a bonobo humanity?

I’m not a scientist of any kind, obviously, and yet…

When I left high school at fifteen, after a contretemps with the sadistic Principal, I was holding my own – just – in the ‘arts’ subjects, but failing in the science subjects. Frankly, I only responded well to the entertaining teachers; authoritarian teachers made me switch off. That, and a kind of natural clumsiness vis-a-vis lab work, and a lack of any scientific background, convinced me early on that science stuff wasn’t for me. And yet…

When, years later, I sat a mature age entry test for tertiary education, it was, I seem to recall, only to do an Arts degree. Not science, not law, not anything that might lead to a lucrative career. Not that I was too worried about this at the time, I knew I was never going to be classed as rich.

Anyway, I received acceptances at Adelaide’s only two universities at the time, Flinders and Adelaide, in that order. On receiving the first acceptance, which I thought would be the only one, I visited the Flinders campus for the first time, and was thrilled by the beauty of the place, and the great views it offered of the city below. Then I received the Adelaide acceptance, and was unsure…. I was living in the heart of the city at the time, a brief walk from the Adelaide  campus, which I was already quite familiar with. It was a no-brainer, surely. Yet I felt slightly guilty. Was I choosing the Adelaide campus because it seemed more prestigious? I kind of hated that idea, and yet… In any case, the convenience of Adelaide made it the obvious choice.  

But by this time, in my thirtieth year, I had long been ‘switched on’ to science. My conversion, if you can call it that, had come from the novel reading I’d been doing for many years, especially a novel by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp, the main character, was, like me, in his mid twenties, and he was holed up in an alpine sanitarium due to being consumptive. He spent his time there listening to intellectuals and reading, and it seems one of his books was something like What is this thing called science? (Chalmers, 1976), or What is Life? (Schrodinger, 1944), although Mann’s book was published in 1926. 

Anyway, something about the book clicked in me, and I decided to learn more about the scientific world. First off, I read Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, then copious copies of science mags, such as Scientific American and New Scientist, which I semi-absorbed and puzzled over in my usual solitary fashion. 

So, on being accepted at uni, I found that one of the subjects I was permitted to enrol in was a kind of ‘biology for arts students’ thing. So, of course, I tried it, but I switched back to an arts/science hybrid of sorts, called anthropology, because a couple of weeks into the science thing I botched up a piece of laboratory work so badly that I felt humiliated. It was as if I’d been told from on high to stop nursing ideas above my station.

The subject that most interested me, otherwise, was philosophy, but my essays on the subject failed to impress my lecturers and tutors. One sentence in one of those essays elicited the comment Wunderbar! – obviously sarcastic since there was no other comment and the essay received a bare pass. Yet the field – especially that of ‘philosophy of mind’, which Adelaide’s philosophy department seemed particularly devoted to – was of great interest to me, if more from a scientific than a philosophical perspective. Is the mind something more than the brain? It is an epiphenomenon of the brain? I very much doubted it, and felt that the mind-body problem was essentially chimerical. It was around this time that I came across a comment by an earlier 20th century philosopher – maybe Moritz Schlick or Max Black – that problems of this type are first taken up by philosophy but then resolved by science.

So there. I don’t think Adelaide University’s philosophy department, or the ‘philosophy of mind’ topic, are doing so well these days. Nya nya ne nya nya.

Philosophy of mind, methinks, has been dealt a death blow by the massive advances made in neurophysiology in the 21st century. As Robert Sapolsky, whose two big books Behave and Determined have thoroughly convinced me on the poverty of the free will argument, has pointed out, more has been discovered and understood, in the first decade and a half of the 21st century, about how our brains work, than in all of the previous centuries combined. 

So, all of this is preliminary, I must say, to my attempt, in the next piece or two, to get my head around photosynthesis –  the horrendously complex processes by which plants manage to ‘eat the sun’, in Oliver Morton’s clever phrase, used for the title of his brilliant but complex book on the topic. I’m looking forward to it….I think…

Reference

Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun, 2007