E.O. Wilson Against Free Will: 1. To a Myrmecologist Everything Is Ants

I  have read the essay, "On Free Will and how the brain is like a colony of ants," by E.O Wilson, which appears in this months' Harpers magazine and am going to be taking some time with it.  The reason for that is that Wilson has managed to include so much sloppy thinking stated so arrogantly and with a pose of authoritative difinitude and philosophical ineptitude that it is breathtaking that a major magazine would publish it.  That an academician of his standing can write something like it looks like a milestone in the march of intellectual decadence mistaking itself as a golden age.

It was tempting to point out that Wilson's problems begin as soon as the third sentence of his text but looking again at the title that would put off the critique far too long.   I recall someone pointing out, back in the 1960s, when he still had a position in science of the kind that Wilson does today, that B. F. Skinner's work with pigeons in boxes was the obvious frame through which he looked at everything, including the human mind.  Back then Skinner's model of thought was  just as much science as Wilson's is today.  But it was science which was rather definitively demolished by a philosophical look at it.  His social and cultural influence lasted as long as he lived due to the repute that a position as a senior faculty member of Harvard and then an emeritus professor can create and sustain among those who aren't particularly deep thinkers.   I would guess that his greatest influence came after behaviorism was debunked due to his ability to turn out a couple of best selling books.

I will be rash enough to doubt that Wilson's ant metaphor for the brain will last any more than Skinners pigeon metaphor did.  That both of those were the products of a larger materialist monist ideological foundation, which it also shared with such other discontinued models of the mind as that of the Freud might start to imply that problem with those cathedrals of science are built on wet sand that inevitably rots them from the foundation.  I doubt that any of them tell us much of anything except for the preferred framing of the men who produced them.  That all of them enjoyed the full status of science in academic, social and even legal contexts is, as well, testimony to the fact that repute in science is no guarantee of reliability or even durability, though it can, sometimes, produced institutions which share more with established churches than most of those inside them would care to have pointed out.

As I said the serious problems begin with the first three sentences of Wilson's text.

Neuroscientists who work on the human brain seldom mention free will. Most consider it a subject better left, at least for the time being, to philosophers. Meanwhile, their sights are set on discovering the physical basis of consciousness, of which free will is a part.

Being such a rank amateur in philosophy that I would object if someone even called me an amateur, a philospher might point out that there are some rather glaring problems with an assertion that free will can have a physical basis, especially a physical basis of kind which science is designed to study.  This is due to the dependence of scientific explanations on relationships within nets of causality, in which every result is the product of definable and set deterministic precedents and their determined actions.  Such a method of study could look for something outside of that net of causality and never find it and free will, by definition, would have to be free of that net.   If, as Wilson unsurprisingly insists, that anything legitimate to be said on the subject would have to be said by science, then, of course, free will can't be more than a delusion.   Anything called "free will" or "consciousness" for that matter, which can't be detected with science could not be redefined to fit into science and retain its most important and salient features.

To definitely say that consciousness has a physical basis - in itself unproven and likely unprovable - is subject to the same problems as basing free will on physical causation.   I would hope that a competent and free thinking philosopher, honest enough to be trying to discern the truth or reality instead of propping up a preferred ideology would point these problems out.  And a competent philosopher could probably come up with aspects of that problem which I have not even noticed.   I will remind any neuroscientist, materialist philosopher, not to mention emeritus myrmecologist of the dangers that philosophical short cuts made for the behaviorism which Wilson's Sociobiology succeeded.  Though I don't think you could really say that it supplanted the earlier, defunct science so much as filled the vacuum left by its demise.

Wilson then says

No scientific quest is more important to humanity. 

Given the piece I reposted here last week in which I identified the Holocaust (and other genocides by dictatorships) as the most important moral event of the last century and the fact that it was brought about by people who either held that free will was a delusion, impossible, not important or bad, I would agree with a statement that promoting the belief and respect for it, as well as other metaphysical attributes of the mind, is among the most important quests of humanity.

Given the fact that every, single time that scientists insist that it is their business to trap consciousness or, worse, free will,  in a net of causation and mount it as a pinned specimen for display and further study, that they end up damaging that belief, I wish they would cut it out of their consideration.  It is especially troubling to have Wilson, the world's most famous ant man looking into the question because we have already seen his framing and how that presents human life and societies.  His practice in Sociobiology and its successor, evolutionary psychology, to assert shared "traits" from the social insects manifested from them, clear across the entire animal taxonomy, in human beings, even without any real evidence that there are "behaviors" or that "behaviors" asserted are actually the same in species no more closely related than the hundreds of millions of years of evolution from a theoretical shared ancestor* is hardly a scientific determination,  they are more the products of willful narration than of actual links based on rigorous evidence.

Wilson then asserts that:

The physical basis of of consciousness won't be an easy phenomenon to grasp. The human brain is the most complex system, either organic or inorganic, known in the universe.

