Self-insight is often considered one of the most distinctive aspects of human experience. While other species can recognize themselves in the mirror or have a rudimentary sense of self, the human capacity for self-insight and self-reflection is what makes our species unique. However, this capacity has many, often hilarious, limits. We all have some version of the emotionally volatile friend who is convinced he is the model of equanimity, or the humor-challenged colleague who, like Steve Carrell’s character Michael Scott, clings to his identity as the funny guy. In this essay I shall argue that humans have both remarkable skill and remarkable limitations when it comes to knowing themselves.

There are many types of self-knowledge, ranging from knowing our immediate sensory states to knowing what career or life partner is best for us. Here I’ll focus on one particular type of self-knowledge: knowing our own personality. This consists of knowing which patterns of behavior, thought, and feeling are particularly characteristic of us.

Some people think that we automatically know our own personalities. In other words, just by virtue of being you, you have direct access to what you are like. This view is very tempting when applied to ourselves, but becomes very difficult to maintain when thinking about our many friends, colleagues, and relatives who clearly are oblivious to their own most salient personality characteristics. If I ask you whether you know yourself better than anybody else knows you, you’re likely to say yes, but if I ask you the same thing about your roommate, that’s another story. In fact, there are many ways in which thinking about ourselves is fundamentally different from thinking about others (Pronin, 2008), so it’s not surprising that when we think about our own self-knowledge we are optimistic, but when thinking about others’ ability to know themselves we are much more pessimistic. It turns out both intuitions are partly correct.

Let’s start with the positive: I believe we have a lot of privileged information about ourselves. We typically know better than anyone else what our fears, hopes, fantasies, and preferences are. These are important parts of our personality. We know how the world looks to us, which again is central to understanding what we’re like (see the work of McAdams). We know our own history, we know how we responded to bullies in childhood, what we were thinking when we decided to buy the $135 bottle opener, how long it took us to get over our first heartbreak, and how we feel when praised by our mothers. These are important things to know about a person, and, most likely, no one can tell you better than the person him or herself. As any therapist or biographer can tell you, a full understanding of a person requires some understanding of their inner life, their subjective experience.

Now for the negative. First, we don’t have unfettered access even to our subjective experience. We have fears, insecurities, and biases that we are not aware of. We misremember our personal history, misinterpret our emotional reactions, get our preferences wrong, and make false predictions about what will make us happy (see the work of Wilson, Gilbert, Haybron, Dunn, and many others). Second, many aspects of personality are not internal. How funny you are, what makes you cranky, whether you’re a good leader — these aspects of your personality are defined by your overt behavior, your reaction to others and others’ reactions to you, regardless of how you see yourself. Third, we can’t perceive our own personality in a neutral, objective way. We have so much at stake when judging our own personality that our perceptions are distorted by strong motivations (see the work of Dunning, Sedikides and Swann). These motivations are varied and can distort self-perceptions in many directions (i.e., they don’t always lead to overly positive self-views).

Over the last few years, my research has focused on trying to develop a balanced theory of self-knowledge of personality. It’s hard to evaluate the amount of self-knowledge people have without a comparison point, so in my research I compare the accuracy of people’s own perceptions of their personality to the accuracy of their friends’ and family members’ perceptions of their personality. In other words, I ask: When do people know themselves better than others know them?

My model, the Self–Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) model, makes two predictions. First, I claim that self-knowledge should be greater than other-knowledge for internal aspects of personality. We know better than others how anxious and optimistic we are, for example. It doesn’t really matter what your friends think, if you feel extraordinarily proud of who you are, then you have high self-esteem. In contrast, when it comes to our overt behavior, (e.g., how funny and assertive we are), I claim that others who know us well are in a better position to judge. This prediction is based on evidence showing that others have a hard time judging our thoughts and feelings, and we have a hard time seeing our own behavior objectively (see the work of Andersen, Malle, and Funder).

Second, I predict that others are in a better position than the self to judge highly evaluative (i.e., very desirable or undesirable) aspects of our personality. When it comes to how intelligent, attractive, and creative we are, we know less than our friends and family do. That isn’t to say that our friends and family don’t have their own biases. In my own research, friends and family members consistently provide rosier judgments of our participants than do the participants themselves (so next time your mom tells you you’re beautiful, don’t take it too seriously). But despite this positive slant, the friends’ and family members’ ratings are still more accurate at distinguishing the most attractive/intelligent/creative participants from the least. It’s the difference between having a perception that is correct in the absolute (e.g., my roommate has an IQ of 136) — which people are not very good at — and having a perception that is correct in a relative sense (i.e., nobody is quite as wonderful as their friends and family members say, but those who are described most positively by their friends and family do score the highest on objective measures). Self-perceptions on these traits are less positive in the absolute sense, but also show less correspondence to reality in the relative sense (i.e., those who rate themselves most positively do not score the highest on objective measures). Thus, even though others are overly optimistic about their friends and family members, people’s illusions tend to be proportional to their loved ones’ actual qualities.

How do I measure reality? That is the $64,000 question. There is no perfect way. The challenge, of course, is to obtain a measure of personality that is independent of the self-ratings and of the friend and family members’ ratings. I’ve used several different methods. In one study with my collaborator Matthias Mehl, we put a recorder on people for four days. It came on and off at regular intervals and recorded the sounds of their everyday life. From those recordings, we could extrapolate how people behave in their natural environments. In that study, we also asked participants to rate how they think they typically behave, and we asked their friends and family members to tell us how they think the participant typically behaves. We were then able to compare these ratings to our objective measure of how the participants behaved from the sound files we recorded over those four days. If you’re wondering whether people censored their behavior while wearing our recorders, we did, too. But Matthias’s extensive research (and our dozens of sound files capturing off-key singing) shows that people forget about the recorder after about an hour or two. So, we were pretty confident that our four days of recording provided a representative picture of how our participants typically behave. And our results showed that self-ratings and close others’ ratings were about equally accurate overall, but there were some behaviors (e.g., arguing) that the self was more accurate about than others, and other behaviors (e.g., attending class) that others were more accurate about than the self.

To test the predictions of the SOKA model, I ran another study in which I collected self- and friend-ratings of personality traits, including internal and external traits, and evaluative and neutral traits. In this study, my objective measures were based on people’s behavior and performance in laboratory-based tasks. For example, to assess anxiety objectively, I had people give a speech to a stern-looking experimenter who told them that their speech would be evaluated by a team of experts, and that public speaking ability was predictive of occupational success, relationship success, and every other good thing under the sun. Oh, and the topic of the speech is: “What I like and don’t like about my body”. Ready? Go. I then had coders watch the videos of the speeches and identify objective signs of anxiety (e.g., nervous hand and mouth movements). I also collected objective measures of assertiveness, talkativeness, self-esteem, creativity, and intelligence. My results were consistent with the SOKA model predictions. For internal traits (e.g., anxiety, self-esteem), self-ratings were more accurate than friends’ ratings, whereas for external traits (e.g., assertiveness, talkativeness) there was no difference. For evaluative traits (intelligence and creativity), friends’ ratings were more accurate than self-ratings.

Each of these studies has its limitations, and they are by no means the final word on self-knowledge of personality. There are many questions left to be answered. To me, the most important implication of these studies (and the work of Oltmanns and Turkheimer, and Robins and John) is that self-knowledge is a complicated thing — in some ways we know ourselves better than anyone else knows us, but there are also some aspects of our personality that others can see more clearly than we can. Humans’ unique capacity for self-reflection does not automatically translate to immaculate self-knowledge.

I’d like to end by posing some of the unanswered questions about self-knowledge, and some speculations.

1. Are people aware of the discrepancies between how they see themselves and how others see them? My graduate student, Erika Carlson, is tackling this question and finding that people do have some insight into the ways in which their views of themselves are idiosyncratic, and may not be shared by others.
2. How do people react when confronted with these discrepancies? Do they change their self-views? As you might have guessed from personal experience, it’s not so easy to get people to correct their self-views. But just like you keep hoping that maybe next time your deluded friend/colleague/relative will finally pick up on your subtle hints, we researchers keep hoping that some manipulation or intervention will show an effect. Like you, we haven’t had any luck so far. Our research suggests that small doses of feedback do not have much impact on people’s self-views. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others does not seem to be enough to increase self-knowledge, at least not in small doses.
3. Should we seek to know ourselves better? There has been an ongoing debate in psychology about whether having an accurate perception of oneself is healthy, or whether positive illusions about ourselves are more adaptive. Would you want to know if it turned out you were dull and obnoxious? What if you had a very specific personality tick that was driving everyone around you crazy? Clearly, there are pros and cons to acquiring self-insight. I think there is a lot more to be learned about this issue. Like everything else in psychology, the answer is probably “it depends.” But what does it depend on?

References

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Andersen, S. M., & Ross, L. (1984). Self-knowledge and social inference: I. The impact of cognitive/affective and behavioral data. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 280-293.

Dunning, D. (1999). A newer look: Motivated social cognition and the schematic representation of social concepts. Psychological Inquiry, 10, 1-11.

Dunning, D. (2005). Self-insight: Roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. (2004). Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health,
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Hayes, A. F., & Dunning, D. (1997). Construal processes and trait ambiguity: Implications for self-peer agreement in personality judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 664-677.

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Malle, B. F., Knobe, J., & Nelson, S. (2007). Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior: New answers to an old question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 491-514.

Malle, B. F., & Pearce, G. E. (2001). Attention to behavioral events during social interaction: Two actor-observer gaps and three attempts to close them. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 278-294.

McAdams, D. P. (1995). What do we know when we know a person? Journal of Personality, 63, 365-395.

Pronin, E. (2008). How we see ourselves and how we see others. Science, 320, 1177–1180.

Pronin, E., Kruger, J., Savitsky, K., & Ross, L. (2001). You don’t know me, but I know you: The illusion of asymmetric insight. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 639-656.

Robins, R. W., & John, O. P. (1997). The quest for self-insight: Theory and research on accuracy and bias in self-perception. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, and S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of Personality Psychology, (pp. 649-679). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Sedikides, C. (1993). Assessment, enhancement, and verification determinants of the self-evaluation process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 317-338.

Sedikides, C., & Green, J. D. (2000). On the self-protective nature of inconsistency-negativity management: Using the person memory paradigm to examine self-referent memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 906-922.

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Sedikides, C., & Strube, M. J. (1995). The multiply-motivated self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1330-1335.

Swann, W. B., Jr. (1983). Self-verification: Bringing social reality into harmony with the self. In J. Suls & A. G. Greenwald (Eds.), Social psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 2, pp. 33-66). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Swann, W. B., Jr., Wenzlaff, R. M., Krull, D. S., & Pelham, B. W. (1992). The allure of negative feedback: Self-verification strivings among depressed persons. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101, 293-306.

Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self-other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 281–300.

Vazire, S., & Carlson, E. N. (2010). Self-knowledge of personality: Do people know themselves? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 605-620.

Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (2008). Knowing me, knowing you: The accuracy and unique predictive validity of self-ratings and other-ratings of daily behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1202-1216.

Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.

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All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter and energy cannot increase but apparently information can.

Two Framing Ideas About Human Evolution.

In “The Metaphysician’s Nightmare”, Bertrand Russell described a Hell in which there is a special torment for practitioners of each branch of scholarly inquiry. In the place in Hell reserved for statisticians, for example, a pack of monkeys walk aimlessly and endlessly on typewriters, each time creating a perfect rendition of a Shakespearean sonnet. Our touching human faith in the “Law of Large Numbers” is revealed by laughing Fortune as the illusion it is—blind chance is blind chance, with no concern to balance things out in the long run.

Russell neglected to mention the place in Hell reserved for moral philosophers, where another pack of monkeys, these wearing human masks but following only their native impulses, ceaselessly enacts a perfect pantomime of the most genteel human morality. Why is this tormenting? Because a demon with appears every hundred years to say, “This isn’t just the Hell you’ve come to, it’s the hell you left behind.” If he’s right, then our touching human faith in what Immanuel Kant called with awe “the Moral Law within” is an illusion as well. Natural selection is natural selection, with no shred of interest in morality. And we humans are just the most hairless and talkative monkeys it has produced to date.

So is the demon right? Recent years have seen a tremendous increase of interest in the bearing of Darwinian thought on morality. Optimistic Darwinists seek to reconcile evolution with morality, but skeptical Darwinians agree with the demon: what moral philosophers have taken to be human morality is a civilized camouflage for an underlying psychology evolved in response to quite different forces.

This skepticism is not, however, your great-grandfather’s Social Darwinism, which saw all creatures great and small as pitted against one another in a life or death struggle to survive and reproduce—“survival of the fittest”. We now know that such a picture seriously misrepresents both Darwin and the actual process of natural selection. Individuals come and go, but genes can persist for a thousand generations or more. Individual plants and animals are the perishable vehicles that genetic material uses to make its way into the next generation (“A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg”). From this perspective, relatives, who share genes, are to that extent not really in evolutionary competition; no matter which one survives, the shared genes triumph. Such “inclusive fitness” predicts the survival, not of selfish individuals, but of “selfish” genes, which tend in the normal range of environments to give rise to individuals whose behavior propels those genes into future.

A place is thus made within Darwinian thought for such familiar phenomena as family members sacrificing for one another—helping when there is no prospect of pay-back, or being willing to risk life and limb to protect one’s people or avenge harms done to them.

But what about unrelated individuals? “Sexual selection” occurs whenever one must attract a mate in order to reproduce. Well, what sorts of individuals are attractive partners? Henry Kissinger claimed that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, but for animals who bear a small number of young over a lifetime, each requiring a long gestation and demanding a great deal of nurturance if it is to thrive into maturity, potential mates who behave selfishly, uncaringly, and unreliably can lose their chance. And beyond mating, many social animals depend upon the cooperation of others for protection, foraging and hunting, or rearing the young. Here, too, power can attract partners, but so can a demonstrable tendency behave cooperatively and share benefits and burdens fairly, even when this involves some personal sacrifice—what is sometimes called “reciprocal altruism”. Baboons are notoriously hierarchical, but Joan Silk, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, and colleagues recently reported a long-term study of baboons, in which they found that, among females, maintaining strong, equal, enduring social bonds—even when the individuals were not related—can promote individual longevity more effectively than gaining dominance rank, and enhance the survival of progeny.

