The article gave more space to why we don’t know much of anything about our selves than to what we do know, or think that we know, for “While it seems irrefutable that we must exist in some sense, things get a lot more puzzling once we try to get a better grip of what having a self actually amounts to.”

According to the article, we are sure of three things about our selves. We are continuous. We are unified. And we are agents.

“All of these beliefs appear to be blindingly obvious and as certain as can be” ; yet “as we look at them more closely, they become less and less self-evident.”

Are we really “continuous” beings if we are happy optimists one day but sad pessimists the next? After all, “during the time that our self exists, it undergoes substantial changes in beliefs, abilities, desires and moods.” If we do persist from day to day, what is that persistence like? New Scientist introduces two very different metaphors for the self: a string of pearls and a rope.

If the self is an unchanging entity that persists through all of the changing experiences it encounters, it is like the string that holds together and defines all of the pearls hanging from it. If the self is instead a conglomeration of separate but intermingled mental events, then it is more like a rope composed of many smaller segments of activity. It seems clear that we can’t have it both ways.

It seems then as if we are left with the unattractive choice between a continuous self so far removed from everything constituting us that its absence would scarcely be noticeable, and a self that actually consists of components of our mental life, but contains no constant part we could identify with. The empirical evidence we have so far points towards the rope view, but it is by no means settled.

Our second belief about the self is that it is the unifier, the entity that organizes and understands a single, external reality. Yet experiment after experiment, illusion after illusion, makes it very clear that the “pictures” our brains construct are incomplete and under many circumstances unreliable.

Perhaps there is something wrong with the notion of a self perceiving a unified stream of sensory information. Perhaps there are just various neurological processes taking place in the brain and various mental processes taking place in our mind, without some central agency where it all comes together at a particular moment, the perceptual “now.”

And our third fundamental belief, that we are deliberate agents, fares little better, for “cognitive science has shown in numerous cases that our mind can conjure, post hoc, an intention for an action that was not brought about by us.”

So, many of our core beliefs about ourselves do not withstand scrutiny. This presents a tremendous challenge for our everyday view of ourselves, as it suggests that in a very fundamental sense we are not real. Instead, our self is comparable to an illusion – but without anybody there that experiences the illusion.

Speculation about the nature, even the reality, of the self is not just idle philosophizing. In an important way, it goes to the core of our thinking about subjects as diverse as criminal justice and quantum mechanics, so continuing to struggle with the issues questions about the self raise will remain one of the most enduring, and critical, tasks our rational “selves” undertake.

More evidence that the world, including us, is a construct, a mental representation of an otherwise un-experienced world “out there,” crops up in reports of a new study that fools subjects into believing that they have a phantom limb.

What makes this deception particularly remarkable is that the study’s subjects were not amputees. Whole-bodied subjects were tricked into ignoring their real limbs and interacting with their non-existent non-existent limbs. That’s quite a double negative!

In “Scientists Create Phantom Limbs in Non-Amputees,” reported on April 11^th by Science Daily, researchers first hid each subject’s real right arm behind a screen. Testers then stimulated the hidden hand with a feather brush, while repeating the same action in the visible “blank space” where a phantom hand would have been. After only a short time, subjects “substituted” the non-existent non-existent hands for their hidden real hands, experiencing phantom phantom-limb sensations. When subjects closed their eyes and were asked to p0int their left hands at their right arms, while the illusion was in force they consistently pointed at the empty air where a phantom right arm would have been.

It’s one thing for an amputee to experience phantom pain. The simplest explanation is that nerves in the stump continue to send signals that used to come from the severed limb. But how to explain this result?

One explanation that makes sense is that we don’t experience the actual sensations that come from the nerves attached to our limbs. Rather, we use those sensations to construct a mental picture of the state of our bodies. And when the incoming sensations are visual tricks, our brains construct false pictures.

It’s long been argued by some that we live entirely inside our heads, that we have absolutely no direct connection to the outside world. Not only do we live with constructs, other research shows that the representations we create are situated in the very near past. How else, for example, would we experience someone’s talking and moving her lips at the same time, when light travels about 881,000 times faster than sound?

