[tt] Seed: The Transcript: Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

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The Transcript: Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/07/tom_wolfe_michael_gazzaniga.php?page=all
8.7.1
[Thanks to Sarah for this. The original is a big favorite of hers, but I
am not quite happy with determinists who say you ought to chose to believe 
in my ideas. I also object to Wolfe being a status reductionist, as though 
the other 16 Basic Drives that Steven Reiss discovered through factor 
analysis did not exist.]

The father of cognitive neuroscience and the original New Journalist
discuss status, free will, the human condition, and The Interpreter.


Wolfe, who calls himself "the social secretary of neuroscience,"
often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural
commentary. His 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," raised
questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic
predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and
Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The
Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed
incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Tom Wolfe: Mike, I don't want you to think I'm giving up my right to
disagree with you down the line--I may not have to--but you're
one of the very few evolutionary thinkers and neuroscientists that I
pay attention to, and I'll tell you why. In the '90s, when the
subject of neuroscience and also genetics started becoming hot,
there was a tendency to conflate genetic theory and evolutionary
theory with neuroscience, as if the two were locked, which just
isn't true. Remember Jose Delgado, the wave brain physiologist who
was at Yale at one time?

Michael Gazzaniga: Oh yeah. Sure.

TW: The guy stood in a smock in a bullring and put stereotaxic
needles in the brain of a bull and just let himself be charged. He
had a radio transmitter. The bull is as far away as that wall is
from me, and he presses the thing and the bull goes dadadada and
comes to a stop.

MG: Right.

TW: He's still with us; he's in his 90s. Anyway, his son, also Jose
Delgado, and also a neuroscientist, was interviewed recently and he
said, "The human brain is complex beyond anybody's imagining, let
alone comprehension." He said, "We are not a few miles down a long
road; we are a few inches down the long road." Then he said, "All
the rest is literature."

Many of today's leading theorists, such as E. O. Wilson, Richard
Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, probably know about as much on the human
brain as a second-year graduate student in neuropsychology. That
isn't their field. Wilson is a great zoologist and a brilliant
writer. Dawkins, I'm afraid, is now just a PR man for evolution.
He's kind of like John the Baptist--he goes around announcing the
imminent arrival. Dennett, of course, is a philosopher and doesn't
pretend to know anything about the brain. I think it has distorted
the whole discussion.

MG: Well, let me roll the cameras back to the '80s and '90s, when
neuroscience was taking off. There were new techniques available to
understand the chemical, physiological, and anatomical processes in
the brain. Imaging was starting up and the inrush of data was
enormous and exciting. So there was a hunger for the big picture:
What does it mean? How do we put it together into a story?
Ultimately, everything's got to have a narrative in science, as in
life. And there was a need for people who didn't spend their time
looking down a microscope to tell a story of what this could mean. I
would say that some of the people who've made attempts at that did a
very good job. But I will hold out for the fact that if you haven't
slaved away looking at the nervous system with the tools of
neuroscience--if you're only talking about it--you don't quite
have the same respect for it. Because it is an extraordinarily
complex machine. If Jose Delgado says we're 2 inches down the road
to this long journey, I would say it's more like 2 microns.

TW: Right.

MG: It's a very daunting task. When I was at Dartmouth College in
the late '50s studying biology, they were just beginning to tell us
about DNA. It was a dream. Linus Pauling said, "Someday there's
going to be molecular medicine." And the response was: "What are you
talking about?"
In the past 55 years, there's been this explosion of work and
incredible, intricate knowledge about how genes work. My youngest
daughter is now a graduate student in genetics, I'm happy to report.
So this past Christmas, I said, "I'm going to buy a genetics
textbook and read the sucker, and I'm going to be able to converse
with my daughter." I got to page two, and I said, "I'm going to talk
to her about other things."

TW: Ha ha.

MG: It's far too complicated. But it's at a point where there's an
explosion of information all over the world. And you feel it--the
next new idea is waiting to happen.

