Are We Automata?

ARE WE AUTOMATA? First published in Mind, 4, 1-22. Everyone is now acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory to which Prof. Huxley[1] gave such publicity in his Belfast address; which the late Mr. D. A. Spalding punctiliously made the pivot of all his book-notices in Nature; which Prof. Clifford fulminated as a dogma essential to salvation in a lecture on "Body and Mind"[2] but which found its earliest and ablest exposition in Mr. Hodgson's magnificent work, The Theory of Practice.[3] The theory maintains that in everything outward we are pure material machines. Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging.

This, however, is an argumentum an hominem which need not detain us. The theory itself is an inevitable consequence of the extension of the notion of reflex action to the higher nerve-centres. Prof. Huxley starts from a decapitated frog which performs rational-seeming acts although probably it has no consciousness, and passing up to the hemispheres of man concludes that the rationality of their performances can owe nothing to the feelings that co-exist with it. This is the inverse of Mr. Lewes's procedure. He starts from the hemispheres, and finding their performances apparently guided by feeling concludes, when he comes to the spinal cord, that feeling though latent must still be there to make it act so rationally. Clearly such arguments as these may mutually eat each other up to all eternity.

The desire on the part of men educated in laboratories not to have their physical reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings is certainly very strong. Nothing is commoner than to hear them speak of conscious events as something so essentially vague and shadowy as even doubtfully to exist at all. I have heard a most intelligent [p. 3] biologist say: "It is high time for scientific men to protest against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness in a scientific investigation". In a word, feeling constitutes the "unscientific" half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a "scientist" will be too happy to purchase an untrammeled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be feared.

If we take the actions of lower animals and the actions of lower ganglia in higher animals, what strikes us most in them is the determinateness with which they respond to a given stimulus. The addition of the cerebral hemispheres immediately introduces a certain incalculableness into the result, and this incalculableness attains its maximum with the relatively enormous brain-convolutions of man. In the beheaded frog the legs twitch as fatally when we touch the skin with acid as do a jumping-jack's when we pull the string. The machinery is as narrow and perfect in the one case as in the other. Even if all the centres above the cord except the cerebral hemispheres are left in place, the machine-like regularity of the animal's response is hardly less striking.

The consciousness of Mr. Darwin lays it down as axiomatic that self-preservation or survival is the essential or universal good for all living things. The mechanical processes of "spontaneous variation" and "natural selection" bring about this good by their combined action; but being physical processes they can in no sense be said to intend it. It merely floats off here and there accidentally as one of a thousand other physical results. The followers of Darwin rightly scorn those teleologists who claim that the physical process, as such; of evolution follows an ideal of perfection. But now suppose that not only our Darwinian consciousness, but with even greater energy the [p. 8] consciousness of the creature itself, postulates survival as its summum bonum, and by its cognitive faculty recognises as well as Mr. Darwin which of its actions and functions subserves this good; would not the addition of causal efficacy to this consciousness enable it to furnish forth the means as well as fix the end -- make it teleologically a fighter as well as a standard-bearer? Might not, in other words, such a consciousness promote or increase by its function of efficacity the amount of that "usefulness" on the part of the brain which it defines and estimates by its other functions? To answer such a question, we must analyse somewhat closely the peculiarities of the individual consciousness as it phenomenally presents itself to our notice.

If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them we find selection again to be omnipotent. In an article on "Brute and Human Intellect " in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, July 1878, p. 236 I have tried to show that all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about into partial factors or elements, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in our given theoretical or practical emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another predicament will need another conclusion, and require another element to be picked out. The man of genius is he who will always stick-in his bill, as it were, at the right point, and bring it out with the right element -- "reason" if the emergency be theoretical, "means" if it be practical-transfixed upon it? Association by similarity I have shown to be an important help to this breaking-up of represented things into their elements. But this association is only the minimum of that same selection of which picking out the right reason is a maximum. I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it may suffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of that selective activity which appears to be the true sphere of mental spontaneity.

The hypothesis we are advocating might, if confirmed, considerably mitigate one of the strongest objections to the credibility of the Darwinian theory. A consciousness which should not only determine its brain to prosperous courses, but also by virtue of that hereditary influence of habit (nowadays so generally believed in by naturalists) should organise from generation to generation a nervous system more and more mechanically incapable of wandering from the lines of interest chosen for it at first, would immensely shorten the time and labour of natural selection. Mr. Darwin regards animated nature as a sort of table on which dice are continually being thrown. No intention presides over the throwing, but lucky numbers from time to time fortuitously turn up and are preserved. If the ideas we have advanced concerning the instability of a complicated cerebrum be true, we should have a sort of extension of this reign of accident into the functional life of [p. 16] every individual animal whose brain had become sufficiently evolved. As his body morphologically was the result of lucky chance, so each of his so- called acts of intelligence would be another; and ages might elapse before out of this enormous lottery-game a brain should emerge both complex and secure. But give to consciousness the power of exerting a constant pressure in the direction of survival, and give to the organism the power of growing to the modes in which consciousness has trained it, and the number of stray shots is immensely reduced, and the time proportionally shortened for Evolution. It is, in fact, hard to see how without an effective superintending ideal the evolution of so unstable an organ as the mammalian cerebrum can have proceeded at all.

Thither Science may retreat and hump her strong back against the mockeries and phantasms that people the waste of Being around. Now the essence of the Common-Sense-theory, I take it, is to negate these negations. It obstinately refuses to believe Consciousness irrelevant or unimportant to the rest. It is there for a purpose, it has a meaning But as all meaning, relevancy and purpose are symbolised to our present intelligence in terms of action and reaction and causal efficacy, Common Sense expresses its belief in the worth of Feeling by refusing to conceive of it out of these relations. When a philosophy comes which, by new facts or conceptions, shall show how particular feelings may be destitute of causal efficacy without the genus Feeling as a whole becoming the sort of ignis fatuus and outcast which it seems to be to-day to so many "scientists" (loathly word!), we may hail Professors Huxley and Clifford as true prophets. Until then, I hold that we are incurring the slighter error by still regarding our conscious selves as actively combating each for his interests in the arena and not as impotently paralytic spectators of the game.