Measuring empathy and cruelty
This week’s TLS has a review by Andrew Scull of Simon Baron Cohen’s book Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty, which argues that cruelty results from a lack of empathy (one is tempted to say, “Duh!”). The six degrees of empathy can be measured by questionnaires and by the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging which can register the presence or absence in the brain of “empathy circuits.” Scull is not convinced and opposes himself to
a spread in popular culture of reductionistic accounts of human behaviour supposedly rooted in hard scientific findings.
But much of this faith is misplaced. Correlation is not cause, so finding (rather crude) patterns of activity in the brain is far from demonstrating how we think–not to mention that the same regions of the brain “light up” under very different circumstances. Human brains are interconnected to an almost unfathomable degree, and complex human actions are infinitely removed from the simple stimuli presented in Baron-Cohen’s and other laboratory experiments, which by their very nature cannot capture how our brains work under these circumstances. Moreover, it is unclear that the extremely indirect and temporally compromised signals that are used to construct fMRI images provide more than the most simplistic look at what is taking place. Since millions of neurons must be active to register on the scan, for example, much is necessarily not being recorded by the instrument. …
The difficulty, as always, is the vast gap between the simple simulated experiments using functional MRI machines and crude stimuli (such as showing pictures of someone being pricked with a pin) and the world of soldiers committing heinous war crimes, of Josef Mengele conducting “experiments” on children in concentration camps, of Turks disposing of more than a million Armenians. We are quite incapable of translating heightened activity in certain regions of the brain into the contents of people’s thoughts, let alone their behaviours. Even framing things in this fashion is to assume, of course, something potentially of greater significance still, and something that Baron-Cohen never bothers to argue for: that our thoughts are the simple product of neural activity in the brain. Might it not be the other way around? What scientific finding, rather than a priori metaphysical assumption, allows us to conclude that human decision-making is a mechanical process, wholly determined by previous mechanical processes? And were we indeed to be mechanical inhabitants of such a universe, why would someone like Simon Baron-Cohen attempt to influence us by rational argument? Surely such an enterprise would be intellectually incoherent, not to mention redundant.
The last two sentences offer an example of what philosophers call “retorsion”–the contradiction between one’s theory of rationality and the exercise of reason that constructed the theory. The theory of reason, often enough, takes no account of the exercise of reason. If a theory of knowledge makes a claim to be knowledge, must it not account for its own genesis?
I’ve recently used a version of this argument against the claim by Thomas Nagel that the idea of agent causation is unintelligible. This sort of argument is also brings to mind what Habermas has called “performative contradictions,” namely saying or doing something that one denies can be said or done.
Arguments of this sort have weight against many claims that one ought to espouse some form of hard determinism. To say that one ought to do or believe something that he or she can’t help but do or believe makes no sense.
I’m not familiar with the term ‘retorsion,’ though. Fr. Komonchak, I’d be glad to have a reference, if one is readily available.
JAK: I’ve read enough of Simon Baron-Cohen’s thought-provoking book that I can tell you that the reviewer has written a caricature of Baron-Cohen’s claims.
Now regarding your parenthetical “Duh!” I wish that the Catholic bishops had enough capacity for empathy that they had been more concerned about the victims of priest sex abuse, when allegations about the sex abuse of certain priests were made.
Mr. Farrell: The “Duh” did not mean that I disagreed with the idea, but that I thought it rather banal.
I’d be interested in hearing what you think was caricature in Scull’s review of the book from which I took two late paragraphs. But I would wonder if those bishops you think should have shown more empathy for the victims can be held responsible if Baron-Cohen’s claims (as summarized elsewhere in the review) are correct: that ‘there are genes for empathy” [this an exact quote from B-C]; that differences in “‘empathy circuits’ are largely immutable features of their brains; their ventromedial frontal cortex and their orbitofrontal cortex are under-active, while their ventral striatum and their amygdala are over-active”; that we have “an ability to peer into the brain, to be able to make a connnection, through the miracles of functional MRIs, between brain and behaviour.”
And I would also like to know what you think of the next to last sentence in the quote I give above.
Mr. Dauenhauer: The method of retorsion (or retortion) goes back at least to Aristotle–”Get the sceptic to say something.” To point out performative contradictions is an example, and has been proposed by many others besides Habermas. I’ve seen it used, for example, to establish the non-deniable character of the principle of contradiction.
