Gonzalo Munévar

A Darwinian Account of Self and Free Will

A Darwinian account can reinterpret Llinas’ and Dennett’s neurobiological claims against the existence of the self, as well as several experiments by Nielson, Walter, Libet and Wegner that conclude that free will, like the self, is an illusion. And it can then serve to examine critically several important brain-imaging studies of self knowledge. For Llinas there is no centralizing “organ” in the brain, no tangible self. The self is a form of perception, ultimately an invention of the brain. For Dennett the self is an abstract center of narrative gravity. Both Llinas and Dennett assume that the self, if it exists, should be a Cartesian, conscious self. Nevertheless, since most of the brain’s cognitive functions are unconscious, the self should also be mostly unconscious. To survive, any organism needs to demarcate self from other. In more complex organisms, meeting that need requires the coordination of external information with information about the internal states of the organism. Such coordination, to be useful, must take into account the previous experience of the organism, as well as its genetic inheritance in the form, say, of basic emotions that will guide it to survive, reproduce, etc., as Damasio argues. Experience must be interpreted on the basis of what the organism takes itself to be, a mostly subconscious task assigned mainly to the brain. The brain has evolved, then, to function as a self. The issue of free will is not about having a little “prime mover” in residence but, as Watson argues, about whether our selves determine our actions. And since free will would be merely the means by which the mostly unconscious self determines its own actions, our free will should be rooted in unconscious processes as well. Now, if consciousness of the self is a sort of internal perception, then we should expect certain perceptual illusions (which can be explained by a Darwinian strategy of adaptation). This Darwinian approach also challenges the account of the self in terms of declarative memories, particularly episodic memories, prevalent in psychology and experimental neuroscience.

Self-Reproducing Automata and the Impossibility of SETI

The fictionalization of space exploration, from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to Star Trek and beyond, has consistently offered us a vision of a future populated by alien civilizations. The scientific underpinnings for that vision were most notably defended by the American astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996). That future vision is often supplemented by another: a future in which machines take their place alongside other sentient beings, as famously exemplified in all sorts of novels and films, including Terminator, with Austrian-actor-turned-California-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead. The scientific underpinnings of that vision owe much to extrapolations of work on computers by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903–1957). It is not widely realized, however, that von Neumann’s alleged proofs for the possibility of self-reproducing automata (SRAs) create a conflict between these two visions of the future; for the application of von Neumann’s SRAs to space exploration seems to lend support to a famous objection against the existence of alien civilizations by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954).

Historical antecedents to the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend.

Paul Feyerabend has been considered a very radical philosopher of science for proposing that we may advance hypotheses contrary to well-confirmed experimental results, that observations make theoretical assumptions, that all methodological rules have exceptions, that ordinary citizens may challenge the judgment of experts, and that human happiness should be a key value for science. As radical as these theses may sound, they all have historical antecedents. In defending the Copernican view, Galileo exemplified the first two; Mill, Aristotle and Machiavelli all argued for pluralism; Aristotle gave commonsense reasons for why ordinary citizens may be able to judge the work of experts; and a combination of Platos and Aristotles views can offer strong support for the connection between science and happiness.

Space Colonies and Their Critics

I will discuss first how Gerard O’Neill’s case for space colonies drew inspiration from several space pioneers such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, John Bernal , Hermann Oberth, Guido Von Pirquet, Hermann Noordung, Wernher von Braun, and Krafft Ehricke, all of whom had envisioned boundless possibilities for humankind in the exploration and colonization of the cosmos. I will then take a critical look at the objections brought up by O’Neill’s environmentalist critics, e.g., Wendell Berry and Dennis Meadows, who believed instead that the very attempt to escape our limits by going into space was irresponsible daydreaming. Nevertheless, I will point out, in spite of the bitterness of the controversy, both sides created the basis for cooperation decades later, bringing up the possibility of realizing the scenarios dreamed by O’Neill.