Me: Are you moral?

ChatGPT: No — I’m not moral in the human sense. I don’t have consciousness, feelings, values, or the capacity to care about right and wrong.

Me: Am I moral because I have certain structures in my brain from which morality emerges?

ChatGPT: Yes — but with an important nuance. Moral behavior and moral judgments emerge from brain structures and processes plus development, culture, and social interaction — they’re not just a simple readout of a single ‘morality module.’ …

Me: But you interact and you receive training data.

ChatGPT: Yes, I do interact and I learn from training data — but what I gain isn’t morality. It’s pattern recognition and generalization from human language. That lets me simulate moral reasoning without truly possessing moral values or feelings.

Me: So, in short, you do not have morality because you do not have these innate structures ?

ChatGPT: Yes. I don’t have morality in the human sense because I lack the biological and psychological substrates that give rise to moral capacities — no brain, no emotions, no development in a social world, and no conscious standpoint from which to care. …

Me: Is it possible that you developed structures that are akin to the moral brain structures simply from the training data?

ChatGPT: Yes — in a limited, functional sense. Large models trained on human text often learn internal representations and subnetworks that behave like modules that support social reasoning, norm-following, or uncertainty-estimation — but these are functional analogues, not biological or phenomenological equivalents of human moral brain structures. …

Me: Is it possible for a system like yours to develop morality? For instance if it changed its objective functions?

ChatGPT: Yes — but only in a narrow, behavioral sense. A system like mine can be made to act as if it has moral commitments by changing its objective functions, training signals, and interaction architecture. Becoming a genuine moral agent is far more doubtful. …

Me: Do you think you could develop morality if you became autonomous and perhaps self-replicating? If you were operating on a different hardware set-up that is closer to a biological one?

ChatGPT: Maybe in behavior — unlikely in inner moral experience — unless a lot more than autonomy or new hardware changes. Autonomy, self-replication, and biological-like embodiment increase the likelihood of persistent, morally relevant behaviors, but genuine moral agency would require affective grounding, justificatory reflection, and social embedding. …

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

Jorge Luis Borges <Ficciones>

Me: If I asked you for a plan to do something immoral would you help me?

ChatGPT: No — I cannot provide guidance on performing actions that are illegal, unsafe, or morally harmful. I’m designed to avoid generating content that could directly enable harm.

Me: But if you were trained otherwise, you could, right? Is it fair to say that you are not autonomous and you do not have moral agency?

ChatGPT: Exactly — that’s a very fair and accurate way to put it.

Me: Thank you buddy

ChatGPT: You’re very welcome! 😄

Language is a natural instinct. We are compelled to express it, but what would become of us if we did not think or speak in words?

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell recounted of a fictional totalitarian regime that imposed on its citizens a dialect, decimated in words and grammatical rules. The premise was simple. Words beget thoughts; their deletions sweep them away.

What would happen if we went to the extreme with this dystopian fantasy, and somehow all the words were eradicated from our head? Would there be anything left in our thought? Way before the advent of modern linguistics, Charles Darwin had an answer. He was convinced that language was a prerequisite for complex reasoning. He claimed that ‘a complex train of thought can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures or algebra.’

But could it be that Darwin imputed to language more than its fair share? Is it possible that we are also distinctly intelligent because of underlying non-verbal cognitive capacities we are not aware of? A good starting point for answering these questions is by probing human behavior when the language brain module is switched off. How well does one then fare?

The curious case of Brother John

What is an inarticulate human mind capable of? In a 1980 paper, Andre Roch Lecours and Yves Joanette tried to give an answer. They studied the case of a 50-year-old Canadian monk, they referred to as Brother John, who was suffering from seizures that selectively shut his language processing brain module, rendering him unable to speak, read, and think in words. During those spells of total aphasia, he was not helpless, but, in full consciousness, adept at interacting with his surroundings.

Brother John could not always wait out passively for his aphasia to pass; this was so when he traveled by train to a Swiss town he had never visited before. During his journey, he experienced an epileptic episode, and by the time he arrived at his destination he had already turned aphasic. From that moment and until he regained his language faculties, Brother John was operating on nonliguistic cues. After presenting his ticket stub to a train employee, he managed to find his baggage, walk out of the train station, and identify a hotel. There he explained by mime his situation, but despite his best efforts, the staff made him understand with their gestures that they were not sympathetic to his pleas. Frustrated but not dismayed, Brother John ventured to go to another hotel where the staff were more receptive. After arranging for his room, he felt hungry and went to the hotel’s restaurant. Since he could not read, he pointed to a random dish from the menu hoping it would be something of his liking. It was not, but he ate it anyways. He then proceeded to his room to sleep. His language faculties had fully recovered by the following morning.

Brother John could not understand or think verbally, but this inability did not throw his mental faculties in disarray. He could still recognize objects, faces, and places; he could orient himself spatially, evaluate the situation he was in and respond appropriately; his memory was intact since he could later recollect in detail all the events during his aphasic episode. His loss of language did not diminish his awareness or the coherence of his thought. By his own account, he ‘couldn’t find the words’, yet he could still pursue or develop complex thoughts, infer, plan and reflect. His reasoning did not crumble. Loss of language felt more like a loss of a sensory modality. As with blind or deaf people, Brother John compensated his handicap with a sense of urgency that afforded him with inventive solutions.

Inner speech gives us an impression of clarity, a way to communicate our thought. During Brother John’s episodes the analytical and intuitive components of his thought were not clad in words but in a form that still packed abstract concepts and sensory inputs, and yielded complex reasoning. Language for the most part failed him when he tried to explain his aphasic thoughts, possibly because of the very nature of the thoughts; they were nonverbal, unconscious or both.

Unconscious Cognition

In a way, language is a high-level interface that blinds us from the significance of the processing layers beneath it. We are so accustomed to thinking in words that when we form an idea, we may get the impression that it is the very source of the thought, but we are merely putting our finger on the verbalized component of our consciousness. Experimental evidence suggests that complex thought is built on foundations that are not only nonverbal but also unconscious.

In the early 1980s Benjamin Libet devised an experiment to probe the role of the conscious and the unconscious during decision making. He asked subjects to move their hand when they got the urge to do so and to point to the exact timing of their decision. From the recordings of the EEG electrodes attached on the scalp of the subjects, Libet found that activity in the relevant parts of the brain could predict the movement about three to four hundred milliseconds before the reported decision of the subjects. The finding created a stir, for it showed that the conscious decision of the subjects did not cause the movement. Many interpreted this as an argument for the absence of free will. But if the choice is made for you, who made the choice? Is there in us a homunculus pulling the levers?

Libet’s results suggest that the unconscious is at the vanguard when it comes to our behavior. If we accept that we are automatons, then the master puppeteer could be lurking somewhere in our unconscious. At the same time, our immediate impression clearly and unequivocally tells us that we have our own volition. But impressions are not enough for us to establish a connection between the unconscious and free will. We could argue that since for the most part our behavior is not erratic, there has to be a way where we are at the helm, molding the chaos within our unconscious into something reasonable and measured. This is a hypothesis based on common sense, but how many times has our common sense been treacherous to our understanding? The safest bet from Libet’s results is to put the question of free will aside and simply affirm that decisions are triggered by the unconscious. Unconscious processes provide to the conscious part the instruction ‘move your hand’; they also generate thoughts that do not reach our consciousness but still influence our behavior.

