Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Twenty-Eight: The Reduction of Human Beings to Their Brains

This is a continuation of earlier posts. When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge. As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”). As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions. The context of summaries related to the brain was that the principal of Ashern Central School, where I worked, started talking about “brain research’ and how teachers needed to implement such research in their daily teaching practice. He even placed an article on brain research in our school mailboxes. As a consequence, I researched the issue and provided critical summaries that critiqued his reductionist view of human intelligence as “brain work.” The attached article for the ESJ Ning is prefaced by the following:

Hello everyone,

 

Attached is another article that I sent to the ESJ Ning. It is prefaced with the following:

 

 

Svend Brinkmann, in his article, “Can We Save Darwin from Evolutionary Psychology?,” provides an overview essential to educators since educational bureaucrats all too often use “evolutionary psychology” and its connected “brain research” as a mystical device to justify their own archaic and one-sided viewpoints. The same could be said of educational psychologists and practitioners who adopt uncritically such views

 

Brinkman’s target for criticism is evolutionary psychology and its related reliance on brain research. The author divides his article into two parts. The first part is dedicated to a critique of five principles of evolutionary psychology as expounded in the work Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). The second part is dedicated to answering the question in the title with a “yes” by using Dewey’s and other psychologists’ appropriation of Darwin (such as J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology).

 

Brinkmann’s general criticism is that evolutionary psychologists do not use brain research as a means to better understand human beings; rather, they reduce human beings to their brains.

 

Before looking at the five principles of evolutionary psychology, Brinkmann’s mention of the political dimensions of evolutionary psychology should be addressed briefly. Evolutionary psychologists focus on the individual as the unit of study, and they treat human beings, mainly, as separate atoms characteristic of market relations of exchange. Such a theory accords well with the neoliberal thrust of reducing human nature to pure individual will. The political dimension of evolutionary psychology should never be forgotten.

 

Another point before looking at the five principles: Cosmides’ and Tooby’s own definition of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is not a theory of psychology as such but an approach to psychology. It is

 

“that branch of biology that studies (1) brains. (2) how brains process information, and (3) how the brain’s information processing programs generate behaviour.”

 

Such a view is from the beginning fraught with problems. How do brains process information? Only living beings process aspects from their environment—not an organ of the living beings. Brains do not recognize sensations as information—only living beings can. As Dewey noted long ago in his article on the reflex arc (1896), a particular sensory disturbance, such as a loud sound, can have different meanings depending on what a human being is doing at the moment of the loud sound—whether walking in woods at night, during the day, reading and so forth. What counts as information depends on the context and the nature of the organism with a brain, including its whole history and experience in its environment. There is no pure sense data that counts as “information” independently of the context and the particular experiences of the organism with a brain. Evolutionary psychologists confuse brains with living beings and persons and the part for the whole.

 

The first principle of evolutionary psychology that Cosmides and Tooby enunciate is:

 

“The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behaviour that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.”

 

Brinkman does not dispute the first sentence, but he does take issue with the second and third sentences. The brain does not operate like a computer; it operates in a non-linear and non-algorithmic fashion—unlike computers. Furthermore, brains are organs that operate as part of a living system. In addition, brains do not operate like computers at the physic-chemical level; they transmit electrical-chemical signals. They do not in themselves process information.

 

Brinkman suggests that a more appropriate model would be one proposed by situational theorists, in which the role of experience, the body and context are important aspects of cognition—not pure information processing from inputs that then produce output.

 

The second principle of evolutionary psychology that Cosmides and Tooby enunciate is:

 

“Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.”

 

This principle is supposed to explain such social phenomena that occurs today as rape and stress. There are several problems with this principle. In the first place, evolution through natural selection, though often taking millions of years, can require much less time when environmental conditions change rapidly.

 

In the second place, evolutionary psychologists attempt to use this principle to explain such differences in modern-day variations, such as the age differences when men and women marry, generalizing it to the Pleistocene around 100,000 years ago. There is no evidence to support such a generalization—a typical problem with evolutionary psychology.

 

In the third place, to speak of the design of neural circuits is to reduce life to the genotype, but there is no natural selection in a purely decontextualized context. The process of natural selection always occurs in a context so that the process of evolution depends on the life process of organisms in specific contexts and not just on the genotype; it depends on organisms in an environment and not just on genes. Design without materialization in context is a figment of evolutionary psychologists’ imagination, and materialization in context may change the evolutionary process. Evolutionary psychologists seek to reduce the complexity and diversity of human life, culture and behaviour to questionable fixed neural circuits formed 100,000 years ago. The whole history of Homo sapiens sapiens, from such a perspective, is irrelevant for explaining human behaviour.

 

In the fourth place, and related to the third point, evolutionary psychologists conceive of the environment as somehow existing before the emergence of the organism whereas an environment only arises when organisms are present. The environment, moreover, is often co-constructed by the living being and not just a product of it.

 

The third principle of evolutionary psychology that Cosmides and Tooby enunciate is:

 

“Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg: most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve—they require very complicated neural circuitry.”

 

This principle assumes that the mind is a place in space (equivalent to your brain). The existence of a brain is probably a necessary condition for being self-conscious (though whether it is necessary for being conscious is subject to debate; earthworms, as Darwin discovered, do adapt their behaviour to changing environmental conditions despite not having a central nervous system). Mind, however, is not an object but a character or quality of activity, and that activity occurs in an environment. In the case of human beings, that environment is social and not just physical, chemical or biological.

