After other failures to find learning in the lower phyla, I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness.6
Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all. When we introspect, it is not upon any bundle of learning processes, and particularly not the types of learning denoted by conditioning and T-mazes. Why then did so many worthies in the lists of science equate consciousness and learning? And why had I been so lame of mind as to follow them?
The reason was the presence of a kind of huge historical neurosis. Psychology has many of them. And one of the reasons that the history of science is essential to the study of psychology is that it is the only way to get out of and above such intellectual disorders. The school of psychology known as Associationism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been so attractively presented and so peopled with prestigious champions that its basic error had become imbedded in common thought and lan-6 For the most recent discussion of this important but methodologically difficult problem of the evolution of learning, see M. E. Bitterman’s Thorndike Centenary Address, “The Comparative Analysis of Learning,” Science, 1975, 188:699-709.
Other references may be found in R. A. Hinde’s Animal Behavior, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), particularly pp. 658-663.
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Introduction
guage. That error was, and still is, that consciousness is an actual space inhabited by elements called sensations and ideas, and the association of these elements because they are like each other, or because they have been made by the external world to occur together, is indeed what learning is and what the mind is all about. So learning and consciousness are confused and muddled up with that vaguest of terms, experience.
It is this confusion that lingered unseen behind my first struggles with the problem, as well as the huge emphasis on animal learning in the first half of the twentieth century. But it is now absolutely clear that in evolution the origin of learning and the origin of consciousness are two utterly separate problems. We shall be demonstrating this assertion with more evidence in the next chapter.
Consciousness as a Metaphysical Imposition All the theories I have so far mentioned begin in the assumption that consciousness evolved biologically by simple natural selection. But another position denies that such an assumption is even possible.
Is this consciousness, it asks, this enormous influence of ideas, principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from animal behavior? Alone of species, all alone! we try to understand ourselves and the world. We become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build Chartres and computers, write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies — what have these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons?
The continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is a very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology.7 The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty 7 To demonstrate such continuity was the purpose of Darwin’s second most important work, The Descent of Man.
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which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering — are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?
The chasm is awesome. The emotional lives of men and of other mammals are indeed marvelously similar. But to focus upon the similarity unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at all. The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.
The appreciation of this discontinuity between the apes and speaking civilized ethical intellectual men has led many scientists back to a metaphysical view. The interiority of consciousness just could not in any sense be evolved by natural selection out of mere assemblages of molecules and cells. There has to be more to human evolution than mere matter, chance, and survival.
Something must be added from outside of this closed system to account for something so different as consciousness.
Such thinking began with the beginning of modern evolutionary theory, particularly in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoons with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness.
But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so. The discontinuities were terrifying and absolute. Man’s conscious faculties, particularly, “could not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws which have determined the progressive development of the organic world in general, and also of man’s
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Introduction
physical organism.”8 He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture. Indeed, it is partly because Wallace insisted on spending the latter part of his life searching in vain among the seances of spiritualists for evidence of such metaphysical imposition that his name is not as well known as is Darwin’s as the discoverer of evolution by natural selection. Such endeavors were not acceptable to the scientific Establishment. To explain consciousness by metaphysical imposition seemed to be stepping outside the rules of natural science. And that indeed was the problem, how to explain consciousness in terms of natural science alone.
The Helpless Spectator Theory
In reaction to such metaphysical speculations, there grew up through this early period of evolutionary thinking an increasingly materialist view. It was a position more consistent with straight natural selection. It even had inherent in it that acrid pessimism that is sometimes curiously associated with really hard science.
This doctrine assures us consciousness does nothing at all, and in fact can do nothing. Many tough-minded experimentalists still agree with Herbert Spencer that such a downgrading of consciousness is the only view that is consistent with straight evolutionary theory. Animals are evolved; nervous systems and their mechanical reflexes increase in complexity; when some unspecified degree of nervous complexity is reached, consciousness appears, and so begins its futile course as a helpless spectator of cosmic events.
What we do is completely controlled by the wiring diagram of the brain and its reflexes to external stimuli. Consciousness is not 8 Darwinism, an Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection (London: Macmillan, 1889), p. 475; see also Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, Ch. 1o.
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more than the Heat given off by the wires, a mere epiphenome-non. Conscious feelings, as Hodgson put it, are mere colors laid on the surface of a mosaic which is held together by its stones, not by the colors.9 Or as Huxley insisted in a famous essay, “we are conscious automata."10 Consciousness can no more modify the working mechanism of the body or its behavior than can the whistle of a train modify its machinery or where it goes. Moan as it will, the tracks have long ago decided where the train will go.