March 2025

My reflections on the books I read this month

A Sand County Almanac and sketches here and there

By Aldo Leopold
I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about Aldo Leopold until a month or two ago. This book is a wonderful set of reflections about ecology and the world, reflections based on a lifetime of professional study and work and also a lifetime of living with and on the land. It’s remarkable.

Click here to read more.

The book has three sections. The titles: “A Sand County Almanac,” “Sketches here and there,” and “The Upshot.” The general point is to urge all of us to live more in community with the rest of nature rather than in opposition to it, but each section takes its own approach. The first section is a month-by-month reflection on a year’s time on his sand farm on the Wisconsin River. I was moved by many of these reflections; I’ll describe just two of them here.

I find his February reflections particularly poignant. He begins: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other than heat comes from the furnace.” The point is that each of these – breakfast and heat — comes to us via a long path that begins with the energy of the sun. “To avoid the second [danger, one] should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm [one’s] shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside” (p. 6). Leopold then describes the task of felling an ancient oak tree on his property, a tree killed by lightening. But he describes the work chronologically: as the saw moves through the growth rings on the tree, Leopold describes what was happening on the land when a particular ring was added to the trunk. The message is that the tree spent many years in complex relations with the surrounding environment, building the stuff that would eventually provide heat and light in the family’s small cabin. The path from sun to heated house is long and complex.

In his April reflections, Leopold describes how regular floods shape the world, but his emphasis here is on the gifts of nature, and, in particular, on lumber that is carried by the flood waters and left on their land: “An old board stranded on our meadow has, to us, twice the value of the same piece new from the lumberyard. Each old board has its own individual history, always unknown, but always to some degree guessable from the kind of wood, its dimensions, its nails, screws, or paint, its finish or the lack of it, its wear or decay. One can even guess, from the abrasion of its edges and ends on sandbars, how many floods have carried it in years past. Our lumber pile, recruited entirely from the river, is thus not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forests. The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who hammers or saws may read at will. Come high water, there is always an accession of new books” (p. 25).

In “Sketches here and there,” Leopold describes his experiences beyond the farm on the Wisconsin. Some of these experiences are from his personal life and others are from his work as a professional forester. In each, he describes his pain as he observes our interactions with the world that waste the world’s resources and that destroy environments. A crucial point here is that we humans are a part of a natural ecosystem and should recognize our interrelations with the larger world. “It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark. These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many” (pp. 109f).

The third section — “The Upshot” — is more tightly written. Here he develops his program for living with rather than in opposition to the larger world. In particular — and recalling the early point about the two dangers of not owning a farm — he says that we need to develop a way of learning from the wilderness without destroying the wilderness. Here he relies on the crucial notion of the biotic or land pyramid: the pyramid that characterizes the long path by which the heat of the sun gets to breakfast and furnace. This pyramid is complex. At its base is the land. Plants grow in the land and take energy from the sun. Insects feed on plants, and birds and rodents feed on insects. And larger animals feed on these. “In the beginning, the pyramid of life was low and squat; the food chains short and simple. Evolution has added layer and layer, link after link. Man is one of thousands of accretions to the height and complexity of the pyramid. Science has given us many doubts, but it has given us at least one certainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota” (pp. 215f). In our current state (and remember, “current” for Leopold was in the 1940s), we neglect the value of all of the layers in this pyramid at our peril. In eliminating the diversity of the biota, we are eliminating elements crucial to our survival.

Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (a re-read)

by Ved Mehta
I don’t remember when I first read this book, but it was at least 40 years ago. Every so often since then I would see it my bookshelf and think that I should pick it up again. I suppose what finally pushed me to do that was reading Ben Rogers’s biography of the philosopher A. J. Ayer. (Notes on that one fairly soon — I’ve not quite finished reading it.) I’ve been more interested in Ayer’s life than I expected to be; reading the biography rekindled my interest in the Oxbridge philosophical scene in the decades after the first World War. I recalled that Mehta’s book, despite being written from a particular perspective, still captures the atmosphere of the times.

Click here to read more.

The book is something like a travel log, describing a series of conversations, following a trail from one philosopher or historian to the next. All of these figures played significant roles in philosophical debates of the period; Mehta describes (and claims to quote extensively from) his many conversations. The conversations with philosophers focus on the areas of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy; those with historians focus on the debate (or, as the chapter title has it, the argument without end) about the nature of history.

