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How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence
Christopher Potter
A startling investigation of what it means to be human.Human beings know how to make machines. But what kind of machine is a human being? And could we ever make one?In order to answer these questions, other questions get in the way:What is it like to be a human being?What is it like to be some other kind of animal?What is reality?What is consciousness?Is there a God?What is love?Why live?The questions proliferate.But all these questions can be viewed as facets of a single question:What is science?In ‘How To Make a Human Being’ Christopher Potter shows how, at every scale of description, human beings escape the net of scientific reductionism. What it is to be human can be glimpsed in the details: in the opening of a window, in a shared joke. But cannot be caught by any reductive scientific description.
Copyright (#ulink_aac5b3d1-e37c-56ea-8874-d3e348f2f1d2)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Christopher Potter 2014
Christopher Potter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007447794
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2014 ISBN: 9780007447800
Version: 2015-02-02
For Peter
Contents
Cover (#u603d2718-7d5e-520e-a678-a424fbf29dab)
Title Page (#u6b148000-0af1-553f-ad5a-55ad3b21b799)
Copyright (#u116fa6a7-ac3f-5d66-894f-ee91ba63de41)
Dedication (#u5ea8f964-e556-52d7-a453-e2aaad9d3656)
PART ONE: Materials and Instructions (#udb6abee6-0e9d-56dd-a701-f887f276cfe4)
Section 1: Getting started (#u10dd6383-5506-5bf4-ab8e-ffac4b940a66)
Section 2: What can the matter be? (#u5e384718-9816-5550-a862-d64bf939a3fd)
Section 3: Taking sides (#u3c6ed209-0816-5bc0-93ea-fd975441bdbd)
Section 4: Nothing → something → everything (#ud34210ee-78ce-5f5d-93e2-977861794fbd)
Section 5: What is science? (#u68e8aacf-2bf8-5fa4-a805-f30d1b1d3b1b)
Section 6: What is the universe? (#u17d53146-57c9-5691-aee7-30e1767dd286)
Section 7: Evidence for the existence of an external world (#u1f4cde98-5f5f-5541-bf12-82383bcb93a0)
Section 8: Evidence against the existence of an external world (#u48d9e757-9af7-5080-a9cb-3c8b8c16da0f)
Section 9: On time (#u4b5c0d19-8ad3-5822-9a9a-c654eccd035f)
Section 10: On things (#uad3dfa84-67ae-5e7b-8822-4ffb97ad9535)
Section 11: Starting again (#u519659fd-966a-53bb-a335-a83a2df66ab3)
PART TWO: Animating the Doll (#u0552d050-467b-544c-b082-cb218417fa26)
Section 1: Matter → meat (#ua3271a58-eae3-50ef-8ccf-49d94c1fd37d)
Section 2: Making babies (#uc01ee401-7240-534d-823e-5dfa71cc98b9)
Section 3: On consciousness (#u2fb065c0-85a3-5e5e-81cf-04bcdc7aee07)
Section 4: On the self (#u9155693b-f294-5649-a8a0-63c9cc034407)
Section 5: Meat → mind (#ufd3b5d63-f267-5448-9396-d6f6c349d581)
Section 6: On perception (#u0626ebd6-1880-5811-abc1-4de2e6c31396)
Section 7: On free will (#u7c80088c-3e33-5011-bf09-c0b2aa39781c)
Section 8: On behaviour (#u4bbda2f3-51e4-5200-9eaa-2a483ede8384)
Section 9: There is always something missing (#uc7e88205-bb2c-598e-8545-6d60fae621e6)
Section 10: When the gene is no longer enough (#u2cc7c431-0272-5b91-b3f4-aa22f1eff359)
Section 11: On tools and human evolution (#uf8259671-5a1d-5dbf-883c-338e52a6e82a)
Section 12: Being rather than making (#u4b1f79bc-2fe8-5784-9a54-dcb5ec4db7ed)
PART THREE: On Being Human (#u00601ca0-cb98-5f40-8696-e740cb4d1e58)
Section 1: On culture (#u8f686466-e675-531c-ac30-80aec953e3a3)
Section 2: On the relationship between human beings and nature (#u2fba3670-b3d9-5d00-8245-c8fe62a848d2)
Section 3: On the relationship between human beings and other animals (#u774f206e-9b9b-5fb3-8336-1be6d2cab8f2)
Section 4: On the relationship between human beings and other human beings (#u449f4703-c7da-578e-917a-44cee4b58c2f)
Section 5: On love (#u5304542c-8ee9-598c-bb3d-23fc79808cff)
Section 6: On doing the right thing (#u75f83995-3793-53c5-a957-2ed67e4c1b22)
Section 7: On the difficulty of being (#ub8c7223c-e493-5919-b807-72e8007d6392)
Section 8: On dreams and doing nothing (#ud37d1d2c-a1ca-5f3f-af9c-8b2826c98800)
Section 9: On memory (#uc7063943-9aeb-590b-943a-9c3eb4170512)
Section 10: On faith, belief and truth (#ue7fd4713-5d12-5172-a49e-1e2636f95422)
Section 11: On God (#u43e9e4f9-06b4-554e-b2ee-3ffa3888cbb0)
Section 12: On eternity (#u0dfd9899-5ab1-5468-9ebc-c87aec545ab0)
Section 13: On death (#ua680717d-a246-52b3-872d-5e4791584b9b)
Section 14: On humility (#ub7676700-dd39-5c1e-b06c-0d88460f2b71)
Footnotes (#u93c3cc27-7b6c-5136-adea-be1c3866a584)
Select bibliography (#uc7e0cc75-f7bf-5e43-b963-fa6c3d2ad836)
Index of names (#u86fb3a84-42f2-585c-9fba-ffcfa75855df)
By the same author (#u660a262a-ae35-53b8-87b0-92de2634f150)
About the Publisher (#uff294ade-4364-5f1d-af01-f59367e22c24)
PART ONE (#ulink_699a5763-ce23-5510-bab3-c8278db69728)
What’s the matter?