I was surprised at your reference to Thomas Nagel because in his book The Last Word he makes effective use of retorsion against post-modernist relativism.
You might be interested in two articles that appeared in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain, vol. 96 (1998). The first, Thomas De Praetere, “La justification du principle de non-contradiction” (pp. 51-68), is critical of Aristotle’s use of the technique for refuting adversaries of the principle of non-contradiction. The second article, Marc Leclerc, “La confirmation performative des premiers principes” (pp. 69-84), argues that Aristotle’s justification of the principle is correct, but thinks that instead of a technique employed polemically as refutation, his insights would be better called a “performative confirmation” and respect better the reciprocity of consciousness, which he illustrates from Augustine’s and Blondel’s use of retorsion.
Both authors appeal to an earlier article in the same journal: Gaston
Isaye, “La justification critique par retorsion,” RvPhL, 52 (1954) 205-33.
There are indeed some extraordinary discoveries being made by the neuroscientists. However, philosophically the neuroscientists I’ve read are quite primitive philosophically, being materialists who reduce everything to chunks of matter in motion in space and time. When they find a “pathway” of certain material chunks with a certain structure and that pathway correlates one-on-one with mental events, the neuroscientists are convinced they have found the material event which is *identical* with the mental one.
My question to them is: well, if the physical pathway is truly *identical* with the mental event (say with the though of a fairy with pink wings), then why is it that when I think of a fairy with pink wings I don’t simultaneously know the brain event which the neuroscientists say is identical with the mental event? How come to think of a fairy with pink wings isn’t identical with thinking of that pathway that that neuroscientists have discovered? If the brain event and the thought of the fairy are really *identical*, then to know one is to know the other, is it not? If “they” are truly identical, then there is no “other” involved.
But the neuroscientists are well aware that in thinking of the fairy with pink wings they do not know what is happening in the brain. In fact, it has taken them millions of dollars of equipment and careful experimentation to discover the *correlative physical event” which happens when the mental event happens. And, Yes, that correlative physical event is indeed intriguing, and * why* there should be a correlative event is most intriguing. (If I were young, I might even go into neuroscience, I think it’s so fascinating!) So there are lots and lots of questions to answer. But we already know that the mental event is NOT identical with the physical one. And the non-scientific implications of that fact are huge, are they not?
Ann: Scull writes in his review: “Despite important advances in neuroscience, we are very far indeed from being able to connect even very simple human actions to the underlying structure and functioning of people’s brains. We are decades away from successfully mapping the brain of the fruit fly, let alone successfully tackling the infinitely more complex task of unravelling the billions upon billions of connections that make up our own brains. For all the talk of en ‘Empathizing Mechanism’, nothing of the sort has been demonstrated.”
I think Scull’s final question is a good one: If thinking and deciding are purely physical events, then why would one write a book with rational arguments in it? What one writes would be simply the result of dumb physical events, and it would be idle to present rational arguments if there is no such thing as reason.
It also seems to me that an explanation of empathy can’t stop with identifying the causes of cruel behavior. I could see what Dr. Mengele is doing and watch the physical reactions of his patients, but that would never of itself inspire empathy in me. The Piagetian Hochberg theorizes that unless we can *imagine* what the victim is feeling when victimized we can never think or feel in his place, so to speak. So imagination is the clue to the development of empathy. Without it, say the Hochbergians, we can never develop a conscience because we can never understand what the other is suffering.
So if we are going to go looking for empathy genes, I suggest we look for the genes that help to trigger imagination.
(One more reason to require the reading of “fiction” by school children. It’s one of the best ways to develop imaginations and understanding of other people. Movies can help too. And TV could, if it ever decided to grow up.)
“If thinking and deciding are purely physical events, then why would one write a book with rational arguments in it? What one writes would be simply the result of dumb physical events, and it would be idle to present rational arguments if there is no such thing as reason.”
JAK ==
I agree. But I don’t think that is how the materialist neuroscientists set up the question. For them there ARE all of these enchanting, non-dumb mental events, just as the nonmaterialists say there are. The materialists, however, *identify* these non-dumb events with what we non=materialists say are dumb ones. The issue is: are the dumb events identical with the non-dumb ones? I say, just look at them — if they are really identical, then there is NO DIFFERENCE between them, and to know the one is to know “the other”, an irrational position if there ever was one.
