Humans Are Special

Introduction

Human beings are very special (or so they think). They have evolved to become very complicated, and their brains extremely sophisticated such that they have consciousness, intentionality, and self-awareness. They are unique in their rationality — indeed, their rationality is their very purpose, per Aristotle. They have souls and spirit and immaterial stuff attached to them. (Somewhere between conception and birth this non-stuff stuff flies in from somewhere and joins their bodies.) They are libertarians, i.e., they have free-will. In fact, not even their omnipotent God knows their futures (otherwise they wouldn’t have free-will — figure that one out). Indeed, they are so complicated and unpredictable that not even science can adequately explain or predict their behaviour. The same science that put a man on the moon, developed artificial heart and lungs, and created robots that can bring them the coffee of their choice fails miserably in explaining they didn’t bring their umbrella to work. That’s how special and unique and mysterious is the human being.

And yet, if you cut open a person, you find only blood, guts, and physical stuff. How can that be? Where is all that specialness?

Per Aristotle, there are many objects in motion in the world, but no object can put itself into motion. He observed causal relationships, and scientists have subsequently discovered explanations for those causal relationships and created scientific models which are often (but not always) reliable for making predictions. But how is it that when a chain of cause and effect intercepts a human being, suddenly the ability to predict an effect becomes enormously complicated and caught in the perplexing maze of human consciousness, intentionality, emotion, and free-will — all of which interfere with the determinism we can find in the rest of the universe? Are humans so different? Alternatively, is our assumption that the human mind-state is relevant simply incorrect?

Hydrogen and oxygen molecules interact to cause water. Heat causes the water to evaporate. The water vapor rises which causes it to cool. Cooling causes condensation. When the air becomes saturated the condensed water falls to the ground as rain. The rain accumulates and feeds a stream. The stream supports insect life. A fish eats an insect because it’s dusk (dinner time). A human . . . wait . . . we don’t know whether the human will eat the fish because that depends on the meaning the human attaches to eating fishes. Does the person identify as a vegetarian? Does the person have empathy for the beautiful fish? Is the person feeling hungry? How hungry? Does she want to wait for her friend to arrive so they can share a meal? Suddenly our neatly explained chain of causes is brought to a screeching halt — at least to the extent it can be clearly understood — at the perimeters of the human head. We can’t possibly predict the person’s behaviour without exploring and understanding those internal beliefs, desires, and emotions — or so the claim goes. But isn’t the human brain just physical stuff, like the fish brain (albeit bigger and with more stuff)?

Rosenberg on human specialness

Alexander Rosenberg states that social scientists are faced with two fundamental (seemingly mutually exclusive) choices: To pursue an understanding of human behaviour as an empirical study, i.e., in the same they would study the cloud or the fish; or, admit that there is something special about a human being that complicates things. Says Rosenberg:

When social scientists choose to employ methods as close as possible to those of natural science, they commit themselves to the position that the question before them is one the empirical science can answer. When they spurn such methods, they adopt the contrary view, that the question is different in some crucial way from those addressed in the physical or biological sciences. Neither of these choices has yet been vindicated by success that is conspicuous enough to make the choice anything less than a gamble. (4)

Rosenberg further states that per the “empiricist” point of view, social sciences have failed because they have not uncovered laws or “empirical generalizations” that explain human behaviour. But other social scientists claim that it is understandable that social-scientific laws are less developed than physical laws: “. . . the human being is subject to all the forces natural science identifies as well of those of psychology, sociology, economics, and so forth” (Rosenberg 19). Further, the social sciences are comparatively young. But empiricists might claim reject these excuses and suggest that it is a mistake to think we can ever develop reliable laws from studying the special human mind; rather we should study humans just like we study the rest of the world.

The behaviourist attempt to apply science to specialness

Behaviourism suggests a method of studying human behaviour without looking into the depths of their mind states. Per Rosenberg, behaviourists claim that scientific laws governing human behaviour indeed exist, but social scientists committed to the idea that humans are just too complex to be governed by general laws have failed to see such laws through the noise they’ve themselves created — the noise being attention to mistaken “category schemes” such as action, desire, and belief (22). Per B. F. Skinner, “The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives” (14). In other words, attention to internal states, including desires and beliefs, obscures the conditions which might reveal explanatory and predictive laws. This is not to say that internal states, such as feelings, don’t exist. It is to say that studying feelings would be the wrong way to apply scientific laws to human behaviour. Says Skinner, “The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression” (14). And, “Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere” (15). Imagine — going straight to the source of the problem rather than getting bogged down in trying to understand feelings!

Thus, Skinner claims that if we turn our attention away from special human feelings and towards concrete, observable things like environments and behaviour, we might be able to discover general laws which will help us understand humans (and address problems) in the way that scientist understand the rest of the world. Says Skinner, “We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body . . . “ (15)

An attempt to eliminate specialness altogether

Another approach to understanding human behaviour by giving up on internal mind states is suggested by eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialists, as do behaviourists, point to the failure in deriving scientific laws from internal psychological states. Indeed, a true eliminative materialist claims that mental terms are empty, and/or mental states cannot be the subject of science because they are not observable. (Traditional materialist reductionists claim mental states are reducible to physical brain states, i.e., identical to the brain.) The distinction between eliminative materialists and traditional reductionists may seem non-consequential for our purposes: In either case, we can see that (at least for the purposes of explaining and predicting human behaviour) mental states can be disregarded and we should be studying the brain instead. Thus, the failed attempt to do science on internal mental states — the endless abyss of beliefs and emotions — will eventually cease when social scientists finally realize they’ve reached a dead-end; instead, they can only hope to develop a science of human behaviour by studying the physical brain — per eliminative materialists and traditional reductionists. In other words, the future of understanding humans is to study them as any other organism or thing is studied.

Conclusion

Some consider humans so special that their behaviour cannot be explained or predicted without studying their specialness, i.e., the content of their minds. But so far, scientific strategies have been less than satisfactory in discovering scientific laws in human behaviour. But rather than analyzing internal states, Skinner argues that we should be examining conditions and events which are prior to behaviour. Eliminative materialists disregard internal states and suggest we can understand a person only by studying his physical brain, e.g., via neuroscience. One thing seems certain: Human brains are sufficiently big and complex to allow people to believe they’re special. Perhaps their big brains have deluded themselves.

Works Cited

Rosenberg, Alexander. Philosophy of Social Science. Fifth. Boulder: Westview Press, 2016.

Searle, John R. Mind, Language and Society. New York: Basic Book, 1998. Book.

Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom & Dignity. Indianapolus/Cambridge: Hackett Pub;lishing Company, Inc., n.d. Book.