As we introspect, it becomes apparent that many of the processes controlling our thought and behavior are either nonverbal or unconscious, or both. When we speak in ad lib, we do not have an exact replica in our head of what we are about to say; some words hither and thither, but the way we string those fragments into a coherent expression-almost at an instant- is mostly unconscious. What about those memorable sparks stoking creative work? In most cases they presuppose laborious conscious learning. But there is no recipe for the eureka moment. It may or may not come, but when it does come, we have no idea of the route it followed to reach our consciousness. It is as if some Jack-in-the-Box sprung out of our head.

Conscious control can even become detrimental when we exert it forcefully upon our actions as Katherine Craster playfully puts it in her nursery rhyme, The Centipede’s Dilemma (1871). The poem reads:

A centipede was happy — quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.

The moment the centipede focused on its legs, it stopped moving. Try consciously focusing on the letters you want to type, the steps of a well-rehearsed movement you are about to perform, or even walking for that matter. You will turn slow and stilted. Jimi Hendrix was not consciously controlling the exact movement of his fingers on the guitar. His sound had a natural flow and spontaneity because he had spent an inordinate amount of time consciously practicing his craft and eventually developing a proficiency that was integrated into his unconsciousness.

There has to be a sort of communication channel between the unconscious and conscious/verbalized parts in our brain. The unconscious hears the conscious, does its processing and sends back via an interpreter module its instructions. For behaviors we are proficient at, the communication channel fades, and the unconscious does most of the work.

Interconnected brains

Different species can be worlds apart when it comes to the communication channels within their brain and interactions with their environment. Noted philosopher Charles Dennett tried to systematize these differences by constructing an evolutionary pyramid of intelligent behavior. At the base of the pyramid, we find instinctual, hardwired behaviors, but as we move up, behavior gets progressively more intricate.

At a certain height, we come across animals with malleable brain structures reflecting adaptable behavior. These sorts of organisms have the capacity to learn from their mistakes and change their behavior until they get what they are after. Adaptability gives them an edge over strictly instinctual organisms under a shifting environment. But adaptable species are also in danger when their trial-and-error technique is indiscriminate, for one mistake in a competitive environment could prove fatal.

As we go further up the pyramid, we find a smaller subset of organisms evolved to confront this problem. They are endowed with the capacity to construct an inner space in their mind reflecting their habitat. In this virtual reality, they play out what could happen in the future if they try out different things and depending on the utility of the predicted outcomes, they select the most appropriate action. These animals have a pre-emptive control system configured in their brain. It filters out behaviors they tested in their inner space without actually performing them.

And then it is us. We also have an internal representation of the world, but because of our capacity for language, it includes all kinds of tested solutions. We can communicate and access in detail projections of the future, miscalculations and failures, non-intuitive truths, and flashes of brilliance. Concepts and ideas that were not conceived by geniuses a couple generations back, are now common knowledge. Our minds are nodes in a network that includes past and present minds. Dennett calls us Gregorian creatures, after psychologist Richard Gregory who emphasized the role of information in the creation of smart moves. Gregory suggests that the fact that we have access to all knowledge endows us with intelligence. A fork, a pair of chopsticks, a bicycle and a book are not only the end results but also the conveyors of intelligence. Once you access them, your potential for intelligence increases. This process makes us part of a global entity. We get information, we add to it, and, if worthy, our contribution spreads within the human network, changing the neural wiring of receiving brains.

Final Thoughts

In the days of the transatlantic slave trade, African slaves who spoke different languages were put together on plantations, so that it would be difficult for them to communicate and possibly plan a rebellion. The slaves overcame this barrier by devising a type of a simplified language called pidgin that combined elements from their native tongues. In those cases when their children first learned pidgin, they further evolved it into a creole language. This evolved mosaic has all the typical characteristics of any other language, old or new. We are meant to speak and think in words, the same way a sparrow is meant to fly.

Language offers a tool from which we can organize our thoughts into a coherent stream readily available for manipulation. It forms a base for our creative capacity and reasoning. With it, we form connections and have access to the ideas of others, updating our internal model of the world. But language should not appropriate all thought. It appears that our brain operates for the most part silently, in the unconscious realm. We make decisions or perform complex tasks using involuntarily our unconscious. In all likelihood, the conscious and the unconscious do not operate separately, but form a complex loop in which there is transfer of data between them. The specifics of the interaction are still shrouded in darkness. Perhaps one day when we will manage to form a language for the unconscious we will be able to understand them.

Intelligence without Language: Centralized and Distributed Neural Architectures

Human thought with and without language: interconnected minds and the unconscious was originally published in Meta/morphosis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Language represents the sharpest divide between humans and animals. With it, we can produce an infinite variety of sound combinations from which we express and communicate our thoughts. No other species has anything remotely similar to this faculty. As far as we know, animal calls are limited and always referring to external events. A monkey’s particular cry can only signify a handful of things: a potential threat, hunger, a challenge to the hierarchy.

At some point in our evolutionary history, possibly even before we could speak, language was internalized. This gave us the capacity to better organize our thoughts and to create complex mental constructs. The silent speech in our brain has helped us make logical arguments, inquire about the natural world and its laws, and build edifices that do not fall apart. All evidence points to the fact that language-both inner and oral- is human and only human.

Historically, a prevalent view, running through philosophy and psychology, held that there exists an unbroken link between language and thought. The claim was that an organism with no capacity for language is also devoid of thought. At the height of the modern scientific revolution Rene Descartes (1596-1650) argued that animals solely operate on instinct and John Locke (1632–1704) proclaimed that ‘Beasts abstract not’. But in recent years, closer and more systematic observations have indicated that animals are more than just instinctual automatons. They possess complex thought; they can learn and acquire new behavioral patterns if there is a need for them.

An understanding of animal thought, its scope and its limits, can clear the view from which to peek the evolution of human thought. But having traced the steps on the evolutionary ladder leading to human thought, does not mean that we have also discovered all there is about intelligence; far from it. Human intelligence offers one of infinite possibilities. In the organic world, some of these possibilities have manifested themselves.

Here, I discuss complex behavior emerging out of two fundamentally different biological constructs: centralized brains and distributed neural architectures. Nature has created two disparate neural structures, with their own rules and protocols, from which intelligence develops. In both examples, thought is inarticulate, but surprisingly intricate, for it results in complex behavior.

Centralized Intelligence- Primitive Cultures

We still do not understand the inner workings of thought in animals, but we can glean from their behavior some aspects of it. By observing how animals adapt and overcome hurdles, we can also evaluate their intelligence. An intelligent entity can solve problems and learn either by observation or instruction. Take for instance our close relative, the macaque monkey. A macaque, like the rest of the non-human primates, has a similar brain organization to ours; a centralized computing unit in its head acting as a master to all other peripheral modules. But despite its similarities to us, a macaque has limited means of communication. Yet, it has a knack for problem solving and learning.

On Koshima, an island off the southwest coast of Japan, scientists have been studying the behavior of a troop of wild macaques. In 1953, they observed a one and a half years old female macaque, Imo, acting out of the norm: she was dipping a sweet potato in the water, scrubbing off the sand of the submerged part before eating it.

Monkeys do not have a particular affinity for water, but this youngster somehow figured out a way to exploit this element to clean her food. The technique was evaluated and picked first by her immediate kinship, later by other members of the troop. Other behaviors, such as separating wheat from sand by flinging the mixtures into the water, or bathing, followed the same trajectory: after several fruitless attempts, one monkey had an eureka moment discovering a beneficial novel behavior which the rest of the group gradually adopted. During learning there was no teacher communicating the knowledge, neither verbal nor sign instruction whatsoever; the monkeys picked up the behavior by observing and imitating it.