The notion that what we experience as reality, even the reality of our own bodies, is nothing much more than a time-delayed mental map is a major challenge for those scientists and philosophers who argue that our consciousness is “embedded,” a part of the material, outside world.

After all, if we can experience false sensations in falsely-false body parts, how tied are we to anything we can really call “reality”?

More often than not, this approach is applied to “higher” animals such as our chimpanzee cousins. But if our individual and social traits are products of evolution — and what else could they be? — then we should be able to find some pretty basic understanding from looking at older, “simpler” animals.

Ants, for example.

Like us, ants are social. We see something of ourselves in them. Their colonies have been compared to human cities, and their co-operative lifestyle has been compared to the networks of neurons in the human brain.

A new study, “Family-based guilds in the ant Pachycondyla inversa,” published in Biology Letters, seems to answer the old question: What came first, co-operation or complex societies? Did we develop complex societies because they facilitated co-operation, or did we begin to co-operate once our societies reached a certain, critical size?

The Biology Letters study produced results that suggest that co-operation came first: “Our results are the first example that suggests that genetically based division of labour may precede the evolution of complex social organization and facilitate the existence of low relatedness societies.”

This is not the place for a detailed summary of the study’s methods and results, but the highlights are interesting. In this particular species, “communal” colonies are composed of groups of genetically-different ants, with the offspring of each queen not only living together in one zone of the nest but also specializing in one kind of labour. Ants related to one queen may be foragers, while ants related to another queen may be soldiers, and so on.

We show that nest-mate workers from different matrilines engage in different tasks, have distinct chemical profiles and associate preferentially with kin in the nest, while queens and brood stay together. This suggests that genetically based division of labour may precede the evolution of complex eusociality and facilitate the existence of low relatedness societies functioning as associations of distinct families that mutually benefit from group living.

The queens are not sisters, and therefore the worker ants have low relatedness between groups. Yet the groups co-operate, each specializing in one of the different tasks necessary for the success of the colony as a whole.

But this isn’t really a post about ants.

Well, it is, but the ant study motivated me to think about the general proposition that, if we are truly and only animals, and if we’ve evolved from simpler forms, forms that still exist, then we can only benefit from studying other animals.

What we’re looking for are echoes of our own traits, either precursors from which we have developed or analogues that exist in many types of animal. In other words, the ways that other animals make their ways in the world are either early versions of our more complex behaviour or one successful strategy that many different animals continue to share.

Despite the evidence, there are still those who feel uncomfortable when some of us compare ourselves to other animals — especially when we do so without the once-obligatory “human specialness” qualifier. Not all of these uneasy people are religious fundamentals, or religious at all. It doesn’t take a magical father in the sky for us to want to be “special.” (Although, pardon the tangent, it does take a desire to be “special” for us to create a magical father in the sky.)

I’m not suggesting that we aren’t different from other animals. We certainly are. We have really bad claws and really powerful brains. We can’t fly, but we can build machines that do. And so forth. We are different, but we’re not special. Our special qualities a matter of scope and intensity, not a matter of kind. We have all of the same kinds of chemistry and biology that other animals do. We just have more of them in some ways, and less of them in others.

It’s particularly discouraging when other proclaimed materialists, quite willing to discard the magical and the mystical, the divinity and the dualism, can’t quite bring themselves to get rid of the idea of human specialness, which they often, revealingly, call “human dignity.” It’s the evolutionary equivalent of nationalistic American “exceptionalism.”

And it’s just as unattractive.

It’s not that Grayling’s prose is particular bad, although it’s not particularly good. It’s not that many of the things he writes are little more than self-help nostrums, although many of them are certainly that.

The problem is that Grayling’s imitation of the style of the old English bible makes his “new bible” seem more a parody than a transformation. He hasn’t so much updated the old bible as he has backdated his new ideas.

What’s more interesting to me than Grayling’s lack of success as a prophet is how far some of my fellow “accommodationists” — committed atheists who don’t  think that belief and believers are only and always evil — are willing to go to perform their acts of accommodation.