Mehta wrote for the New Yorker, and he dedicates his book to William Shawn, the long-time editor of that publication. (And by “long-time” I mean a long time: from 1952 until 1987.) The book republishes several essays first published in the New Yorker. It’s worth noting that Isaiah Berlin, one of the philosophers featured in the book, was not all that impressed: “You ask me what the reactions of my colleagues are to your piece on Oxford Philosophy… [T]hose to whom I have spoken are in various degrees outraged or indignant … The New Yorker is a satirical magazine, and I assume from the start that a satire was intended and not an accurate representation of the truth. In any case, only a serious student of philosophy could attempt to do that” (from one of Berlin’s letters, quoted in the Wikipedia article on Mehta).

I think Berlin was wrong – I don’t think the book is satire. However, nor do I think it’s authentic intellectual history. Rather, I think it should be read as one man’s perspective on important philosophical debates and the context in which those debates occurred. And, for that matter, it’s entertaining. (My wife is only one of many who would find it odd to use that word to characterize a book like this one!)

I’ll note just a few particular points. I’ve already highlighted what G.E. Moore saw as the importance of being philosophically puzzled. Ayer – the philosopher whose story prompted me to return to this book has a different take: “vanity is the sine qua non of philosophers. In the sciences, you see, there are established criteria of truth and falsehood. In philosophy, except where questions of formal logic are involved, there are none, and so the practitioners are extermely reluctant to admit error” (p. 75). Finally, in light of our current political situation here in the United States, I’ll close with Herbert Butterfield’s thoughts about the value of studying history: “As far as I am concerned, the point of teaching history to undergraduates is to turn them into future public servants and statesmen, in which case they had better believe in ideals, and not shrink from having ideas and policies and from carrying their policies through. We mustn’t cut the ground from under them by teaching that all ideas are rationalizations. In brief, we must teach a statesmanlike view of the subject. … I happen to think history is a school of wisdom and of statesmanship” (p. 204).

Confession

by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy was born in 1828. He published War and Peace in 1869. He published Anna Karenina in 1877. So he published two massive and classic novels before he was 50 years old. Yet only a couple of years later he faced a deep crisis in which he thought that his life was utterly without meaning. He was faced with questions — “Why? What next?” — that he simply couldn’t answer. This book, with the simple title Confession, depicts his struggle with these questions.

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He writes, “I was immediately convinced, first of all that they were not childish and foolish questions but the most vital and profound questions in life, and, secondly, that no matter how much I pondered them there was no way I could resolve them. Before I could be occupied with Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books, I had to know why I was doing these things. As long as I do not know the reason why, I cannot do anything. … As soon as I started to think about the education of my children, I would ask myself, ‘Why?’ Or I would reflect on how the people might attain prosperity, and I would ask myself, ‘What concern is it of mine?’ Or in the middle of thinking about the fame that my works were bringing me I would say to myself, ‘Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world — so what? And I could find absolutely no reply’” (p. 27).

He goes on to report that his “life came to a stop,” and then spends virtually all of the remainder of the book considering and rejecting different answers to this “Why?” question. Of course (and I’m immediately reminded me of a teacher’s caution: “In philosophy, there is no ‘of course’”), these are questions that many of us face, and many (most? all?) of those who don’t face them are simply avoiding them. If I’m going to die, then what difference does anything I do make? “If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That’s what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion!” (p. 30). Death comes to all of us; is there any meaning in life that can survive death?

Science, he says, can describe how molecules can come together to form a human being — “a temporary, random conglomeration of particles” (p. 41), but can’t explain why we should see meaning in such randomness. Tolstoy finds a similar perspective in Solomon (of the Hebrew bible), the Buddha, and Schopenhauer. He then observes people “whose circumstances were precisely the same as [his] with respect to education and way of life,” and finds that they fall into four camps with regard to these questions (pp. 49ff):

They fail to see the questions, remaining ignorant of life’s meaninglessness

They see life’s meaninglessness, but set concerns about it aside and pursue pleasure

The succumb to life’s meaninglessness, and commit suicide

They face the question, but weakly: they “know that death is better than life, but they do not have the strength to act rationally and quickly put an end to the delusion by killing themselves” (p. 51)

As he faced these questions, Tolstoy explicitly abandoned the second group, and saw himself in the fourth group; his weakness disgusted him, but he committed to a life of asceticism, and continued his quest.

