Manipulating the Mind
Steven Rose’s engaging new book begins with chapters on the evolution of life before brains developed, on the development of the brain from embryo to old age, and on the over-hasty pretensions of modern science to explain the mind. It moves towards the alarming question of how far can neuroscience enable us to ‘mend, modulate and manipulate the mind.’
Fairly early in the book he promises to explain why we can’t explain consciousness. His answer seems to be as follows. Mind is far too complex for any simplistic explanation. Reductionists – those over-zealous theorists who accept only evolutionary/genetic explanations – are shown to be too narrow. He criticizes those who seek to explain self-sacrifice and altruism (and indeed everything else!) by genes only. Those who claim they have ‘The Answer’ in terms either of Darwin or of any other unitary explanation have forgotten the need ‘to touch empirical biological ground’.
Equally he has no time for those who compare the brain / mind to a computer. He quotes the psychologist Stuart Sutherland who is famous for asserting that ‘nothing interesting has ever been written about consciousness’ and who in the 1960s ‘was predicting that within a few years computers would be given the vote.’ (p 294) ‘Brains / minds,’ as Steven Rose justly observes, ‘do not just deal with information. They are concerned with living meaning.’ Besides, we are social creatures and users of language. Mind develops as the result of interaction between brains, society, the world and language. We are permanently in active interaction with our world. Crick’s view ‘that it is possible to reduce questions of consciousness to those of awareness, and of awareness to perception, so that if we can understand the neural processes underlying vision and perception, we will have a model for consciousness’ (p 123) is absurdly reductive, for it leaves too much out of consciousness. Such ambitions are due to the narrowness of their proposers’ perspective, and as Rose nicely comments, ‘Given a hammer, everything seems more or less like a nail.’ (p 191)
Pinker, following Chomsky, suggests that ‘the mind is likely to contain blueprints for grammatical rules.’ Rose replies that because children learn to read, this does not show there is an innate ‘reading module’. (p 134) ‘Systems do not exist in the brain in abstract; they are called into play by actions and are as transient and dynamic as the actions themselves.’ (p 163) GDM:. Reductionists would object to this unusual use of the word ‘abstract’ on the grounds that process is more abstract than particle. But to Rose, nicely, activity is more concrete than mechanism.
Consciousness for Rose is an emergent property. But how and why does it emerge? To me, Rose does not answer this question, nor (p 215) face the problem about qualia. But let me set aside my own partis pris, warmly applaud his refusal to be taken in by simple-minded reductionism, and move to what I take to be the heart of the book, namely the many actual or potential ethical problems which the various brain sciences increasingly pose. For instance genes have been identified in the US as the causes of compulsive shopping, religiosity, midlife divorce, royalty, white lies, jazz, and the propensity among men to like having their backs scratched in the bath. Naturally people have then gone on to use genes as an excuse for criminal behaviour. Scientists also often hubristically claim they can improve our brains (and so our minds!) through chemical means. Rose nicely points out the logical errors here: ‘If for instance one has toothache, and taking aspirin reduces the pain, one should not jump to the conclusion that the cause of the toothache is too little aspirin in the brain.’ (p 234-5).
What should governments do about this? What can they do? For ‘progress’ is like the natural growth of an invading forest: it persists, regardless of frantic attempts at regulation, and government is always running to catch up. The use of drugs in these ‘social’ areas may well be uncontrollable in the end, as it has long been in competitive sports, which may be viewed as a competition, not so much between athletes as between drug companies and the authorities.
There is a very interesting discussion of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and Ritalin. (pp 253-263) Here, as is widely known, the ‘uncontrollable’ behaviour of children is often seen as a medical problem, and the growth in Ritalin prescriptions in the USA has grown to about 8 million today. It continues to rise America, Europe and Australia. One notes many alarming factors, e.g. the fact that adults are all too willing to see small boys’ behaviour as ‘abnormal’; the fact that drugs designed as stimulants or as anti-obesity drugs may now be used as calmants; the fact that (in a classic example of upside-down thinking) the effects of Ritalin may be used to prove the existence of ADHD.
One must be alarmed by the blind faith so many people, whether laymen or scientists, show in chemical remedies. And yet, as the research director of GlaxoSmithKline pointed out in 2003, at best drugs work in only about half of the patients to whom they are prescribed, whereas adverse reactions occur in many cases. Nor is testing them very reliable, for they often affect humans much less than they do the animals in the trials. Why too do some people seek to explain the differences in violent crimes between the USA and Europe through disordered biochemistry, whereas these places simply have different cultures, including of course a different availability of guns?
What about responsibility, then, in which Rose so firmly believes? Are we approaching Huxley’s Brave New World, but without his all-purpose miracle drug ‘soma’, which provided all the repressive qualities the State desired, without the individualistic drawbacks? Certainly we seem to be in a new world where we need committees concerned with Neuroethics and Bioethics – ‘charged like any preceding priesthood, with condoning and if possible blessing the enterprise of the new biology.’ (p 298)
Rose is aware of the full range of human behaviour, and of the need to take it into account. We may take some comfort from the fact, he points out, that reductionists are unprepared for complexities which may in the end often defeat their efforts. Nonetheless, his overview remains alarming. I welcome this lucid and beautifully written book by this most humane of scientists.
Graham Dunstan Martin is the author of Does It Matter? The Unsustainable World of the Materialists.