Transcript No Slide Title

EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE
STUDY OF COGNITIVE SYSTEMS
Genoa 2-4 July 2008
ABSTRACT
The Evolution/Machine: Reconsidering
La Mettrie’s L'homme machine
Robin Allott
In 1748 La Mettrie published, in Holland, L'homme
machine , an extension of Descartes' automata concept
from animals to man. The book was publicly burned and
La Mettrie was forced to seek protection from Frederick
the Great at Berlin, until his death in 1751. The
following (condensed freely from the English
translation) gives some idea of the argument in
L’Homme Machine:
“Let us conclude boldly that man is a machine. The human body
is a watch, a large watch constructed with such skill and
ingenuity. To be a machine, to feel, to think, to know how to
distinguish good from bad, as well as blue from yellow, in a
word, to be born with an intelligence and a sure moral instinct,
and to be but an animal, are therefore characters which are no
more contradictory, than to be an ape or a parrot and to be able to
give oneself pleasure. In general, the form and the structure of the
brains of quadrupeds are almost the same as those of the brain of
man; the same shape, the same arrangement everywhere, man the
one whose brain is largest, and more convoluted.
The transition from animals to man is not violent, The
springs of the human machine are such that all the vital,
animal, natural, and automatic motions are carried on by their
action. In a purely mechanical way the eyelids are lowered
at the menace of a blow and the pupil contracts in broad
daylight to save the retina, the pores of the skin close in
winter so that the cold cannot penetrate to the interior of the
blood.
Reconsidering L’homme machine in the light of
advances in neuroscience and evolutionary biology
What do we share with animals?
What don’t we share with animals?
How have we acquired the things we do not
share with animals ?
What part has language played?
How did we acquire language ?
How did human brain size and intelligence
increase so rapidly and remarkably ?
La Mettrie proposed that the human is 100% machine
How much of a machine should we think we are now?
There is little in the detail of what La Mettrie said
which nowadays would be disputed. Research in
molecular biology and in neuroscience every day is
showing how wonderfully the “springs” of human
and animal action function.
As shown by the following examples of the
essential machinery we share with animals (even, at
the cell level, with yeast ! )
These videos present, in real time, what Francis Crick
called the central dogma of modern biology, how DNA
makes protein
and also suggest how neurons change to respond to
incoming information and to the cell environment
DNA TRANSCRIPTION: The DNA strand (purple) is held in the
cell nucleus by the polymerase complex (blue- grey), collects the
complementary codons (yellow) and is read out into messenger
RNA (yellow)
TRANSLATION: mRNA (yellow) emerges from the cell nucleus and is
captured by a ribosome (blue), collects transfer RNA (green) with
amino-acids attached (red tips) and exits as a protein (red) haemoglobin
NEUROSCIENCE
Brain Remodelling I
Dendrite(blue) spines growing in real time (recorded in
2006) Spines grow on the surface of the neuron, on the
dendrites
NEUROSCIENCE
Brain Remodelling II
Kandel Nobel Lecture December 2000
The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialog
between Genes and Synapses
The strategies used for storing memory are the same from
mollusks to mammals. “There are no fundamental …
differences between the nerve cells and synapses of
humans and those of a snail, a worm or a fly.”
“The biology of the mind has now captured the
imagination of the scientific community”
Science shows us how more profoundly we are
machines
Evolutionary theory suggests we are machines in a
broader sense
Evolutionary biology has introduced a completely new
dimension – which La Mettrie no doubt might have
welcomed as further demonstrating how the human is a
machine.
La Mettrie listed the easily visible aspects of the
machine. Now we know and, in the illustrations
can see, the working of the hidden machinery.
Apart from the massive clearly mechanical
aspect of the human being demonstrated , what
else in the human is machine ?
Evolution has brought with it behavioural
machinery.
The central feature of evolution is the genetic programming
for maintenance of the species, programming male and
female behaviour for reproduction.
This has been most fully investigated in one of the standard
experimental animals, the drosophila or fruit fly.