The Charlie Rose Brain Series is a fabulous window into what’s going on in neuroscience these days:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702
I don’t take issue with the idea that mental events are mediated by the physical stuff of the brain; I don’t know how else they could be mediated. I don’t think there’s any extra components in there besides all those neurons. But the complexity of the connections is something else again, something like 10 to the 15th synapses (1 quadrillion). The number of stars in the entire universe is something like 10 to the 24th, so that some pretty serious complexity going on.
We’re just at the beginning of figuring out how all that works and while the progress is fascinating, we need to see it in comparison to the awesome (and awesomely changing) complexity of the connections in the brain that make us who we are.
I actually take heart to see neuroscience effectively supporting what ethics seems to have already figured out.
“.. . . while the progress is fascinating, we need to see it in comparison to the awesome (and awesomely changing) complexity of the connections in the brain that make us who we are.”
Jeanne –
When you say that it is the complexity of the connections ‘that make us who we are”, it seems to me that you have made a gigantic assumption.
How do you know that complex physical connections make us who we are?
Ann, it is an assumption. I make it because I see that when those neurons get messed up in a person I know, that person ceases to be the person I know.
Ann —
Could you explain what you mean when you write “identical”?. An object is identical to itself, granted. Two hydrogen atoms can be called identical – with respect to explicitly specified properties_. The same two are not identical if more or other properties are specified.
What are the specific properties defining the objects of interest when you write “mental event” and “material event”?
Thanks, Fr. Komonchak, for the references.
Jeanne, note your judgment that the person you once knew “ceases to be the person I know.” Whio is this “I”? Surely, not just an assemblage of neurons, some of which are decaying and being replaced by others. What you say here is another example of the kind of claim subject to the argument from retorsion, just the kind of argument that Schull has used.
This “I” is me ;-) obviously more than just neurons, there’s bones and organs and flubber and such, all created by God.
I don’t think you have to imagine some secret component in the brain that is the “I” in order to think that you have a soul (which Aquinas defined as the aliveness of a body) or to believe in God or mystery or the Incarnation or any of it. I think all you have to do is recognize the reality of mystery. That frees you up to more freely move the line between knowledge and mystery, guided by your God-given ability to reason about the evidence found here in God’s creation.
Jack Barry ==
When I said “identical” I meant it in its strongest sense. To put it as a double negative, to be identical is not to be other than in any respect. Unfortunately, the word “same” which is often used as a synonym of “identical” is ambiguous. It can mean either “identical” or “totally alike” where “alike” does not imply identity. For instance, you can say that two electrons have the “same” properties meaning that what each one is is wholly *like* the other, but that does not mean that they are one and the same electron.
You ask: “What are the specific properties defining the objects of interest when you write “mental event” and “material event”?”
Great question, but I can’t give you a very satisfactory answer. I’d say that my mental events are conscious ones (at least the ones I’m thinking about at the moment are). In saying that I am “conscious of a patch of blue” (to use a classic example) I am talking about two realities: *consciousness of* and its content the *patch of blue*. The consciousness itself, though it is quite real, does not consist of any dimensions and is itself colorless, whereas the patch of blue is two dimensional, and, of course, blue.
Now the fun starts. We seem to be made such that when we think of sensory objects like patches of blue we think of them as *other than* ourselves, as things existing apart from consciousness whether or not our consciousness is actually conscious of them. And we think of them (or many of them anyway) as *three* dimensional, even though we never actually see the opposite side of anything — we project the third dimension (e.g., the other side of the moon) onto our two-dimentional content of consciousness.
Now we’re in the middle of the great epistemological problems, and it’s my opinion that we don’t have — and are unlikely ever to have — any water-tight arguments proving that our sensory experience is actually the experience of an external, three-dimensional, non-mental world.
I go with the explanation that the assumption of a three-dimensional external world is the most useful explanation for my own experience and that it is probably because there really is a you out there reading your computer screen. (That gets us to wondering about the reality of Other Minds. Talk about a rat’s nest!)
Don’t you love all this self-consciousness stuff? One of my fav theology things is Augustine’s idea that the Son of God is God as known to God: God’s self-knowledge or awareness.
PS I really am out here reading my computer screen.
Jeanne –
Yes, indeed, consciousness is wonderfully intriguing. So far as I’ve been able to determine, “consciousness” alone didn’t become of great philosophical interest until Descartes at the earliest. Oh sure, the philosophers and theologians were interested in “mind” or “mensa” (a very complicated reality which in Locke becomes identified with “self”), and they were very interested in “intellect” and the other powers of knowing, but they didn’t reflect on consciousness as such until fairly recently, after Descartes reduced so much to “I think, therefore, I am
Now, of course, it’s the rage :-) And with all the good stuff the neuroscientists are discovering, it’s even more intriguing.