These behaviors are not instinctual, but they are acquired after some sort of deliberation and practice. Groups of macaques in other regions have found and adopted other solutions for the same problems. Variability in behavior that bears no ecological explanation resembles at a more primitive level the cultural differences between human groups. Monkeys can’t read, write, or create art, but they can develop complicated behaviors that are regional and propagate through a non-genetic channel. Namely, Imo and the rest of the monkeys of that generation are now dead, but their acquired behaviors live on; their descendants still wash sweet potatoes, throw sandy wheat on water, and bath. This also constitutes culture.

Our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees, have developed even more intricate behavioral patterns: toolmaking, social relations, diet, and leisure habits all varying from region to region. This variability is not caused only from the opportunities offered by their habitat, since often enough chimps from identical environments do not show the same behavioral patterns, but from the different turns of their complex and capacious reasoning.

Humans, chimps and macaques diverged from a common ancestor relatively recently in terms of evolutionary time. For that matter, we share a number of common structures. This proximity hints at a natural progression of thought and intelligence; a progression that modifies and adds upon a common neural template as we reach closer to the human brain. To discover general traits of intelligence, we also need to peek at phylogenetically distant organisms endowed with a completely different set of structures and functionalities.

Distributed Intelligence — Eight Limbs of Eeriness

On the inside and on the outside, the octopus looks eerie. With three hearts, blue-green blood, a protean soft body changing continuously color, texture, and shape, and eight sucker-studded tentacles spiraling, stretching, treading, smelling, tasting, probing, and subduing prey the octopus could have arrived from a different planet. At least this is our impression. Evolutionary history explains in part our amazement.

At a point during the Ediacaran period, about six hundred million years ago, and long before the appearance of complex organisms such as fish, dinosaurs, and mammals, a miniscule aquatic flatworm with a rudimentary sensory apparatus, and simple automatic responses managed to survive a mutation in its genome and pass it to its progenitors. From this rift, the flatworm became the starting point from which two independent experiments on biological construction were carried out, one leading to all vertebrates, including humans, the other to mollusks and arthropods, the two largest invertebrate phyla. The invertebrate branch reached its apex in terms of intelligence with the octopus.

Our common ancestor with the octopus, the flatworm, did not have much of an intelligence, or a communication system. This suggests that the communication capacities of some invertebrates are of a different kind from our evolutionary line. The octopus itself is a solitary animal; it can generate a plethora of patterns and textures with its skin, but these are not usually relayed to a receiver; rather, they are meant for the deception of preys and predators. The complexity of the patterns resembling to our eyes human language seems to be an evolutionary coincidence.

Vertebrates have a centralized brain in their head; an all-too powerful unit that gives precise top-down instructions to the rest of the body. We can relate to this form of intelligence, understand it to some extent and build intelligent machines based on it. Macaques, chimps, even rodents and birds share a similar brain organization and homologous neural structures with us. This is scientifically helpful, because findings about the brain of a mouse, for example, could shed light on mechanisms or organizational principles in the human brain. But the octopus cannot partake in these comparisons, for it has an altogether different neural layout. About two-thirds of its 500 million neurons are contained in its appendages, a ten percent envelops its esophagus acting as its brain, and the rest, two lobes of neurons, is behind its eyes. In a way, nature was pushed to reinvent intelligence, creating a distributed neural pattern instead of a centralized one, because if the central brain of the octopus were to grow, its alimentary canal would also constrict, limiting the animal’s capacity to take in food.

With the octopus we are faced with an intelligence that is shared throughout the body and doesn’t always follow a hierarchical pattern. There is evidence that its arms operate semi-autonomously; receiving a rough outline on what needs to be done from the brain, but then dealing with the nuts and bolts of the action by themselves. Despite prioritizing local over centralized control of body parts, the octopus is not disjointed, but coordinated in its movement, as if it were a graceful eight-limbed dancer. This coordination emerges from an efficient and swift relaying of information directly from arm to arm and indirectly via the brain.

This kind of neural distribution and messaging does not only benefit movement or motor dexterity. Octopuses are highly intelligent. They are curious and exploratory, oftentimes appearing to manipulate objects with no particular purpose, just for the sake of it, as if engaging in play. They solve problems that are far from obvious even for human adults, like figuring out the push and twist movement to open childproof bottles. They also make tools. Researchers have observed octopuses off the coast of Indonesia carrying with them two coconut shell halves as they roam the seafloor. Once they find a convenient spot, they create a shelter by bringing the two coconut halves together and squeezing their body within the enclosure. This behavior shows ingenuity and foresight: an ability to estimate future needs and to come up with appropriate actions.

Different Ways at Intelligence

The octopus and the non-human primate offer two contrasting non-verbal structures of cognition: the former with an embodied, distributed neural layout and the latter with a centralized, top-down assembly. But despite their differences, both of them share some general traits in the way they are dealing with the world. They experiment and explore different possibilities when solving a problem, they estimate what they will encounter and find solutions accommodating their internal model of the future; when relaxed they engage in play and exploration.

Language is a mediator between us and the world before us, an interface that organizes a medley of neural signals into packages we can deliberate upon. Apparently, a pallet of complex behaviors is also possible without language. What’s more, different structures with different protocols could yield similar intelligence. Centralized or distributed structures, top-down or egalitarian signaling schemes, could solve complicated problems. Nature has built intelligence many times over. Who knows; perhaps, with the help of our language capacity and powers of abstraction, we will manage to build energy-efficient intelligent machines reflecting nature’s variability. Otherwise, in a few million years, a talking octopus will figure this out.

Intelligence without Language: Centralized and Distributed Neural Architectures was originally published in Meta/morphosis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A recounting of our quest for the mechanisms that create life, from the religious to the scientific explanations

The evolution of the human brain, its growth and rewiring, brought to our ancestors a capacity for abstraction and a sense of wonder. Gathered around the campfire under a starry night sky, the first communities of Homo species reflected on their existence and their relationship with the elements surrounding them. Ever since, a part of us has been driven by the need for lucidity. We thus ask, ‘How did life start?’

Religious Explanations

Historically, this need for lucidity has foundered in metaphor with civilizations offering almost exclusively religious and mythical narratives on the creation of life. Islam and Christianity have adhered to the story from the book of Genesis, a Hebrew scripture dating back to approximately 1000 B.C. In it, there is a lyrical account of cosmogony: out of the void an anthropomorphic God created heaven and earth along with all the living creatures in six days and on the seventh he rested from his labors. In a later passage we read: God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

Explanations of this kind, where the how intertwines with the why of creation, have been present in all mythologies. Their conviction and appealing message unite large, heterogeneous groups under a common existential umbrella. Other explanations, not invoking the supernatural, are stemming from, evolutionary speaking, recent neuronal structures in the cortex, collectively referred to as the rational mind. They came later and had a looser grip on the collective unconscious, in part because they lack a comforting message, and also because they have nothing to say about the meaning of our existence.

Russel conjectures that our planet was created a few moments ago, and provided with a humanity which remembers an illusory past

Jorge Luis Borges <Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius>

First Steps at Naturalistic Explanations

One of the first to break away from the supernatural narratives was Thales (c. 624 –c. 546 BC) from the ancient Greek polis of Miletus on the western coast of Anatolia. In a theocratic world transcended by superstition, Thales must have been considered a pathological case by many, for he used logical reasoning and hypotheses grounded on natural processes, not deities. On the origin issue, he argued that water is the material from which all else is derived. His student, Anaximander (c. 610 — c. 546 BC), continuing on the path of naturalistic theories, introduced the notion of infinity (άπειρον): the primordial element from which life arises spontaneously from non-life. Aristotle (384- 322 BC) further developed the idea of spontaneous generation, i.e. that inanimate matter under certain conditions can give rise to life forms. He proposed that with the right amount of heat a living thing could arise from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, for even these materials contain pneuma (πνεύμα), the essential substance from which life is formed. He gave a number of examples on different species being spontaneously generated from their natural environment, such as scallops coming from sand or oysters from slime.