A picture thus emerges of selection for “proximal psychological mechanisms”—for example, individual dispositions like parental devotion, loyalty to family, trust and commitment among partners, generosity and gratitude among friends, courage in the face of enemies, intolerance of cheaters—that make individuals into good vehicles, from the gene’s standpoint, for promoting the “distal goal” of enhanced inclusive fitness.

Why would human evolution have selected for such messy, emotionally entangling proximal psychological mechanisms, rather than produce yet more ideally opportunistic vehicles for the transmission of genes—individuals wearing a perfect camouflage of loyalty and reciprocity, but fine-tuned underneath to turn self-sacrifice or cooperation on or off exactly as needed? Because the same evolutionary processes would also be selecting for improved capacities to detect, pre-empt and defend against such opportunistic tendencies in other individuals—just as evolution cannot produce a perfect immune system, since it is equally busily at work improving the effectiveness of viral invaders. Devotion, loyalty, honesty, empathy, gratitude, and a sense of fairness are credible signs of value as a partner or friend precisely because they are messy and emotionally entangling, and so cannot simply be turned on and off by the individual to capture each marginal advantage. And keep in mind the small scale of early human societies, and Abraham Lincoln’s point about our power to deceive.

Why, then, aren’t we better—more honest, more committed, more loyal? There will always be circumstances in which fooling some of the people some of the time is enough, for example, when society is unstable or individuals mobile. So we should expect a capacity for opportunism and betrayal to remain an important part of the mix that makes humans into monkeys worth writing novels about.

How close does all this take us to morality? Not all the way, certainly. An individual psychology primarily disposed to consider the interests of all equally, without fear or favor, even in the teeth of social ostracism, might be morally admirable, but simply wouldn’t cut it as a vehicle for reliable replication. Such pure altruism would not be favored in natural selection over an impure altruism that conferred benefits and took on burdens and risks more selectively—for “my kind” or “our kind”. This puts us well beyond pure selfishness, but only as far as an impure us-ishness. Worse, us-ish individuals can be a greater threat than purely selfish ones, since they can gang up so effectively against those outside their group. Certainly greater atrocities have been committed in the name of “us vs. them” than “me vs. the world”.

So, are the optimistic Darwinians wrong, and impartial morality beyond the reach of those monkeys we call humans? Does thoroughly logical evolutionary thinking force us to the conclusion that our love, loyalty, commitment, empathy, and concern for justice and fairness are always at bottom a mixture of selfish opportunism and us-ish clannishness? Indeed, is it only a sign of the effectiveness of the moral camouflage that we ourselves are so often taken in by it?

Speaking of what “thoroughly logical evolutionary thinking” might “force” us to conclude provides a clue to the answer. Think for a moment about science and logic themselves. Natural selection operates on a need-to-know basis. Between two individuals, one disposed to use scarce resources and finite capacities to seek out the most urgent and useful information and the other, heedless of immediate and personal concerns and disposed instead toward pure, disinterested inquiry, following logic wherever it might lead, it is clear which natural selection would tend to favor. And yet, Darwinian skeptics about morality believe, humans somehow have managed to redeploy and leverage their limited, partial, human-scale psychologies to develop shared inquiry, experimental procedures, technologies, and norms of logic and evidence that have resulted in genuine scientific knowledge and responsiveness the force of logic. This distinctively human “cultural evolution” was centuries in the making, and overcoming partiality and bias remains a constant struggle, but the point is that these possibilities were not foreclosed by the imperfections and partiality of the faculties we inherited. As Wittgenstein observed, crude tools can be used to make refined tools. Monkeys, it turns out, can come surprisingly near to objective science.

We can see a similar cultural evolution in human law and morality—a centuries-long process of overcoming arbitrary distinctions, developing wider communities, and seeking more inclusive shared standards, such as the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Humans Rights. Empathy might induce sympathy more readily when it is directed toward kith and kin, but we rely upon it to understand the thoughts and feelings of enemies and outsiders as well. And the human capacity for learning and following rules might have evolved to enable us to speak a native language or find our place in the social hierarchy, but it can be put into service understanding different languages and cultures, and developing more cosmopolitan or egalitarian norms that cut across differences. Consider the way that empathy and the pressure of consistency have led to widespread recognition that animals, our fellow monkeys included, should receive humane treatment. We still must struggle continuously to see to it that our widened empathy is not lost, our sympathies engaged, our understandings enlarged, and our moral principles followed. But the point is that we have done this with our imperfect, partial, us-ish native endowment. In our best moments, we can come surprisingly close to being moral monkeys.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/moral-camouflage-or-moral-monkeys/?hp

I would like to open by paraphrasing Dobzhanzky’s well-known title (1973) and assert that nothing in human psyche and society makes sense except in the light of cultural evolution. Having written the paraphrase I must confess that, alas, I cannot affirm it. The study of cultural evolution will not yet support such an assertion. It is too scattered and incomplete. Yet I believe that such a paraphrase indicates the proper scope for a robust investigation of cultural evolution. Accordingly I’ll offer a few observations on what we must do to move in that direction.

* * * * *

But first I want to deal with a mundane organizational matter. Once I’d committed myself to this post I recalled those many times when I set out to write an easy piece – nothing new, just bang out a couple of thousand quick words on stuff I’ve been chewing on for some time. Before I knew it Quick and Easy had grown into an Ungainly Monster with no end in sight. As this assignment had all the earmarks of such a beast I decided on a preemptive strike in the form of a series of posts at my own blog, New Savanna. The idea was to think things through ahead of time so that: 1) I had at least the ghost of a chance of writing a coherent post for the Forum, and 2) I would have plenty of online back-up material at hand.

I have listed those posts in an appendix and will refer to them as CE1, CE2, CE7, etc. I’ve also gathered those posts, including some comments, into a single PDF document which you can download from the Social Science Research Network (here). I would, of course, be happy to comment on those posts either here or at New Savanna (see URLs in the appendix).

My Slant

While I accept the anthropological view of culture, I tend first to think of such things as literature, music, art, and film. I was trained in English Literature; I am a musician and have published a book about music (Benzon 2001); I like to photograph graffiti [1]; and have developed a deep interest in animation in the last several years. My discussion is thus biased toward those kinds of things.

Thus I will not be discussing one of the most robust research programs in cultural evolution, gene-culture cooevolution. I am willing to take it as given that cultural environments have influenced our biology. But for reasons given in CE1 and CE2 I don’t think gene-cultural cooevolution has much to say about the phenomena that most interest me.

Nor do I intend to say much about memes. The term is a brilliant coinage, and I’ve adopted it myself, but I think the conceptualization that has come with it is unfortunate. The notion that culture consists of homuncular memebots hopping about from brain to brain is uninformative and thus a useless time sink (cf. Benzon 2002).

And yet I believe that Dawkins got something right. As I say in CE3, Dawkins’ key insight is that, in the cultural evolutionary process, selection operates on cultural entities and not on human phenotypes. That is to say, the evolutionary costs and benefits accrue directly to cultural entities, not to the human beings who create and consume them. There are cases where cultural entities seem to thrive at the expense of humans, but this is a secondary matter and, in the large scope, not worth the attention that’s been lavished on them in popular discussions. Most of my preparatory effort has been aimed at working out such a scheme (CE3, CE4, CE5, CE6, and CE8; see also Benzon 1996, Benzon 2001) and I will offer a few remarks on those matters here and there.

A Start: Colin Martindale

Let me set the stage by quoting a passage from the excellent review Tim Lewens (2007) wrote for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

One might fear that in the end cultural change, and the influence of cultural change on other aspects of the human species, are best understood through a series of individual narratives. Our brief examination of memetics illustrated this concern. We gain no real explanatory insight if we are told that ideas spread through populations, some more successfully than others. We want to know what makes some ideas fitter than others. And it is not clear that there will be any general rules that can help us to answer this question. In the biological realm we need detailed accounts of local environmental circumstances, species-specific physiology and anatomy, and so forth, to tell us what makes one organic variant fitter than another. Similarly, in the cultural realm we will need to look at local psychological dispositions to explain why some ideas are more likely to spread than others. So any explanatory value to be had from memetics is parasitic on conventional work done in psychology.

With those caveats in mind, let’s take a quick look at the work of the late Colin Martindale. Like Dawkins, Martindale realizes that cultural selection operates on cultural objects and processes (1990). Unlike Dawkins he has both a theory about those processes and empirical data supporting that theory.

A need for novelty is the driving factor in Martindale’s scheme. Novelty value is what recommends expressive works to their audience. The trouble, of course, is that once one has sufficient experience of the new, it loses its capacity to excite. It has become old. Psychologists call this habituation, and it is a much-studied aspect of neural operation. Martindale argues that art overcomes habituation 1) through the regressive inclusion of more primordial content and 2) through the formal elaboration of content (pp. 34-76) – here’s an entry point for the local psychological dispositions Lewens mentions.

Using his model Martindale argues for cyclic change in aesthetic styles within a given tradition. Basically, an increase in primordial content (novelty) is followed by a relaxation of stylistic rules. That permits stylistic change (novelty) which then allows the use of primordial content to recede as the new style becomes increasingly elaborated. At some point, however, further elaboration becomes pointless and it’s time to up the primordial content. And so on. Given these predictions, Martindale has analyzed long runs of French and British and American poetry, classical music, Gothic architecture, European painting, Japanese prints, and New England grave stones. In all cases he has found cyclic variations in form and content in line with his predictions.

Martindale’s theory is thus fundamentally about audience reception. For all practical purposes we can treat artists – even the most exalted of geniuses – as an anonymous fountain that spews forth works for public consideration. People decide which works they like and it is those preferences that, in the long run, allow selected works to enter the canon. Thus when Martindale is tracking artistic change he is also indirectly tracking changes in the collective psyche.

But how can we conceptualize the collective psyche without falling into hopeless mysticism?

Collective Culture

Let me offer a simple model system, one simple enough that we are probably within range of understanding it at the neural level. I used this example in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, and the following discussion is a paraphrase of that discussion.

Consider the bi-modal clapping that routinely rewards a successful performances—music, drama, circus, etc.—in eastern European communities, but which is less common in western Europe and North America. Z. Néda and colleagues (2000) have investigated this phenomenon, recording applause for a number of performances in Romania and Hungary. The applause would start out randomly and then quickly become strongly synchronized. Synchronized clapping would continue for a short while (one mode) and then disintegrate into random clapping (the other mode), from which synchronized clapping would reemerge, and so forth.

Analysis of the recordings revealed two things:

1. The average noise level was greater during the random clapping than during the synchronized clapping.
2. During random clapping individuals clapped at roughly twice the frequency they used during synchronized clapping.

Clearly the greater volume during random clapping came because individuals were clapping faster. But during this mode, the time between individual claps varied more than when people clapped at the lower rate. That variability made it impossible for the group to synchronize at the higher rate, which also produced a louder sound.

Néda concluded that audience members were caught in a conflict. They can express one value by making as much noise as possible through rapid clapping. If, however, they wish to express another value by synchronizing their clapping, they must clap more slowly, thereby lowering the volume. It is impossible simultaneously to maximize these two aims. The group deals with this conflict by switching back and forth between two different expressive modes.

The investigators assume that the loudness of the clapping reflects the audience members’ enthusiasm for the performance, while synchronous clapping expresses group solidarity, which seems reasonable enough. What is immediately significant, however, is the mechanism by which these two values, whatever they are, were expressed by the group. That mechanism is clearly self-organizing. No one leads audiences in this behavior. It just happens.

Now I want to take a quick look at memes (cf. CE3) by shifting point of view slightly and asking an obvious question: What is audience attending to in this process? That is, what aspects of the sound stream are carrying the expressive messages in these two clapping modes? Obviously, synchrony in one case and volume in the other. We can thus say that those properties are memetically active (CE5).

In my reading, those properties are memes (CE3). They don’t replicate and scatter (the wrong theoretical imagery). Rather, they allow mutual coordination. In my notes I devote considerable attention to a more complex example, so-called Rhythm Changes (CE5, CE6). This complex is named after George Gershwin’s song, “I Got Rhythm,” and refers to the song’s harmonic structure, which spans 32 bars. Gershwin’s song was so popular that by the late 1930s other composers where writing their own melodies on that harmonic foundation. This practice went riot with the emergence of bebop in the early 1940s, with every musician of stature creating one or more tunes on Rhythm Changes. Consequently any reasonably competent jazz musician can recognize Rhythm Changes tunes regardless of the melody and can jam on Rhythm Changes anytime, anyplace.

It is not obvious to me just how one is to characterize such complex patterns in physical terms. In my posts I draw on fairly standard means of musical notation, but that’s pretty far from the sound itself. But if the patterns weren’t physical, musicians couldn’t use them as vehicle for coordination.

What this suggests about memes in general, however, is that various disciplines may already be quite familiar with them under rubrics such as semiotic codes, or what not. I explore this possibility in a discussion of the emic/etic distinction in a comment to John Wilkins in CE3 and in my discussion of language in CE8, including comments made to John Lawler. But this is taking us a bit afield, into perceptual and cognitive psychology. Both are necessary to our study, but I want to return to group behavior.

I want to move beyond the immediacy of post-performance applause. What happens in the days and weeks following, say, the opening of a film? What gives a film legs, as they say? That’s a question investigated by Robert de Vany in Hollywood Economics, a profound and imaginative treatment of the economics of the movie business. De Vany is interested in understanding what happens to movies once they’re released to the public. To that end he has analyzed a ten year run of box office receipts from the 1990s.