TW: I think all this excitement has spawned a replacement for
Freudian psychologists. They've been replaced by the evolutionary
psychologists, whose main interest seems to be to retrofit the
theory of evolution on whatever ended up happening. I read an
example in your new book of a woman who's come up with an elaborate
theory that music has a survival benefit in the evolutionary sense
because it increases the social cohesiveness of populations. I would
love for her to read a piece that appeared recently in the New
Yorker about a tribe, the Pirahã in the Maici River, a little
tributary of the Amazon. This tribe, it turns out, has a language
with eight consonants and three vowels. I think they have a sum
total of 52 words or something like that. As a result, they have
little art, they have no music, no dance, and no religion. They're
usually cited because they seem to be a terrible exception to Noam
Chomsky's rule that all people are born with a structure that
enables them to put words in a grammatical form. Not the Pirahã! And
they're not stupid or retarded in any sense. They just had never
increased their language abilities--and they don't want to.

MG: Yeah. Well, exceptions are historic. Look, the good evolutionary
psychologists are good. They're telling us not to fall into the trap
of thinking that everything's fixable via simple learning mechanisms
or social engineering. They're saying, "Look, there are basic
aspects to human nature that are common to all members of our
species and have been there a long time." What's exciting is that
we've developed this cognitive mechanism to free us from the things
that determine so much of our behavior. And by doing so, we've sort
of cut the rope from the rest of the animal kingdom. We can do
things and we can cultivate certain behavior, even though there are
obviously a lot of tendencies that are part of our biology. For
example, here's an idea that comes from evolutionary psychology, an
observation that I think is rather shrewd: Why are members of our
species drawn to the fictional experience? Here you are, someone
who's spent your life with fiction.

TW: I was at one time a journalist. We don't deal with fiction.
Not intentionally.

MG: Ha ha--right. But it's a fascinating thing to think of the
role that fiction and make-believe play. Do you feel, when you
create a body of fiction, that you're opening up possibilities for
people to think about problems in a different way? To confront
things they don't yet know about?

TW: Well, I do take issue with the idea that all stories have a
bearing on evolutionary benefits or survival benefits. In my opinion
all stories have to do with status. When people say, "I just want
some good escape literature," what they're looking for are
dramatizations of people facing status problems. Harry Potter is
like every child who feels overwhelmed by this adult world around
him, and he overcomes it in ways that don't interest me in
particular--he can pull things out of the air. But, like Anna
Karenina, it's a story about status problems. Tolstoy and Flaubert
would be paupers today, writing these novels, which are all based on
the idea that a woman must remain chaste. They'd be laughed out of
town. The story of Anna Kerenina and Vronsky would be a Page Six
item and then that would be the end of it. But if we successfully
put ourselves in the mindset of the 19th century, we can really
enjoy the status problems that they have.

MG: Do you think all art is about status?

TW: Well, certainly not music. Dance, maybe yes, maybe no. But
literature and movies, yes. To me the crucial point is something,
which I don't think even Chomsky understands, about speech and
language. Chomsky and many other people are wonderful at telling us
how language works, and about differences in languages and the
historical progression of languages across the face of the Earth.
But I seem to be the one person who realizes the properties of
speech. Speech is an artifact. It's not a natural progression of
intelligence, in my opinion--we have to look only at the Pirahã
for that. It's a code. You're inventing a code for all the objects
in the world and then establishing relationships between those
objects. And speech has fundamentally transformed human beings.

MG: By speech I assume you mean language and not the actual act of
speaking?

TW: To me, it's the same, speech and talking.

MG: Okay, so what do you think language and speech are for? I mean,
it's probably an adaptation. We're big animals, and that's one of
the goodies that we got.

TW: I think speech is entirely different from other survival
benefits. Only with speech can you ask the question, "Why?"

MG: Right.

TW: Animals cannot ask why. In one way or another, they can ask
what, where, and when. But they cannot ask why. I've never seen an
animal shrug. When you shrug, you're trying to say, "I don't know
why." And they also can't ask how.

MG: Yeah.

TW: With language you can ask that question. I think it's at that
point where religion starts.

MG: Right.

TW: Humans got language and they were suddenly able to say, "Hey,
why is all this here? Who put it here?" And my assumption is that
they said, "There must be somebody like us but much bigger, much
more powerful, that could make all these trees, the streams. God
must be really something, and you'd better not get on the wrong side
of him." I think that's the way it started.

