I’ve decided there are two Colin McGinns. The first – call him M₁ – writes clear, lucid, witty reviews of philosophical books and papers for non-specialist readers. A good example is “Minds and Bodies”, Oxford 1997, ISBN 0-19-511355-1, reading which led me to “The Problem of Consciousness”. The second (M₂) writes obscure, dense, highly technical material for a readership of his peers, and is the author of this book. I’ll come clean: I didn’t understand most of it.

Which is ironic in a way because McGinn argues that there are limits to human understanding, or to put it another way, that our brains are physically incapable of solving certain problems. He calls this “cognitive closure”. This is not so hard to grasp: we accept that other brains (cats, bats) are built in a way which, try as we and they might, will never allow them to play chess. This book is a collection of papers in which McGinn develops his argument that the mind-body problem – the problem of understanding how a physical entity like a brain can produce the range of mental states we call consciousness – is permanently closed to human reason.

This is not to say that McGinn believes we must resort to the supernatural to explain consciousness. It is not god-given. We are right, he says, to call it a mystery, but he argues that there is a perfectly natural explanation of the mystery – it’s just that we can never reach that explanation or solve the mystery.

And now I’ve reached the limits of my own understanding, at least for the time being. I think McGinn believes not only that his position explains our failure, despite the best efforts of philosophers, to account for consciousness, but that our failure is inevitable. But if I’m right, I don’t understand how he reaches that more extreme conclusion. It must be there in the book, but the language is just too technical for me. I thought I understood what was meant by “mental state”, but now I think I probably don’t, at least in M₂‘s terms. Nor do I really know what he means by things like intentionality or perceptual content. Cognitively closed as I am, I’ll have to leave it there.

Still, never mind. I’ve been given Nagel’s “A View from Nowhere” for Christmas. M₂ discusses Nagel’s ideas at some length: maybe I’ll do better with him, and maybe then I’ll be able to come back and find a natural and non-mysterious explanation of “The Problem of Consciousness”.

If you are interested in the questions central to this book – how and why human minds have evolved – but are not closely in touch with the latest academic and scientific thinking on the subject, be warned: this book is not written for the layman. One back-cover reviewer calls it “densely, but elegantly, written”, and confessing myself to be indeed a layman I have to say it takes a bit of getting into. The language is technical, specialised, and at times fairly impenetrable, but with perseverance you can start to become familiar with the vocabulary and follow Sterelny’s arguments.

His main proposition is that human thought evolved in response to a rapidly changing environment, both physical and social, in which things were not always as they seemed. Competitors, enemies, and resources hide, lie, and pretend to be other than what they are. The ability to respond flexibly to these uncertain signals became advantageous and so was selected for under evolutionary pressure. (This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of Sterelny’s thesis.)

Work in this field over the past few decades has been dominated by linguistics and by evolutionary psychology, with linguistics developing into various theories and hypotheses about modularity of human minds. Sterelny examines these ideas critically in the light of his own theories, rejecting some and accepting others either as useful bases or at least containing an element of truth, but his synoptic view of the development of human thought is not built on either of these foundations.

The building blocks he identifies are, I think, these. First there was – and still is in many organisms – only a simple and direct link between stimuli and responses. Understanding and choice play no part: stimulus and response are “closely coupled”. The first significant step was decoupling, where an organism is able to exhibit a range of behaviours when it becomes aware of a particular stimulus. The greater the breadth of the organism’s response repertoire, the more adaptive and potentially successful its behaviour becomes.

Then there is the importance of social behaviour. Humans are undeniably social creatures, and Sterelny hypothesises about the mechanisms by which social co-operation may have developed. For an individual to be successful in a social group requires it to be able to interpret the behaviour of others in the group – behaviour which may or may not be what it seems. He sees group selection (the process whereby groups rather than individuals are more or less successful in evolutionary terms) as playing an important, even vital, role.

Possibly the most powerful adaptation shown by humans is “niche creation”. This is the ability of humans to modify their environment to their own advantage. Although some other organisms have some ability in this area, none come close to humans in this respect. This is not just the ability to use sophisticated tools to modify the environment, but also the capability of true imitation – the difference between Douglas Adams’ “keep banging the rocks together” and an understanding by the observer of what the observed is setting out to do. Imitation fosters learning, which is the way in which better ways of doing things can be transmitted both down generations and sideways within a generation. “Veterans of this industry” (Sterelny’s phrase) apparently know this process as Tomasello’s Ratchet. Language, obviously, is a vital component of this complex behaviour.

Sterelny says at the outset that his “whole discussion is both tentative and gappy: the main aim is to foreground issues and ideas that have been underplayed in current debates”. While I am not sure if he is referring to all or just part of his project, it probably doesn’t matter. In developing his own arguments he reviews the whole range of current work in this field. The book is rich in references and impressively up-to-date: in more than 16 pages of references in the index, few entries are earlier than 1990 and quite a few are “forthcoming”. Anyone wanting to go further could easily draw up a reading list from these sources. As for me, now I’ve got to the end and feel more at home with the language and the concepts I think I’ll go back and read it again.