Most movies, of course, don’t even break even, much less make a profit – not in theatrical release, though many movies finally break-even or make a profit though DVDs and TV. The deep and ineradicable condition of the business seems to be that there is no reliable way to estimate the market appeal of a movie short of putting it on screens across the country and seeing if people come to watch. What De Vany shows is that that about 3 or 4 weeks into circulation, the trajectory of movie dynamics (that is, people coming to theatres to watch a movie) splits into one of two alternative trajectories (a term of art in the study of dynamical systems). Most movies enter a trajectory that leads to diminishing attendance and no profits. But a few enter a trajectory that leads to continuing attendance and, eventually, a profit. Among these, a very few become block busters.

No matter how the studios and distributors try to manipulate audience behavior through advertising and public relations, the most important factor in movie success is word-of-mouth (pp. 60-63). People sitting together in a theatre influence one another’s experience of the film through remarks to one’s immediate neighbors, but also through sighs, groans, and laughter audible several rows away. When the movie’s over people tell their friends about the film and that, in turn, influences whether or not their friends will go see the film. The studios cannot elicit this behavior, they cannot lead it. It reflects the spontaneous reactions and interactions of people.

In the short term such behavior determines which movies make a profit and what kind of movies the studios will churn out in search of profits. Over the long run such behavior determines what films will have an enduring cultural presence and become canonical cultural works.

Some Examples of Large-Scale Phenomena

During roughly the third quarter of the twentieth century some anthropologists and archaeologists did a great deal of empirical work on cultural complexity, mostly among preliterate societies. This work typically involved large-scale cross-cultural studies. Much of it was directed toward forms of social organization, establishing a sequence going from the hunting-gathering band, to the tribe, the village, the chiefdom, petty-kingdom, and church-state (Hays 1993, chapter 5; Hays 1997; cf. Service 1975). Note that these levels of social organization are all within preliterate cultures. So far as I know such work has not been attempted among literate cultures.

During the 1960s the late Alan Lomax (1968) decided to investigate folk song styles against the background of cultural complexity. Lomax and his colleagues prepared a sample of over 3000 songs, representing 233 cultures from 5 continents plus the Pacific islands, and had judges code the songs on features of style — nature of the performing group, relationship between vocal part and instrumental parts, melodic style, rhythmic style, wordiness, tone quality, tempo, and so on. They correlated style traits with measures of social complexity and found that the simpler the society, the simpler its song lyrics. The simplest societies used a great deal of repetition and nonsense syllables. Similarly, the precision of enunciation varies with social complexity; the more complex the society, the more precise the enunciation. The prevalence of solo singers was also associated with complexity. In the simplest societies, everyone sang; no one was given or took a solo role. It is only in more complex societies, with permanent leaders and social stratification, that we see ensembles divided into a soloist and accompanists.

This is an empirical finding. And, while it may seem intuitively obvious that complex cultures create a collective ambiance that favors expressive forms that different from those of less complex cultures, one would like an explanation for this “fit.” I would expect a robust account of cultural evolution to provide such an explanation.

In a similar vein, John Roberts, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Adam Kendon (1963) were interested in the relationship between child-rearing practices, community size, types of games, and folk tales. In particular, they were interested in what they have called the strategic mode. Strategy plays a minor role in games of physical skill, but a dominant role in games such as chess and poker, which also has strong elements of chance. In folk tales, we can examine how the outcome is achieved, whether through physical skill, chance (guessing, casting lots, magic), or strategy (e.g. evaluating a situation, deception, out-witting an opponent). They discovered that games of strategy are likely to co-occur with folktales having a strong strategic element and that both are more likely in politically complex societies (chiefdoms and above).

Now let us consider a different style of large-scale research. Franco Moretti (2003) has recently published some very interesting work on the origins and course of the novel in Britain, Denmark, India, Japan, Italy, Span, and Nigeria. In this work he is interested in sheer numbers, creating graphs depicting the number of titles published per year over a century or more, starting in the eighteenth century. In most cases – Britain, Denmark, India, Japan, Italy, Spain – he finds that the rise is not a steady one but is marked with declines so long and deep that we must talk of the cyclic rise and fall of the novel.

To my mind, however, Moretti’s most interesting finding concerns the emergence of British novelistic genres between 1750 and 1900. Most generally, he shows that the types of genre shift over time. For example, Gothic novels were strong from 1800-1825, sporting novels seem to run from 1820 to 1860, while imperial romances run from 1850 though 1890, and so on for over 40 genres. What is most interesting, however, is that the genres seem grouped into six periods of creativity and they disappear in clusters as well. Consequently there is an almost complete turn-over in genres every 25 years or so, that is, roughly a generation (p. 80 ff.). Moretti cannot explain that, but it does seem to be a fact about literary history.

How could one explain such a pattern? I find that to be a deep and puzzling question. But it is not just the evolution of the British novel that puzzles me, it is the phenomenon of cultural, and literary, evolution itself. The work of Lomax and of Roberts, Sutton-Smith, and Kendon suggests causal relations between cultural forms and social organization – a game that has been played by legions of Marxist scholars and critics – but the existence of such relations does not itself tell us why, in the long run, such forms evolve.

Sita Sings the Blues

It is time to turn from such empyrean heights – Moretti talks of distant reading – and think about these aesthetic objects in some greater detail and particularity. Thus I would like to consider one specific example, Nina Paley’s animated film, Sita Sings the Blues. Using a variety of visual styles Paley juxtaposes and intertwines two narratives: 1) the breakup of her own marriage and, 2) the story of Rama and Sita from the Ramayana, one of the classic texts of Hinduism. Paley is thus using Hindu tradition to illuminate her life, and her life to reflect back on that tradition.[2]

Paley tells Sita’s story in three different ways: 1) in a series of vignettes set to songs recorded by Annette Hanshaw in the 1920s and which is animated in a very “cartoony” style; 2) in a series of scenes based on paintings Paley did in imitation of 18th Century Rajput miniatures and on collages based on what appears to be calendar and greeting-card art, and 3) through voice-over dialogue among three Indian-Americans talking about the Ramayana and realized on-screen as three Indonesian shadow puppets. The multiplicity of this story, its many sources – which I’ve only hinted at in this brief description – is deliberately built-in to the visual and audio texture of the film.

One could, in fact, organize a course on cultural process around Sita Sings the Blues. As a way of thinking what could go into such a course, imagine a large table. In the first row we list various elements appearing in the film. In the rows below we trace those elements back to their sources, moving further back in time as we move down the table. The incidents in Paley’s own life took place only a few years ago. The Hanshaw recordings date to the 1920s, as do elements of that caroony style. Hanshaw’s singing, in turn, is in a popular tradition that evolved through over two centuries of interplay between Americans of European origin and Americans of African origin. Some of Paley’s art imitates 18th century Indian sources, which, in turn, can be traced back to Persian miniatures. And so forth and so on through a list of 20, 30, 50 or more items.

And then we have the Ramayana itself, the oldest version of which is attributed to Valmiki. The dating, as best I can tell from a bit of googling, is the sort of thing over which learned scholars argue for generations. It’s not quite lost in the mists of time, but it is very old. As Amardeep Singh (2009) has pointed out, the Ramayana exists in multiple versions that are not always mutually consistent, one source of the confusion exhibited by Paley’s three shadow-puppet narrators. And so this putative course must discuss that kind of process and its role in maintaining culture, but also allowing it to change (cf. Whitehouse 2000).

In thinking about this table one must, of course, distinguish between the process by which Paley took up those materials and made a film and the processes by which those materials had become available for her use. The first is individual creativity while the latter are group processes. The distinction is, however, a difficult one to make. For Paley made the film over five years and began posting segments on the internet as she completed them. Thus she was interacting with her audience during the process, and that audience includes fundamentalist Hindus who objected to her work and, in some cases, threatened her.

Finally, the sociology and economics units in this course can examine Paley’s distribution process and her subsequent income streams. Copyright problems made it impossible for Paley to secure normal theatrical distribution, so she put the film into the public domain and put copies on the internet where people can download them free of charge. She’s shown the film at festivals all over the world, won many prizes, and has developed a small merchandising operation based on the film. All of this depends, more or less, on word of mouth.

But enough already. Let us look at the film itself. What does it look like on the screen? How do we describe it? What features are important to the film’s effect, and which are incidental? These are important and difficult questions and I can do no more than indicate what’s entailed.

I want to examine the Agni Pariksha segment, which is unlike anything other segment in the film.[3] In the Ramayana Sita had to prove her fidelity to Rama in a trial by fire. She throws herself into the flames and is rescued by Agni, the fire deity, thereby establishing her purity.

Paley has placed this segment somewhat after the middle of the film at the point immediately after Nina, her alter ego in the film, learns that her husband wants a divorce. On the sound track we hear her heart thumping away while we see it pulsing (a stylized red heart) and finally breaking. At that point Nina screams, the virtual camera zooms into her wide-open mouth, and we’re into the segment, which is basically a solo dance amid flames.

The role of Sita is danced by Reena Shah, who voices Sita and who also sings the lyrics, written in Hindi by her mother, Laxmi Shah. This is the only place in the film where we hear Hindi and the only place where we see live action, sort of. Paley videotaped Shah dancing before a green screen and then hand-traced Shah’s movements into the film.

Rather than attempting to describe the entire three-minute segment, which could easily go on and on – “a picture is worth a thousand words” and this film packs a lot of them into 180 seconds. Instead, I’ll concentrate on a few frames. The following two frames are from the beginning and the end of the segment, respectively. We see Sita in white outline against a black background, but her hair has some color fill (collaged in) in the ending segment, but not the beginning.

In both frames she is holding  a lighted match. She lit the match at the opening of the segment and then dropped it, lighting the fire beneath her. At the end she blows the match out, ending the segment. Thus there is a bit of visual continuity between the opening and ending segments. At the same time the final act, in effect, reverses the opening one. The opening act took Sita into the fire; the closing act brings her out of it and back into the world.

Is this a rite de passage? (Of course it is, of course.) For who? Sita, Nina, us? Of what kind, from what to what?

Now consider these three frames, which come one after the other in the film:

The backgrounds are pretty much the same, which is what you would expect from such closely spaced frames. But look at Sita in the center. Her outline is not quite the same from one frame to the next, for she’s spinning counter-clockwise at a pretty good rate; but her overall visual mass remains in the same position within the frame. The texture filling her form, however, differs radically from one frame to the next. All three body fills are half-tone images magnified to the point where the individual dots are visible, but I can’t make out identity of the material in either the first frame or the third. The second image is the head of a woman.

Paley uses this technique throughout the segment. None of the collage elements is on the screen for more than a fraction of a second. You can identify some of the images, but not most of them. It is obvious that she’s showing lots of different things mostly through Sita’s form, but through other elements of the segment as well.

Now look at Sita in this next frame, to the left. Her outline, in black, is decoupled from the texture-filling forms, one for her hair (yellow-green), one for her body (a warm medium brown) and still others for her eyes. Paley does this for about six seconds. What’s this about?

If you’ve been reading visual neuroscience you may note that fill and outline are handled in different systems, as is motion. So Paley is “manipulating” those systems, which is interesting. But that doesn’t tell us why she’s doing it? Because she can, and it’s interesting? Certainly, but is that all?

Before I hazard a guess I want to state that the most important thing, at this point, is simply to describe what’s going on. Without that description, nothing else can be done.

So, why’s she doing it? Because it’s different from every other segment in the film, including the other segment that also depicts the Agni Pariksha. This segment is set to Annette Hanshaw’s performance of “Mean to Me” and the visual style is Paley’s old-time “cartoony” style, which she uses for all the Hanshaw performances. That is to say, that ritual enactment is not stylistically different from any other events in the Hanshaw version of the Sita story.

Any anthropologist will tell you that rituals are about transformation (e.g. van Gennep 1960); some literary critics will tell you that as well (e.g. Frye 1965, Barber 1959). By making this segment visually different from anything else in the film Paley is giving the film itself a ritual dimension – though the part of me that is a child of the 60s is thinking “altered state of consciousness” (cf. Fischer 1975). She’s not merely showing a ritual, depicting one in the film; she is inviting us to enact a ritual by experiencing the visual world in a way that is radically different from what we experience anywhere else in the film. This segment of the film IS ritual.

Now, if we wish, we can begin thinking about what happens in the nervous system in this segment that is different from every other segment in the film. In the annoying manner of math textbooks, however, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The Priority of Description

I want to conclude with a more general discussion of the need for better descriptive work in my home discipline, literary studies.

Let’s consider some work by a great anthropologist, the late Mary Douglas. She spent the last years of her career investigating so-called ring structures in narrative (Douglas 2007). In such stories the narrative will unfold through a series of steps to a mid-point and then trace its way back through the same series of steps, but in reverse, thus:

1 2 3 … X … 3’ 2’ 1’

Douglas has been investigating ring structure in books of the Old Testament, while I have found it in Osamu Tezuka’s graphic novel, Metropolis (Benzon, 2006) and in two episodes of Disney’s Fantasia (Benzon 2010). I would like to know, for each text of interest (all 100, 1000, or 10,000+ of them), whether or not it has a ring structure. If not, what kind of structure does it have – and on that point I am embarrassed to confess that I don’t know what the alternatives are. They may be named in the literature somewhere, but I don’t know that work.

Determining whether or not a narrative has a ring-form is not a deeply difficult and problematic task. It is not neuro-science, nor even rocket science. But it is tedious and time-consuming. And that, I suppose, is one one reason why the work hasn’t been done. Another reason is that we have no theory of narrative cognition that would tell us the role such a form plays in comprehension.

As another example, consider the well-known distinction between story and plot (cf. Shklovsky 1965). Story refers to the intrinsic temporal order of a series of events in some narrative while plot refers to the order in which those events are introduced into a particular narrative. Where plot order and story order are the same, there is no need to make the distinction. But many narratives introduce events in some order other than that intrinsic to those events. Noting this fact and attending to it in fragments of texts is standard practice in narratology. But I am unaware of any effort to systematically map the relationships of story and plot for complete texts. David Herman has done so for a film, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (Herman 2002, pp. 237-250), and has discovered that the ordering of some events with respect to others is indeterminate. That’s an interesting result. Is this the only narrative where that is so? It seems unlikely, but the work hasn’t been done that would permit us to answer that question.