Then there is the theological position that when God the Father thinks of Himself, the Son (the Logos) is thereby generated, and they love each other, and that Love is the Holy Spirit :-) (And these young whipersnappers think the old theology is irrelevant!!! Poor them.)
Speaking of self=identity, here’s an article in Wired about the Jerusalem syndrome. It seems that certain cities inspire some tourists to behave in particular forms of craziness. In Jerusalem the craziness often taken the form of thinking one is the Messiah. The insanity persists for a while, then goes away, often when the person leaves the city.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_jerusalemsyndrome/all/1
Oops == I’ll try again –
It seems that certain cities inspire a particular form of craziness in certain tourists. It Jerusalem the craziness consists in thinking that you’re literally the Messiah.
Ann: For pre-Descartes discussion of consciousness, I think we could look at the treatment of the soul’s knowledge of itself, on which Augustine (of course!) and Aquinas had a great deal to say when they talked about the soul’s self-knowledge. Augustine anticipated Descartes’ cogito with his si fallor, sum, while Thomas distinguished notitia sui from cognitio sui: everyone had the first, what we might call “self-awareness,” but for the soul’s real self-knowledge hard work is necessary. Aquinas thought that the soul was transparent to itself, which I think comes pretty close to the idea of self-consciousness
JAK –
Hmm. You seem to be implying that for Thomas consciousness *is* the self, as it was for John Locke. It’s very tempting to identify them. But it presents a humongous problem: if consciousness is me, then not to be conscious is not to be me. If follows that when “I” am asleep, I am not me. Aargh! Or did Thomas make a distinction between self-consciousness and the operation or activities of consciousness? I don’t remember anything like than in him at all, though it has a certain plausibility. There would/might? be soul as act insofar as it it the form of the body but soul as potential insofar as it has certain activities. Hmmm.
“Notitia sui” does look promising, though. It might be similar to G.E. Moore’s “consciousness of”. Where does he talk about that? I read some stuff in the S.T. years ago, but I wasn’t asking any contemporary questions at the time. Moore, of course, is fascinating. Pity Wittgenstein didn’t pay more attention to him.
Ann: I don’t know what I said that implied that “consciousness ‘is’ the self.” Aquinas dealt with the question of the soul’s (or mind’s) knowledge of itself in the De veritate, q. 8, a. 6; q. 10, aa. 8-10; in the Summa theologica, I, q. 87, aa. 1-4; and in several other places. Notice in the Summa, his use of the verb “percipere” and of the noun “praesentia”. There is, he says, a first knowledge of the mind by way of its presence to itself, and a second knowledge that requires “diligent and subtle inquiry.”
JAK –
Thanks for the references. But I find the texts very muddled. It’s hard to know just what the most important terms are referring to. Sometimes they’re used synonymously, sometimes not. The S.T. article 8 seems to use “intellectual soul”, “soul”, “intellect”, and “mind” interchangeably as if they all mean the same thing. Hmm. I wonder where “awareness” belongs in all that. Yes, he distinguishes a knowledge of the mind based on its “presence to” itself, and I assume that has something to do with awareness or consciousness-of. A pity he didn’t know Moore (who knew some of Husserl who was influenced by Brentano, the Aristotelian/Thomist. Moore talked about consciousness as transparent too.
In de Veritate, Q.10, A. 8, in the beginning of the the Reply Thomas pretty much sticks to talking about the “soul”, but then he says, “The essence alone of the soul, which is present to the mind, is enough for this. . .” It seems obvious that here he is distinguishing the soul and the mind. Later in the Reply he talks as if soul is the possible intellect, and he goes on to talk about the “mind”. In the Answers to the Difficulties he also talks about our “understanding” and seems to identify it with “mind”. At 13. he says, however, that “The intellective power is a form of the soul with reference to its act of existing, for it has existence in the soul as a property in a subject”. This seems to mean that intellect is not identical with soul but is a property of it (which is the way I learned it). And in 16. he also seems to be taking this position.
In these articles he doesn’t address the question general “what is consciousness-of?”, though he is obviously very interested in the specific consciousness of one’s own soul. Well, he’s ahead of our contemporaries there.