 

 The fourth principle of evolutionary psychology that Cosmides and Tooby enunciate is:

 

“Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.”

 

Research into the structure and functions of the brain do not show that neural circuits are specialized for specific adaptive problems. Specialization of structures and functions is a product of child development and not something given at birth. There may be tendencies to do certain activities (what John Dewey called “impulses”), but they develop within specific physical, biological and social contexts. The way in which people walk, for instance, depends on the specific social environment, with Western people learning to walk from the hips whereas Japenese people learn to walk from the knees. Differences in culture are biological in that human beings are, by nature, very adaptable living beings.

 

The fifth principle of evolutionary psychology that Cosmides and Tooby enunciate is:

 

“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”

 

Some problems with such a view have already been indicated above. Further problems also arise. The human mind cannot be confined to the interior of the skull; human beings have used and continue to use a variety of tools that enhance their capacities. Galileo would have been much more hard pressed to justify his Heliocentric view of the world if he had not had the culture of lens-making to use and adapt for his own purposes (a telescope). Humans have extended minds that reach out to their environment and the world.

 

On a political-economic note, this definition of mind corresponds well with modern capitalist society, with the separation of human beings from control over the tools for their continued life process. If all that mind involves is contained within the confines of the skull—and all human beings have skulls—then all human beings equally have minds. If, however, mind is extended to the various tools, machines and instruments that we use to produce our lives, then if some individuals (a minority) control those various tools, machines and instruments control our minds in various ways. Whether one views human beings as free, or whether treated as machines through the control by others of the tools, machines and instruments (an economic dictatorship) is dependent on whether mind is viewed as merely within the skull or an extension beyond the skull (and, indeed, the body).

 

The second section of the article tries to answer the question in the affirmative: We can save Darwin from evolutionary psychology by returning to John Dewey’s philosophy. Brinkmann points out that alternative theories exist, including ecological (as opposed to environmental) psychology (ecological psychology is based on J. J. Gibson’s work on analysis of perception of animals in general and humans in particular in context). He, however, focuses on Dewey’s psychology since it incorporated Darwin’s insights into psychology a long time ago. Dewey’s incorporation of Darwin involves such views as the nature of ideas as  tools for resolving problems that arise as humans live in specific environments rather than copies of existing reality—which assumes that ideas and thought are merely reflections of a given and fixed reality. In a world that often changes, fixed ideas are not useful.

 

Dewey, in keeping with a Darwinian perspective, considered living organisms to be or exist only in an environment, and an environment to be or exist only when organisms exist. There is not an independent organism on Earth and an independent environment on Earth, each existing separately from the other. There is simply one life process, with a differentiation of organism and environment for certain purposes.  The environment is not the “cause“ of the organism, and the organism is not the “cause“ of the environment.

 

Dewey considered the mind as forming part of the human life process; it is not a “thing“ or a place but a function within that process; this function emerges as we experience problems in our environment and must step back and reflect on the situation. This requires us to be able to disassociate ourselves to a certain extent from the situation and to treat both ourselves and the elements in the situation as objects for analysis in order to resolve the problem. We perceive qualities and objects as signs that help us to identify the nature of the problem and formulate hypotheses in order to resolve the problem.

 

The mind does not copy an objective reality for the sake of truth, certainty, or what have you (a typical but implicit view in schools). People, by developing certain habits, can use those habits to identify certain qualities and objects as means for their own ends.  Mind is this background of habitual actions, in conjunction with diverse environments, that permit people to live their lives and, if that mind is flexible, to deal with problems in the life process as they arise.

 

 Learning, in such a view, is not a process of controlling our “brains,“ but in learning to control our relations to diverse environments; it involves a process of gaining control over the life process. The development of human “minds“ in such a view requires the life process to be the center and all else to function to enhance control over that process; in the case of human beings, that involves control over the social life process since human beings are eminently social beings.

 

How does this relate to equity and social justice?

 

Some principals and other administrators (such as superintendents) seem to rely on environmental psychology to justify their views about the world. For instance, a principal where I worked sent the attached article about the so-called risk-taking of teenagers to all members of the teaching staff in an email and also had the article printed off and placed in their school mailbox. (This article was already indirectly criticized in a couple of articles that I had attached in another blog. See earlier blogs.)

 

This imposition by the principal is only the tip of the iceberg. How many other administrators, senior school bureaucrats, consultants and ministers of education rely on such “research” to justify their views and impose them on teachers, on the one hand, and children and adolescents on the other?

 

Learning for such middle and upper class bureaucrats is confined to the “brain”: their own model of what an intelligent person is. The denigration of the body and the environment—and self-control over them by children and adolescents—is class-based bias that needs to be thoroughly and persistently criticized.

 

Indeed, the reduction of human beings to the brain has major political and ethical repercussions. If human evolution and nature is reducible to the evolution of the brain, then all problems can be resolved through a modification of chemical processes in the brain. The capitalist pharmaceutical industry certainly has an interest in fostering such a view. The solution for problems that people experience in modern society is—to drug them, by force if necessary.

 

Does not equity and social justice demand such criticism?