Brain of Drosophila
Melanogaster
Courtship is an innate sexually dimorphic behaviour that
can be observed in naive animals without previous
learning or experience, suggesting that the neural circuits
that mediate this behaviour are developmentally
programmed.
In Drosophila, this involves a complex yet stereotyped
array of dimorphic behaviours that are regulated by
FruM, a male-specific form of the fruitless gene. The
gene is expressed in about 2,000 neurons in the fly brain.
[extracts from Greenspan R. 2000 Courtship in drosophila Annu. Rev.
Genet. 2000. 34:205–32]
A male fly can perform the entire courtship sequence even
if raised in complete isolation from egg to adult and then
presented with a female as its first encounter with another
creature.
This conjunction is planned by evolution. The same
pattern of behaviour can be seen over a very wide range
of species, including humans.
Reproductive behaviour is built into the DNA, expressed
through the genes and built into brain organisation of
humans and other species in terms of specific male and
female neural complexes.
Crudely the evolutionary duty (or compulsion) of the
drosophila is to produce more drosophilae. There is the same
duty (or compulsion) for people to produce more people.
Evolution requires the overwhelming genetic importance in the
brain, body and behaviour of every animal of the drive and
mechanisms for reproduction.
Present-day much unconditional surrender to
evolutionary drives ?
The gorilla in the living room ?
The perennial struggle against the blind animality of the
evolutionary process
What else is machine besides the clearly biochemical
machinery? What else do we share with animals?
Feeling as part of the machine - I feel … hungry, thirsty
pain, desire. The senses: tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing,
touching. Emotions, guilt (Do not walk on the grass !)
What made it possible for man not to be altogether a
machine? To be a modifiable machine?
How comes it that l’homme machine can now re-jig the
machine? Can be a self-transforming machine ?
Unexpected applications of the brain/machine:
synthetic biology, on the point of creating life in the
laboratory (Venter).
What do we not share with animals?
A sensory-motor cortex 5 times larger than for the
chimpanzee
Speech and spoken language certainly (and writing) - but
much else
Mind
Consciousness?
Laughter Amazing bodily skills Music Clothes (perhaps
the first nearly universal cosmetic)
The (human) predictive (planning) power.
The elaboration of mental simulation and imagery.
Mind is the dynamic system manifesting in
thought and action
Consciousness as an idea is closer to feeling and
degrees of feeling. Animals and all life may have
varying degrees of consciousness
But it is less certain whether any animals have
mind as an originating, controlling and predictive
system
Understanding of the human mind and human
consciousness has advanced surprisingly little
since La Mettrie’s time (despite Darwin)
The question remains how human beings advanced from
shared mechanical animality to the achievements which have
left other animals far behind.
How to explain the emergence of the individual and social
superstructure which humans have erected on the same
physical base as the ape, the dog, the drosophila?
La Mettrie asked what was man before the invention of words
and the knowledge of language.
The contribution of language to the ascent of the human being
is no novel discovery (Aristotle, Darwin and many others).
How has language made us into the humans we are
individually and in groups ?
What did it do for the ascent of mind? How did it function to
increase intelligence and power?
Separate what language does:
In the brain – Internally –
In the human group – Externally –
Internally (in the brain)
Role in ?
creating mind
creating the self
creating I and You
making possible prediction and the planning of action
stabilising understanding
discriminating past present and future > time
labelling memory > history
analysing and mirroring the external world
reshaping the brain - increasing intelligence
Externally (in the group)
Language operating at a distance - and writing at a
further distance, in time as well as in space
Family relationships made conscious by naming
Communication in the group and the stabilisation of
groups
Classification of objects
Accumulation of knowledge and invention
A language as externalised mind ?
Language distances us from the immediate reality - mirrors
our world and allows us to operate in the mirrored world.
Mind has offered the possibility of freedom from evolutionary
drives, which otherwise make humans, like all animals, into
evolutionary puppets
WORDS
Language is a system of words
It is through words that language has changed
human beings
How could words do all these things?
