of a rude grammar
of feeling, and of the nervous mechanism whereby its rules could be alone
formulated and carried into practice, were a mere question of time -- .'
By
virtue of his firm grasp of the information concept, Butler was better able to
cast aside religious trappings to arrive at an essentially similar viewpoint as
Romanes, while avoiding much of his theological angst (Forsdyke, 2006, 2009,
2011a : 7-26).
In Unconscious Memory,
Butler quoted Hering with approval (Butler, 1880: 102-103):
'The
materialist regards consciousness [mind, spirit] as a product or result of
matter, while the idealist holds matter to be a result of consciousness, and a
third maintains that matter and spirit are identical; with all this the
physiologist, as such, has nothing whatsoever to do; his sole concern is with
the fact that matter and consciousness are functions one of the other.' [Thus,
mind and matter are] 'two variables -- so dependent upon one another in the
changes they undergo in accordance with fixed laws that a change in either
involves simultaneous and corresponding changes in the other.'
Failure to communicate
However, as with many others who came to study Butler's writings, the historian
Frank Turner (1974: 164-200) did not see memory in informational terms. Despite
Butler's satirical style that many recognized, Turner took literally Butler's
self-proclaimed amateur status. Butler's 'patchwork' writings were considered to
lack 'philosophical rigor,' and some, such as
The Fair Haven, were declared 'a total
failure.' Turner concluded that 'there was nothing in Butler's writings to
suggest that he believed the presence behind reality itself had any essence -- .'
To Turner, this non-material lack of essence meant a 'spiritual,' not
'informational,' abstraction.
If Butler failed in any
way, it is perhaps that his fair-minded personal ToM led him to look
horizontally across to, rather than down on, those who might be his peers. In
short, he did not realize just how far ahead his own thinking was. The
truculence he so often encountered was seen as willful, rather than as an
expression of bewilderment. When The Fair
Haven was attacked, Butler (1873b) responded: ' The
main purpose of the book was not argumentative, but satirical. --
A writer cannot write for
everyone; he must assume a certain amount of apprehensiveness on the part of his
readers and is justified in leaving children and stupid people out of his
calculations.'
Outsourcing long term memory
Romanes had gone beyond Clifford in proposing that extracorporeal mindstuff
could become organized, but in 1886 he did not consider how this proposed 'world
eject,' perhaps with its own subjectivity, might relate to the apparently
localized subjectivity of an individual brain. Conflicting with the view that
'the phenomena of mind are invariable in their association with cerebral
structures' (Romanes, 1882: 880), the brain as 'the exclusive seat of mind' is
today challenged by considerations of the massive storage space needed both by
human brains for long-term memory, and by gametes for the transfer of
instinctual information into the long-term memory of the embryos they generate
(Forsdyke, 2009). Indeed, recent reports hint that such information might be
stored in, and retrieved from, an extracorporeal source, by a process analogous
to 'cloud computing.' This source could correspond, in part, to Romanes' world
eject. Evidence that part of our minds might not be cranially localized,
challenges no less a philosopher than Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969: 18e) who, in
On Certainty,
pondered: 'Now would it be correct to
say: So far no one has opened my skull in order to see whether there is a brain
inside; but everything speaks for, and nothing against, its being what they
would find there?'
Extreme examples of
extracorporeal localization could be rare individuals whose childhood
hydrocephaly was thought to have been successfully treated and are functionally
normal - one even obtaining a first class degree in mathematics. Yet they are
found to have only 5% the normal
volume of cerebral tissue (Lewin, 1980). While initially disbelieved, there are
now two further reports of relatively normal individuals with such minute brain
tissue volumes .
While, as noted by Makorek
(2012) and
Forsdyke (2014), these cases stretch the credibility of brain 'plasticity'
explanations (the 5% able to become functionally close to 100%), or 'redundancy'
explanations (we normally use 5% and the remaining 95% is superfluous), many
neuroscientists still disbelieve. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence, and neurones are known to be remarkably stress-resistant (Ding et al.,
2001). But there are growing indications that the hallowed foundations of modern
neuroscience are not as stable as once supposed (Firestein, 2012;
Satel and Lilienfeld, 2013).