While I can multiply such examples, there’s no point in that. Such work simply hasn’t been systematically and thoroughly done (see Benzon 2005 for a more complete account of such a descriptive program). We have some useful conceptual tools, but lack an overall intellectual context in which the thorough use of those tools for descriptive purposes is seen as an important matter. It seems to me that the cognitive sciences might provide some of that context, for computation – as a model as well as a metaphor – has been critical in the development of the cognitive sciences. And the matter of serial order is fundamental to both the practice and theory of computation. Computation, real computation, is always resource limited: is there enough time to reach a result, do we have enough memory? Intuitively, a narrative which forces the distinction between plot and story requires more computational resources than one that does not (cf. Benzon 1993). Is there a reason, then, for using a more computationally expensive strategy?

That is one thing. There is another.

Consider the situation of Darwin faced in the 19th century. When he began formulating his ideas on the origin of species he had three bodies of knowledge to work from: prior thought on the topic, his own observations over three decades, and the cumulative results of four centuries of descriptive work in natural history (cf. Ogilvie 2006) to which he had access through books and collections. That descriptive work provided models for his own observation and description. Plants and animals, and their lifeways, are very complex. Which traits and features are the most important to observe and describe? That is not an obvious matter, and it took naturalists decades to arrive at useful descriptive methods (cf. Foucault 1973, pp. 128 ff.). Secondly, it gave him the means to abstract and generalize from his own observations, to explore their implications throughout the natural world, most of which, of course, was beyond his immediate experience.

In short, description was indispensable to Darwin’s enterprise, as it is to biology in general. Though discussions of scientific method accord more cachet to theory-testing, and devotes more effort to debating it, description is no less necessary to objective knowledge. It sets the boundaries of the knowable. If we cannot describe a phenomenon – whether in words, images, or mathematical expressions – then we cannot investigate it, we cannot come to explain it.

How, then, do we gain more effective control over literary texts? I have no easy answer to that question. These are very complex objects, not only literary texts, but other cultural artifacts and processes. They have many properties one could note in a description – for all practical purposes the number of properties is unbounded. How, then can we tell which properties are memetically active?

For one thing, it helps to be . . . no, it is essential that one is familiar with a wide range of examples, and to have worked through many examples in detail. This cannot be done by reading a methods book or two or three or ten or by reading up on the pop neuroscience du jour. It requires total immersion in primary materials.

Given that, I imagine that the statistical techniques developed in corpus linguistics would be useful tools. And such tools represent our only hope of gaining some purchase on the vast number of texts that are our proper province. Then, one day some decades from now, perhaps longer, when we have better descriptive control over literary phenomena, then it will be possible for a Darwin-of-literature to come on the scene and make deeper sense of the distribution and diversity of literary forms. But for now, we must labor in the fields of analysis and description. For us, to quote John Barth, the key to the treasure is the treasure.

Conclusion: All Together Now

In the course of my argument I’ve moved from the emergent behavior of coupled neuro-muscular systems (clapping) and so forth to the apparently mundane business of describing literary texts. The former is properly the domain of the sciences while the latter belongs to literary specialists. These are very different kinds of tasks and require very different methods. To those we can add the work of modeling perceptual and cognitive phenomena, conducting field studies, searching through archives, and simulating phenomena at all scales, from the microscale of neural processes through the macro scale of change over historical time and geographical space. The study of culture encompasses all of that, if not more.

The way is by no means clear. But it is there. Or rather, they are there.

Do we have the will to take those first few steps leading thousands of miles into an intellectual future we cannot foresee in any detail?

Appendix: New Savanna Posts on Cultural Evolution

Cultural Evolution 1: How “Thick” is Culture?
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/05/cultural-evolution-1-how-thick-is.html

Cultural Evolution 2: A Phenomenological Gut Check on Gene-Culture Coevolution
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/05/cultural-evolution-2-phenomenological.html

Cultural Evolution 3: Performances and Memes
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/05/cultural-evolution-3-performances-and.html

Cultural Evolution 4: Rhythm Changes 1
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-4-rhythm-changes-1.html

Cultural Evolution 5: Rhythm Changes 2
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-5-rhythm-changes-2.html

Cultural Evolution 6: The Problem of Design
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-6-problem-of-design.html

Cultural Evolution 7: Where Are We At?
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-7-where-are-we-at.html

Cultural Evolution 8: Language Games 1, Speech
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-8-language-games-1.html

Cultural Evolution 8A: Addendum on Language as Game
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-8a-addendum-on.html

Cultural Evolution 9: Language Games 2, Story Telling
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-9-language-games-2.html

These two posts are also useful:

The Busy Bee Brain
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/05/busy-bee-brain.html

The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/group-intentionality-collective-mind.html

Notes

[1] I post many of my graffiti photos to a Flickr site, where my user name is STC4blues:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/collections/72157601413328684/

[2] Paley has established a website where you can find information about Sita Sings the Blues, links to interviews and articles, and even links to downloadable copies of the film itself. The Wikipedia entries on the film and on Paley herself are also useful, as is Paley’s own blog.

Sita site: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/

Nina Paley’s blog: http://blog.ninapaley.com/

Wikipedia, Sita: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues

Wikipedia, Paley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Paley

[3] You can view the Agni Pariksha segment online here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdG6PySczg0&feature=related

Start at, say, 7:00, to see Nina’s heart get broken; the purification segment itself starts at 7:20.

References

Barber, C. L. (1959). Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Benzon, William (1993). The Evolution of Narrative and the Self. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 16(2): 129-155. Downloadable PDF: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1516054

Benzon, William (1996). Culture as an Evolutionary Arena. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 19(4), 321-362, 1996. Downloadable PDF: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1532898

Benzon, William (2001). Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. Basic Books.

Benzon, William (2002). Colorless Green Homunculi. Human Nature Review 2: 454-462, 2002.

Benzon, William (2005). Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form. PSYART: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2005, Article 060608. URL: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2006_benzon01.shtml
Downloadable PDF: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1503087

Benzon, William (2006). Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Moden Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos. In Uta Klein, Ktaja Mellmann, Sterranie Metzger, eds. Heurisiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur. mentis Verlag GmbH, pp. 527-545.

Benzon, William (2010). Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice. The Valve. 24 March. URL:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/two_rings_in_fantasia_nutcracker_and_apprentice1/

Dobzhansky, Theodosius. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” American Biology Teacher 35(1973): 125-29.

Douglas, Mary (2007). Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. Yale University Press.

Fischer, R. (1975). The Cartography of Inner Space. Hallucinations. R. K. Siegel and L. J. West, eds. New York, John Wiley & Sons: 197-240.

Foucault, Michel (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books.

Frye, N. (1965). A Natural Perspective. New York, Columbia University Press.

Hays, D. G. (1993). The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks. New York, Metagram Press. URL: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/Tech/FRONT.shtml

Hays, D. G. (1997). The Measurement of Cultural Evolution in the Non-Literate World: Homage to Raoul Naroll. New York, Metagram Press.

Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press.

Lewens, Tim (2007). Cultural Evolution. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/

Lomax, A. (1968). Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers.

Martindale, Colin (1990). The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change. Basic Books, Inc.

Moretti, F. (2003). “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History–1.” New Left Review 24: 67-93.

Néda, Z., E. Ravasz, et al. (2000). “The sound of many hands clapping.” Nature 403: 849-850.

Ogilvie, B. W. (2006). The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Roberts, J. M., B. Sutton-Smith, et al. (1963). Strategy in Games and Folk Tales. Mythology. P. Maranda, ed. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, Ltd.: 194-211.

Service, E. R. (1975). Origins of the State and Civilization. New York, W. W. Norton & Company.

Singh, Amardeep (2009). Animating a Postmodern Ramayana: Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues. South Asian Review, Vol. 30, No. 1.

Shklovsky, V. (1965). Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary. Russian Formalist Criticism. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis, eds. Lincoln, NB, University of Nebraska Press.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Whitehouse, Harvey (2000). Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford.

Darwin’s radical new history of the world did not give a central place to the human. It challenged human exceptionalism and emphasised what was shared, across all organisms extant and extinct. He thought of himself initially as a geologist, so was constantly alert to the ghosting presence of past life forms, visible now only as vestiges, impacted, fossilised, fired, crumbling but discernable, and capable of being re-imagined. In The Voyage of the Beagle encounters with human beings from other tribes and cultures became important and helped his thinking to thrive, but in the years up to and including the publication of the Origin, and well beyond it, his main concerns and researches were with forms of life other than the human, including barnacles and plants. As is well known, he withheld discussion of the human in the Origin, for what he called ‘diplomatic’ reasons. In fact, though, this refusal was profoundly disruptive since it had the effect of simply including us in the general class of primates without a special space or reach reserved. From the start Darwin made it clear that there is no simple opposition between organism and environment since environment is itself composed of the interpenetrating needs, desires, and claims of all the other organisms that surround and include any single being. But it is striking that in trying to describe primordial life he figures the ancestor as single almost as often as he describes it as a pair: the ‘ single progenitor’, ‘one primordial form’.

Such an imagined being is asexual or ‘hors-sexe’, outside sex, and much of Darwin’s research life was spent studying life-forms in which the methods of reproduction are through parthenogenesis (virgin birth, as in some reptiles, fishes and plants), splitting (as with amoebas) or hermaphroditism (as with some barnacles and slugs who fertilizes themselves). Sex is a mechanism of reproduction that speeds up the possibilities of change. In sex two streams of unlike material from the parents enter the progeny, and the spectrum of outcome is much greater. Darwin did not have the language or the knowledge of genetics to work with. He saw the outcome of hyperproductivity and difference but he struggled to explain how such changes were carried between generations. It’s worth emphasizing at the outset that sex difference is not a universal condition since, looking at things from our human point of view, we tend to see it as normative.

Until the 1870s Darwin did not publish extensively about human beings and their descent or liaisons. Then in quick succession he published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). That second work was originally to have formed part of the Descent but it grew too large. The Descent itself is on an enormous scale and explores the issue of sexual selection in ways that demanded quite new thinking from Darwin, though it had been touched on in the Origin. In the Descent he brings the human to the foreground of his argument and that produces new tensions in his relation to his readers and in his own mind.

Darwin’s later theory of ‘sexual selection’ placed sex at the centre of explanation, supplementing the emphasis already established in the Origin through natural selection on the resilience of family ties across generations. In the Origin Darwin expanded the idea of family, away from the exclusiveness of what he called “pedigrees and armorial bearings” (Origin 486), to embrace all “the past and present inhabitants of the world” (488) – and by ‘inhabitants’ he did not mean merely the human.

In this brief essay I shall concentrate on a single effect of the newly emphasised presence of the human: what happens when he is writing about man and woman rather than simply male and female. The terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ are fundamental to his argument across species, and to his insistence on the kinship of all species (even those that reproduce through methods other than sexual difference). As soon as his vocabulary enlarges to include man and woman particular difficulties arise – and these difficulties are exacerbated because he does not have a vocabulary that would allow him to discriminate between sex and gender.

The sexual behaviour of different human groups is studied in the Descent alongside that of other kinds, as also are the physical differences between sexes in a range of creatures. And here we begin to see the problem that Darwin has not so much introduced as illuminated by setting the human among other kinds. In his descriptions of species behaviour it is often difficult to discriminate human values from structures. Where he finds physical likeness between the sexes he comments, using the observations of colleagues, on contrasted behaviour:

In one of the sand-wasps (Ammophila) the jaws in the two sexes are closely alike, but are used for widely different purposes: the males, as Professor Westwood observes, ‘are exceedingly ardent, seizing their partners round the neck with their sickle-shaped jaws’; whilst the females use these organs for burrowing in sand-banks and making their nests. (p317)

- a striking example of separate spheres among sand-wasps. Darwin clearly felt some little scepticism himself since he adds a footnote stating that ‘Mr. Walsh, who called my attention to the double use of the jaws, says that he has repeatedly observed this fact.’ And fact it may be, since we cannot just wish away such structural and performative differences between sexes within species, even as we note the gendered interpretation being offered.

Darwin’s later years were spent seeking a system implicit in the inordinate, the decorative, the ornamental, in the drive of sexual desire. Sexual selection demanded flaunting, extravagance, smells and song. The males of most species, his researches showed, were driven to display, the females were the choosers (though ‘choice’ might sometimes be a false word to describe the process of accepting the successful male’s advances). Beauty re-emerged as a key element in his enquiry, and he argued that humans were not the sole possessors of aesthetics and of delight in art.

We have evidence of this capacity even low down in the animal scale thus Crustaceans are provided with auditory hairs of different lengths, which have been seen to vibrate when the proper musical notes are struck. (634-5)

Bird-song was prior to language; it expressed territorial and erotic claims by means of all the pleasures of skilled elaboration. The primordial skills are singing, dancing, and poetry, he argued, skills shared across many species (636). Music becomes his key example of the powers of selection. And he compared the capacities of gnats, dogs, and seals alongside humans. The key point to observe is that once again the whole ground of his argument is the uninterrupted continuum between human experience and that of other life forms, here predominantly animals and birds, but often also including plants.

This discussion of aesthetic life across species and its importance in sexual selection follows one of his most controversial arguments (at least so far as his fellow-humans are concerned), which again relies on analogy (here claimed as homology) with other animals: ‘Differences in the Mental Powers of the Two Sexes’. That is, the two sexes of human beings. He approaches this topic through lengthy discussions of differences between the sexes in a variety of animals, insects, beetles, and birds: in size, in strength, in colouration, in smell, in voice. Once that difference is established he turns in Part III to ‘Sexual Selection in Relation to Man, and Conclusion’. The first paragraph describes the greater muscular development of the male. The second opens boldly, and flatly:

Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. (622)

The third paragraph opens ‘As with animals of all classes, so with man’.