Perhaps, he thought, his reasoning was flawed, and that in fact life does have meaning. Or perhaps someone has solved the quandary. More to the point, perhaps he should consider the lives of “the huge masses of people” instead of those in his own social class. And here, he found an answer. The masses – those who were uneducated – found meaning in their lives despite all of their suffering. This meaning was grounded in faith, and more specifically in Christian faith. But Tolstoy thought that the Orthodox Church obscured that faith. He still found room for reason, because the teachings of the church, he said, include both the truth and lies; one might use reason to sort those out. Eventually, and after considerable struggle, he committed to Christianity (and proclaimed this faith publicly in the book What I believe, published in 1884).

A final point – some day I’ll write a post about the different trails that lead me to different books, but I’ll say there that I was led to this particular book by Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life.

So Late in the Day: Stories of women and men

by Claire Keegan
This book, a collection of three short stories, has a blurb at the top of the cover written by George Saunders: “Claire Keegan is one of the greatest fiction writers in the world.” Of course, I don’t know the context in which Saunders wrote that, but who am I to argue with George Saunders? I’m not as bold as he is, mostly because I don’t think I’ve read enough fiction to make such a judgment. But I do think Keegan’s writing is powerful.

Click here to read more.

What I find most powerful is Keegan’s ability to build tension in the narrative, tension that is not relieved, but rather is eventually brought to a climax. The tension exposes an unsettledness in a relationship. I found this particularly true and most troubling in the last of the three stories. I generally try when writing these notes about fiction to avoid spoilers, but I take permission from the inside cover of this book to include this one. Actually, I’ll just quote from the cover notes: “…in ‘Antarctica’ a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.” I had that blurb in mind as I read the story – I had a general sense of where the story was going — and I still found myself caught up in the growing tension. I had a general idea of where the story was going, but I still felt like I was in unfamiliar territory.

In some ways, these are simple stories about everyday life. But they’re written in a way that highlights the tragedy that is often just under the surface of such everyday experience.

After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart

by Megan Marshall
Marshall is an acclaimed biographer. Her biography of the Peabody sisters was well received and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Margaret Fuller. In this collection of essays she turns the biographical eye on herself. This is not a chronological narrative about her life; instead, she tells stories about objects, about people, and about events that have shaped her. I find it an interesting approach – just as a biographer exists in the background of the subject’s life, Marshall as autobiographer emerges more subtly than she might in this collection of essays. Each of the essays stands alone in some ways, but I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.

Click here to read more.

I won’t attempt to describe all of the essays here, but rather focus on two that I found most interesting. In “Free for a while,” she tells the story of how her life interfaced with that her high school classmate Jon Jackson. Jon’s brother George was found guilty of stealing $70.00 and received a sentence of one year to life. He published a collection of prison letters called Soledad Brother. In his senior year of high school, Jon died in a courthouse raid that he hoped would free his brother so that could escape together to join Eldridge Cleaver, exiled in Algeria. The judge and two prisoners also died. The story of George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers and of Jon Jackson’s failed attempt to rescue George is well known; what I found most interesting in this essay is how Marshall describes the interweaving of her life with Jon’s, showing the different circumstances of their private and family lives and also the ways in which they overlapped in and around school.

Marshall doesn’t excuse Jon’s violent attempt to free his brother from prison, but draws on one of George’s letters (a letter that provides the essay’s title) to make a crucial point. “It’s not my place to tell what happened that summer, to raise or attempt to answer the questions that lingered with Jon’s classmates and teachers who wished so hard, as the bereaved always do, that it could have gone otherwise and looked for somewhere to place blame. George professed ignorance of Jon’s plan, lauding him as the ‘black man-child with submachine gun in hand, … the true revolutionary who, during the brief span of time he’d controlled the courtroom, ‘was free for a while. I guess that’s more than most of us can expect’” (p. 76). The essay brings out how the freedom that different individuals can expect is shaped largely by circumstances beyond their control.