There’s no need to replace the old bible with a new one. Why should we need any sort of sacred book? Wouldn’t the absence of any sacred books come closer to our worldview, to our sense that there are many complexities in life but no definitive users’ manual?

Grayling isn’t the only one playing this game. In one section of After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?, published online by the New Statesman on March 27th, Alain de Botton argues that we should remember that we created religions to fill deep and universal psychological and emotional needs. And, as he correctly points out, abolishing religion doesn’t eradicate those needs.

However, where de Botton goes quite wrong is in his impulse to retain or copy the forms of religion once the magical mysteries have been shed.

De Botton writes of the need to find a “new priest,” perhaps a mass-market psychiatrist, someone officially sanctioned to listen to us when things get tough. I’m reminded of the computer counsellor in George Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971), the one whose soothing female voice tenderly asks, “What’s wrong?” before prescribing an extra dose of mood-lifting drugs. Just as we don’t need a new sacred book, we don’t need a new sacred professional.

De Botton does a little better when he argues that the great artifacts of culture can replace the sacred books of religions. Literature, music, art, architecture, and the like are repositories of great wisdom — and even when they’re not filled with wisdom, they are often sources of important questions and new points of view. Certainly we benefit when we are encouraged to think deeply, to feel deeply.

But de Botton goes on to suggest new churches, advocating in effect that universities become purposeful cultural counselors, that art galleries construct their exhibits in ways that encourage deep thought and emotional insight. What’s wrong with this, of course, is that by making thoughtfulness and self-reflection “official,” we would merely replace one institutional source of truth with another.

It’s worth noting that de Botton doesn’t have anything to say about science as a source of knowledge and understanding. Science doesn’t replace myth with myth, mystery with mystery — but it does represent an entire side of reality with which too many fervent religionists — and too many “new, new atheists” — seldom engage.

Are the physical sciences also biased? In particular, is the way we typically explain the physics of the universe fundamentally anthropomorphic, with the assumption from Newton to the present that the universe functions the same way that our minds function?

In “A computer cosmos will never explain quantum physics” (New Scientist, Feb. 15th), Ken Wharton questions “the assumption that the universe solves problems in the same way that we do – that the universe works like a computer.”

Humans are always trying to compute the future. Given that all of our experience is of the past, there is really only one way we can do this: take information about the past, manipulate it using some rules, and then use the result to forecast the future. Mechanical computers process data in the same fashion.

Wharton writes that it is “not surprising” that Newton used a similar “schema” in his physics: “{1) Map present reality onto some mathematical state; 2) Input that state into some dynamical equation; 3) Map the equation’s output back onto a future reality.”

The universe, we almost can’t help but imagine, is some cosmic computer that generates the future from the past via some master “software” (the laws of physics) and some special initial input (the big bang). Note that this is very different from the claim that the universe is a computer simulation.

Wharton writes that “Newton’s schema naturally arose from our human experience of time,” that  “the notion of the cosmic computer is itself an anthropocentric bias.”

Wharton argues: “This is not irrelevant metaphysics. Our assumptions frame our best models in physics, and for quantum physics in particular, the models have deep problems.”

In other words, perhaps it’s this natural human bias that lies behind some of the as yet intractable conceptualization problems we have with quantum physics, with probability fields collapsing into finality at the moment of observation and all the other esoterica that led Richard Feynman to claim (with little or no dissent) that no one understands quantum physics.

What if our universe is not a computer after all? What if our software-input-calculation-output model is wrong? We don’t know if it is, but Wharton’s suggestion that it might be deserves serious consideration.

Of course, what Wharton’s claims might mean for our understanding of the quantum world is not at all clear, but if his objection has merit, a similar set of biases may need to be more closely examined in the study of the human brain, of what it means to be conscious, and how consciousness (not to mention our sense of self) is acquired and maintained.

So far, computational theories of consciousness have met considerable resistance from scientists and philosophers who argue that reducible mechanical processes similar to those we build into our computers are inadequate to explain the workings of our brains, much less the creation of our minds.