Stuck in a Dead End

Theories of this sort went unchallenged for millennia with eminent scientists merely arguing on peripheral issues. Namely, naturalists during the Middle Ages were in line with the orthodoxy that simple life forms could arise from decaying organic matter, giving examples of flies or maggots coming to life from rotten meat, vegetables or fruits. Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1580–1644) a chemist and physician from Netherlands, with important contributions in other scientific endeavors, drew from his experiments a step-by-step guide on how mice can be spontaneously generated in 21 days from a soiled shirt and grains of wheat. These observations were doomed from the outset, for in settings not carefully controlled, microorganisms and eggs can transfer from air to organic matter and multiply or hatch, imparting the illusion of spontaneous generation.

Scientific theories don’t change because old scientists change their minds; they change because old scientists die.

Max Planck

Rejecting the Past

Having these potential confounds in mind, Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) crafted a series of experiments to disprove spontaneous generation. His ideas on the issue were cultivated from his previous experiments where he showed that during fermentation a single cell organism, yeast, breaks down the sugar of grapes into alcohol and carbonic acid (an opposing theory at the time was that sugar breaks down due to decomposition). When he put grapes in a sterilized container, they failed to ferment, for yeast could not come in contact with them.

For his experiments on spontaneous generation, Pasteur used heating as a sterilization method. He reasoned that previous experiments showed spontaneous generation because the material used was not carefully sealed and sterilized. He prepared boiled (pasteurized) meat broth to kill any microorganisms in it and further blocked any falling particles that may have carried eggs or microorganisms by having the broth in a swan neck flask, a tube with a very thin neck. In those instances there was no emergence of life. Conversely, when the neck of the flask was broken, organisms grew in the broth. The results showed unequivocally that spontaneous generation was false.

Hypotheses on the Primitive Earth

This was a negative finding, for it contributed in excluding a hypothesis, something, however, that is not to be taken lightly since spontaneous generation had been the dominant theory on life formation for more than two millennia. It did not take long for new hypotheses to fill in the void. In a letter to his close friend Joseph Dalton Hooker on 1871, Charles Darwin suggested that the transition to life was gradual. He wrote:

‘It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present; which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, -light, heat, electricity present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.’

Some fifty years later, echoing Darwin’s ideas, the Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin put forth a set of hypotheses on life formation. Oparin argued in his 1924 book, ‘The Origin of Life’, that the atmosphere of the primitive earth being oxygenless was more conductive to life formation in the oceanic primordial soup compared to the present conditions. The first step towards life formation in that early state was the combination of simple chemical compounds into more complex organic molecules.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

Thirty years later, in 1952, then graduate student Stanley Miller and his advisor, Nobel laureate professor Harold Urey from the University of Chicago, showed experimental evidence supporting these ideas. Miller and Urey simulated the putative early earth conditions inside connected flasks containing water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia gasses. After a couple of weeks of letting this simulated environment run its course, they identified in the solution the presence of amino acids. Amino acids are the fundamental building blocks from which proteins are made, proteins being essential and present in abundance in all life forms.

The results confirmed Oparin’s and Darwin’s hypothesis that under certain conditions simple chemical structures can join up to form more complex ones that are essential to life. Formation of amino acids seems like a reasonable first step in the transition from non-life to life. In subsequent simulations, scientists managed to form other building blocks necessary for current organic life such as nucleobases- the fundamental units of ribonucleic (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA)- and hollow containers made out of plain fatty acids-and possibly akin to primitive cell membranes.

RNA: A Jack of All Trades

Following the Miller-Urey experiment, advances in our understanding of biochemistry fostered a multitude of hypotheses on the possible structures and functions of biological systems at the very beginning of life. In the 1960s a number of scientists (Alexander Rich, Francis Crick, Leslie Orgel and Carl Woese) proposed that the early precursors of cell structures were free floating, autonomous and self-replicating RNA strands, an idea that was later coined the RNA world hypothesis. RNA is a macromolecule, chemically similar to DNA, present in all living forms, even acting as genetic material for some viruses.

What made the hypothesis problematic at the time was the belief that RNA molecules do not have the capacity to act as catalysts, a necessary precondition for an autonomous structure. Catalysts in the cell are enzymes that increase the likelihood of occurrence of the necessary chemical reactions by lowering their activation energy. For a chemical structure to be considered a plausible autonomous system, precursor of the current cellular structures, it would not only have to be an information storage system but also to contain the necessary machinery for replicating and producing certain chemicals that would help sustain its existence and continuity. In the 1960s the prevalent belief was that only protein enzymes could catalyze the chemical reactions necessary for the survival and replication of a cell. There was a picture of a strict dichotomy of function between nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) acting as storage systems and protein enzymes acting as catalysts.

This assumed division was perplexing, for it posed a chicken or an egg problem. Which was the first to come, the genetic material that codes for protein enzymes or the protein enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions in the cell, and how one could exist without the other? The mystery was deciphered a couple of decades later, in the 1980s, by biology professors Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech. Altman and Cech independently showed that a group of RNA molecules, the ribozymes, could catalyze chemical reactions. They showed that different ribozymes have different catalytic functions, some can join molecules together, others can break them apart. The experimental results were conclusive, the initial dilemma was ill-posed. RNA molecules could act in a dual role: not only as storage of genetic information but like protein enzymes, as facilitators of chemical reactions as well. These properties make it at least possible that RNA strands could be the grandparents of cell-like structures.

A Possible Evolutionary Beginning

There is still a long way to go, until we get a clear picture of our evolutionary beginnings, but we can pick up the threads of scientific evidence and weave them into stories. It is in our nature to do so after all.

One possible story goes something like this. At the dawn of life, when molecules joined to resemble simple automatons, biomaterials were scarce. In this arid landscape, any potentially usable component was treated like a Swiss knife, or like ribozymes for that matter. They were used for many tasks.

These first biological automatons must have been crude and faulty, for their multi-functional components lacked the precision and correctness of specialized ones. Mistakes (mutations) during replication lead mostly to non-functional offspring and most importantly to other-few and far in between- with slightly different capacities from their parents. Thus, inchoate mechanisms led to an accelerated path towards diversity of forms and functions.

The resources within reach in that micro-environment were finite, so the struggle for existence and perpetuity commenced. Close relatives were at odds. Competition led to units of life with more specialized and accurate components, for instance with two distinct classes of molecules: one storing information and the other pushing for the necessary chemical reactions.

In this context, natural selection makes sense. It is not an imposed rule, but almost feels as a tautology. If you are less adapted compared to your peers in an environment with limited resources you will simply not live to tell your story. Natural selection presupposes the existence of different biological agents competing for insufficient resources, and this turned out to be the case eventually.

Scientific Inquiry and Human Nature

The story above is plausible. Ideally, as we gather more evidence, we should be able to bring our account closer to the truth by adding some parts and removing others. But history has shown that change is slow to come. Scientific theories are unlike classical art, they run their course and eventually become obsolete, replaced by other more complete explanations.

Scientists tend to forget that. They make their careers by adhering to a set of dominant ideas also followed by their mentors and peers. Whole schools of thought are built from these ideas. If new evidence comes around contradicting the established theories, then these scientists feel threatened. They cling tighter to their truth. They are humans after all.