And that complex 'factory-installed' behaviors (instincts) can be accounted for
on the basis of the information content of gametes alone is also hard to
believe. Outsourcing to a parallel extracorporeal racial memory - a 'collective
unconscious' (Jung, 1959) - that could be tapped into during neural development,
is no less hard to believe. Yet, failing the emergence of other explanations,
both these arguments-from-incredulity deserve a place at the table of
responsible neuroscientific discourse. While the critical 'crossroads
neuroscience has reached' is gaining recognition, a multimillion dollar 'brain
initiative' (Yuste and Church, 2014) may err if too narrowly focused on that
wonderful organ.
|
Inspired by Darwin and well versed in the classic languages, mathematics,
philosophy and theology, Victorians such as Clifford, Romanes, and Butler, seem
to have been better able to think broadly on biological problems - see the big
picture - than many, detail-laden, later
scientists and philosophers. The information concept entered biology with Hering
and Butler, and passed by way of Semon and Schrodinger to illuminate the
emergent discipline of molecular biology (1945-1966). Romanes was able to extrapolate Clifford's ToM hypothesis
from individual humans to their societies - a 'stepping stone' to mind in the
universe. The relationship, if any, of this higher order of subjectivity ('world
eject') to that of individuals, was clouded by his persisting theological
concerns. However, recent reports of normal memory, and even advanced intellect,
in rare individuals with greatly reduced brain volume, would be consistent with
an accessible extracorporeal long-term memory that might be part of such a
higher subjectivity. Whether of external or internal origin,
mentalese-information-flows ('thoughts') interact to generate the 'meanings'
that, when we are awake, exist as information-flows in our conscious and
unconscious minds and, when we are asleep, exist as information-flows in our
unconscious minds (Majorek, 2012; Mashoura and
Alkire, 2013). |
Acknowledgements
Gerard Battail and
Chris Frith provided constructive comments on the manuscript.
1.
Religious texts have so shaped our
language over millennia that we now use words, such as 'goodbye' (presumably
'God be with you'), with little thought for religious implications. Thus, it
does not follow, since we borrow words from the domain deemed theological,
that we necessarily subscribe to the beliefs of that domain. By the same
token, just as politicians act prudently by being seen to practice religious
faith, so daily prayers for family and servants was the norm in some
Victorian households (Butler, 1903), where it would have been important to
attract and retain dutiful servants, and to 'properly' educate children
(Schwartz, 2010: 25-27).
2.
Aspects of this paper overlap with the 'Integrated
Information Theory' (IIT) of Tononi and Koch (2014), who equate
consciousness with subjectivity - a definition similar to that of Majorek
(2012). However, the scope of this subjectivity is more limited than
proposed here. There is no Zeitgeist. Thus Tononi and Koch 'consider two
people talking: within each brain, there will be a main complex - a set of
neurons that form a maximally irreducible whole with definite borders -- .
Now let the two speak together. --
According to IIT, there should indeed be two separate experiences,
but no superordinate conscious entity that is the union of the two.'
For present purposes,
two people communicating is the same as two parts of an individual brain
communicating. In both cases, information flows can interact to give an
output greater than the sum of the whole.
3.
While a putative path to the selfish
gene idea is
described here and elsewhere (Forsdyke, 2011b), evidence for
direct antecedent influences is unclear, with the exception of
Williams who is cited by Dawkins.
But ideas usually arrive first, just as ideas. The words ideas
subsequently 'fly with' (Butler 1904: 187) can aid in their comprehension
and marketing. Different words compete
for this role. The words Johannsen, Kalmus, and Williams each assigned to
the idea of the
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EndNote:
Wittgenstein's Certainty is Uncertain.
A further paper on hydrocephaly (Lorber's work described in Lewin 1980) is in
Biological Theory
(placed online July 24th 2015). According to Altmetric, it received
immediate Internet attention.
An anecdotal contribution to
Neurosceptic Blog July 31st 2015 is of particular
interest:
From Rosie raveis:
"I have a unique perspective on this topic
having been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus last
year at age 58, and, I am a med school professor with a PhD in
physiology. My brain scans are scary, ventricles are not quite
as enlarged as those in the article, but close. Although I was
shunted three days after diagnosis, ventricular size remains the
same, evidently due to tissue compliance issues as we age. My
cranial volume is unusually large, suggesting long standing
abnormalities, but other than some vestibular problems in my
30s, I was symptom-free until last year, when my gait changed
and I had trouble writing an NIH grant, the dementia component
of this disease. Never had a head CT or MRI prior to last year,
so I don't know how this condition evolved over time. Both my
gait and short term memory have improved with the vp shunt, but
I have quite a way to go to reach "normal" again."
