Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

382 LOSING OUR MINDS TO DARWIN The Role of Language in Intelligence 383
impenetrable mysteries, I can be expected to disagree, but this is not the place
to pursue such issues. Since neither Chomsky nor Fodor thinks he himself can
explain free will or consciousness, the claim that it is humanly impossible is
doctrinally convenient for them, perhaps, but also in considerable tension
with another claim of theirs. In other moods, they have both (correctly) hailed
the capacity of the human brain to "parse," and hence presumably understand,
the official infinity of grammatical sentences of a natural language such as
English. If we can understand all the sentences (in principle), couldn't we
understand the ordered sets of sentences that best express the solutions to the
problems of free will and consciousness? After all, one of the volumes in the
Library of Babel is— must be—the best statement in fewer than five hundred
pages of short grammatical English sentences of the solution to the problem
of free will, and another is the optimal job in English on consciousness. 4 I
daresay neither of my books is either of those, but that's life. I can't believe
that Chomsky or Fodor would declare either of those books (or the trillions of
runners-up) to be incomprehensible to a normal English reader. 5 So perhaps
they think that the mysteries of free will and consciousness are so deep that
no book, of any length, in any language, could explain them to any intelligent
being. But that claim has absolutely no evidence in its favor to be derived
from any biological considerations. It must have, um, fallen from the sky.
Consider the "closure" argument in more detail. "What is closed to the
mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us
may be closed to the monkey" (McGinn 1991, p. 3 )• Monkeys, for instance,
can't grasp the concept of an electron, McGinn reminds us, but I think we
4. Two other books in the Library are the most compelling "refutations" of these masterpieces,
but of course the Library doesn't contain any refutations, properly so-called, of
any of the true books on its shelves. These hatchet jobs must be merely apparent
refutations—an example of a fact that must be true but is systematically useless, since we
could never tell which books were which, without the help of, say, God. The existence
of this sort of fact will become important in chapter 15.
5. Chomsky has in fact revised his earlier views about the nature of language, making a
distinction these days between "E-language" (the external—and you might say eternal—
Platonic object, English, in which so many of the books in the Library of Babel are
written) and "I-language" (the internal, intensional, idiolect of an individual), and he
denies that E-language is a proper object for scientific study, so he would probably object
to the straightforward way I have run this objection (Steven Pinker [personal communication]
). But there are more devious ways of running the argument and appealing only
to the I-language of individuals. Can Chomsky or anyone else give a good reason for
believing that any five-hundred-page book of short sentences meeting the I-language
standards of any normal, literate individual would be incomprehensible ("in principle")
to that person?
should be unimpressed by the example, for not only can the monkey not
understand the answers about electrons, it can't understand the questions
(Dennett 1991d). The monkey isn't baffled, not even a little bit. We definitely
understand the questions about free will and consciousness well enough to
know what we're baffled by (if we are), so until Chomsky and Fodor and
McGinn can provide us with clear cases of animals ( or people ) who can be
baffled by questions whose true answers could not unbaffle them, they have
given us no evidence of the reality or even likelihood of "cognitive closure"
in human beings. 6
Their argument is presented as a biological, naturalistic argument, reminding
us of our kinship with the other beasts, and warning us not to fall
into the ancient trap of thinking "how like an angel" we human "souls" are,
with our "infinite" minds. But it is in fact a pseudo-biological argument, one
that, by ignoring the actual biological details, misdirects us away from the
case that can be made for taking one species—our species—right off the scale
of intelligence that ranks the pig above the lizard and the ant above the
oyster. We certainly cannot rule out the possibility in principle that our minds
will be cognitively closed to some domain or other. In fact, as we shall see in
more detail in chapter 15, we can be certain that there are realms of no doubt
fascinating and important knowledge that our species, in its actual finitude,
will never enter, not because we will butt our heads against some stone wall
of utter incomprehension, but because the Heat Death of the universe will
overtake us before we can get there. This is not, however, a limitation due to
the frailty of our animal brains, a dictate of "naturalism." On the contrary, a
proper application of Darwinian thinking suggests that if we survive our
current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will
continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us.
Why shouldn't Chomsky and Fodor and McGinn love this conclusion? It
grants to human minds—and only to human minds—an indefinitely expanding
dominion over the puzzles and problems of the universe, with no limits
in sight. What could be more wonderful than that? The trouble is, I suspect,
that they deem the means to be unsatisfactory; if the mind's power is due to
cranes, not skyhooks, they would just as soon settle for mystery. That
attitude, at any rate, has often surfaced in these controversies, and Chomsky
has been a primary source of authority for it.
6. Fodor has bitten this bullet: "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material
could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea
about how anything material could be conscious" (Fodor 1992). In other words, if you
so much as think you understand the question of consciousness, you're mistaken. Take
his word for it—and change the subject, please.