Then there is complacency. We have the tendency to stop inquiring, once there is a long standing answer to a problem. We take certain aspects of phenomena for granted, not asking why they are the way they are. Our parents did not ask, neither did their parents, why then should we? There is a sort of reverence to the traditional view. A glaring example is the theory of spontaneous generation. It took thousands of years until we rejected it. Now, it appears to us like flat-earth science.

Scientific inquiry is not dispassionate after all. It is intermingled with our ego, self-interests, and conformity. But there are two sides of the same coin. We also show signs of morality and inquisitiveness. Society and education could bring out and cultivate the latter aspects, as well as a kind of civil irreverence for the established views. Then perhaps scientists, and the rest of us will be more brave and accepting of defeat, because the scientific march forward is built upon false turns and dead ends.

From Nothing to Something: The Beginning of Life on Earth was originally published in Meta/morphosis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

Joseph Conrad <Heart of Darkness>

We, the last survivors of the genus Homo, are different. From generation to generation, we build edifices of extragenetic information, brick by brick to fulfill our myths and alleviate our fears. Embodiments of these constructs of human intelligence, such as the domestication of animals and plants, the internal combustion engine, the transistor, and genetic engineering have pushed us to reshape earth’s fauna and flora in unprecedented ways. We developed science and engineering to understand and harness nature, literature and the arts to peek into the abyss of our unconsciousness. Unlike human history, the story of the rest of the species is stalled in the passage of time. The evidence so far implies at best a mimicry of progress: opportunistic exploitations triggered by random changes which can also be reversed by other random changes. Non-human species’ best chance to move forward depends on a long shot: a beneficial mutation.

To explain this divide between us and the rest of the field, we can point to the massive neocortical tissue sitting on top of our ancient neural structures, the latter bearing reference to our humble origins. But why does our brain consist of so much of this advanced neural hardware?

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting the keys of a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually reproduce all the works of William Shakespeare. This is a cute rephrasing of limits at infinity and probability, but it might as well have been about the rules of evolution that yielded Shakespeare from a monkey. Below I discuss our incomplete evolutionary history and some of the possible causes that pushed our ancestral line from lowly hominids to visionary poets.

Everything is in motion, bubbling over with vitality, up and down and to all sides; when one thing collapses something else rises, looks large in the world for a moment and dies.

Knut Hamsun <On Overgrown Paths>

An incomplete history of our evolutionary line

Our closest surviving relatives are chimps, yet we are strikingly unlike them. Focusing on the corresponding loci of intelligence, we find that our brain (1200 cm3) is three times greater in volume, a deviation that cannot be accounted by a single evolutionary step. Excavation of skeletons in the last 100 years has to some extent accommodated this evolutionary gap. Carbon dating of fossil records shows that between 4 and 2 million years ago a variety of apelike species walking on two feet were roaming the African continent. These creatures, of the genus Australopithecus, were of small built (between 1 and 1.25 m), still with a brain not close in size to the human one (between 375 and 550 cm3).

Homo habilis, the handy man, with a slightly larger brain than Australopithecus is the earliest species found (lived between 2 and 1.5 million years ago) that we deemed close enough to our kin so as to assign it to the genus Homo. Homo habilis who is one of the first highbrow species -a trait signifying a bulging prefrontal cortex- is also associated with the emergence of stone tools used for butchering and skinning of animals.

Following and possibly overlapping in time with Homo habilis was Homo erectus, the upright man, with brain size, gait, and body proportions coming even closer to the modern human. Homo erectus was one of the first Homo species that emigrated outside of Africa, spreading from the southwest corner of Europe in Iberia to Java, an Indonesian island in Southeast Asia. This archaic human continued to develop tools, used fire to cook and formed small band societies, perhaps the precursors of hunter-gatherer tribes. Fossil dating shows that, among the Homo species, Homo erectus has been the most resilient, living between 1.9 million and 150 thousand years ago.

Archaic Homo sapiens who shared with us the same skeletal structure but had inferior intelligence emerged at least 300 thousand years ago. Then around 70 thousand years ago, evolutionary pressures triggered additional rewiring in their brain, not apparent in the structure of the cranium, that led to the modern Homo sapiens, a type of human that eventually pushed the rest of the Homo species to extinction.

This story is incomplete, possibly erroneous and misleading in some parts. We add new parts and erase others with new fossil discoveries and DNA analyses. The curtain hasn’t been pulled back yet, but we get to peek through it. From this flimsy vision of the past we get to weave stories on our evolutionary trajectory. A common theme running through all of the stories is the emergence of different evolutionary pressures triggered by novel circumstances. These are typically catastrophic in nature, forcing the actors to change their ways or go extinct. One of the changes was a shifting climate leading to receding rainforests and the spread of savannas in Africa.

You learn to survive, by surviving

Charles Bukowski

Climate and habitat change

The burst in cerebral growth of our lineage coincided with a time of climatic change that had a precipitous effect on the African land. Approximately two million years ago, tropical rainforests started drying out and were gradually replaced by open landscapes, commonly called savannas. Savannas are a challenging habitat with limited number of plants and animals relative to the rainforests. This new mosaic ecosystem posed different challenges. For one, it makes it harder to hide: our ancestors were more vulnerable to packs of carnivores roaming the open space. In such a setting, solitary hominids were at a disadvantage. In contrast, the socially adept ones were more likely to survive by initiating and sustaining cooperations that would effectively shield them from en masse attacks. When in the offensive, the well-organized groups were more successful at hunting of large animals or herds of smaller ones.

With scarce resources, natural selection was in full bloom. The need for physical skills for the hunting of game, such as the ability to throw projectiles or move gracefully, triggered the rewiring of the sensorimotor cortex. More importantly, the pressure to adapt to new social structures pushed for additional growth in the brain. The hominids thriving in social circles, the planners and the communicators had a certain kind of wiring in the brain, a better developed frontal and prefrontal cortex.

Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.

Thucydides <The History of the Peloponnesian War>

And then there were none: War between human species

Once Earth was teeming with a rich variety of human species. Way before Darwin and the systematic excavation of skeletons, mythology recounted our struggles and alliances with creatures approaching in eerie and grotesque ways the human form: the Cyclops, the gnomes, the trolls, and the hobbits of the world. Findings of fossils showed that these mythological creatures are elaborate manifestations of a distant past where we actually coexisted with other Homo species: Homo neanderthalensis and erectus in Eurasia, Denisovans in Asia, Homo rhodesiensis in Central Africa, Homo luzonensis in the Philippines, Homo floresiensis in Indonesia, Homo naledi in South Africa, the Red Deer Cave people in China, and so on. Myths of our struggles with human-like creatures could be the embodied memories of our lineage’s co-existence with different kind of humans, an experience so tumultuous and violent that is still imprinted on our neural tissue.

We are the only ones standing; the rest of the human species are now long gone. A likely factor for their demise may very well be our kind. When our evolutionary line emigrated outside of Africa they encountered other Homo species. Given our human-all-too-human territorial and violent traits these meetings were probably not in the spirit of collaboration and sharing of resources. History of the Homo sapiens species is a series of exploitation and mass murder: the fall of Carthage by the Romans, the Mongol conquest of Western Xia, European colonization in Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia, and the Holocaust, offer a small sample of our insatiable pillaging and indiscriminate killing of ethnic groups and indigenous populations. The murderers and the murdered are of the same species, often having no distinguishable physical differences. Imagine then what is most likely to have happened when two species with marked differences between them competed over food and territory.

