The Mind of the Ant

I shall conclude this long account of the leaf cutting ants with an instance of their reasoning powers. A nest was made near one of our tramways, and to get to the trees the ants had to cross the rails over which the wagons were continually passing and repassing. Every time they came along, a number of ants were crushed to death. They persevered in crossing for several days, but at last set to work and tunneled under each rail. One day when the wagons were not running, I stopped up the tunnels with stones; but although great numbers carrying leaves were thus cut off from the nest, they would not cross the rails but set to work making fresh tunnels underneath them.

     [Thomas Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, 1874]

Thomas Belt (1832-1878) was an English naturalist who spent much of his life in mining enterprises in Australia, Nova Scotia, and in Nicaragua. The tramways referred to were carrying ore.

I found this fascinating passage in Wilder Penfield’s The Mystery of the Mind, quoted by Sir Charles Symonds (1890-1978), an English neurologist, in a commentary chapter in Penfield’s book called “Reflections.” Symonds included this quote in a context of in which he argues that what looks like the mind is anchored even in such lowly creatures as the ant. Symonds goes on to quote W.H. Thorpe (1902-1986), an English zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist:

If we can see purposive behavior in animals or man, we have provisional grounds for believing that there is within the organism some sort of expectancy of the future, which entails or implies a capacity for ideation, an integration of ideas about past and future, and a temporal organization of ideas.

     [W.H. Thorpe, in Brain and Conscious Experience, J.C. Eccles, editor.]

To this Symonds adds: “I know nothing about the nervous system of the ant, but it would seem that it contains a prototype of the anatomical substrata of mind.”

Penfield himself, then, in the last chapter of The Mystery of the Mind, comments on these quotes as follows:

The beautiful story of Belt’s leaf-cutting ants that you [Symonds] have retold seems, to me, to show clearly that there is self-awareness in the ant. The ant who carries his leaf to the rail and stops, finding the hole closed underneath the rail, must be aware of himself and his predicament if he begins to make a new hole.

     [Penfield, p. 105-106]

This sort of an exchange tells me that science, through some minority of its representatives, is on the edges of a recognition of something against which all manner of orthodoxies, ancient as well as new, strain in horror. Conscious man is bad enough. Conscious animals? Please, please…

Timidly Touching the Border

Having revisited the Planet of the Robots yesterday morning, in the afternoon I chanced across Wilder Penfield’s The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 1975). The book’s subtitle is “A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain.”

Penfield is perhaps best known for stimulating neural cells of awake subjects and, doing so, eliciting super-sharp memories the subjects spontaneously produced. Examining such reactions—in which the subject was simultaneously aware both of the memory and his or her current presence in the operating room—as well as doing other experiments where pictures were shown to the subjects to be named—while Penfield occasionally inhibited the subjects’ abilities to produce words—Penfield gradually reached the conviction that the mind was independent of the brain and, indeed, made use of a source of energy of all its own. He could not determine if that energy came from some external source or was produced by the brain for the mind. But that a separate energy was definitely involved became quite clear to him (link on this site). He was confident that, someday, we would discover what that energy was.

Penfield died a year after his last book was published. A brief look suggests that science has indeed continued to concern itself with the brain-mind subject since Penfield’s death. The general tendency of that research, however, has been to deny Penfield’s notion of a possible brain-mind dualism, first by linking the “energy” to quantum phenomena and, second, tentatively identifying new brain structures which could explain the mind’s seeming “independence”—thus denying that independence.

For a while there one scientists had timidly touched the border between the physical and something else. But the overwhelming bias of science has been and continues to be in the other direction: back to the comforts of materialist monism. I use the word “timidly” because, in that book, Penfield, while stating his own convictions, does so with an obvious awareness that he is, most definitely, stepping off the reservation.

A recent post on The Zennist says that “Usefulness and truth are different” (link). The useful aspects of Penfield’s work were aimed at the understanding and treating epilepsy by surgery—to which he made significant contributions. The utility of knowing that mind and brain are different would appear to be quite slight. Moreover, it does not really require a scientific proof; good philosophy suffices. One sort of hopes that the special “energy” the mind uses will not be discovered. If it is, it might well be abused…

Endless Debate

I’ve had occasion to point to a categorization of problems offered by E.F. Schumacher earlier (link). Schumacher suggests that humanity’s problems are either convergent or divergent. The first of these are physical in nature, dealing with the non-living sphere.  In attacking these physical problems, sooner or later efforts “converge” on a decent solution. The second, divergent problems, center on the living, including human phenomena. Values are always involved in these. And precisely for that reason, humanity never embraces a single solution. There is perpetual discovered. And that is because humans are—and this is my label, not Schumacher’s—unfinished.

Endless debates are a marker of divergent issues. Even masses of empirical data fail to solve them. One such is whether “life” or “mind” are emergent or transcendent phenomena. If they are emergent, all is but a consequence of matter/energy complexly arranged by chance. If the latter, we must posit a “higher” dimension from which life and mind derive. The debate is unending because the scientific observations will not produce an answer. They present a pattern which people with different awareness will interpret intuitively, thus from personal experience. And they will therefore have a very firm conviction that they are right. If one’s intuition produces the inwardly felt truth of transcendence, the mechanical will never seem sufficient explanation for the living or the spiritual. If no such resonance is felt by the person—but the facts of life and mind are still there to see—the equally firm view is that these must have evolved.

A recent example of this is a book by Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed—and a review of the book by Collin McGinn (link), in the New York Review of Books, titled “Homunculism” (ht to Siris).

Rare, exceedingly rare, is the case where a man of science after long, long study of what is a divergent problem, at last concludes that something transcendental is going on. I came across a book that makes this point last year, Wilder Penfield’s The Mystery of the Mind (p. 113-114). Penfield was a pioneering neurosurgeon.  And even Penfield ends with a reservation:

And so I come to my final reconsideration: I worked as a scientist trying to prove that the brain accounted for the mind and demonstrating as many brain-mechanisms as possible hoping to show how the brain did so. In presenting this monograph I do not begin with a conclusion and I do not end by making a final and unalterable one. Instead, I reconsider the present-day neurophysiological evidence on the basis of two hypotheses: (a) that man’s being consists of one fundamental element, and (b) that it consists of two. I take the position that the brain-mechanism, which we (my many colleagues and I all around the world), are working out, would, of course have to be employed on the basis of either alternative. In the end I conclude that there is no good evidence, in spite of new methods, such as the employment of stimulating electrodes, the study of conscious patients and the analysis of epileptic attacks, that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does. I conclude that it is easier to rationalize man’s being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one. But I believe that one should not pretend to draw a final scientific conclusion, in man’s study of man, until the nature of the energy responsible for mind-action is discovered as, in my own opinion, it will be.

The debate will certainly continue on. There is such a thing as the will to believe, but  it arises from a spark of intuition. Until it does, all will be matter, matter, drearily matter.