He goes on to present the rudest of schematic descriptions of the neuro-anatomy of brains, itself based on the, presumably, preliminary knowledge we have of that "most complex system... known in the universe".  Even more problematically, he asserts how those are asserted to work on the basis of that schematic knowledge.  If he is aware at the problems of asserting anything like that on the basis of present day knowledge of the brain, he doesn't seem to take those seriously.  If he is aware that all of the assertions made about how "the brain works" are, as well, based in ideological if not philosophical assumptions - his own materialism, for example - I don't see any evidence of that, whatsoever.   The extent to which that flow chart could be the product of imagination based on ideology and required framing within the scientific and academic establishment is worth considering, certainly if the question is as important as Wilson says it is.  But that is hardly ever done, even by philosophers and never, to my knowledge, by neuroscientists.  But, considering the fact that the crude materialism that is the foundation of all of this article was shown to be fatally problematic in physics and how that is ignored by those who invoke physics, I'm not waiting up nights for them to understand the problem of their assertions.

I have increasingly come to believe that a lot of stuff, even very important stuff, within science is the artifact of framing and ideology, desiring to fill in gaps in knowledge and entire areas of human experience.  Some of those, I've come to conclude, exist only in the imagination of scientists.  I have become skeptical that the mother of all such ideas, natural selection, is a real thing, believing it is merely a required lens through which members of the educated class are required to view evolutionary science, biology and, as can be seen in this topic, the utterly ineffable matter of the consciousness which is the basis of everything we think, including thinking about these things, including the thinking of Wilson and his fellow ideologues.  As a matter of academic legalism, it is also the vocabulary through which everything said about such things is required to be expressed, on pain of disrepute and expulsion.  Even using a different vocabulary will be considered incomprehensible and heretical.

I think a look at discontinued science might teach us a lot about how such required thoughts come into being, gain currency and then become a required means of understanding,  only to, then, be overturned**.   I look at the list of discontinued science from the past century and those sciences today which, being based on anything from a total lack of evidence to study, to ideologically framed evidence, to the ideologically framed creations based on ideological framing, and even the further manipulation of those creations and find that the dogma of materialism is, in every case, the foundation and the motive for it.  I went through "exobiology" yesterday and I've gone through others, abiogenesis, .... on the basis of the outrageous assertions of certitude based on scant to no evidence in those and Wilson's assertions in this article, I will predict that all of those will, in the future, be as forgotten as any now ditched idea is.

Considering the title of his piece, Wilson says something,  incredibly unaware of its irony.

Philosophers have labored for more than two thousand years to explain consciousness.  Innocent of biology, however, they have for the most part gotten nowhere.  I don't believe it too harsh to say that the history of philosophy when boiled down consists mainly of failed models of the brain.

Call me a skeptic but I, somehow, think that long after the 20th century world's foremost ant specialist's model of the brain has long been relegated to a quaint curiosity, if not a joke, people will still find even such things as Plato's cave and large parts of the Buddhist psychology useful and relevant.  For Wilson to make such a statement in an article with his title is an example of incredible arrogance of the kind that only the truly unaware and pathologically narrowly focused can have.

In the episode of WKRP in Cinncinati in which Dr. Joyce Brothers played the jeans magnate, "Vicky von Vicky," she walks in on three of the regulars rather bizarrely kneeling on a hotel floor in her jeans - they're hoping to nail down an advertising account.  As they are trying to explain their behavior she says,
"All I see are three pairs of jeans on the floor".   Which is as much if not more of an insight into how the human mind might operate as anything I read in Wilson's article.

*  Considering that those "behaviors" today are actually separated by two divergent lines of evolutionary history, those hundreds of millions of years should be multiplied by two,  I'd think.

** Physics has produced a good example to study, the luminiferous ether.   
I move through this “luminiferous ether” as if it were nothing. But were there vibrations with such frequency in a medium of steel or brass, they would be measured by millions and millions and millions of tons’ action on a square inch of matter. There are no such forces in our air. Comets make a disturbance in the air, and perhaps the luminiferous ether is split up by the motion of a comet through it. So when we explain the nature of electricity, we explain it by a motion of the luminiferous ether. We cannot say that it is electricity. What can this luminiferous ether be? It is something that the planets move through with the greatest ease. It permeates our air; it is nearly in the same condition, so far as our means of judging are concerned, in our air and in the inter-planetary space. The air disturbs it but little; you may reduce air by air-pumps to the hundred thousandth of its density, and you make little effect in the transmission of light through it. The luminiferous ether is an elastic solid, for which the nearest analogy I can give you is this jelly which you see, 5 and the nearest analogy to the waves of light is the motion, which you can imagine, of this elastic jelly, with a ball of wood floating in the middle of it. Look there, when with my hand I vibrate the little red ball up and down, or when I turn it quickly round the vertical diameter, alternately in opposite directions;—that is the nearest representation I can give you of the vibrations of luminiferous ether.