Because:
.Words are not arbitrary
.Words are not symbols
.Words change the structure of the brain
.Words increase the size and complexity of the brain
.Words are integrated with and form part of the motor
system of the brain
.Words form a network in the brain, a network of linked
interacting neurons
.Words accumulate and integrate
.Words allow a distance between immediate experience
and the experiencing self
.Words create the self in time and space
.Words actively mirror the world
.Words transmit experience from one person to another
.Words change the other person’s mind and brain
.Words can program action for the individual
.Words can program the action of others
.Words can program action for the group
..Words can be an instrument for power of the group
.Words can change the environment for individual
selection
.Words can change the environment for group selection
.Words change fitness and so survival of individuals with
bigger brains and greater effectiveness in the physical
and cultural environment
Words have made humans into what they are now
But where did the words come from:
Words came from gestures.
Words and Gestures
Where do the gestures come from?
Gestures come from perception (visual,
auditory and other sensation) of the world, of
the human being’s own bodily experience shapes, sounds, movements etc.
The universality of gesture?
Seeing gesture as at the origin of language (Condillac)
Gesture manifests the relation between language and action. It
was at the origin of language and is of central importance in the
relation between motor articulation and the motor storage of the
concepts and percepts from which individual words derive their
meaning
Was each gesture as arbitrary as traditional linguistics says
that each word is?
Clearly not.
Gestures of all kinds were generated by imitation of
actions, shapes and sounds. These were stored as motor
programs before humans acquired speech.
“The discovery of mirror neurons may provide a new,
though still sketchy, neurobiological basis to account for
the emergence of language” (Gallese)
From gesture to speech
“Neuroanatomically, the step from genetically
determined controlled vocal patterns is associated
with the emergence of a direct connection between
the motor cortex and the laryngeal motoneurons, a
connection lacking in subhuman primates” (Jürgens,
Uwe. 2000. [German Primate Center, Göttingen]
A computational model has been constructed which allows
prediction of the fMRI images in the brain associated with
individual words. (Mitchell et al. Science 30 May 2008)
Cerebral reorganisation provided new direct
connections between the motor cortex, the tongue
and the larynx.
There was a great increase in the innervation of the
articulatory apparatus generally.
Motor programs from gestural origins were
transduced automatically into articulated words
structured by the gestural programs.
The meanings of words were automatically linked to
the actions, sounds and shapes to which the gestures
referred.
The process by which words were formed was the
inverse of the process by which gestures and sounds
can be generated from existing word-forms - a
reverse application of motor equivalence.
On seeing some one hitting something, the action
patterning was by motor equivalence converted into
articulatory patterning to produce a speech-sound
structure, a word, directly related to the action
patterning seen.
Similarly on hearing an animal sound, the typical
sound of a cat, a hyena, a wasp or a wolf, the soundpatterning is transduced by motor equivalence to
form a word whose structure is derived from the
sound heard.
The Ascent of Intelligence through
language
Brains, and particularly human brains, have much increased in
size and complexity in the course of evolution. The increase
must have brought survival benefits. However intelligence is
measured, greater size and complexity have moved in step with
greater intelligence.
The growth in human brain size and complexity can be related to
and explained in terms of the acquisition and continuing growth
in language and particularly rapid increase in the number of
words acquired.
Language in the group will account for an ever-larger segment of
total cultural input to the brain and will also act as a powerful
instrument in shaping the social system. A ratchet effect is
established which goes to promote a persisting increase in
brain-size. (Evo-Devo and the Baldwin Effect)
Animal and Human Gesture:
Illustrations
ANIMAL GESTURE AND COMMUNICATION
KISSINGER
SARKOZY : DE GAULLE
CHAVEZ
BERLUSCONI
SICILIAN CONVERSATION
GORDON BROWN
Repeating some illustrations from
Last Year in Groningen
Animal names are derived from animal sounds
The sound-structures of animal names can reverse the
process and regenerate the animal sounds