Even such a leading computational champion as Daniel Dennett lately has been speculating about an understanding of human thought as something “non-reducible” and maximally complex, as I summarized in a recent posting (here). That’s not to say that our brains don’t compute, but most computational models insist that computing is all that they do. Is that right, or is it a bias?

If Wharton’s cautions about computational models prove accurate, we may have to wait for an insight as profound as the reversals of the Copernican Revolution before we have an accurate model of the universe — and of the process of human thought that seeks to understand it.

The news that a professional assassin was shot to death while enjoying the many pleasures of a shooting range — people who understand these things assure me that there are, indeed, pleasures at a shooting range. Go figure —  Kyle was killed by another weaponized ex-soldier. Sympathies to those who knew and loved the victim, but my frank reaction to the news was, “What goes around …,” or, in older terms, “Those who live by the sword ….”

What bothered me much more than Kyle’s perhaps untimely death was the way that the incident was covered by the broadcast media on both sides of the border. There’s no need to compare and contrast the coverage above and below the 49th. Both of the TV news reports that I watched, one domestic and one from the U.S., covered the story in exactly the same way.

The broadcasts reported the facts of the incident, as far as they were known at the time the programs aired. We learned that the victim was perhaps the “most distinguished” American military assassin in history. We learned that the shooter (the “alleged shooter,” as it’s always put) was a combat veteran with reintegration issues. We learned that the victim was “working with” the shooter on those issues, although no one explained how in the world the victim thought that meeting the shooter at a gun range would help effect his reintegration.

What else we didn’t hear about in the story is the reason that I’m disturbed by the coverage.

Neither broadcast had anything at all to say about a culture that celebrates a silent assassin enough that his death is newsworthy. Not a word about the morality of the sniper, the legitimacy of the foreign incursions in which he performed his “services,” or any other notion with the slightest hint of questions of moral values or national character.

Nor did either broadcast even hint at the considerable irony in a military assassin’s having been, well, assassinated in the supposed safety of the country that he had killed to protect. Come on! The killer is killed, the gun expert is gunned down, the soldier who survived the battlefield is murdered at home — isn’t all of this just too juicy, too obvious, to ignore?

Finally, and most surprising, neither broadcast made even the slightest connection between this latest case of domestic slaughter and the current gun control debate that otherwise occupies much journalistic space at the moment. The murder weapon was reported to be a semi-automatic pistol, one of those high-efficiency killing mechanisms at the heart of the gun controversy. Why no link? Why not make this obvious connection?

I don’t want to believe that all of the writers, editors, and commentators who staff the high-profile news divisions of networks in two countries never thought of any of these highly-relevant “side” topics. After all, everyone I’ve talked to about the incident has quickly and easily grasped each of the points I’ve outlined.

Why not the newspeople?

Perhaps the only way to rationalize a culture that celebrates human killing machines and dehumanizes the “targets” they hunt is to not notice the moral issues that accompany stories like this.

Not notice them at all.

The first article is “The Normal, Well-Tempered Mind,” by Daniel Dennett, published by EDGE on January 8th.

The second article,”The hologenome: A new view of evolution” (January 14th), now behind a paywall at New Sicentist but so far available free here, considers how “symbiotic microbes may shape the evolution of the plants and animals that play host to them.”

While considering the semi-independent life of our cells, Dennett briefly dismissed the symbionts that inhabit our bodies. They don’t loom large in his consideration of consciousness. But they do dominate discussion of the “microbiome,” the microbes that live in and on us.

The New Scientist article discusses the idea of a “hologenome,” an environment in which microbes play a significant role in our evolution. These organisms live with us, but they are not “us.” Yet they profoundly influence our lives. They may be so important that “instead of thinking about an individual plant or animal, we should think about the overall collective including the microbiome – the ‘performance unit’.” If this is true, then “This unit comprises the contributions of many, sometimes thousands, of individual genomes, in varying combinations and numbers.” And “an animal’s survival – or fitness – often depends not just on its own genes, but also on those of the microbes it inherits.”