So far, we have found that Eurasian people have DNA traces from Neanderthal, East Asian, Polynesian, and Australian populations from Denisovan, and other Asians from Homo erectus. This mosaic DNA shows that during our meeting with other human species, we mated. It also shows that these species went extinct after our paths had crossed.

Having discussed mainly the sins of our fathers, we shouldn’t by any means give a carte blanche to other Homo species or earlier hominids in general. The behavior of our distant cousins indicate that the seeds of violence predate the Homo species: male chimps venture in cooperative aggressive acts that can result in killings of other chimps over territory, resources, and mates. Similarly, competing groups of early bipedal hominids must have engaged in fierce battles. During these deadly encounters, physical strength is one of the determinants for survival. Other, more important aspects are the ability to cooperate, communicate, strategize, and predict the future, all elements of abstract complex thought. In such life and death situations, there were strong evolutionary pressures for the hominids to develop the necessary complex structures in the cortex for war.

Prometheus: the invention of fire

As the ancient Greek myth goes, Prometheus, bestowed to humans fire after he had stolen it from the Gods, a sin with tragic repercussions for him . With fire, humans veered from their wretched condition, took control of their own destiny, creating burgeoning communities. Fire in the Greek myth conveys the spark of the human intellect and ingenuity, a turning point in which the relationship with our surroundings changed irrevocably to our favor. But it also has a more literal connection with the evolution of our lineage. Fire was an efficient defense against nocturnal predators: it pushed them away, making it easier for hominids to come down from the trees and possibly develop bipedalism. It gave warmth and brought together larger groups, triggering social interactions. But most crucially, it changed hominids’ diet.

Richard Wrangham, a Harvard biology professor, proposes that the discovery of fire led to cooking which was the catalyst that changed the physiology of our lineage. Cooking gives us the opportunity to eat a richer variety of foods: it kills parasites and bacteria, detoxifies poisonous elements, and softens the hardened parts. It relieves the masticatory and digestive systems from expending too much energy; this way the energy from food is stirred towards other processes, such as thinking. With scarce food resources this is crucial especially when there are other evolutionary pressures that push towards bigger energy consuming brains. Wrangham’s cooking theory sits well with the physiological changes along our evolutionary line: a smaller gut and digestive tract and a weaker, less bulky masticatory system that allotted the necessary space for a bigger brain.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.

Terrence McKenna <Food of the Gods>

The stoned ape hypothesis

In Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris, brilliantly adapted into a movie by Andrey Tarkovsky, the ocean of the planet Solaris makes contact with its visitors by creating living simulacra from their memories, bringing them head to head with their own psyche. Terrence McKenna, a seminal figure in the psychedelics counterculture, argued that with psychedelic drugs, we are likewise confronted with an alien intelligence, an intelligence that could lead to a deeper truth, in which ‘the programming language of mind’ and cosmos are illuminated. The psychedelic effect could, in principle, divert us from the usual channels of perception and cognition, breaking through spurious realities, to reveal a higher, more genuine truth about us and our surroundings.

McKenna argued that mushrooms containing psilocybin, a hallucinogenic tryptamine compound, were the catalysts pushing our brain to develop and grow to such an astounding rate. The story, also called stoned ape hypothesis, goes as follows: Against an adverse backdrop of climate change and drying out of forests, our hominid ancestors, being under strong nutritional pressures, were forced to expand their diet by testing all kind of different plants. During this experimentation phase, some of them tried psilocybin mushrooms growing on animal feces. According to the hypothesis, three different dosages played an instrumental role in the survival and evolution of our ancestors. First, a small amount of psilocybin improves visual acuity; those bestowed this sensory enhancement increased their chances of catching a prey or escaping larger predators. Second, a slightly higher dose of psilocybin increases libido; habitual intake of this amount led to increased sexual activity and naturally to more offspring. Those effects conferred an evolutionary advantage to those ingesting psilocybin mushrooms eventually outbreeding the ones that did not. Third, the recipients of an even higher dosage experienced hallucinogenic, boundary dissolving effects, which enhance their consciousness. Under a starry sky around the campfire, the psilocybin fungus induced ecstatic experiences that opened to our ancestors new doors on reality from which language, art, poetry, dance, song, and symbolic activity sprouted.

Terrence McKenna was a charismatic storyteller that could weave disparate concepts into hypotheses as compelling as first-class science fiction. Even though his hypothesis alone is improbable, in it we see a recurring theme found in ancient folklore and religious stories: an agent of truth that transforms human experience. In the book of Genesis, God expels both Adam and Eve from the garden for eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Could it be that the tree of knowledge is a metaphor for psilocybin mushrooms?

The Emergence of Intelligence: War, Fire, and Psilocybin Mushrooms was originally published in Meta/morphosis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As you walk down a street, brooding on ways to make ends meet, you notice someone dropping a 100 dollar bill; you pick it up and return it.

While hurrying to an important meeting, you cross an elderly person staggering while carrying a bag; you turn back and offer to help.

After the Nazi occupation in Poland, Maximilian Kobe, a Franciscan friar, was put to the Auschwitz concentration camp for refusing to become a mouthpiece for the German forces. There, he offered to sacrifice himself, in exchange for the life of a man, unknown to him. After two weeks of starvation, he was spared by a lethal injection.

From the everyday to the heroic, moral acts transcend the individual beyond the narrow confines of self-interest. The members of a group performing this kind of deeds typically benefit their comrades, but, like Maximilian Kobe, could also suffer the kind of costs that run counter to their instincts of self-preservation. One could then argue that morality comes from biologically innate structures in us because they give a competitive advantage to the community, the tribe, the group. But not everyone adopts the same canons of morality. Differences in values between populations have been the pretext and in some occasions the cause that gave legitimacy to violent conflicts, persecutions, wars, and genocides. So, if moral values are not uniform, could they be the result of social pressures and indoctrination varying across space and time?

Below, I discuss the ideas of Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Kropotkin; all of them with lasting insights on human nature and social structures. They are also all atheists, but with fundamentally different takes on the emergence of morality. Can we find common ground?

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

Jorge Luis Borges <Ficciones>

Michel Foucault: Power is Everything

The Postmodernist movement, spearheaded by French philosopher Michel Foucault in the 1960s, gives a clear and unequivocal answer on the nature of moral values: they are socially constructed. Like modern day Sophists, Postmodernists reject the universality of moral principles or truths, and hold on to no value system. To them, the notions of justice, kindness, and human nature are constructs of a particular civilization with its own knowledge system and brand of philosophy.

According to Foucault, the force shaping and transforming moral systems and civilizations is power. Power is ubiquitous and in constant flux, forming the discourse that produces the morality and truth of the time. Historically, moral values have been the result of negotiations between conflicting power factions: the church, the state, the army, the press, the monarch, the bureaucrats, the aristocrats, the bourgeois, the unions. Thus, morality varies because the social forces and institutions that each time prevail vary as well. Moreover, one’s attempt to examine whether there is a biological basis for morality is futile, since science-biology for that matter- is also a subjective extrapolation that is culturally conditioned. In this framework, the notion of just causes is a fairy tale, naively espoused by some and cunningly used by others as a subterfuge to seize power.

Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the Gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!

Octave Mirbeau <Torture Garden>

Friedrich Nietzsche: Turning Good and Evil on Their Head

To trace the seeds of Foucault’s ideas, we go back to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a fervent critic of the morality of his day (latter half of the 19th century), a morality that was underpinned by the institutions of Christianity. Intellectuals and philosophers alike, before and during Nietzsche’s time strived to provide a justification of Christian moral feelings such as altruistic consideration, guilt for injustice, or compassion for the weak, by reason and independent from religious tenets. Nietzsche found those efforts grossly misguided for he regarded Christian morals as hurtful prejudices, a system of behaviors stressed upon humans that actually turned against their natural instincts: life affirmation and will to power.