This equalising between the human and other animals is the argumentative gesture that recurs throughout the discussion, and is in line with all that Darwin has written earlier. It comes as a surprise only because it is here focussed specifically on human beings in a transhistorical and generalising manner, whereas the other crucial aspect of his argument until now has been the emphasis on variability. He acknowledges that ‘some writers doubt whether there is any such inherent difference’ between the human sexes. He has in mind John Stuart Mill, as becomes evident on the next page where he joins in open dispute with Mill. In the text Darwin writes:

Now, when two men are put into competition, or a man with a woman, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, perseverance, and courage, the latter will generally become more eminent in every pursuit, and will gain the ascendancy.

The footnote runs:

J. Stuart Mill remarks ( ‘The subjection of Women’, 1869, p.122), ‘The things in which man most excels woman are those which require most plodding, and long hammering at single thoughts.’ What is this but energy and perseverance? (630)

The tone of exasperation as the qualities slide downhill in Mill’s description from energy and perseverance to plodding and one-track mind sounds as if Darwin has felt Mill’s comments as a personal affront. He has earlier, with a certain ethical self-abnegation spoken of competition, ambition, and selfishness as the ‘natural and unfortunate birthright’ of men. (629) Here, ‘natural’ seems a cover-word for social. Darwin is struggling, and the effect is to make him much more emphatic than is his wont.

Once he substitutes the term ’Man’ for ‘male’, his descriptor for all other species, a rush of social assumptions gathers behind his statements. One is that ‘Man’ (capitalized) in human generalising discourse is to cover both sexes whereas in his descriptions of all other sexed species he painstakingly discriminates between male and female. In a mordant aside he suggests that, unlike most of his argument for sexual selection in which the male displays and the female selects, women may have ‘first acquired musical powers in order to attract the other sex.’ ‘But if so,[he asserts] this must have occurred long ago, before our ancestors had become sufficiently human to treat and value their women merely as useful slaves.’ (639) He sees human behaviour as an aberration in the processes of sexual selection since men seek wealth and beauty in their women, and having social dominance can require that. They do the choosing. Even when women choose:

their choice is largely influenced by the social position and wealth of the men; and the success of the latter in life depends upon their intellectual powers and energy, or the fruits of these same powers in their forefathers.(653)

That women might bring intellectual powers and energy into the marriage does not enter his argument here.

Occasionally, Darwin reaches a different form of inclusivity, ‘human beings’ rather than ‘man’ become his aim:

But we should bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. (681)

And he argues earlier that :

In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance, and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point; and then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult daughters. (631)

But he has little hope of equality since men are by him assumed to be destined to be the breadwinners:

they generally undergo a severe struggle in order to maintain themselves and their families: and this will tend to keep up or even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present inequality between the sexes. (631)

It turns out that it is not quite possible to transpose the physical traits and behaviour of other species to the human and use that to delimit human potential, even in the terms of his own argument. The discussion of men and women’s powers is a matter of about seven pages in a text of seven hundred pages plus, but inevitably it attracts our attention, disconcertingly so. Again, the linking of the two words ‘new and improved’, which, conjoined, lurk at the heart of natural selection haunt this argument too.

Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen. (631)

But – and this is an important but – Darwin is here describing what has not happened: the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes does prevail, he acknowledges, against this possible vast mental superiority of man over woman. And that word ‘ultimately’, (‘man has ultimately become superior to woman’) must, if it is to be in key with the rest of his evolutionary thinking even if reluctantly granted here, signify ‘at the moment’ rather than ‘for ever’.

Were I to have the chance to ask him one question I would want to ask him how he sees the changed achievements of women and the altered relations between the sexes in some (dare one say ‘many’?) societies now. Sexual selection as a process is poised between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ – that is to say, it includes ‘choice’ and discrimination in the drive of desire between individuals and, as he acknowledges, social assumptions and pressures exercise their power in the selection. Darwin’s founding argument that we are ‘all netted together’ across species and that all forms of life are kin, is a wholesome and enfranchising belief. But in the Descent it often seems to have congealed into the assertion that analogies between species debar social change.

The Descent is the work in which Darwin must face the further implications of his insistence on kinship between all organic life, and the place of ‘improvement’ in his argument. The foregrounding of the human forces these issues: male and female become man and woman – and these two are gathered into the title ‘Man’ . He is torn by the difficulty of descrying what is temporary and what eternal in the evolutionary process, what social and what physical in the relations of creatures to each other and in the human sexes too. His intelligence often drives him past the position that his argument can reach.

Darwin rejected Wallace’s belief that the human was a special case, distinguished from other creatures by the possession of a soul, yet he struggles with the question of how far male and female can translate directly into man and woman. Indeed, his daughter Henrietta, who acted as his much-valued commentator and critic while he was writing the Descent, teases him that ‘ you think an apology is wanting for writing abt[sic] anything so unimportant as the mind of man!’(Correspondence, 18, 25) She does not capitalise Man. She knows that for Darwin the human is not the measure of all things and she here pinpoints the difficulty he faced when he wrote a book that placed the human at the centre of his discussion.

References: page references in the text refer to the editions below

• The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 18, 1870, edited Frederick Burkhardt and James A. Secord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, second edition , 1879, introduction James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004)
• On the Origin of Species, A Facsimile of the first Edition, introduction Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)

This is a précis of an argument that I developed in an article called “Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?” The article was published in 2009 and may be found on my web set at http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/recent.html. An expanded version of the argument is the first chapter of a book that I’m publishing at the end of 2010 with Prometheus Books. The book has the same title as the 2009 article.

Although Darwin’s theory is often described as the theory of evolution by natural selection, most commentators recognize that common ancestry (the idea that all organisms now alive on earth and all present day fossils trace back to one or a few “original progenitors”) is an important part of the Darwinian picture. What has been less explored in Darwin studies is how these two parts of Darwin’s theory – common ancestry and natural selection — are related to each other. Ernst Mayr and others have noted that they are logically independent. But this leaves open how the two ideas are evidentially related. How does common ancestry affect the way in which evidence concerning natural selection should be evaluated? And how does natural selection affect the way in which evidence concerning common ancestry should be evaluated?

Darwin addresses one of these two questions very succinctly in a passage from the Origin:

… adaptive characters, although of the utmost importance to the welfare of the being, are almost valueless to the systematist. For animals belonging to two most distinct lines of descent, may readily become adapted to similar conditions, and thus assume a close external resemblance; but such resemblances will not reveal – will rather tend to conceal their blood-relationship to their proper lines of descent.

The fact that human beings and monkeys have tailbones is evidence for common ancestry precisely because tailbones are useless in humans. Contrast this with the torpedo shape that sharks and dolphins share; this similarity is useful in both groups. One might expect natural selection to cause the torpedo shape to evolve in large aquatic predators whether or not they have a common ancestor. This is why the adaptive similarity is almost valueless to the systematist who is trying to reconstruct patterns of common ancestry.

In this passage, Darwin is saying that to determine whether a trait shared by two species is strong evidence that they have a common ancestor, one must be able to judge whether there was selection for the trait in the lineages leading to each. In this sense, knowledge of natural selection is a prerequisite for interpreting evidence concerning common ancestry. However, there is a subtly different question that has a very different answer. Must natural selection have been an important influence on trait evolution for there to be strong evidence for common ancestry? Darwin’s answer to this question is no. A world in which organisms are saturated with neutral and deleterious similarities, while adaptive similarities are rare or non-existent, would be an epistemological paradise so far as the hypothesis of common ancestry is concerned. That’s the point that Darwin is making in the passage I just quoted. Inferring common ancestry does not require that natural selection has occurred.

What about the converse question – how does the fact of common ancestry affect the interpretation of evidence for natural selection? One of Darwin’s most famous arguments concerning natural selection does not depend one whit on common ancestry. This is Darwin’s Malthusian argument. If reproduction in a population outstrips the supply of food, the population will be cut back by starvation. If the organisms in the population vary with respect to characteristics that affect their ability to survive, and if offspring inherit these fitness-affecting traits from their parents, the population will evolve. The process of natural selection is a consequence of these conditions and it can and will occur even if no two species have a common ancestor.

All this is correct, but there is more to the Darwinian picture of natural selection than this. The Malthusian argument establishes that selection has occurred – that some traits changed frequency because of their influence on the viability of organisms. But which traits evolved by natural selection? Darwin doesn’t think that every trait we observe evolved because there was selection for it; recall his comment in the Origin that selection is “the main but not the exclusive cause” of evolution. And if a trait did evolve under the influence of natural selection, why was it favored by natural selection? It is these questions, which concern the detailed application of the hypothesis of natural selection to examples, that common ancestry helps to answer.

An interesting illustration of how Darwin uses the assumption of common ancestry to think about natural selection may be found in his discussion of why mammals in utero have skull sutures that allow them to pass through the birth canal:

The sutures in the skulls of young mammals have been advanced as a beautiful adaptation for aiding parturition [live birth], and no doubt they facilitate, or may be indispensable for this act; but as sutures occur in the skulls of young birds and reptiles, which have only to escape from a broken egg, we may infer that this structure has arisen from the laws of growth, and has been taken advantage of in the parturition of the higher animals.

On the face of it, Darwin’s reasoning here is odd. If he wants to evaluate the hypothesis that mammals have skull sutures because this facilitates live birth, why does he consider the fact that nonmammals have the sutures but not the live birth? Let us hope that he isn’t thinking that if a trait T evolved because the trait facilitated X in one lineage, that T cannot be present without X in any organisms on earth. Penguins do not refute the hypothesis that wings evolved to facilitate flight in birds. And the hypothesis that a species of lizard evolved its green coloration because this color provided camouflage does not require that every green organism on earth gains protective coloration from its being green.

What Darwin is doing in this and in other similar passages is exploiting the fact of common ancestry to test hypotheses about natural selection. The reason that birds and reptiles are relevant to the question of why mammals have skull sutures is that all these organisms share a common ancestor. Common ancestry allows Darwin to infer what happened in the lineage leading to modern mammals. The fact that present day birds and reptiles have sutures but no live birth is evidence that sutures were present in the lineage leading to modern mammals before live birth evolved. If so, the sutures did not evolve because they facilitated live birth. On the contrary, live birth evolved after the sutures were already in place.

Darwin does not spell out the details of this inference, but modern evolutionary biologists will recognize it as an application of the principle of parsimony. Consider the phylogenetic tree shown in the accompanying figure. The tips of the tree represent modern mammals, reptiles, and birds. This is not the tree that a modern biologist would draw, but it may well have been the one that Darwin thought is true. As you move down the page, you are moving from present to past. The lines represent lineages; when two of them coalesce, you have reached a common ancestor. The tree says that mammals and birds are more closely related to each other than either is to reptiles; A2 is an ancestor of the first two, but not of the third. If you go sufficiently far into the past, you will find a common ancestor (A1) that unites all three of these present day groups.

The figure also indicates the traits (±skull sutures; ± live birth) that contemporary mammals, birds and reptiles exhibit. Given this tree, and the features exhibited by its tips,

what is the most reasonable inference concerning the characteristics of the ancestors A1 and A2? The most parsimonious inference is that A1 and A2 both have skull sutures but no live birth. This is the most parsimonious reconstruction in the sense that it requires fewer changes in character states in the lineages leading to the present than any other reconstruction. If this most parsimonious reconstruction is correct, we can deduce that skull sutures evolved before live birth made its appearance in the lineage leading to modern mammals; the mammalian lineage is represented in the figure by a broken line. This parsimony argument justifies Darwin’s statement that sutures now facilitate, or may even be indispensible for, live birth in mammals, but this is not why the sutures evolved.

The argument just described raises an interesting philosophical question: why should we think that the principle of parsimony is a good inferential rule? Why should we think that the most parsimonious hypothesis is true? I won’t pursue this enticing question here. Rather, the point of relevance is that in Darwin’s theory, and in the evolutionary biology of the present, common ancestry is not an unrelated add-on that supplements the hypothesis of natural selection. Instead, common ancestry provides a framework within which hypotheses about natural selection can be tested. In Darwinian biology, a lineage is like a mineshaft that extends from the surface of the earth to deep below, with multiple portholes connecting surface to shaft at varying depths. By peering into a porthole, we gain evidence about what is happening in the shaft. The more portholes there are, the more evidence we can obtain. Thanks to common ancestry, facts about the history of natural selection become knowable.

There is an asymmetry in how common ancestry and natural selection are related to each other in Darwin’s theory. To get evidence for common ancestry, natural selection need not have caused any of the traits we now observe. But to get evidence for natural selection, Darwin needs to be able to think of present day organisms as tracing back to common ancestors. Selection doesn’t make adaptations out of nothing; adaptations are modifications of the traits of ancestors. To know what those ancestors were like, we need to be able to infer their characteristics from what we now observe. It is common ancestry that makes those inferences possible.

If this is the right picture of how common ancestry and natural selection are related in Darwin’s theory, a puzzle presents itself: why did Darwin write the Origin by front-loading natural selection? Darwin does mention some ideas about common ancestry early in the book, but the big picture of there being one tree of life for the whole living world emerges only gradually, and later. On the whole, it is natural selection that comes first. Why is the book structured like this? Why didn’t Darwin begin by defending the idea of common ancestry and then gradually introduce natural selection as a secondary theme?

Introduction
An important notion in moral philosophy and many legal systems is that certain circumstances can mitigate an individual’s responsibility for a transgression. Generally speaking, such situations are considered extenuating in virtue of their exceptional influence on a person’s ability to act and make decisions in a normal manner. The essence of the case for diminished responsibility is that these special circumstances impede the ability of a normal person to exercise self-control.