STORYTIME, ALL THE TIME

MG: As you may know, I came across this phenomenon that I call the
Interpreter. It's something that's in the left hemisphere of the
human; it tries to put a story together as to why something
occurred. So, we found this in patients who've had their brains
divided. What we could do is sort of tiptoe into their nonspeaking
right hemisphere and get them to do something like walk out of the
room or lift their hand up. Then we would ask the left hemisphere,
"Why did you do that?" And they would cook up a story to make sense
out of what their disconnected right hemisphere just did. The left
brain didn't know that we'd pulled a trick on them, so they concoct
an explanation for why they walked out of the room. And it's because
this left hemisphere can ask, "Why? What's that all about?" But one
of the things we've never been able to unpack is whether this
Interpreter is completely overlapping with the language system and
is therefore a sort of press agent for its own mechanism. What we do
know is that there are separate systems for different types of
cognition. And the Interpreter seems to be located in the parts of
the brain where language is located. So many people do think that
interpretive capacity comes with language; that this is the deal
with language--it comes along for the ride. Others believe that
there are actually all kinds of different cognitive mechanisms
happening, and language reports them out. So the function of
language is to talk about it, talk about what you know and
communicate, "Hey! Look here, I know how to cook a fish. Here, let
me show you how."

TW: I've always been interested in your theory of the Interpreter.
When I was in graduate school, I was introduced to this concept of
social status in the work of Max Weber, the German sociologist. And
the more I thought about it, the more I could see that status was
not simply something that was appearances and houses and
automobiles, or even ranks in a corporation or that sort of thing.
It invaded every single part of life. I remember when I was in
graduate school, there was a setup wherein a common bathroom was
shared by two rooms. And there was a student from India--a
brilliant scientist--who had apparently come from way out in the
countryside, with no natural social standing and not many amenities.
Now, you'd think the things you do in absolute private would not be
driven by status concerns. But he heard three of his American
friends joking about the fact that when they went into the bathroom,
they found footprints on the toilet seat. Well, this fellow had
never seen a porcelain toilet before. He was crushed. He felt
absolutely humiliated, and here was something that goes on in
private.

Anyway, this was something before I'd ever heard of neuroscience,
and I said, "There must be something in the brain that registers
this, your status in every kind of situation." And I kept looking
for it. Freud had been such a powerful figure that everyone seemed
to think, "Freud's got the bottom line, why should we go through all
these complicated neurons and everything to see how he got there.
He's got it." I hoped to find the answer in Delgado's book, but it
wasn't really there. It wasn't until I ran across your concept of
the Interpreter that I thought, "Hey, maybe we've got it."

MG: Well, the key concept in understanding status has to do with the
idea of social comparison. The Interpreter fires up and almost
reflexively starts to compare the new person with one's self and
others. Multiple factors seep into this narrative being built by the
Interpreter and the importance of status is one of the products of
that process.

Still, I think the essential question that neuroscience has to
answer is why, when I interact with someone, I don't think it's my
brain talking to their brain. I'm talking to Tom Wolfe, and you're
listening to Mike Gazzaniga, right? We instantly convert to that: I
give you an essence right off the bat. I put you at the level of a
person with mental states and all the rest of it. That mechanism, it
makes us all dualists in a way. Absolute dualists. That mechanism is
the deep mystery of neuroscience, and no one has touched it yet. No
one knows how that works. That's the goal.

For my part, what I've come to realize is that the neuroscience of
the next 20 years will be studying social processes of humans. In
order to get to the biology of anything, you need technology that
allows you to study the human mind. It's only really in the past 10
or 15 years that we've had the new methods of imaging. And they keep
getting better and better and better. The ability to think about
other people is probably the impetus behind all these marvelous
things the human brain can do.

TW: Every time we go into a room with other people, it's as if we
have a teleprompter in front of us and it's telling us the history
of ourselves versus these people. We can't even think of thinking
without this huge library of good information and bad information.

MG: That's why the great psycholinguist George Miller, whom we
shared a dinner with once, called us the "informavores." That's how
he wanted to cast us.

When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and
squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the
past 100 years.

You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to
your peers. You're thinking about your spouse, about your kids,
about your boss. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent thinking
about other people's thoughts about you, their intentions, and all
this kind of stuff. So sorting all that out, how we navigate this
complex social world, there's going to be a neuroscience to it, and
I think it's going to be very powerful.