It may be that “the separation of an organism from its microbiome is artificial.” Natural selection works on a combination of the host’s genome and the genomes of all of the host’s symbionts. The result is the “hologenome.” From this viewpoint, we are not single organisms. We’re not even a single collection of semi-independent organisms, as Dennett speculated. In this view, each individual may be seen as a combination of internal cellular agents and the genetic characteristics and behaviours of all of those other organisms that share our bodies. We are not organism but superorganism.

One scientist supports this idea with an outsourcing analogy:  ”All the bacteria doing useful jobs in and on our body are not just symbionts. Rather, they are part of us, like distant workers for a giant company that outsources manufacturing jobs. The work being done remains just as important for the company even though it is carried out by overseas workers it does not employ directly. “

There are many skeptics, especially among evolutionary biologists, who are reluctant to expand the unit of selection so dramatically. But even if the “hologenome” theory is to date more speculative than proved, it provides another way of viewing our “selves” as something quite different than any kind of creature to which we can accurately apply singular pronouns.

Do I believe that our brains are communities of sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating individual agents we call neurons? Do I accept that my evolution is the evolution of hundreds, even thousands of commingled genomes, only one of which is human?

I’m not yet convinced. But boy, am I ever intrigued!

That is, to pick just one felicitously phrased example, I believe that we are specially creative, but not the product of special creation. Our superior mental abilities are extreme versions of similar or analogous abilities in other creatures; these abilities are not one-off gifts from a benevolent creative force, natural or supernatural.

I’m back to this topic thanks to the conjunction of three sources: a book, a journal study, and a popular science article. Although these sources are quite independent, taken together they highlight a number of connected points about primate mental development. And this set of overlapping sources adds yet another layer to the arguments that (1) evolutionary biology is the key to any deep understanding of human nature and behaviour and (2) our proudest achievements are extensions of the skills of other creatures.

The book is Chip Walter’s Last Ape Standing, which I recently reviewed on my other blog. Walter argues that we are lifelong neonates. We are born too soon, for if our large brains were any larger at birth, we would get stuck on our way out into the world. Our immature brains make us extraordinarily plastic learners in our first few years of life, and Walter writes that its our retention of at least part of that plasticity that makes us so open to new experiences and so creative.

What has this got to do with bonobos? Unlike other chimpanzees, bonobos are unusually, actually quite remarkably, social and non-aggressive. Of all animal societies, theirs looks the most like ours, featuring co-operation, sharing, and inclusion. (OK, so that’s how our societies are supposed to work, not how they do work, but that’s another topic altogether.)

The journal article is “Bonobos Exhibit Delayed Development of Social Behavior and Cognition Relative to Chimpanzees,” available here as a PDF. In this study, juvenile and adult bonobos and chimpanzees were observed during food sharing and competition tests. Even the youngest chimpanzees demonstrated a higher level of food competition than did the bonobos.

Most relevant to the current topic is that the behavioural differences seem to correspond to developmental delays in the brains of the bonobos. The researchers controlled for other factors like motivation and comprehension, concluding that

The association in bonobos of juvenile levels of tolerance, delayed development of social inhibition, and a pedomorphic cranium suggests that common developmental mechanisms might be responsible for the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.

Is increased sociability and sharing in bonobos a result of the same kind of process that Walter believes generates human cognitive flexibility? Does an “infantile” brain make for a better primate, of whatever species?

The third source is a popular science article, “Bonobos Will Share With Strangers Before Acquaintances,” published on January 2nd by ScienceDaily. The article does not deal directly with persistent neoteny. Instead, it reports a study that shows a particular, peculiar feature of bonobo sharing behaviour.

“It seems kind of crazy to us, but bonobos prefer to share with strangers,” said Brian Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. “They’re trying to extend their social network.” And they apparently value that more than maintaining the friendships they already have.

Test subjects had learned how to open a door to either or both of two adjoining chambers. When subjects entered the enclosure with food, they could eat it all, or they could let in one or both of their companions and share. In the test, one companion was a bonobo known the subject, and the other was a bonobo previously seen only at a distance.

