Behaviorism
One of Dr. Sagan’s certainties concerns the nature of thought. He does not believe that he has a mind, and some times this writer is inclined to agree. He maintains that “mind” is the term we use to describe the workings of the brain. He is a behaviorist. To define the term, I quote Ernest Nagel’s Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in 1954:
The occurrence of events, qualities, and processes, and the characteristic behavior of various individuals, are contingent on the organization of spatio-temporally located bodies, whose internal and external relations determine and limit the appearance and disappearance of everything that happens. That this is so, is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience.... There is no place for the operation of disembodied forces, no place for an immaterial spirit directing the course of events, no place for the survival of personality after the corruption of the body which exhibits it.
This notion, that mind is merely the behavior of matter, has been advocated by many leading philosophers and scientists, among them John Dewey, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner. Skinner is justly famous for his attack on political freedom and human dignity and his advocacy of a totalitarian society controlled by scientists. Watson was an experimental psychologist of the early twentieth century who exerted enormous influence in both psychology and philosophy. Dewey, of course, is notorious for his influence on American government schools. He is the prime reason why Johnny can’t think, for Dewey did not believe in thinking: according to Dewey, one learns by doing. Dewey wrote: “Habits formed in the process of exercising biological aptitudes are the sole agents of observation, recollection, fore sight and judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations is a myth.... Knowledge lives in the muscles, not in consciousness.”
Carl Sagan accepts this behaviorism. In The Dragons of Eden, subtitled Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, he writes (7): “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings-what we sometimes call `mind’-are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. `Mind’ may be a consequence of the action of the components of the brain severally or collectively.... We are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an extremely complex array of molecules.... Because there is not a shred of evidence to support [sic] it, I will not in these pages entertain any hypotheses on what used to be called the mind-body dualism, the idea that inhabiting the matter of the body is something made of quite different stuff, called mind.”
Notice that Sagan presents this behaviorism as a premise, not as a conclusion. He does not argue for it, but assumes it, because, as he says, there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of mind. Obviously, if science can investigate only what can be sensed or quantified, then there is no evidence for mind, which can be neither sensed nor quantified. But this means merely that Sagan is also making assumptions, of which he does not inform us, about the nature of evidence.
Sagan’s phrase about man being an extremely complex array of molecules reminds me of another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who wrote one of the most powerful passages in English literature defending the same view:
That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the out come of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built....
Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of dark ness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.... Proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power (Mysticism and Logic, 47-48, 56-57).
Russell’s prose is magnificent-I have come across nothing nearly so good in Sagan-but the “truths” he believes are not true at all.
Neither is Sagan’s behaviorism. For the triune God, Sagan has substituted what he calls “The Triune Brain” consisting of the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex. Sagan believes the old mythology of Ernst Haeckel, the popularizer of evolutionary thought in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose books were bestsellers and laid the foundation for Nazism. One of Haeckel’s myths was that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Sagan believes that “in human intrauterine development we run through stages very much like fish, reptiles and nonprimate mammals before we be come recognizably human. The fish stage even has gill slits, which are absolutely useless for the embryo who is nourished via the umbilical cord, but a necessity for human embryology: since gills were vital to our ancestors, we run through a gill stage in becoming human” (The Dragons of Eden, 59-60).
But we are getting somewhat afield from Sagan’s behaviorism. Dr. Sagan believes that “consciousness and intelligence are the result of `mere’ matter sufficiently complexly arranged” (The Dragons of Eden, 221). “Each human being is a superbly constructed, astonishingly compact, self-ambulatory computer” (Broca’s Brain, 281). Speaking of him self, Sagan writes: “I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somewhat demeaning to human dignity, for myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we” (Cosmos, 127). “A thought,” Dr. Sagan thinks, “is made of hundreds of electrochemical impulses” (Cosmos, 277).
Upon discovering the brain of Paul Broca, the nineteenth-century French surgeon, in a bottle in the Musee De L’Homme in Paris, Sagan wondered “whether in some sense Broca was still in there-his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments. Might there be preserved in the configuration of neurons before me a recollection of the triumphant moment when he argued before the combined medical faculties ... on the origins of aphasia? A dinner with his friend Victor Hugo? A stroll on a moonlit autumn evening? ... Where do we go when we die? Is Paul Broca still there in his formalin-filled bottle?” (Broca’s Brain, 10-11).
These thoughts remind one of the delusions of savages who think that by eating the flesh of their enemies they will become like them. Scientists have performed innumerable experiments testing the cannibalistic theory of learning: since memory inheres in the chemistry of the brain, one can, by ingesting that chemistry, learn what others have known. Scientists use rats and planaria in their experiments; cannibals, of course, use people. Of course, this is not a refutation of behaviorism, merely an illustration of how primitive the modern scientist (or perhaps how advanced the unjustly maligned cannibal) is.