In “These Useless Things,” Marshall considers how objects that some might deem useless can have a profound significance, both in the life that one lives and in how one understands the history that shaped the present. She begins by reflecting on the old “ice pick on my kitchen windowsill, its tarnished prong thrust into an ancient wine cork for safety’s sake.” She found the ice pick while going through her father’s possessions after he died. These reflections lead her to considerations of her relationship with her father, of how the hands that once held that ice pick helpfully taught her to use various tools. But her father, suffering from mental illness, was frequently absent when she was growing up. “When wielding the ice pick, my father was the father I hoped for. And perhaps the immplement’s concealed danger, the spike blunted with a wine cork, spoke to me of my father as well. I had him in hand on the window sill” (p. 103).

Marshall also considers how other objects from the past shape the present. In her biography of the Peabody sisters, she described a portable writing desk — a wooden box that can be used as a lap desk – that Elizabeth and Mary received as a gift from their students. Sometime after the book was published, Marshall received a letter from a man who thought he owned that desk and would like to pass it on to someone. Marshall eventually bought the desk, and it now sits in the room where she writes. Someday, she writes, she’ll find a museum or archive that will add this desk to their collection. Quoting phrases from Elizabeth’s description of the desk written almost 200 years ago, Marshall writes that “for now I’m happy to set my morning coffee down next to my own portable writing device — a Lenovo IdeaPad S340 laptop computer, which also opens to reveal secrets, to enable me to reveal mine — and look up at the shelf where the most ‘handsome’ and efficient writing box of its kind in 1826 reminds me of my purpose. The box may not be used, but it is not useless to me. If … there is a language of form, my two portable ‘desks,’ each containing ‘everything convenient’ in one compact case, speak of the enduring human need to communicate in writing, to give things life in words (p. 109).

What to Save and Why: Identity, authenticity, and the ethics of conservation

by Erich Hatala Matthes
I stumbled on this book while browsing the shelves of Book Culture, a bookstore enthusiastically recommended by one of our son’s good friends. I mention that only to illustrate the rather chance nature of my encounter with this book. It’s not the sort of book I seek out, and if the title were on a list of books I might read next I suspect I wouldn’t have selected it. But something about the title (or the jacket design?) led me to pull it off the shelf, and I left the store with it under my arm. (That day I also purchased a copy of Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life, which is a book that was on my list of books to read soon.)

Click here to read more.

Chance is good.

I think that if Matthes were pressed to provide a one-sentence response to the questions implied in his title he would say something like “We save those things that shape who we are and remind us of who we want to be, not only to understand our past and present, but also to offer an authentic sense of self that those who live after us can inherit and shape for themselves.” Of course, the “we” in this sentence is complex — there are many different groups, each with its own artifacts and cultural traditions that inform its identity.

And this complexity of groups implies a complexity of conservation approaches and practices. Individuals within a cultural group struggle to reach agreement not only on what to conserve and why, but also on just how best and in what form to conserve it. But the existence of many different cultural groups complicates things still further: what’s the difference between conservation and appropriation, and how does one adjudicate the different claims on cultural artifacts? Here Matthes argues that authentic participation of the different parties both in the decisions about what should be conserved and also in the conservation process itself. In making this point Matthes draws on the work of Suzy Killmister: “‘What the participatory model draws attention to is the way in which practices such as language, ritual, and history provided the context within which the self is understood, supplying the scaffolding upon which personal identity is built.’ More even than scaffolding, which is removed when a building is complete, these participatory goods often end up functioning as constituent parts of personal identity. They’re not just the scaffolding — they’re the brick and the mortar” (p. 119). And the issues apply not only to the identify of the self, but also to the identity of an entire culture.

Matthes has me thinking more deeply not only about the larger issues regarding the conservation of cultural artifacts important to large groups of people, but also about issues related to my own personal possessions – issues exacerbated as my partner and I live into the downsizing appropriate to people of a certain age. I’m not surprised that he closes the book with thoughts about small items from his family history that he has preserved. He wonders whether his young daughter will find in these items anything like the sense of self they hold for him. I’m thinking about an old metal measuring cup, a gift from a favorite grandparent more than fifty years ago when I moved into my first apartment. Each morning these days, as we prepare our breakfast, I weigh our breakfast coffee beans in that cup. I’m thinking also of a worn rocking chair from my grandparents’ house now sitting in our living room, this one an inheritance rather than a gift. Both the cup and the rocking chair – simple material objects in themselves – have me thinking of my grandmother, the life she lived, and how she helped to shape the person that I’ve become. Perhaps our son will someday face the question whether one or both of these objects carry similar meanings for him, despite the fact that he never met my grandmother. As Matthes says, my treasuring them now is an important element in the person that I am. My saving them now offers our son the opportunity to find some sense of history in his family as well.