Nine of the 14 animals who went through this test released the stranger first. Two preferred their groupmates. Three showed no particular preference in repeated trials. The third animal was often let in on the treat as well, but more often it was the stranger, not the test subject, who opened the door for them.

Two other versions of the test were run, clarifying that it’s the social contact that motivates the bonobos to share.

Chimpanzees “fail” all of the tests, never choosing to share, and fighting over the food when with another animal.

The bonobo tests are not direct assessments of brain development, but combining these results with the information from the two other sources easily leads to the speculation that developmental “delay” in bonobos contributes to their extreme sociability, in a way similar to the idea that human neoteny contributes to our extreme flexibility and creativity.

It’s one more support for the idea that the way that shared primate characteristics are tweaked or emphasized by natural selection is a key to the development of our most prominent — and admirable — traits.

One thing that I’m noticing is the nearly universal pessimism, not to mention cynicism, that people down here express whenever the subject turns to the dysfunctional U. S. federal government. No one expects a comprehensive deal, and few hold any hope that the likely deal, to extend the middle class tax cuts and the extra unemployment benefits, will do anything more than yet again defer any comprehensive agreement.

And no one here is expressing faith in the legislators, who will, as they always do, calculate their fiscal principles in the currency of their chances for re-election. David Brooks may be saying that while a compromise that raises tax rates on the richest Americans is bad for the economy, that’s preferable to the wholesale economic chaos of going over the cliff; but his Republican friends in the House don’t take the same larger view. Realignment of congressional districts over the last twenty years has made the vast majority of House seats “safe,” for both parties. As Nate Silver points out, this makes a primary challenge more threatening than a general election contest. As a result, ideological purity has replaced the ability to get things done as the #1 criterion for electoral success.

Of course, if Republicans keep the faith to the extreme detriment of the nation, they will be cast out in sufficient numbers to lose control of the House. For one thing, they’ll keep nominating candidates from further and further out on the right wing; and as we saw in some of the Senate races in November, there is a point beyond which the dwindling but still breathing Republican centre won’t go. And if opinion polls that show that a clear majority of Americans will blame the Republicans for going over the cliff hold steady, even some not-so-nutso Republican members of Congress could be swept away in a general disgust with the party as a whole.

For this reason, there are some prominent Democrats who actually want President Obama to make sure that the country drops off the cliff. They’re hoping that they can make the Republicans pay for the damage in 2014. Notice that neither part is paying a whole lot of attention to the damage itself. They’d rather figure a way to get some political advantage out of the crisis. In today’s Washington, that calculated self-interest is what passes for governance.

But last night’s PBS Newshour discussion between conservative Brooks and his opposite number, liberal columnist Mark Shields, highlighted another danger, this one more subtle. As the comedy show that is Congress continues, confidence in the ability of the government to accomplish anything, to function at all, continues to wane. This is a great threat to the country as a whole, but it’s particularly dangerous for Democrats.

There is a strongly-expressed Republican narrative, one that resonates with Libertarians as well, that not only is Big Government always Bad Government, but also that Government itself, in any form, is an evil force that exists not to serve the people but to control them. This paranoid claim, popular with all of the right-wing media, is only bolstered when even reasonable people lose faith in the ability of their leaders to lead. If the only things that come out of Washington are flawed programs and failed promises, more and more people will turn away from government as solution and turn toward the argument that government is the problem.

Is this crisis of confidence just an unintended negative consequence of extreme partisanship? Or is it, perhaps, the underlying strategy behind the blustering and blocking bloviations of the Republicans in Washington? After all, after the 2010 Congressional election, John Boehner candidly stated that the primary legislative priority of House Republicans was going to be to make sure that nothing that President Obama wanted would pass. Not that this or that particularly unacceptable proposal would be rejected. The sole criterion for determining the worth of a proposal would be where it originated, not what it contained.

This slavish partisanship is not a new approach, of course. Three hundred years ago, at the birth of the modern party system of competitive government in England, essayist Joseph Addison was already complaining in The Spectator that the worth of an idea was determined by which party proposed it, not by the quality of the idea itself.