The opening words of Coriolanus
SECTION 1 (#ulink_500cae36-2f05-59a7-b00f-acbfb185f1f5)
Getting started (#ulink_500cae36-2f05-59a7-b00f-acbfb185f1f5)
1 | Clearly one way to make a human being is to start by making a universe of the right kind. But out of what material, and what conditions?
SECTION 2 (#ulink_5dea58a4-0b21-5122-b7c3-8692538fff51)
What can the matter be? (#ulink_5dea58a4-0b21-5122-b7c3-8692538fff51)
There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the physical stuff of physics, chemistry and physiology.
Daniel Dennett, philosopher
There is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical. Out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.
Julian Baggini, philosopher
The laws of physics have conspired to make the collisions of atoms produce plants, kangaroos, insects and us.
Richard Dawkins, biologist
1 | All of reality is nothing more than an arrangement of particles. Our physical and mental life must be made out of particles because there is nothing else. Everything comes down to what the particles are. Work that out and you know all there is to know.
2 | Bishop Berkeley’s
strongest claims to whatever fame is still attached to his name are his theory of immaterialism – that material objects exist only because there is a mind that perceives them – and his ‘proof’ that there is nothing the world can be made out of. If the world is material and made out of some type of smallest thing, some particle, then whatever that smallest particle is, it must extend into space, since it is in the nature of all material things that they take up room. Furthermore it must be possible in principle, even if we don’t know how to do it in practice, to divide these particles into smaller particles; because however small any particle might be, we can imagine some part of it taking up less space. And so the search to find the smallest particles out of which the fabric of the material world is woven must be endless. The argument does not necessarily claim the world as spirit, so much as point out that a material world must be some kind of an illusion: not that the world does not exist, but that it is not what it appears it be.
There is no there there.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), poet and novelist
I have followed the materialist story of our origin – nay, of my origin. But I have grave misgivings. As an act of faith it requires so much.
John Eccles (1903–97), neurophysiologist
I said that the latest advances in science seemed to have made materialism untenable, and that the most likely outcome was still the eternal life of the soul and reunion beyond the grave.
Marcel – Proust’s narrator – to his grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past
SECTION 3 (#ulink_6a5ee2c3-b574-56d6-9596-90327f042011)
Taking sides (#ulink_6a5ee2c3-b574-56d6-9596-90327f042011)
1 | Ever since Newton’s time, when billiards was in vogue, science has tried to reduce the world to balls hitting one another: billiard ball atoms, billiard ball planets, billiard ball stars. For those of us who have fought shy of games ever since schooldays, it is sometimes hard to accept that ball games really are the be all and end all of existence. Even on those days when I know – or is it fear? – that all that there is can be reduced to particles, I am dispirited. I feel as I did at school: I know that materialism is the manlier choice, but it just isn’t me.
There are days when the world seems to be split into two teams and I do not know which side to be on. Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins (captain), Daniel Dennett, Dr Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, Lucretius, Stephen Hawking, Aristotle, David Attenborough and Thomas Huxley are on one side.
Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, William James (captain), Marilynne Robinson, John Keats, Rowan Williams, Karen Armstrong, Plato, William Blake and Emily Dickinson on the other. Dr Johnson and Rowan Williams sometimes play in goal. Proust and Keats invariably call in sick. Darwin and Descartes have been known to show up for either side. Einstein is a popular referee. Confusingly, there are times when it is hard to tell which team even Richard Dawkins or Brian Greene is playing for. But generally Richard Dawkins’s team terrifies me and wins. William James’s team invariably loses, but they don’t seem to care.
On the one side are the materialists: what you see is what you get. The world can be reduced to basic ingredients, and those ingredients are material: they exist, can be weighed and counted, measured and timed. Materialism, reductionism: words that shine with confidence.
On the other side are the idealists, who believe that the physical world is somehow a manifestation of something immaterial. We are the transcendentalists, they cry (‘Give us a T …’). Idealism, transcendentalism: words that sound airy-fairy.
2 | At school I remember games period, lining up, waiting to be chosen, down to the last four, the final humiliation of being the very last hardly averted by the gamesmaster: ‘The rest of you just divide up equally’; then the desperate rush to attach myself to what I hoped was to be the stronger side, wanting to be on the winning team but not wanting to take part, hoping that I might be in goal, left alone to sing hymns to myself while everyone else battled it out at the other end of the pitch.
3 | I remember, too, poring over a copy of the Ladybird book of Roundheads and Cavaliers, puzzled. Clearly, my heart told me, it was better to be a Cavalier: the clothes, the hair, the colours! And yet rationally I knew that to be a Roundhead was the right, the moral choice.
4 | There are these days:
I am satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), American founding father