EndNote Jan 2017: Butler-Williams/Dawkins
Parallels
The parallels between the works of Butler and Williams/Dawkins, alluded to above
(Forsdyke 2011b), are not alone (Forsdyke 2017). Whereas Butler referred to a
chicken being an egg's way of making another egg,
so Dawkins referred to a body being a gene's way of
making another gene. Whereas Butler considered the machines, tools and
ideas fashioned by man as his "extracorporeal limbs," so Dawkins wrote of the
"extended phenotype" and "memes."
Thus in Lucubratio Ebria
1865 we find:
"It must be
remembered that men are not merely the children of
their parents, but they are begotten of the institutions of
the state and of the mechanical sciences under which they
are born and bred. These things have made us what we
are. We are children of the plough, the spade, and the ship;
we are children of the extended liberty and knowledge which
the printing press has diffused. Our ancestors added these
things to their previously existing members; the new limbs
were preserved by natural selection and incorporated into
human society; they descended with modifications, and hence
proceeds the difference between our ancestors and
ourselves."
There is a tendency to endorse the view that Butler was an amateur philanderer
distinct from professional scientists (Gillott 2015). Indeed, in a 1970 lecture
Gregory Bateson declared that Butler "never looked at organisms. I don't think
Butler ever looked at anything except his own cat." (Cock & Forsdyke 2008, pp.
525, 557). This discounts the four years Butler dedicated to keeping
his flocks of sheep healthy and reproductive. While Mendel was breeding peas and
studying Darwin in Moravia, Butler was breeding sheep and studying Darwin in New
Zealand. Indeed, Charles Darwin and William Bateson repeatedly emphasized the
great value of tapping the wisdom of those commercially concerned with the
raising of livestock (animal husbandry) and plants (horticulturalists). Although
not so wealthy as Darwin, Butler was financially independent and, on his return
to England, his days were spent, much like those of Darwin, deeply studying
evolutionary biology.
Forsdyke DR (2017) Speciation: Goldschmidt's heresy, once supported by Gould and
Dawkins, is again reinstated. Biological
Theory
Gillott D (2015) Samuel Butler against
the Professionals. Rethinking Lamarckism 1860-1900.
Legenda, London.
End Note
(July 2019)
- Hoyle's Echoes of Romanes
Jim Holt interviewed physicist Freeman Dysen (1), who brought his
attention to astronomer Fred Hoyle's science fiction work The Black
Cloud (1957).
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"The most plausible answer -- is that conscious life will take the
form of interstellar dust clouds." Hoyle wrote: "An ever-expanding
network of charged dust particles, communicating by
electromagnetic forces, has all he complexity necessary for
thinking an infinite number of thoughts."
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This seems to echo the writings of Clifford and
Romanes on conscious thought. (1) Holt J. (2018)
When Einstein Walked with Godel. Farrar, Straus & Giraud, NY. |
End Note
(Jan 2024)
That Hoyle may have been on to something, is supported by the discovery of
"Anyons" as fundamental particles/waves that have something akin to
memory. ln a book physicist Frank Wilczek (1), writes:
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Anions are quasiparticles that have a simple kind of memory. ...
People hope to use anyons as building blocks for quantum
computers, because you can use their memory to store and
manipulate information.
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A simple way to explain this approach of
Clifford and Romanes to the nature of conscious thought, is to consider
the many ways inwhich a single property (e.g. mind, flight) might have
evolved. Take birds, bats and bugs. Birds fly with feathers. Bats fly
with skin between their fingers. Bugs that fly have membranes. So, if
what we call "mind" can have evolved in brains, why could it not have
evolved in the universe through interactions between quasiparticles
(whatever they are). All this is highly
speculative, so we must be cautious. This was not helped by a team in
Brazil who faked a picture that was reproduced in Forsdyke (2014). But the
overall case stands. It would be nice if we could have more studies of the
adult brains of treated hydrocephalic children. (1) Wilczek F. (2022)
Fundamentals. Ten Keys to Reality. Penguin Books, NY. |
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This web-page was established in Nov 2014 and last revised
03 Jan 2024
by Donald Forsdyke
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