It’s worth saying that I once had other items from my grandparents. Now I have only the measuring cup and rocking chair. The other things disappeared from my life one by one over the years, sometimes because I lost them, and other times because I made either a considered or impulsive decision to pass them on. But my having and treasuring these two items now that shapes my sense of my history and my sense of self. Simone de Beauvoir says somewhere that our identity is a combination of choice and chance. I think Matthes is right in saying that the things we save and the reasons we save them both shape our identity and I agree that we should take care in deciding how and why we save them.

We also have to acknowledge the chance involved in this. My discovering his book was a matter of chance. I’d say the same about my holding onto the cup and the chair. The book, the cup, and the chair have shaped the person that I am, and I’m grateful for the chance that brought them into my life.

The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters

by Sean B. Carroll
Carroll takes the title of this book from the Serengeti, a massive ecosystem in Africa supporting a wide variety of animal and plants species. Extensive research of this ecosystem has provided a deep understanding of how the many different species interact. Carroll draws on this research to develop a set of rules that he calls the Serengeti rules, and argues that these rules are relevant the study of both other ecosystems of animals and plants and also individual organisms like human beings. In each case, a healthy system is one in which the different players exist in a balanced environment. Moreover, he says, the rules provide a framework that supports interventions that can heal damaged systems, both in the larger environment and in individual organisms. In each case, he says, someone seeking to return a system to a balanced state needs to identify the players, sort out all the relationships among them, figure out what’s missing or over-abundant, and finally to introduce corrections. He’s not suggesting that this work is easy, and he acknowledges that we face major challenges from both diseases that affect individual organisms and ecological disruption, but he expresses what I would call a cautious optimism, arguing that we are not defenseless in either case.

Click here to read more.

His goal here is both to integrate the work and research of molecular biologists with that of ecologists. He traces the development of medical research and practice that have helped us to face major health challenges — like polio and smallpox – and overcome those challenges. On the basis of this survey, he develops “a set of general rules and a logic of regulation” that he says has broad application in both medical and environmental practice:

Positive regulation – A → B – A positively regulates the abundance or activity of B

Negative regulation – A →| – A negatively regulates the abundance or activity of B

Double-negative logic – A →| B →| C — A negatively regulates B, which negatively regulates C; A increases the abundance of C through double-negative logic

Feedback regulation – A → B → C →| A — The accumulation of C feeds back to negatively regulate A and the production of B and C

He then turns to a discussion of several different instances in which researchers have identified particular stress points in decaying environments and then worked to restore those environments to something like their natural balance. This leads him to the statement of the Serengeti rules. While the Serengeti is something like an archetype here, he includes several examples from other ecosystems.

The Serengeti rules, together with their relationship to the general rules and logic of regulation

Keystones: Not all species are equal. In a particular ecosystem or food web, there are some species that punch above their weight – their impact on the system is out of proportion to their numbers or biomass.

Some species mediate strong indirect effects through trophic cascades. An environment can be seen as a food web, in which some animals are primarily or exclusively predators, some are both predators and prey, and some are only prey, eating plants rather than animals. In these webs, the predatory nature of some species has an extremely strong “top-down” impact on the ecosystem as a whole.

Here “A →| B →| C”: A predator can decrease the number of its prey, which means that the food of the prey become more numerous

Competition: Some species compete for common resources. This competition has an impact on the rates of survival of these different species.

Here “A →| B”: when two species compete for food, each lowers the number of individuals of the other species.

Body size affects the mode of regulation. Smaller animals are typically regulated (i.e., the size of their population is controlled) in a top-down way by predation, while larger animals are typically regulated in a bottom-up way by food supply.

Top-down regulation is an expression of “A →| B”: The existence of the predator negatively impacts the number of the prey.

