Biology vs. the Blank Slate

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker deconstructs the great myths about how the mind works.

Nick Gillespie & Ronald Bailey from the October 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Reason: In an earlier book, How the Mind Works, you say it's possible we will never understand the mind. Do you still believe that?

Pinker: We may never understand it at an intuitively satisfying level. From a scientific standpoint, I think we can be satisfied that every aspect of conscious experience can be tied to or caused by some process in the brain. But what it actually feels like to have a brain is one of these age-old paradoxes that probably is an artifact of the way our mind conceptualizes things. I would liken it to our puzzlement over how time can begin at the Big Bang. It's impossible not to think, well, what was it like before the Big Bang? Or, what is the effect of the universe being curved in the fourth dimension -- what exactly does that look like? There, the problem is not a deficit in physics; the problem is a deficit in our own intuition. There is an aspect of reality that can never be intuitively satisfying even though our best science tells us that it is true.

Reason: In the new book, you suggest that "we may have to make room for a pre-scientific explanatory concept in our view of human nature -- fate." What do you mean by that?

Pinker: By fate, I don't mean divine preordination. I mean uncontrollable fortune. We can't account for about half of the variation in things like personality and intellect. I suspect that this 50 percent of the variation that is neither in the genes nor in the family may be chance events in development, the way your brain wires itself up within the constraints of the genes.

Reason: So for whatever reason, during development, something zigged rather than zagged?

Pinker: Yes, whether the growing axons in your brain zig rather than zag. Whether you inhaled a virus or your mother inhaled a virus, whether you got the top bunk bed or the bottom bunk bed. All kinds of uncontrollable events that may have a profound role in making us who we are. Indeed, there is reason to suspect just from the studies of biological development of simple organisms that chance has to play a role. When you look at genetically homogenous strains of roundworms and fruit flies growing up in a well-controlled monotonous laboratory environment, they are not the same. They have physical differences. They have longevity differences.

Reason: You've exposed the essentially materialist roots of human society. How does that not translate into humans just being apes, precisely in the way with which the right is so uncomfortable?

Pinker: We are apes, but we're our own species of apes. We're not chimpanzees, and we're not gorillas. We're a species of ape that has this outsized brain. Among the faculties of this outsized brain is the ability to learn from history via language and recorded documents. And a moral sense and an ability to perceive consequences of our actions.

I don't really know where the moral sense is located in the brain because, in a sense, it encompasses a number of the different faculties. Morality encompasses a mentality of autonomy and interchangeability of interests. It is also tied to notions of purity and defilement and to notions of conformity to community norms. If you could take any person and tap his or her moral intuitions, you would get this melange of sentiments, not all of which coincide with morality as it would be understood by a moral philosopher.

People, for example, tend to equate morality with high rank. We see that in the language: words like noble, which are ambiguous, [meaning both] high ranking and morally exalted. We see it in celebrity worship: People think that Princess Diana and John Kennedy Jr. were highly moral people, but they were pretty average. People tend to blur good looks with morality. You can give them a bunch of photographs and ask them to judge how nice they think the people are. The better-looking people are judged as being nicer.

All that is to say that the psychology of morality is multifaceted. There is no one answer to where morality is in the brain. Recent research has been looking at the part of the brain called the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, pretty much the part of the brain that sits above the eyeballs. When that is damaged by early brain injury, you grow up with what looks like defective conscience, an inability to empathize, an inability to think through conflict resolution. But I suspect that it's a complex system involving a number of parts of the brain.

We're stuck with brains. These are brains that give us pleasure and satisfaction from certain outcomes. We appreciate beauty. We fall in love. We have a sense of justice and morality. I don't see what's so terrible about satisfying those particular values that our brains provide us with.

In the case of morality there is a kind of built-in logic, namely that it's inherently contradictory to impose a standard of behavior on others that you are not willing to have applied to yourself. An amoral egoist might be able to prevail by sheer brute force by terrorizing everyone else, but if you want to justify the way you behave to others, if you are part of a community in which your well-being depends on others, you are kind of stuck with some kind of moral logic. That's why the universal core of morality across cultures is some kind of golden rule mentality.

Reason: How does a materialistic approach play out on the left? Isn't there an impulse to say, "Let's take these human monkeys and train them in a way that is more perfect?"

Pinker: The fear on the left is that if there is a human nature, we won't be free to design a better society in the future. They worry that we are marionettes or meat puppets on the ends of strings and that we're doomed to create a world of oppression and inequality. The reason that doesn't follow is that human intelligence is an open-ended combinatorial system.