THE NEW IDENTITY CRISIS

MG: I'm involved in a new project called "Neuroscience and the Law,"
which I think you're familiar with. It brings up the idea that there
are these causal forces that make us do the things we do, that by
the time you're consciously aware of something, your brain's already
done it. How else could it be? Because the brain is what's producing
these mental events that we're sorting through. So these ideas--what I 
call the ooze of neuroscience--are going out everywhere, and people are 
willing to accept that: "My brain did it. Officer, it wasn't me." These 
defenses are popping up all over the judicial  system. But if we adopt 
that, then it's hard to see why we have a retributive response to a 
wrongdoing. It would seem to me to be morally wrong to blame someone for 
something that was going to happen anyway because of forces beyond their 
control. So people get into this loop, and they get very concerned about 
the nature of our retributive response. This puts you right smack in the 
middle of the question: Are we free to do what we think we're doing?

TW: Oh, it's the hottest subject in academia. Philosophy students
are flocking to neuroscience because they think the answers are all
there, not in our silly, cherished way of thinking. It's called
"materialism," to some. We are computers, and a computer is
programmed a certain way, and there's nothing the computer can do to
change its programming. I think materialism is too grand a word for
it. It's mechanical. I mean, here's what happens. The scientist
says, "We are machines." There's no ghost in the machine. There's no
little tiny "me" in the conning tower surveying the universe and
figuring out a place within it. It's a machine. Things get more and
more complicated when it comes to humans, but it's still a machine.
Obviously, this machine has no free choice. It's programmed to do
certain things. It's as if you threw a rock in the air, and in
midflight you gave that rock consciousness. That rock would come up
with 12 airtight, logical reasons why it's going in that direction.
This has caught on like wildfire. The flaw in that is that speech,
language, creates so many variables. Speech reacts. It's the only
artifact I can think of that reacts.

MG: Well, I think using the term "free will" is just a bad way to
capture the problem. Because here's the question: Free from what?
What are you trying to be free from?

TW: It's a very simple definition: You make your own decisions.

MG: Yeah. But who is "you"? "You" is this person with this brain
that has been interacting with this environment since you were born,
learning about the good and the bad, the things that work and don't
work. You've been making decisions all the way along, and now you
have a new one and you want to be free to make it. So
psychologically, the Interpreter is telling you you're making this
decision. But the trick is understanding that your brain is basing
the decision on past experience, on all the stuff it has learned.
You want a reliable machine to make the actual act occur. You want
to be responding rationally to any challenge that you get in the
world, because you want that experience to be evaluated. That's all
going on in your brain second by second, moment to moment. And as a
result, you make a decision about it. And phenomenologically, when
the decision finally comes out, you say, "Oh, that's me!"

TW: Speech has introduced so many variables into your machine that
it becomes pointless to argue whether this is free or not free will.
Obviously, it's not free in the sense that if you don't have this
body, you can't do anything. But it is free in the sense that
because of your experiences and because of the reactions of speech
constantly feeding you new material, your brain is going to operate
differently from anybody else's, and that is the free will --
whether you call it mechanical or not. Everybody becomes such an
individual, it becomes pointless to say, "You didn't make that
decision." It's an absurd idea.

MG: Well, I think we're saying the same thing. There is a very
clever little experiment that you would be amused by, run by my
colleague Jonathan Schooler. He has a bunch of students read a
paragraph or two from the Francis Crick book, Astonishing
Hypothesis, which is very deterministic in tone and intent. And then
he has another group of students reading an inspirational book about
how we make our own decisions and determine our own path. He then
lets each group play a videogame in which you're free to cheat. So
guess who cheats? The people who have just read that it's all
determined cheat their pants off.

I think people who try to find personal responsibility in the brain
are wrongheaded. Think of it this way: If you're the only person in
the world, you live alone on an island, there's no concept of
personal responsibility. Who are you being personally responsible
to? If somebody shows up on the island though --

TW:--Friday was his name.

MG: Yeah, exactly. Then you've got a social group. And the group
starts to make rules; that's the only way they're going to function.
Out of those rules comes responsibility. So responsibilities are to
the relationships within the social groups, and when someone breaks
a rule, they're breaking a social rule. So don't look for where in
their brain something went wrong; look at the fact that they broke a
rule, which they could have followed. I'm actually kind of
hard-nosed about this. I think people should be held accountable for
lots of stuff.

TW: No, I would certainly agree with that. In fact, my theory of
status is that all of us live by a set of values that, if written in
stone, would make not me but my group superior in some way. I think
there are just so many kinds of status layers due solely to
likeness. You can always find a group that seems to justify whatever
you're doing.

MG: Our species seems brilliant at forming groups--indeed support
groups--for almost anything. And no matter what the group is
about, no matter what its character, it becomes advocatory.