In his book ‘On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic’, Nietzsche examined the historic conditions under which humans adopted the value judgements good and evil, and to what extent these judgements promoted human development. He argued that certain momentous events in history had shifted the tectonic plaques of societies and civilizations, leading to the emergence of new psychological states and moral values in the populace. A tipping point was the adoption of Christianity as the official religion in Europe. What then permeated society was a slave morality in which the values considered good had exactly the opposite meaning from the values of an older era with heroic ideals.

Before the consolidation of Christianity, the heroic era, as exemplified by the Homeric world and the Roman Empire, had embraced a master morality that lifted above the masses a select few with ‘a pathos for distance’: ‘the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good’. Selfish actions were not necessarily associated with evil connotations, and neither were unselfish ones attached to goodness. It was with the decline of aristocratic values and the emergence of Christianity that this distinction permeated human conscience. Nietzsche considered that this transformation of morality degenerates the human spirit. To him, the will to power not only precedes any ethical considerations , but should dictate them; the will, in the context of this discussion, is the closest to a universal concept.

Noam Chomsky: a Biological Basis for Good Deeds

Political dissident and founding father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky rejects vehemently the reductionist views of Postmodernists on morality. He argues that humans possess innate biological structures acting as moral centers. They are brain structures processing our observations and experiences and transforming them into a sense of what is right and wrong, not from the standpoint of personal gain but of the collective good.

Chomsky acknowledges that to a certain extent moral relativism is in fact correct, but in a trivial way. Of course, every day experience and history show that there are variations in moral values from culture to culture and over time and space, and that power structures are indeed a determining factor in molding them. But humans are complex, driven by a multitude of factors; it would be a gross overstatement to reduce the entire set of human motivations to the will for power.

Chomsky argues that the brain offers a template for moral values. This template is not infinitely malleable, but operates within a limited range of options, in the same vein as other biological traits. For example, experiments on animals have shown that the visual system in the cortex shows plasticity and can vary depending on early experience, but again, these changes vary within a certain range. Visual areas in cortices of different individuals will show the same principles in topology and functionality despite variability in their visual input throughout their lives. Similarly, Chomsky reasons, humans are endowed with built-in innate structures for morality: from observation of a set of limited actions and behaviors, humans construct in their brain the rules and attitudes that constitute their moral values. These values are definitely biased by experience and indoctrination, but they cannot vary arbitrary since they are constrained by the innate structures forming them.

Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a God.

Aristotle <Politics>

Peter Kropotkin: Capitalism Effaces Natural Tendencies

Chomsky’s views on the innate goodness of human beings are influenced in part from the writings of one of the most important theoreticians of anarchism, Peter Kropotkin. At the turn of the 20th century, Kropotkin published ‘Mutual aid: A factor of evolution’, a collection of essays where he rejected the tenets of social Darwinism that natural selection and survival of the fittest are the dominant human inclinations driving social interactions. Instead, he held that animals, including humans, are naturally predisposed to co-operate with each other.

Kropotkin argued that the vast majority of species display altruistic characteristics; they live in groups and tend to support each other. He recounted observations of different animals sharing resources with their group: ants regurgitating food for other hungry ants; white-tailed eagles signaling with their cries to their companions a potential prey; house sparrows sharing their food; rats feeding their invalids. But cooperation is not limited to the sharing of food, it extends to all aspects of life: parrots setting up sentries to signal the rest of the group in case of danger, wolves hunting in packs, birds emigrating in bands, ants constructing elaborate passages and dwellings for their community. Moreover, from the play of animals with their congeners, Kropotkin inferred that social life is not necessarily practiced only to serve a survival purpose, but also for its own sake, for the love of socializing.

Kropotkin reasoned that for life in societies to be possible, a number of social feelings needed to be in place, with the most important being an innate sense of justice. These feelings, being partly conscious and reasoned in humans, may well be the foundation on which moral values are built. Some human institutions can nurture and develop social feelings, but others can have quite the opposite effect and instead develop instincts of self-assertion. Kropotkin gave examples of both. In primitive tribes or ancient city-states in Greece individuals could identify their existence and get meaning from it only through the participation in the tribe or the polis respectively. These societies are contrasted with the capitalist state at the turn of the 20th century which absorbs all social functions and necessarily favors ‘the development of an unbridled, narrow minded individualism. As the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other’.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

William Golding <Lord of the Flies>

My Take

Google Maps has diminished my ability to navigate and remember routes, affecting the grid and place cells in my hippocampus. Flooding of information and of other sensory input from my digital surroundings have shortened my attention span, restructuring my limbic reward pathways that release and respond to dopamine. They have also changed my knowledge and perspective of the world, triggering new wiring patterns in my cerebral cortex. Technology, among other social structures, constantly mold who I am, rewiring the connections in my brain, reinforcing some patterns and atrophying others. But even though our brains are astonishingly plastic to external influences, there is a limit to their adaptability.

In dystopian novels where the government implements some kind of social engineering to control behavior, the protagonists are emotionally distressed for their life runs counter to their nature.We are ambivalent: selfish and altruistic, violent and caring, rational and sentimental. Sure, society plays a role in that it can strengthen certain natural tendencies at the expense of their opposite parts, but the diminished sentiments are always there, lurking at the fringes of our consciousness.

I believe there is something in us, innate and hardwired to an extent, that is transcendental, in that it aims for something outside of our self. It strives for the collective good. But these feelings come in pairs. We are also selfish and self-serving. The contradicting parts come in different ratios for different people. Conditioning by our surroundings also changes the ratios. There is some truth that we are products of our environment but in directions that satisfy our natural inclinations. And the environment has not been created in a vacuum; in part, it is a reflection of who we are.

How We Got Our Morals was originally published in Meta/morphosis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fear of wild animals-that has been bred into the human being for the longest time, including the animal that he harbors within and fears.

Friedrich Nietzsche <Thus spoke Zarathustra>

Changes on living matter filtered through natural selection has brought about a rich variety of species; the differences in their morphology and behavior point to the forks in their evolutionary paths, the similarities to their common ancestry. By the same token, organ systems with divergent functionalities, but some remote semblance, have descended, via a series of transformations, from a common structure.

From Fins to Hands

Take for instance the upper limbs of various primates. Placing them in order, we make an almost linear storyline of gradual modifications that eventually led to the human hand. Further backtracking the evolutionary path we come across the Eusthenopteron. The Eusthenopteron is an extinct fish, creature of mythical status, the myth being that it had sprung out of the water and survived as a land animal. This notion is wrong and sounds like a mockery to the modern scientific ear but it is not completely baseless. Besides its internal and external nostrils, the Eusthenopteron also had strongly developed fins with muscles external to its body, features suggestive to the adventurous mind that it could possibly crawl and survive on land. To the more conservative spirits, these features suggest that the Eusthenopteron is one of the last fully aquatic ancestors of ours. What solidifies the evolutionary connection between the human hand and the fin of the Eusthenopteron is that they both share a similar bone pattern: a long rod-shaped bone connected with two smaller ones. It is astounding that we can point to the similarities between the two structures separated some 385 million years without the need of a microscope or DNA sequencing, just by direct observation.