I am not competent to review this book from a philosophical point of view. Instead, I have tried to give an overview of Popper’s themes which might perhaps encourage you to read the book for yourself!

To understand Popper’s viewpoint one must understand his case against historicism, for it is in historicism that he sees the roots of the totalitarianism he condemns in Plato, Hegel, and Marx. By “historicism” Popper means the belief that “a truly scientific or philosophical attitude towards politics, and a deeper understanding of social life in general, must be based upon a contemplation and interpretation of human history.” Through such study the historicist hopes to be able to identify the “laws of historical development”, and so will be able to predict future developments.

Popper’s attack on historicism is based on his philosophical analysis of its methods – whether it can live up to its claims to predict the course of social developments – and on the association he finds between historicism and totalitarianism. The philosophical arguments are only sketched briefly in this book: they are developed much more fully in his book “The Poverty of Historicism.” In his Introduction Popper writes

Elsewhere, in “The Poverty of Historicism,” I have tried to argue against these claims [to have discovered laws of history which enable prophesy of the course of historical events], and to show that … they are based on a gross misunderstanding of the method of scientific prediction and historical prophecy. While engaged in the systematic analysis and criticism of the claims of historicism, I also tried to collect some material to illustrate its development. The notes collected for that purpose became the basis for this book.

Instead of historicism, Popper advocates a piecemeal approach to social engineering. The question we should ask is not “Who should rule?”, but “How can we build political institutions which defend the individual against threats to his freedom?”. The future of our world is in our hands, not subject to inexorable historical trends. We may, indeed we will, make mistakes, and not all our efforts to improve the world will succeed, but we should learn from our mistakes. If we turn away from taking responsibility for our actions, and place our trust in historical inevitability, we will only revert to tyranny and totalitarianism.

In choosing his targets, Popper did not make a bid for popularity. However, he demonstrates convincingly that it does not take much more than a simple scratching of the surface to reveal Plato as an advocate of full-blown totalitarianism, including recommending that the State should not stop short of lying to its citizens and resorting to murder in order to keep the élite rulers permanently in power.

Hegel is treated with open contempt. In Addenda I, “Facts, Standards and Truth“, written in 1961, Popper writes

I am still surprised that serious philosophers were offended by my admittedly partly playful attack upon a philosophy which I am still unable to take seriously … [and] … which I can only regard with a mixture of contempt and horror.

Some more quotes will give a flavour

Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries.

Hegelianism is … exactly what this kind of popular superstition supposes philosophy to be. It knows all about everything. It has a ready answer to every question. And indeed, who can be sure that the answer is not true?

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.

This last quote is not Popper, but Popper quoting Schopenhauer.

Hegel was first and foremost the philosopher of the (totalitarian) Prussian monarchy appointed by Frederick William III in the period after the French Revolution when ideas of “liberty, fraternity, equality” were threatening to take hold in other parts of Europe. Little wonder then that his philosophy is one of the supreme power of the State, and the identity of power and right. By applying his dialectic method he was able to show that the Prussian monarchy was the supreme and ideal form of government that would maintain and grow its strength and dominance through war.

Popper’s third target is Marx. He deals far more courteously with him than with Plato and Hegel, admitting he finds him a “far more worthy opponent.” In fact there are many parts of Marx’ ideas which Popper is in sympathy with, saying that his (Marx’) intentions were basically humanitarian. His criticism is of the historicist roots he finds in Marx’ philosophy – ultimately in Marx’ claim, like others before him, to have discovered the Laws of History, in this case the class struggle. Marx’ predictions of the forthcoming social revolution leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the eventual withering away of the State have (not surprisingly, Popper would say) proved false. But he gives Marx credit for his perceptive analysis of social conditions in industrial societies in his time, and the realisation that economic factors play a highly significant part in social and political developments.

Popper wrote this book in the early years of the second world war, but in his later additions he stresses that his opposition to totalitarianism is much wider-ranging than the immediate problems of those years. Although the book is over 50 years old, the influence of anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian forces has not diminished, and the force of his arguments is no less.

It would be interesting to speculate what other targets he might have chosen over the second half of this century. Hegelianism is still strongly represented in European philosophy, and it is not surprising that the empty and meaningless twaddle purveyed by Derrida and the deconstructionist movement, which condemned a whole generation of students and academics to at best an indulgence in hollow verbiage, and at worst to an upwelling of bigotry and intolerance, openly acknowledges its roots in Hegel’s writings. I can only regret that Popper was not around to turn his attention to this and other threats to the Open Society.