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116 C H A P T E R S I X What Is the Mind? Richard Dawkins’s general argument in The Blind Watchmaker is that evolution through natural selection can account for all life on the planet earth, from tulips to (now extinct) pterodactyls. Additionally, Dawkins argues that natural selection is the only scientific way of accounting for all of the various complex organs with which these life-forms come equipped. Eyes are an example of an extremely complex organ possessed in several varieties by many species. Dawkins also mentions the Tadarida bat’s marvelously complex ear, which is capable of switching ‘‘o√’’ so that the bat does not go deaf when it emits the very loud shrieks it sends out to navigate, then switching back ‘‘on’’ so that the bat can hear the much softer echoes of those shrieks upon their almost instantaneous return, and performing this switching up to fifty times per second .∞ Surely Charles Darwin was right; there is a grandeur in this view of life. Much of that grandeur arises out of the astounding complexity that evolution through natural selection is able to achieve. But there is complexity, and there is complexity. I suspect that many individuals —perhaps many so-called intellectuals especially—do embrace the general theory of evolution, but only up to a point. They want to insist that there is one thing that evolution cannot explain. That thing is the human mind. To be sure, evolution may be able to explain the physical structures of the human brain. But the mind is di√erent. The special status of the human mind as the one thing that resists explanation by evolution through natural selection can be accounted for in a number of ways, depending upon who is doing the accounting. For some, the mind’s special status inheres in its unique capacity for self-awareness or self-reflection. This capacity, it is argued, is not really a physical property of the brain but rather a quasi-metaphysical, perhaps transcendental, quality of the human being as such.≤ For others, the What Is the Mind? 117 mind’s special status inheres in its unique capacity for creative thought— particularly as such thought is manifested in all forms of artistic expression. Again, the idea here is that true creativity is not a physical property of the brain. It is instead a kind of gift from somewhere outside the physical realm.≥ Obviously, both of these accounts of the mind’s special status are compatible one with another and perhaps mutually reinforcing. They both maintain that the qualitative complexity of the mind is such that it can never be fully explained even by the best evolutionary theory. This argument is given a kind of final philosophical ‘‘lift’’ with the observation that the best evolutionary theory that could ever be produced would, of course, need to be produced by the very type of mind that the theory itself was trying to explain. But, as a wit once said, if the mind were simple enough to be understood, we would be too simple to understand it. Steven Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists will have none of this. They flatly reject the idea that the mind itself is inexplicable in evolutionary terms. Indeed, they insist not just that the brain but the mind as well is in the final analysis just another organ of the human body—albeit a very complex one. Still, like any other organ of the body, the mind must have evolved right along with the rest of our material substance. To be sure, the mind’s complexity , and maybe its capacity for self-reflection as well, guarantees that it will be a uniquely fascinating organ. This explains, Pinker modestly notes, why you are not likely to read a popular-science book with a title like How the Pancreas Works. Nonetheless, according to Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists , the mind is best conceptualized as an organ. And like all organs it has a function. Its function is information processing and computation. This makes the evolved mind sound very much like an evolved computer. Although Pinker says the computer is not a good metaphor for the mind, he cannot help deploying exactly this metaphor when the allusion is just too good to pass up.∂ Thus, in the beginning of How the Mind Works he writes, ‘‘Richard Dawkins called natural selection the Blind Watchmaker; in the case of the mind, we can call it the Blind Programmer...

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