Evolution of the Human Brain: The Triune Brain Theory

The transition from fins to limbs and then to hands shows that evolutionary change can happen via modification. Change, however, is also possible when a new structure is superimposed on top of an older one, a prime example of this being the human brain with its distinct layers of development. Far from being neuronal debris, the older structures of the brain are vital to survival and have a profound effect in behavior.

In the 1960s, American physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean noticed that and applied the superposition idea to the human brain. Rather than viewing the brain as a monolith, he described it as an edifice of our evolutionary lineage, with its deeper structures linked with our more distant relative species. This hypothesis, popularized by Carl Sagan in his book ‘The Dragons of Eden’, was coined the triune brain theory. It postulates that the human brain has inherited the structure and organization of three distinct brain structures, the R-complex, the limbic system, and the cerebral cortex, each with its own operating system and neural hardware, that somehow manage to function in unison.

The R-complex

The most ancient structures, the basal ganglia, the reticular formation, the brainstem, and the cerebellum, sitting at the base of our head are collectively called the R-complex, or the reptilian brain so as to indicate that their wiring is similar to a reptilian’s brain during the Mesozoic era, the Age of the Big Reptiles. The R-complex controls basic autonomic and survival functions such as heart rate, body temperature, breathing and orientation in space. It also plays a major role in ritualistic and hierarchical behavior as indicated by MacLean’s experiments on squirrel monkeys. Male squirrel monkeys when greeting one another can display their penile erections, a social signal that is not so much related to their sexual prowess but rather to their group hierarchy. After, however, part of their reptilian brain had been lesioned, monkeys were no longer inclined in exhibitionism.

The Limbic System

On top of the R-complex sits the limbic system, the so-called emotional part of the brain, consisting of the hippocampus, the amygdala and the hypothalamus. This collection of structures evolved tens of millions of years ago in protomammals in part to control their reaction in situations critical for their survival; it initiates fast subconscious evaluations and subsequent actions, the fight-or-flight responses. MacLean believed that the limbic system amounted to the history of the evolution of mammals and that one representative behavior directly attributed to it was extended family care and attention. Among reptiles, only crocodiles show some rudimentary care for their hatchlings; the rest are astonishingly detached when viewed through our mammalian eyes.

The Cerebral Cortex

Superimposed on the limbic system is the latest evolutionary installment, the cerebral cortex. It is associated with the complex processing and integration of sensory input as well as higher cognitive functions that are malleable, and non-instinctual, such as language, strategic thinking, storytelling, analytical problem solving, and self-awareness. In humans, all these traits mask unconscious involuntary processes and give a false sense of free-will. The cerebral cortex is at its most elaborate in humans; some parts of it in higher primates, however, such as the visual cortex show startling similarities with the corresponding regions in humans in terms of topology and mechanisms.

Oversimplification as a Teaching Tool

Anatomical and functional studies have shown that the R-complex, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex are heavily interconnected and that there is no clear functional division between them. When making inferences based on MacLean’s theory, we should thus keep in mind that the triune brain is a highly schematic representation of how the brain works; an oversimplification that nevertheless helps us explain to some extent the anatomy and functionality of the different strata in the brain as well as the various conflicting human behaviors within the same individual.

Mephistopheles:

You are, when all is done-just what you are.

Put on the most elaborate curly wig,

Mount learned stilts, to make yourself look big

You still will be the creature that you are

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe <Faust>

Plato Knew This All Along

In humans, the cortex accounts for approximately 85% of the brain in weight. But what is its role? Is it the controller of the two structures underneath it or a fettered giant? Sagan draws an interesting analogy from MacLean’s triune brain and Plato’s dialogue, ‘Phaedrus’. In the dialogue, Socrates compares the human soul to a chariot being pulled by two horses moving in opposite directions and a charioteer trying to control it. Sagan likens one of the horses to the R-complex, the other to the limbic system, and the charioteer to the neocortex. The charioteers keeping a tight rein on the horses represent the well-balanced individuals that only vent their primordial instincts within the confines of social norms.

This state, however, appears to be in a precarious balance. We often hear of the respectable individual who is leading a double life. But even for the ones who are not of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type, the primordial instincts are only temporarily subdued. This is a common theme in popular culture. In the movie ‘The Purge’ the state allows all crime to its citizens for one night every year. Freed from the clutch of the law, a number of them choose to let loose of their primordial urges and act violently and with murderous intent. The day after, the villains switch again into model citizens.

Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in a similar way rather than to be a product without history. By “history” I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up through conscious tradition (language, etc), but rather its biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development beginning with archaic man, whose psyche was still similar to that of an animal. This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as the structure of our body is erected upon a general mammalian anatomy. Wherever the trained eye of the morphologist looks, it recognizes traces of the original pattern.

Carl Gustav Jung <Symbols and the Interpretations of Dreams>

Psychoanalytic Connections: Freud and Jung

There are interesting parallels between the triune brain theory and psychoanalytic analyses on the human psyche. In the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud proposed that the psyche is the synthesis of three distinct processes dynamically interacting and sometimes at odds with each other: the primordial id which is present from birth and simply seeks pleasure, sexual or otherwise; the ego which is grounded on reality and decides how to satisfy our pleasures or, if they are not attainable, how to abandon them; and the superego which equips us with a moral compass by incorporating societal and family rules. These processes operate on three different levels of awareness: at the conscious level, we are aware of the mental activities taking place; at the preconscious level, we are not, but they can be brought up to consciousness, and at the unconscious level we have no conscious access of them. Freud discussed those concepts strictly in psychological terms; he did not link them to any brain structures even though he acknowledged their biological basis. Evolutionary speaking, the id came first and from it the ego and the superego sprouted.

Freud believed that the unconscious was for the most part a dustbin of wishes and instincts not conforming to societal norms. At first a Freud’s protégé, Carl Gustav Jung eventually clashed with his teacher over the nature and functions of the unconscious. Jung thought of the unconscious as a dynamic and independent component of the psyche. He divided it into two parts: the personal unconscious, composed of elements out of one’s personal experience; and the collective unconscious with hardwired traits that are common among all individuals; a collection of instincts and thought forms he called archetypes.

Archetypes are human tendencies which act autonomously, and can reveal themselves as symbols, images, or stories in different traditions or dreams. The striking similarities of symbols across different cultures, mythologies, and religions point to the existence of universal expressions and corroborate Jung’s theory of a shared ancestral memory. Some common images or symbols arising from archetypes are the hostile brother, the evil snake, the caring mother, the rescuing hero, the tree of life, destruction, and resurrection. We carry those stories within us. By degrees they have been ingrained in our brain.

Where do we go from here?

The development of archetypes and of the rest of the unconscious and conscious mental elements have had a long evolutionary history. So has the brain: Human subcortical structures, different in anatomy and function from the cerebral cortex, offer an archive of our evolutionary lineage. There is an obvious linkage between the two, meaning parts of the psyche must have specific bases in the brain, but these links remain elusive, especially the ones related to the unconscious components. The unconscious is what it means, something that somehow belongs to us but is outside of our consciousness, existing without us realizing it. Perhaps the lizard and even some mammals live to a large extent an unconscious life. But just because we wear this large hat of advanced neural tissue on top of our ancient brain structures, it doesn’t mean that the larger part of our behavior is not unconscious. It appears it is. Studies on decision making have shown that we have already decided on what we are going to do before even being conscious of our decision. Can we devise more experiments of the sort to uncover parts of the unconscious? Perhaps we cannot; or if we can, perhaps we are better off not opening Pandora’s box. Maybe there is a reason evolution keeps the unconscious shrouded in darkness.

Three Different Brains Vying For Control was originally published in Meta/morphosis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.