Bottom-up regulation is an expression of “A → B”: the relative availability of food supports or restricts the number of animals that depend on that food.

Density: The regulation of some species depends on their density. A food environment can support only a certain number of individuals in a species that eats a particular food. This is how the food supply provides bottom-up regulation.

Here he has a slightly modified expression of the general rule of feedback regulation: “A → → → A →| A”: the increase in the number of individuals is eventually lowered because more individuals mean less food for each of them.

Migration increases animal numbers. A species that typically migrates can increase its numbers, both by having access to a wider range of food supply and by having lower exposure to predators that don’t follow the migration.

Nature is resilient. This rule, Carroll says, is perhaps the most important rule, in large part because it provides some encouragement that we can overcome the environmental and climate-related challenges we currently face. He offers examples of instances when environments that were seemingly totally destroyed have been restored to something very close to an ecological balance.

Throughout the book, he relies heavily on the work of the scientists who did the research he is describing. He captures the drama of their research and also their personalities as these were expressed in their work. While I’m impressed by his optimism that we can meet the challenges we face, I fear that I didn’t emerge from my reading quite as encouraged as I think he would like me to be. Perhaps I’m overly shaped by the moment — the growing skepticism of scientific and medical expertise, the decay of our public health system, and the emphasis on short-term goals at the expense of long-term health of both individuals and ecosystems — but I don’t share his optimism, cautious though it is.

A postscript. Picking up on my comment about the stresses of the current moment, it occurred to me that Carroll’s rules and principles might help me to understand better what’s going on in the United States and formulate some sort of response to it. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that there are different players involved in our culture and politics, and that in a properly functioning democracy these players are in symbiotic relationships with each other. Of course, there’s the standard rule of the checks and balances between the three branches of government, but I would suggest that these aren’t the only players here. Other players include the political parties, the news media, the entertainment media, the public as a whole, and also the various publics. Surely there are others. Following Carroll’s lead, how might we sort out all the relationships among these players, figure out what’s missing or over-abundant, and finally introduce some corrections. Having written this out, I confess that I can’t muster even the small amount of optimism regarding this task that I have for Carroll’s proposals for the ecosystem and human health. It would be an interesting exercise to explore the possibilities, even if it leads merely to acknowledging the impossibility.

Metazoa: Animal life and the birth of the mind

by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
As the book’s subtitle suggests, Godfrey-Smith presents here his understanding of how consciousness emerged in evolutionary development. He’s arguing here for a position he calls (and others call) biological materialism, a view that differs starkly from the dualism of philosophers like Descartes. The “project is to show that somehow a universe of processes that are not themselves mental, or conscious, can organize themselves in a way that gives rise to felt experience. Somehow, a part of the world’s often-mindless activity folded itself into minds” (p. 19). In short, he says, minds emerged in biological evolution, not as something different from or somehow produced by material processes, but rather as those processes themselves: “Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences; they are thoughts and experiences” (p. 20).

Click here to read more.

In this work he draws not only on scientific research, but also on a wide range of philosophical reflection. He complements this research and reflection with examples from his own observations of animals in the sea and on land. He makes his way through time and the many branches of the evolutionary tree, drawing comparisons and contrasts between different elements that might be called the precursors of experience and consciousness in animals and even, at some points, in plants. Along the way, he highlights developments of these precursors that he says anticipate something like the experience of contemporary animals generally and/or human beings in particular.

That’s the structure of his presentation generally stated; I found some of the particular discussions along the way to be especially interesting.

I’m particularly fascinated by his rather extensive discussion of research on split-brain patients, human beings whose connection between the two hemispheres of the brain has been severed. This severance has often been done in order to treat humans suffering from severe seizures. Severing the connection prevents a seizure that starts on one side of the brain from spreading to the entire brain. Work with these individuals highlights the fact that each of the two hemispheres specializes (to some extent) in particular tasks.