In recent years, however, this notion of diminished responsibility has come to wider attention in a quite unexpected way. Some researchers, drawing on findings from social psychology, have argued that situational forces may play a much larger role in behavior than traditionally assumed. The situational forces in question are often entirely ordinary, mundane and seemingly trivial. Given that such influences are pervasive, the general issue raised concerns control in commonplace cases. According to a condensed version of this view – which we call the Frail Control hypothesis for convenience – even in unexceptional conditions, humans have little control over their behavior. If correct, this line of argument could have widespread and dramatic ramifications, notably for our practices of attributing moral and legal responsibility. (We note that although in certain rare cases control and responsibility come apart, in most cases of moral and legal responsibility attribution, control and responsibility are closely linked.)

While agreeing that moral philosophy and the law can benefit from a greater understanding of developments in psychology and neuroscience, we suggest that the Frail Control challenge is markedly weakened once a wider range of data is considered. In our assessment, the Frail Control hypothesis underestimates the vigor of normal goal-maintenance in the face of distractions, and neglects the role of nonconscious aspects of control as displayed, for instance, in the exercise of cognitive, motor and social skills. Furthermore, a large psychological literature has demonstrated that nonconscious, automatic processes are pervasive and anything but “dumb”. Instead, they are often remarkably sophisticated and flexible in performing functions such as goal pursuit that were once considered the sole province of conscious cognition (Bargh & Morsella, in press) [3].

On the basis of these and other data, we develop an account of control that we believe goes some way toward sharpening the meaning of control – including nonconscious control – in a way that accommodates the role of nonconscious processes in nearly everything we do. the general conclusion we will be arguing for is that nonconscious processes can support a robust form of control and, by extension, that consciousness is not a necessary condition for control. One notable feature of our account is a model of control in which neurobiological criteria, rather than intuitive or behavioral criteria alone, define the boundaries of control. A significant virtue of this account, in light of the pervasiveness of automatic processes in our cognitive lives, is that it is agnostic as to whether the underlying processes are conscious or nonconscious.

Frail Control
A leading advocate of the Frail Control hypothesis is the philosopher John Doris (e.g., Doris, 1998, [7]). He bases his claims on a range of data from social psychology showing that choices can be affected by various manipulations, such as priming (often below the level of consciousness) or ostensibly banal environmental features. For example, subjects exposed to words related to rudeness on a scrambled-sentence task are subsequently more likely to interrupt a (staged) conversation between the experimenter and another person than are subjects primed with words related to politeness or controls who are not primed (Bargh et al., 1996) [8]. Other studies show that people are more likely to litter in a particular setting when it is heavily littered than when the same setting is clean (Keizer et al., 2008) [9]. (For reviews, see Bargh & Morsella, in press; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) [3, 10].

Adding to the surprise, the data appear to show that very minor environmental influences can at times produce large effects. Among the examples Doris cites are the finding by Isen and Levin (1972) [11] that “[p]assersby who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than passersby who did not find a dime” (Doris & Murphy, 2007) [12, p. 34] and the finding by Darley and Batson (1973) [13] that “[p]assersby not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passersby in a hurry” (Doris & Murphy, 2007) [12, p. 34].

These data are connected to the issue of responsibility in the following way: if your choice is strongly affected by situational factors in ways that you are unaware of, then you plausibly have an excuse for your actions. Doris echoes widespread philosophical assumptions when he says that to be responsible we must have normative competence, meaning that we consciously weigh the evidence, effectively deliberate, and make a decision (Doris, 2002) [14, p. 136]. If the deciding and weighing is below the level of consciousness, normative competence is compromised. No normative competence, no responsibility. (Other statements of Frail Control positions can be found in Wilson (2002) [15], Harman (1999) [16], Bargh (2008) [17], Wegner (2002) [18], and Appiah (2008) [19], as well as a recent news feature in Nature (Buchanan, 2009) [20].

The conclusion that our actions are much more frequently excusable than hitherto assumed could have monumental implications for the law, both criminal and civil, as well as our daily social interactions. A rather different picture of control emerges, however, once the range of data is expanded to include neurobiological, clinical, and other behavioral data, as well as considerations from evolutionary biology.

The co-evolution of control and situational responsiveness
The co-evolution of sensitivity in responding to a diverse array of environmental stimuli and the capacity for executive control is highly probable (Baumeister, 2005; Dennett, 2002) [2, 21]. Generally speaking, if an organism is to reap the benefits of adaptive responsiveness to its environment, it must also be able to control how and to what it responds.

Observations of mammalian behavior suggest that mature animals do indeed regularly exhibit control. A cougar that can carefully stalk a deer will do better than one who just runs after it; antelope that go skittering off every time they glimpse a lion in the distance are apt to waste excessive amounts of energy. And laboratory experiments show that rats can defer gratification to obtain a larger reward (Dalley et al., 2004) [22] or be trained to stop an already-initiated bar press (Eagle et al., 2008) [23]; relevant behavioral differences in these tasks are described as differences in the capacity for control, and the circuitry underlying these capacities is an object of study.

Mechanisms for exercising control in numerous species, hominins included, were probably selected for in conditions that favored being able to defer gratification, wait for the advantage, plan ahead, undertake a complex, multi-step action, and so on. In discussing control as a deep and general feature of animal behavior, Baumeister makes the point that the desire for control, both of physical and social conditions, is fundamental to reproductive success. He thus remarks that “if control is part and parcel of getting most of the things one wants in life, a person could evade wanting control only by not wanting anything” (Baumeister, 2005) [21, p. 96]. The pursuit of goals and achievement of them requires some measure of control, and the longer the lag time or the more obstacles in the path, the greater the need for control.

In the social environment of one’s own species, the capacity to exercise control and select an appropriate action is perhaps even more critical. For example, hierarchy is extremely important in chimpanzee and baboon troops. If an individual is to avoid social ostracism (or worse), he must be able to exert substantial control in managing feeding (Tomasello et al., 2003) [24] and mating (Crockford et al., 2007) [25] opportunities, and in seeking entry into new troops (Sapolsky, 2002) [26].

In modern human culture, exercising control to adjust to and thrive in one’s social environment is likewise paramount. In line with this, Baumeister (2005) observes that humans have an expanded repertoire of ways to satisfy the desire for control [21]. Humans exhibit control by, for instance, attending school, learning to build a house, maintaining a garden or farm animals, or going to work regularly, and such control tends to pay off over the course of a lifetime (Bembenutty & Karabenick, 2004; Mischel et al., 1989) [27, 28]. Skills of self-discipline and self-control are acquired by maturing children as a result of social pressure from many directions, including from peers (Blair & Diamond, 2008) [29].

In circumstances where nothing much hangs on doing A rather than B, vigilance may be lower and situational factors more significant. While pursuing a goal, one can encounter many “fringe” choices – whether to pick up a piece of litter, for example. Nevertheless, how one decides these fringe choices has very little to do with the normal function of executive control in pursuit of a goal. While attending to a task that has interrupted the pursuit of an important goal, people typically experience frequent intrusive thoughts about the goal, getting back to the goal, how to complete the current task quickly, and so on. Demonstrated experimentally and sometimes referred to as the Zeigarnik effect (Förster et al., 2005; Zeigarnik, 1927) [31, 32], this phenomenon implies that nonconscious processes continue to keep the goal high in priority until resumption of the goal-related action, no matter the interruption by task-irrelevant contingencies. Rather than frail control, this phenomenon and the others described above bespeak rather stalwart and sturdy control.

A neurobiological account of control
We suggest that a range of neurobiological data and models of brain function (see Box 1 in published version) point to a way to sharpen the meaning of “control”. Our proposal has two parts. The first component is anatomical, specifying that the brain regions and pathways implicated in control are intact and that behavior is regulated by these mechanisms in a way consistent with prototypical cases of good control. So, for instance, if trauma or disease damages areas implicated in control – such as the fronto-basal-ganglia circuit (Aron et al., 2007) [33] and prefrontal cortex (Miller & Cohen, 2001) [34] – control will be impaired (Bechara et al., 1994, 1996; Damasio, 1994; Damasio et al., 1991; Fuster, 2008; Rushworth et al., 2004) [35-40]. The second component is physiological, and includes the molecular mechanisms whereby controlled is regulated. Even if the anatomical structures for control functions are intact, functionality requires that the levels of various neurochemicals – neurotransmitters, hormones, enzymes, and so on – are maintained normally. To a first approximation, what ‘normal’ means here will be determined experimentally by discovering links between uncontentious examples of control in behavior, and the neurobiological parameters in question; similarly for cases of impaired control. Roughly speaking, and granting individual variability, the normal range of the implicated neurochemicals (for a given species) is calibrated to the spectrum of values that the brain evolved to maintain in response to environmental demands typical of the species’ evolutionary past. Outside this range, control will be compromised. For instance, in addicts, a delayed return to baseline of corticotrophin releasing factor (CRF) levels, correlated with high levels of anxiety, appears to be a major factor in addicts’ recidivism (Koob, 2006; Koob & Le Moal, 2008) [41, 42]. Considering a different parameter, low serotonin levels are correlated with poor impulse inhibition, implying that this neurochemical plays an important role in control (Beitchman et al., 2006; Ferrari et al., 2005; Frankle et al., 2005; Nelson & Trainor, 2007) [43-46].

Is there a way to connect this neurobiological perspective on what constitutes being “out of control” with the sorts of “situational” factors cited in support of the Frail Control hypothesis? We suggest not. Normal levels of neurochemicals, and thus control, can be disrupted when external circumstances are, for instance, profoundly threatening. Great fear or shock can trigger a cascade of stress responses (including a rise in CRF, glucocorticoids, and the catecholamines epinephrine and norepinephrine (Koob, 2006; Koob & Le Moal, 2008; Lupien et al., 2007; Sorrells & Sapolsky, 2007) [41, 42, 47, 48] that may cripple control mechanisms. As a result, a captured spy may divulge secrets after “being shown the instruments of torture”, or a cuckolded husband may knife the disgraced pair in bed. These are the kinds of circumstances that courts regularly consider when asked to reduce penalties. Significantly, however, they are not the kind of mundane circumstances on which the Frail Control hypothesis relies.

To be clear, the account just sketched does not set the unreasonable standard that every relevant neurochemical must be at its ideal level or even within its normal range. Instead, the physiological requirement for being in control is defined in terms of a hyper-region in an n-dimensional “control space”. An important consequence of defining control in this way is that there will be many different combinations of neurochemical levels that fall within the “in control” hyper-region. As a result, a given neurochemical straying outside its normal range need not render a person “out of control”, assuming that other neurochemicals are within their normal ranges and that the deviation is not too extreme (click to expand Figure).

The role of nonconscious processes
According to a traditional framework – which, begging some forebearance, we will call neo-Kantian – consciousness is a paramount, and perhaps even necessary, condition for a decision’s being considered free. According to the neo-Kantian, consciousness must play a substantial role in most or all steps leading to a free decision: deliberating, choosing, intending, and acting. The interplay of reasons in deliberation must be transparent, since a reason must be conscious to be a reason at all; otherwise, it is a mere cause. Control, accordingly, is believed to be limited to those cases where most or all evidence, reasons, weighting of reasons, and so forth that contribute to a choice are consciously accessible. This transparency is central to the emphasis placed on consciously deliberated choice as a paradigmatic case of control in much of the philosophical literature, as well as the relation between “normative competence” and responsibility invoked by Doris (2006) [14, p. 136]. In keeping with the neo-Kantian perspective, the Frail Control hypothesis implicitly attaches enormous importance to whether the factors that play a role in an action can be consciously acknowledged as reasons. In our view, however, the general consciousness requirement for being “in control” is unrealistic. Exactly what role awareness of specific factors must play for an action to be considered controlled, relative to neurobiological criteria, is a matter not of stipulation, intuition, or semantics, but scientific discovery.

The exercise of skills is one domain where nonconscious processes are entirely consistent with – and even boost – successful control. Skilled responses are involved in just about everything we do, from driving, reading and gardening, to getting along with members of our community and finding our way home (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000) [49]. Studies of skill acquisition, whether motor (Poldrack et al., 2005) [52] or cognitive (Fincham & Anderson, 2006) [53], indicate that in skilled or trained individuals, conscious attention is directed not to the intermediate steps, but to the larger aim and to unforeseen hazardous contingencies. Routine control can therefore be automatic (as evidenced, for instance, by increases in anterior cingulate cortex activity with practice (Fincham & Anderson, 2006) [53], while vigilant control can be directed to other things. Thus, habit and routine serve to spare the brain the energetic costs of close attention and to give the benefits of smooth operation (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009 [6]; Landau et al., 2004; Reichle et al., 2000; Sayala et al., 20060 [54-56], making nonconscious control of this sort a great energy- and face-saving device. Notably, cognitive, motor, and social skills, including those that underlie habit and routine, are often invoked in later explanations of actions and are certainly robust enough in their guidance of action to be considered genuine reasons.

Additional support for the value of automaticity comes from the hypothesis that (conscious) executive control is itself a somewhat limited resource. According to this view, known as the self-regulatory resource model, the amount of energy people have to expend on conscious self-regulation is limited, with the result that expending it on one task reduces the amount available for other tasks (Baumeister et al., 2007a, 2007b) [57, 58]. This suggests that nonconscious processes not only perform control functions of their own but may also help to ensure the efficacy of conscious mechanisms of control.

Furthermore, as evidenced by our ability to function while being bombarded by stimuli on a moment-to-moment basis, environmental factors – even if processed below the level of conscious awareness – do not flow straight through to trigger behavior. A reason for this is suggested by the model developed by Miller and Cohen (2001) [34], which proposes that the prefrontal cortex exerts control by sending bias signals that modulate activity in other brain areas. On this account, the totality of environmental influences – via automatic processes – clearly need not determine behavior. Even if, acting alone, environmental factors were to give rise to a pattern of activity divergent from a goal, the prefrontal cortex can, through bias signals, cause a goal-relevant pattern of activity to prevail instead.