A refutation of behaviorism can be derived from either the Bible or from logic. God, angels, and demons all think. None of them has brains or body. Christ and the thief on the cross went to paradise at death; their brains were lying in the ground in Palestine. Moses, whose brains had been buried somewhere in the Middle East more than a thousand years earlier, held a theological conversation with Christ at the transfiguration. These scriptural references ought to be sufficient to convince Christians that brains are not necessary for thinking. Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan does not believe that the Bible is true, so we will have to offer a more extended argument from logic. If he does not believe that logic is true, then there is no point in arguing with him at all; one ought rather to confine him to a soft room.
Let’s assume that Dr. Sagan’s beliefs about mind and thought are true. Thoughts are, he thinks, “hundreds of electrochemical impulses” in the brain. What follows from this? First, error is impossible. One electrochemical impulse is as good as another. The chemistry in the brain of someone who thinks that behaviorism is false is as perfect as the chemistry in the brain of someone who thinks that behavior ism is true. If thoughts are electrochemical, then one thought, one chemical reaction, is as good as another. Why Sagan insists that his chemical reactions are right and mine are wrong is a complete mystery. “Wrong” has no meaning on behaviorist premises.
It follows from the meaninglessness of error that behaviorists, in this case Dr. Sagan, cannot claim their assertions are true. Behaviorism makes truth equally meaningless. Truth is not a quality of electrochemical impulses. My rejection of behaviorism, that is, in Dr. Sagan’s terms, the electrochemical impulses in my brain, are chemically as good as his. Chemicals never err. Both his reactions and mine are solid chemistry. Both obey the inviolable laws of chemistry, which, Dr. Sagan has told us, are the same every where in the universe. Now if anyone, no matter how highly respected and decorated, proposes a theory that precludes the truth of the theory he proposes, he is involved in a hopeless contradiction and needs no further refutation. If he persists in asserting what cannot be true, he needs close and compassionate attention, rather than disputation.
The situation is, however, somewhat worse than this initial consideration indicates. Not only does behaviorism eliminate truth, it eliminates memory and communication as well. If thoughts are electrochemical impulses, then they are specific datable events in the brain. They cannot be repeated. They occur and then they stop. Memory is impossible. A behaviorist might reply that we can have a similar thought later, that is, a similar electrochemical impulse can occur. But the behaviorist forgets (and hopes that we will forget as well) that according to behaviorism the thought of similarity is still another and still later electrochemical impulse, another dated event separated by time (and perhaps by space) from the first two chemical reactions. How can still a third electrochemical reaction connect the first two, which have already occurred and ended? How can a behaviorist tell whether two ideas are similar, if ideas are electrochemical impulses? Behaviorism makes comparison and memory impossible.
It also makes communication impossible. Carl Sagan’s mind is a bundle of electrochemical impulses and reactions; and so is mine, according to Carl Sagan. Dr. Sagan has a thought, that is, his intracranial chemicals react in a certain way. But his brain’s electrochemical impulses cannot be my brain’s electrochemical impulses, any more than his toothache can be mine or my toothache his. Therefore, I can never know his thought. It is therefore impossible to tell what Dr. Sagan means by any of the thousands of propositions that he has written in his books and articles. And since behaviorism also destroys memory, Dr. Sagan himself has no idea what he wrote either. Perhaps his books mean nothing at all. Perhaps they are simply the debris left by a powerful and sudden electrochemical brainstorm.
Behaviorism has been around for centuries, but the modern revival of some forms of Greek paganism has made it into one of the major superstitions of the twentieth century. Ernest Nagel, in his presidential address that I quoted above, said that it is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience. Gordon Clark has suggested that behaviorism be subjected to the same sort of test that other theories claiming to be scientific undergo. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted several events, such as the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and the deflection of starlight in the presence of large masses. Scientists could observe whether those events occurred as implied by Einstein’s theory. Let Dr. Sagan specify which electrochemical impulses in the brain are the thought “the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.” Let him tell us what the specific chemistry of astronomy, as distinguished from astrology, is. Let him specify how the surge of electrochemical impulses meaning “The opening chapters of the book of Genesis are mythological” differs from the spurt of electrochemical impulses meaning “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the word of God written and therefore inerrant in the autographs.” Let us see what empirical basis there is for the claim that thoughts are electrochemical impulses. I certainly hope Dr. Sagan’s brain is up to the task.
Originally Posted by Sola_Fide
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