For example, in some studies, researchers ask a subject to describe an object that’s presented only to the left visual field, which feeds it to the right side of the brain. They then ask the subject to describe the object. However, speech function is centered in the left side of the brain, so the subjects are unable orally to describe the object that they see. Research by philosopher Elizabeth Schlechter points to “improvised communication between the two halves of the brain that takes place in the public world. For example, in a number of documented cases, the right side of a patient’s brain, which cannot speak, has tried to convey messages to the left side by writing with a finger of the left hand onto the back of the right hand. If the right hemisphere knows the answer to something and the left does not, the right may try to get a message across in this way. This was sometimes an attempt to subvert the point of an experiment, as the aim was to show images to the right side and see how much the left could say about them. The experimenter would see the finger writing and say, ‘Don’t write!’” (p. 152).

In other research the hemispheres are “disconnected” using with anesthesia, in one stage putting one side of the brain to sleep and in the next stage putting the other side of the brain to sleep. “At each stage the patient is tested on their use of language, to see what they can do with one half of their brain asleep. In most cases, when the left side is asleep the patient can’t speak. But the patient is still conscious, or seems so, at both stages: ‘During the test he would show me something, ask me to identify it and whether he had showed it to be before. …For the right side of the brain I didn’t notice anything different. For the left side — wow! When he showed me an object I looked at it and had that feeling you get when you can’t think of a word, like it’s on the tip of your tongue. Only that was true for all words — it was amazing! I had no words” (pp. 153f).

Some of the same specialization in the two hemispheres is apparently present in non-human animals, animals in which the connection between the two hemispheres isn’t as strong. Consider the toad: “If prey is brought from out of view into the left side of a toad’s field of vision, where most information goes to the right side of the brain, the toad usually won’t strike at the prey until it has crossed into the other half of the visual field, engaging the left side of the brain. The left, again, is the side that specializes in identifying food. The opposite applies, roughly speaking, when what is seen is a competitor toad rather than food” (p. 239). Godfrey-Smith suggests that the heightened skill in food recognition by the left side of the brain offsets the cost of the right side’s not recognizing prey as prey.

Another interesting point is the relationship between social engagement and brain development. Simply put, some animals are gregarious, preferring to stay in larger groups, often to provide a measure of protection against predators. “A complex social environment makes it worthwhile to develop recognition, memory, and strategic skills” (p. 181). (Interestingly enough, experiments with fish suggest that some are able to use this pattern-recognition ability to distinguish between blues and classical music.) It’s worth noting that many researchers suggest a similar process early in the evolutionary process leading to humans, when our predecessors moved out of forests into the Savannah, where they gradually developed cooperative skills (and the brains to manage them) that allowed them to flourish. Those who are more adept in such relationships have an evolutionary advantage — they’re more likely to survive long enough to pass these skills on to their offspring. (And, it seems, many human beings can also learn to distinguish between blues and classical music.)

These are just a couple of examples of the research Godfrey-Smith describes as he develops his argument for biological materialism. He makes what I think is a convincing case that experience itself emerged gradually as increasingly complex organisms developed more sophisticated ways of taking information about the external world in and then manipulating that world. He develops a simmilar narrative that shows how particular elements — “new kinds of engagement with the world through the senses and action…, subjectivity and agency…, [and] a tacit sense of self” (p. 258f) — eventually came together in human beings as what we now call consciousness or mind. He readily admits that there remain many questions to explore about this. And he argues that something like consciousness is more broadly distributed across animals and even insects than is commonly thought. There is, however, one way in which human consciousness is different from that of other animals, at least to some extent: “A feature of human cognition that really does seem to differ greatly from what goes on in other animals is something psychologists call ‘executive control,’ the ability to direct oneself on a task, suppress momentary urges, and marshal one’s various abilities in pursuit of a consciously represented goal. Through this side of human cognition, in concert with tools such as language as an organizer of thought, we can deliberately induce and control our offline journeys, rather than just having them happen. We can set out deliberately to some particular elsewhere, though we might also meander, drift off, and dream” (p. 258). As I read him, though, he sees this more as a difference in degree rather than an absolute contrast. Just as both experience and consciousness emerged gradually, so that there’s no particular moment which marked the move from absence of either to its full presence, so the line dividing our ability to focus from that of other animals is rather fuzzily and broadly drawn.

Surely it’s clear that I’m not a biologist. Nor am I conversant with the details of evolution generally or human evolution in particular. I’m not in a position to evaluate the soundness of his entire discussion. But I found the book to be extremely engaging, both in its general argument and in the particular examples he introduces along the way.

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