In sum, although the idea that reasons and control can be (and often are) nonconscious is unacceptable to those who – even tacitly – accept the traditional, neo-Kantian view of action, it is consistent with the data.

Social psychology and control
The implications of the neurobiological account of control developed above for the interpretation of social psychological results can be summarized as follows: quite simply, most of the patterns of behavior described in the social psychology literature do not fall outside the realm of control (see also Bargh & Morsella, in press) [3]. The reason is that although the effects studied by social psychologists are mediated by situational factors and (often) by nonconscious processes, evidence indicates that the requirements for control set out above are typically met. First, the brain structures essential for control functions are intact (the anatomical condition). And second, the circumstances studied are usually within the typical range encountered in the evolutionary past of humans, and thus levels of various neurochemicals on which the proper functioning of the anatomical structures depends can reasonably be expected to be within their normal ranges (the physiological condition). Contrary to the claims of the Frail Control hypothesis, therefore, findings from social psychology should not be taken to motivate a substantial revision of our moral and legal practices of responsibility attribution.

The relationship between conscious and nonconscious control
To be clear, we are not advancing the radical thesis that there is no such thing as consciousness or conscious control. Our main point is rather that although consciousness – for instance of goals and what the neo-Kantian would call “reasons” – does sometimes have an important role in control, it is not required for control. Nonconscious control can be – and frequently is – exercised, and this control can be every bit as genuine as the conscious variety.

Given that the notion of nonconscious control is only beginning to gain traction in the scientific literature (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009) [6], we are not currently in a position to speculate about the precise interplay of conscious and nonconscious processes in controlled behavior or about the similarities and differences between the neurobiological substrates for these processes. Even so, it seems a safe bet that anatomical and physiological factors such as those discussed will figure in both conscious and nonconscious control in some fashion, and to some degree. The real work, however, will be in investigating the neurobiological details and teasing out how the anatomical and physiological factors underlying conscious and nonconscious control coincide and differ.

Moreover, while the extremes of conscious and nonconscious control may be fairly clear, the gradations and connections between cases are not yet major targets of research, let alone known with any certainty. However, by examining a range of cases between the extremes of conscious and nonconscious control and systematically varying the situational parameters, researchers may be able to illuminate the factors that prompt significant conscious involvement in the process of decision and action.

Conclusion
Recent challenges to the classical framework of control and responsibility are based on data from social psychology showing that minor external contingencies can play a significant role in behavior even when we are unaware that they do so. The data are taken to imply that control is rare and frail, and that the category of excuses from moral and legal responsibility should be modified accordingly. From our perspective, once these findings are placed alongside a broader range of data, a very different hypothesis is motivated: goal-maintenance and executive control are remarkably robust, and elements of control are often nonconscious. Neurobiological grounding for this alternative hypothesis is provided by findings that suggest a framework for control based on anatomical and physiological parameters. Accordingly, it is possible to model control as neural activity within a parameter space, where a region of the space characterizes values of various neurobiological parameters needed for executive control. So long as control-relevant anatomical structures are intact and the neurochemicals on which their functionality depends are within their appropriate ranges, sensitivity to situational contingencies and nonconscious processes are appropriate aspects of control and goal-directed behavior, not obstacles to them.

Acknowledgment and References

This post is a condensed version of Christopher L. Suhler and Patricia S. Churchland, “Control: conscious and otherwise,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (Aug 2009): 341-347. Numbers in brackets correspond to the article’s References list.

Creativity and computers: what could these possibly have to do with one another? “Nothing!,” many people would say. The two are simply incompatible.”

Well, I disagree. Computers and creativity make interesting partners with respect to two different projects. One, which interests me the most, is understanding human creativity. The other is trying to produce machine creativity–or anyway, machine “creativity”–in which the computer at least appears to be creative, to some degree.

What is Creativity?

Human creativity is something of a mystery, not to say a paradox. One new idea may be creative, while another is merely new. What’s the difference? And how is creativity possible? Creative ideas are unpredictable. Sometimes, they even seem to be impossible — and yet they happen. How can that be explained?

Before we can hope to explain creativity, we need to know what’s meant by the term. In fact, people use it in rather different ways — so, when discussing it, they can end up talking at cross purposes.

Here, let’s agree that creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable. “Ideas,” here, includes concepts, poems, musical compositions, scientific theories, cooking recipes, choreography, jokes … and so on. “Artefacts” include paintings, sculpture, steam-engines, vacuum cleaners, pottery, origami, penny-whistles … and more.

Creativity isn’t a special “faculty,” confined to a tiny elite: it’s an aspect of human intelligence in general. Nor is it an all-or-none affair. Rather than asking “Is that idea creative, Yes or No?,” we should ask “Just how creative is it, and in just which way(s)?” Asking that question will help us to see just what sorts of psychological process could have brought the new idea about.

Creative ideas, then, are new. But of course, there’s new–and there’s new. Ask a teacher, for instance. Children can come up with ideas that are new to them, even though they may have been in the textbooks for years. Someone who comes up with a bright idea is not necessarily less creative just because someone else had it before them.

We need to make a distinction between “psychological” creativity and “historical” creativity. (P-creativity and H-creativity, for short.) P-creativity is coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it. It doesn’t matter how many people have had that idea before. But if a new idea is H-creative, that means that (so far as we know) no-one else has had it before: it has arisen for the first time in human history.

Clearly, H-creativity is a special case of P-creativity. For historians of art, science, and technology, H-creativity is what’s important. But for someone who is trying to understand the psychology of creativity, it’s P-creativity which is crucial. Never mind who thought of the idea first: how could anyone manage to come up with it, given that they had never thought of it before?

If “new,” in this context, has two importantly different meanings, “surprising” has three. First, An idea may be surprising because it’s unfamiliar, or even unlikely–like an outsider winning the Derby. This sort of surprise goes against statistics.

The second sort of surprise is more interesting. An unexpected idea may “fit” into a style of thinking that you already had–but you’re surprised because you hadn’t realized that this particular idea was part of it.

And the third sort of surprise is more interesting still. This is the astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible idea. It just couldn’t have entered anyone’s head, you feel–and yet it did. What on earth can be going on?

The Three Roads to Creative Surprise

“What is going on” isn’t magic–and it’s different in each type of case. For creativity can happen in three main ways, which correspond to the three sorts of surprise.

The first involves making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas. Examples include poetic imagery, collage in painting or textile art, and analogies. Think of a physicist comparing an atom to the solar system, for instance, or call to mind some examples of creative associations in poetry or in political cartoons.

In all these cases, making–and appreciating–the novel combination requires a rich store of knowledge in the person’s mind, and many different ways of moving around within it. If the new combination is to be valued, it has to have some point. It may or (more usually) may not have been caused by some random process–like shaking marbles in a bag. But the ideas/marbles have to have some intelligible conceptual pathway between them for the combination to “make sense.”

The other two types of creativity are interestingly different from the first. They involve the exploration, and in the most surprising cases the transformation, of conceptual spaces in people’s minds.

Conceptual spaces are structured styles of thought. They aren’t originated by one individual mind, but are picked up from one’s culture, or occasionally borrowed from other cultures. They include ways of writing prose or poetry; styles of sculpture, painting, or music; theories in chemistry or biology; fashions of couture or cooking … in short, any disciplined way of thinking that’s familiar to (and valued by) a certain social group.

Within a given conceptual space, many thoughts are possible, only some of which may have been actually thought. Some spaces have a richer potential than others. Noughts-and-crosses is such a restricted style of game-playing that every possible move has already been made countless times. But that’s not true of chess, where the number of possible moves, though finite, is astronomically large. So is the space of possible sonnets, or screenplays, or fugues.

Someone who comes up with a new idea within a particular thinking-style is being creative in the second, exploratory, sense. If the new idea leads on to others (still within the same space) whose possibility was previously unsuspected, so much the better. Exploratory creativity is valuable partly because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn’t glimpsed before. They may even start to ask just what limits, and just what potential, this style of thinking has.

All professional artists and scientists do this sort of thing. Even the most mundane street artists produce new portraits every day. They are exploring their space, though not necessarily in an adventurous way. Occasionally, they may realize that their sketching-style enables them to do something (convey the set of the head, or the hint of a smile) better than they’d been doing before. They add a new trick to their repertoire, but in a real sense it’s something that “fits” their established style: the potential was always there.

What the street-artist–or Picasso, in a similar position–may also do is realize the limitations of their style. Then, they have an opportunity to change it.

The limits of the thinking-style, or of some particular aspect of it, may be slightly pushed, slightly altered, gently tweaked. They may even be changed so decisively that ideas which previously were unthinkable now become possible. The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn’t have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator transforms the pre-existing style in some radical way.

But how can that possibly happen? And how could computers help us to find the answer?

How Can Computers Throw Light on Creativity?

To understand how exploratory or transformational creativity can happen, we must know what conceptual spaces are, and what sorts of mental processes could explore and modify them.

Styles of thinking are studied by literary critics, musicologists, and historians of art, fashion, and science. And they are appreciated by us all. But intuitive appreciation, and even lifelong scholarship, may not make their structure clear. (An architectural historian, for instance, said of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses that their “principle of unity” is “occult”.)

This is the first point where computers are relevant. Conceptual spaces, and ways of exploring and transforming them, can be described by concepts drawn from artificial intelligence (AI).

AI tries to get computers to do the many different sorts of things that minds can do. Indeed, AI-concepts enable us to do psychology in a new way, by allowing us to construct (and test) hypotheses about the structures and processes that may be involved in thought. For instance, the structure of tonal harmony, or the “grammar” of Prairie Houses (no longer “occult”), can be clearly expressed, and specific ways of exploring the space can be tried out. Methods for navigating, and changing, highly-structured spaces can be compared.

Of course, there is always the additional question of whether the suggested structures and processes are actually implemented in people’s heads. And that question isn’t always easy to answer. But the point, here, is that a computational approach gives us a way of formulating clear scientific hypotheses about the rich subtleties of the human mind.

With respect to understanding creativity, computer models can help us because they can be creative. Or rather, they can at least appear to be creative.

Many people would argue that no computer could possibly be genuinely creative, no matter what its performance was like. It might produce theories as ground-breaking as Einstein’s, or music as highly valued as Beethoven’s … but still, for these people, it wouldn’t really be creative.

Several different arguments are commonly given. For instance: it’s the programmer’s creativity that’s at work here, not the machine’s. The machine isn’t conscious, and has no desires or values–so it can’t appreciate or judge what it’s doing. A work of art is an expression/communication of human experience, so machines simply don’t count. And all ideas have meaning, which is lacking in computers.

Perhaps you accept at least one of those reasons for denying creativity to computers? Very well, I won’t argue with you here. Let’s assume, for the purpose of this discussion, that computers can’t really be creative. That doesn’t mean, however, that there’s nothing more of interest to say.

All the objections just listed accept, for the sake of argument, that the imaginary computer’s performance is indeed very like that of human beings. What we need to focus on here is whether it’s true that computers could, in fact, come up with ideas that at least appear to be creative–and, if so, how?

Computer Models of Creativity

Let’s consider combinational creativity first. In one sense, this is easy to model on a computer. For nothing is simpler than picking out two ideas (two data-structures) and putting them alongside each other. A computer could merrily produce novel combinations till Kingdom come.

But would they be of any interest? We saw, above, that combining ideas creatively isn’t like shaking marbles in a bag. There must be some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them that we value because it is interesting in some way. We saw also that combinational creativity typically requires a very rich store of knowledge, and the ability to form links of many different types.

For a computer to make a subtle combinational joke, for example, would require (1) a database with a richness comparable to ours, and (2) methods of link-making (and link-evaluating) comparable in subtlety with ours. In principle, this isn’t impossible. After all, the human mind/brain doesn’t do it by magic. But don’t hold your breath!

The best example of computer-based combinational creativity so far is a program called JAPE, which makes punning jokes of nine general types that are familiar to every ten-year-old. For example: What do you call a depressed train?–A low-comotive, and What’s the difference between leaves and a car?–One you brush and rake, the other you rush and brake. To be able to do this, the program needs a set of templates defining the ’skeleton’ of each type of joke (e.g. What’s the difference between an x and a y?, What kind of x can y?, and What do you get when you cross an x with a y?), plus rules for finding words to fit the chosen template. Those rules, in turn, need access to a large semantic network (of over 30,000 items), with links representing not only meaning, hierarchy, and synonymy but also phonology, spelling, syllabic structure, and grammatical class.

Filling-in a familiar joke-schema is difficult enough. (Try to work out just what was needed to generate the joke about the depressed train.) But making a one-off jest is usually more demanding. Ask yourself, for instance, what Jane Austen had to know in order to write the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (And why, exactly, is it funny?) To put the relevant knowledge into a computer, alongside (so as not to ’cheat’) the many other things that Austen happened to know, would take forever. And to enable the program to originate the countless one-off jokes in the book (in Mr. Collins’ preposterous proposal to Elizabeth, for instance) would in practice be impossible.

In short, computer models of combinational creativity can help us to understand, in general terms, how our own combinations can come about–but they will generate valuable new combinations only rarely.

Exploratory creativity is more promising. Indeed, several programs already exist which can explore a given space in acceptable ways.

One example is Harold Cohen’s AARON, a drawing-program that can generate thousands of line-drawings or coloured images in a certain style. These are pleasing enough to be exhibited in galleries around the world. Another is David Cope’s “Emmy”, which composes music in many different styles (based on human composers such as Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Joplin). Still others include architectural programs that design Palladian villas or Prairie Houses, and programs that can analyse experimental data and find new ways of expressing scientific laws.

A few AI-programs can even transform their conceptual space, by altering their own rules. ”Evolutionary” programs, for instance, can make random changes in their current rules so that new forms of structure result. At each generation, the “best” structures are selected, and used to breed the next generation. Several examples evolve coloured images which, like AARON’s, are exhibited in galleries world-wide. These images often cause the third, deepest, form of surprise. In such cases, one can’t see the relation between the daughter-image and its parent. The one appears to be a radical transformation of the other, or even something entirely different.

Values and Creativity

There’s no major difficulty in getting an (evolutionary) art program to make transformations: that’s relatively easy. What’s difficult is to state our aesthetic values clearly enough to enable the program itself to make the evaluation at each generation. At present, the “natural selection” is done by a human being. (In scientific domains, the value-criteria can often be stated clearly enough to allow the program to apply them automatically. So these techniques are used, for instance, to help biochemists to design new molecules for pharmaceutics.)

One huge problem here has no special relevance to computers, but bedevils discussion of human creativity too. I said earlier that “new” has two meanings, and that “surprising” has three. I didn’t say how many meanings “valuable” has–and nobody could. Our aesthetic values are difficult to recognize, more difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to state really clearly. (For a computer model, of course, they have to be stated really, really clearly.)

Moreover, they change. They vary across cultures. They are often disputed: different subcultures or peer groups value different types of dress, jewellery, or music. And where transformational creativity is concerned, the shock of the new may be so great that even fellow artists or fellow-scientists find it difficult to see value in the novel idea.

Because creativity by definition involves not only novelty but value, and because values are highly variable, it follows that many arguments about creativity are rooted in disagreements about value. This applies to human activities no less than to computer performance. So even if we could identify and program our aesthetic values, so as to enable the computer to inform and monitor its own activities accordingly, there would still be disagreement about whether the computer even appeared to be creative.

The answer to our opening question, then, is that there are many intriguing relations between creativity and computers. Computers can come up with new ideas, and help people to do so. And computer models of creativity, both in their failures and in their successes, help us think more clearly about our own creative powers.

I

There remains great controversy in philosophy over the issue of how we should make sense of what people do, of their actions, as opposed to explaining what happens to them. Some philosophers believe that if the question is: what distinguishes naturally occurring events like bodily movements in space from metaphysically distinct purposive doings initiated by me, the answer is: nothing. There are no such special events; there are only bodily movements in space, naturally caused like all other events.  In Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, under the influence of logical positivism and various projects in scientific reductionism, this was the dominant position, and in some very influential camps, it still is. The picture is more sophisticated now, thanks to extraordinary advances in the brain sciences, and various ways that have been found to bypass difficult problems in scientific reductionism, but the metaphysical position remains basically the same.

The situation began to change in mid-century, to some degree owing to the influence of Wittgenstein, and a new consensus began to form among some philosophers who rejected the physicalist position, but not in favor of a full blown metaphysical incompatibilism or voluntarism. The idea was that actions could be said to require a distinct sort of explanation, and that it made a complete hash of our experience and especially of what we want explained to insist that everything should be understood as having the form of a natural event. Actions have a distinct logical form, one could say; they were purposive doings, undertaken “for the sake of something”; they were reflective and intentional (if you asked someone why she was going on about something, she could tell you); and to some degree, that form was rational. That is, the answer you got when you asked that “why” question was a reason, of some, even minimal sort, what the agent took to justify the action, or at least that action rather than any other, and their having such reasons was what motivated them to undertake the actions they did. In this sense it is a philosophical impossibility for the answer to any such “why” question about an action to be “No reason at all; I just did it”; as much an impossibility as saying about a fire that broke out: there was no cause; it just happened.

By now the philosophical landscape is dotted with so many variations on these options that it is difficult to get to a sufficiently high altitude and see the basic alternatives. However those who think there are such things as actions and agents requiring logically distinct forms of explanation point to many common features, the simplest being that (i) in acting I know what I am about and why I am about it (some stress especially that I know this in a unique way, “non-observationally” and “non-inferentially”), and (ii) that what I am doing is subject to some kind of deliberative control (I am able to arrive at reasons for acting by deliberation and be motivated by them), and (iii) that I, considered as a distinct particular, have the capacity to direct a course of events in line with of the results of this deliberation. Call this the Humanist Inheritance, the inheritance of a complex tradition stretching back to Aristotle on the voluntary, massively influenced by Christian requirements for individual responsibility and guilt, and largely influenced by (but not wholly determined by) Cartesian positions on the required metaphysics of mental interiority.

Suppose though that all three of these assumptions presupposed in any notion of agency are now less and less robustly credible than they once were. Of course, on the self-knowledge issue, I could easily be said to have “practical knowledge” of what I am doing in cases of simple, straightforward actions: going to the store for bread, tying my shoes, driving to pick up my son at school, etc. But much literature and film in the modern era provide ample credible examples that in more complicated cases (the ones we care most about) people cannot provide a clear act description or even a very clear account of motivation. If they do, we often read or see that the act description is hotly contested (“you were not doing X, you were in fact doing Y”) and that that avowed motivation has little or no connection with what the character actually does. We might think that Freud was right about the limits of self-knowledge, or that the Marxist and critical theory tradition is right about the extent to which persons’ views about the world are truly “their own,” the product of reasoning or deliberation, or are the products of the vast shaping powers of modern consumer societies and cannot count as self-knowledge. Or we might think that the evidence from evolutionary biology is beginning to show us that our own attitudes and avowed ethical descriptions and motives are merely epiphenomenal, and that we are very strongly disposed to act in ways that are better accounted for by such evolutionary explanations, that we act as we do regardless of our avowed views.

Likewise, suppose that what we are able to effect as the result of deliberation is actually of a much, much smaller extent than we optimistically assume when we decide what to buy, whom to marry, whom to vote for, what we are willing to sacrifice for.

Suppose, that is, that the right picture is that characters who take themselves to be deliberating and initiating various deeds come to look like somewhat pathetic figures frantically pulling various wires and pushing various buttons which are, unknown to them, not connected to some moving machine they are riding, on a course completely indifferent to anything such characters pretend to do (or much more indifferent than the riders believe). If we extend the image we could say that sometimes the machine looks on a pre-programmed course of some sort, unalterable no matter what we “do,” that it is set or programmed by human nature, our fallen nature, our genetic inheritance, social forces, the initial conditions at the Big Bang and the laws of physics, or whatever. Perhaps the machine just seems to be careening about randomly, subject to a vast number of variables no one can manage or control or effectively predict. Fate or destiny as blind chance, in other words.

The first thing to say is that this is not an academic exercise. The problem I want to raise has become especially interesting in the last hundred and fifty years or so, because, under the influences, first, of the so-called “Masters of Suspicion” – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud – and in our own day under the influence of everything from structuralism and various “anti-humanisms” in European philosophy to evolutionary biology and the neurosciences (experimental results, brain imaging, Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment and so forth), many seem to have concluded that in an ever expanding range of cases, it only seems to us that we are “running any show” as conscious agents in any even metaphysically modest sense; it only seems that we could be actually leading our lives. On the other hand, in many of these contexts, it also seems extreme to say that because these general conditions have not been met, or are only minimally met, then to just that extent we must be said to be in the grip of something, some passion or unconscious desire, and that we are not acting at all; something is happening to us.

II

So the question is: if these assumptions are false or less credible and under increasing pressure, what difference should it make in how we comport ourselves? What would it actually be to acknowledge “the truth” or take into practical account the uncertainty? There are some compatibilists who might argue that it makes no difference at all, that our not being “in charge” or “in control” of our deliberations, preferences, schemes of evaluation, values, etc. is beside the main point, that being free from external constraint (such as force or coercion) and being able “to do what we want” is freedom enough. For most of us though, viewing ourselves as “products” of social or evolutionary or bio-chemical processes (and thereby not “running any show”) does count as itself an important form of constraint and as hugely deflating to the Humanist Inheritance.

And it is difficult to imagine what simply acknowledging the facts would be, to give up all pretensions to agency. Call this Simple Acknowledgement. Even if the “moving machine” picture is only roughly accurate, it is hard to see how we could simply declare that we are not in charge, the machine is, and simply “wait to see what happens,” what the machine ends up doing.

This last consideration opens up onto a very popular view. This has it that, as a practical matter (constantly facing situations in which, whatever the metaphysical facts, we must deliberate and decide), we just cannot be spectators of our lives. We are, have no other practical option but being, participants. Simple Acknowledgement is not a practical possibility. Moreover, as Strawson argued in his influential article, “Freedom and Resentment,” such a “participant or practical point of view” involves a variety of commitments, values, attitudes, and the like which we simply cannot (again as a matter of some practical fact) eliminate without rendering our practical lives unintelligible. I find myself in a great deal of sympathy with this view, but it also seems to me to come with a high price and I am not sure how to pay it.

Perhaps the most well known defense of such a practical point of view was Kant’s and his position makes clear these difficulties. Some of the difficulties are theoretical: “Who cares how it seems to us? What we cannot imagine giving up? What we ought to care about is the truth.” But practically, what some regard as the greatest liability of the Kantian approach is also the most consistent aspect of it and the hardest to avoid. That is, the spectator or “sideways on” and the practical or participant points of view are logically distinct, allow no overlap or mediation. You are “in” one perspective or “in” the other. Kant put this by talking about what appear to be separate domains of the real – the noumenal and the phenomenal – but the basic distinction is problematic enough without adding such burdens. Why assume that anything resolved when “considering ourselves as agents” can effect anything in the world, considered from a third person point of view? How could a Kantian account for what clearly appear to be degrees of agency and effective agency? How could it be right to hold someone subject to years of abuse and neglect to the same degree of accountability as someone privileged and loved? Could Kant possibly be right that we must either assume we can act with absolute spontaneity, as uncaused causes, or must consider ourselves no better than “turnspits”? How could we assume something is true just for “practical” reasons? Isn’t that like wishful thinking, or believing in God because we think we “need to”?

III

So much for the question. My very brief suggestion is that we accept (i) that the possibility of the self-knowledge criterial for agency is much more difficult and complicated than in the standard picture of agency (and rarer, though not impossible), (ii) that deliberations are rarely “freely” undertaken by persons simply qua rational deliberators, and they are never capable of “stepping back” from all their commitments and assessing them, and (iii) that we are likely “in charge” of much less of our fate than has been assumed in the traditional picture that has come down to us from the Humanist Inheritance. Assume all this and that a Kantian-style dualism, even a practical dualism, is much too strictly disjunctive and abstract, and that Simple Acknowledgement is not a practical option. What then? The question is what it would mean practically, from the point of view of someone who must lead his or her life, cannot wait to see what happens, to acknowledge this, who must embody the acknowledgement and “live out” this acknowledgement or act in the light of its truth.

My suggestion is that this is not, cannot be, a purely philosophical or theoretical question. It is largely a practical question and concerns a collectively sustained social practice. That is, the question of how to hold each other to account has obviously varied a great deal over historical time, sometimes including notions of familial guilt and inherited responsibility and quite varying notions of the relation between intention and responsibility. No theory of agency that does not acknowledge this from the outset seems to me to have much credibility. The idea is that agency – being the subjects of deeds that are categorically distinct events, being subjects whom others hold accountable for their deeds – is much more like a social status instituted and sustained by the relevant social attitudes shared in a community at a time than it is like being a unique sort of entity, one either exempt from the causal laws of the spatio-temporal universe or possessed of a distinct psychological structure and mode of causation that requires a distinct logical form of explanation. By analogy, one is a professor by (and only by) being taken to be one in ways that are relatively well settled and agreed on by a community at a time, and the idea is that being of the sort who can be held accountable for deeds (or falling outside such a boundary) is very like this, and that that status can change, expand or shrink, over time. There is no fact of the matter “outside” of the rules of such a practice that could “settle” the matter of who can inhabit such a status, and thus no reason to look at the problem as a matter of either the results established by the best science or scientifically realist philosophy, or a matter of a wholly autonomous practical attitude. We can and do adjust the rules by which we hold each other to account in the light of either changing socio-historical conditions or new findings in science. (The philosophical intuition that we must first establish a priori that we “can” do what the practice assigns to us as doers is a red herring; there is ample evidence already that we can play many different variations of the game or practice.) In this context both Simple Acknowledgement or a wholly autonomous practical attitude look like what they are; bad practical suggestions.

This is not to say that the considerations relevant to any current assessment of the practice or its alteration are easily accessible. And obviously “we” don’t hold conventions and decide whether and what to change. It is extremely difficult to get a clear grip on what we actually are doing and even more difficult to know when some aspect of a practice is “losing its grip” and what to do about it if it is. That is, we need to be able to imagine in a fine-grained way what we are actually up to at any moment (what rules we are following, how we are applying them) and what any supposition about change would look like, what it would call on us to do, what it would feel like, how an imagined alternative would be experienced under specific historical and social conditions. A few general principles about how to incorporate this deflation is not going to get us far since we need to re-imagine something like a form of life.

A tiny step forward in such a project would be to acknowledge that something like this issue has been addressed in modern literature and film for some time, more than it has in philosophy. It has not been entirely absent in philosophy, of course. One can understand the projects of Hegel, or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Heidegger or Dewey as contributing to our sense of such a different shared form of life without the traditional picture of rational agents or conscientious moral individuals at its core. Freud and the development of the “therapeutic attitude” would be another candidate. And in our own day, certainly Richard Rorty and Bernard Williams would have to count as helping to advance the conversation. But the best resources for understanding it might lie in a philosophically sensitive assessment of such “records” of the struggle with this problem as one finds in Fontane, Tolstoy (above all Tolstoy), Hardy, James, Musil, Döblin, Dreyser, Kafka, Ibsen, Beckett and others in whatever aesthetic kind these form (the kind that deals with the ever more fractured and deflated fate of the Humanist Inheritance). Bernard Williams was likely right, in other words, that “(i)n important ways, we are, in our ethical situation more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime,” and he meant especially with regard to the dwindling credibility of the core of the Humanist Inheritance. But that fact not only invites a renewed attention to the epic and tragic poets, but also invites attention to these modern aesthetic attempts at imagining this “ethical situation” in our own day.

This is admittedly still hand-waving and promissory notes, but it is at least hand-waving and note offering in a certain direction, and an expression of some skepticism about the major alternatives on offer in philosophy.