Sentient Cuttlefish: The Novel?

I've mentioned on this blog thoughts on intelligent cephalopods a few times. The concept fascinates me: here is a group of animals at a completely different spot in the evolutionary chain from ourselves, lacking our mammalian social instincts, but yet with a high degree of intelligence. What if they were to cross some threshold and become self-aware? What would this look like? I've played with the idea of sentient dolphins also, but that seems more boring: they'd look like cavemen of the sea at first, and then build up something like an underwater, mammalian society, not too different from what humans would do. It would be a good test case in how a different environment can shape intelligence, but cephalopods are cooler. So, I want to start writing about them. Maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe an epic poem, but I want to make this happen, and I'm looking for input.

I'm still working on the setting. These beings lack social instincts, and this will change them at their very core. What does reason look like for them? Language? They don't use language primarily to communicate, so where does it come from? I'm thinking that it will arise from evolutionarily beneficial mnemonic systems, with perhaps some adaptation to rudimentary communication (such as "stay off my territory"). This entails that writing comes before speech for them.

They would also be solipsistic in a sense since they would have no innate feeling for others. But they wouldn't even have a well-defined sense of themselves, since there would be no other over which they could define themselves as separate individuals. Ethically, they would appear amoral, not having basic social feelings, but it's not as though they would actively try to be bad, either - they just wouldn't recognize each other. They would in some ways be more like those with extreme autism than, say, psychopaths, except that their entire evolution would have been guided by this.

Could these beings ever have anything remotely resembling a society? It would still be beneficial to them, but then how would they maintain it? Would they end up like Vulcans of a sort? What would happen if they encountered human beings (or sentient dolphins)? Just some of the ideas with which I am playing.

On Human Nature

I have been grading many essay questions on the topic of whether human nature is good or bad according to Chinese philosophy, and I thought that I would weigh in on the question since I've been forced to think through it fifty times.

On the side of Mengzi (Mencius): there are roots in human nature which give us the capacity of being good. Further, when left to themselves, they make us actually good. For example, according to Mengzi, if we see a child stuck in a well, we will save the child. This is the case even if the child is not ours and we expect no reward from saving the child.

Roots like this sense of compassion are how we could ever get any virtuous qualities. Because we naturally feel compassion,* we can actually be benevolent. The alternative would be that we would have a set of rules instructing us to act in a benevolent way, but without anything being internalized beyond these rules.**

We cease being good by failing to reflect on these roots in our nature. We naturally feel compassion for those close to us. As we reflect and nourish the feeling, it grows outward, encompassing more and more people. External forces can push us away, however. For an illustration, a starving person will eat whatever is offered to her, though her nature distinguishes between tasty and disgusting food when left to itself. Similarly, conditions such as oppression and poverty can distort our natural judgments.

For Xunzi, on the other hand, human nature is bad. We are born and our nature is only concerned with ourselves. A baby feels its own hunger, not that of another. Each of us starts by seeking our own immediate advantage and this alone. We need to be shown a way out. This requires a virtuous role model (the sage) with her standards and practices for reaching the good life.

This good life is peace and harmony in society for Chinese thought. As long as we seek our own immediate benefit, we cause disorder and disharmony. This is why human nature is bad, not because of some arbitrary command from on high decreeing it to be such. We can recognize the need to be better, since such a disharmonious society is bad for everyone involved at some level, but without the external force of the sage we cannot escape. The Achaeans in the Iliad honoured warriors and those who could accumulate wealth, even while realizing that a life of war is horrible for human beings. We need (a) a model to see to give us possibilities, (b) a set of practices to follow to discipline us against seeking our immediate benefit, and (c) our own deliberate effort to become good.

The problem is, who is right? Contemporary science backs Mengzi to an extent (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/ for a quick view of some of the issues). If there were a race of sentient cuttlefish, they would have an entirely different nature and set of ethics.*** However, human beings are mammals and so have social natures. Living together is something hard-wired into the vast majority of us. We naturally feel empathy, fairness, altruism, etc., and not just our own immediate, purely self-focused benefit.

Still, this only helps part of Mengzi's argument. We do not seem to naturally keep extending these roots out further and further, since whatever is according to nature (or the way of heaven, or however one wishes to put it) happens always or for the most part. We stop at a given point where we feel comfortable, with whatever tribe is relevant in our context. Genocides and general dickishness seem to be a natural trait of human beings as much as anything else. Is there some other basic component of human nature we need in order to account for this?**** Are there always external forces resisting our natural impulses, always shortages of resources that cause societies to go wrong at some point? Does our intrinsically social nature work against us as much as for us, depending on the society into which we are born?

Addendum: perhaps the entire problem is that we are starting off with the evaluative terms "good" and "bad". If we were to stick with simple descriptions, some of the problems disappear. Human nature is intrinsically social, and geared toward benefiting those around us. This is simultaneously good and bad, depending on what we are looking at any given time. Starting with the issue of good/bad is therefore trying to cut against the joints of reality, which of course will lead to contradictory conclusions.

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* Note that "feeling" is not opposed to "thinking" in Chinese thought. There is simply the xin, the heart/mind/all inner states together, and feeling correctly is an important part of thinking correctly.

** Which rules out a divine command ethic. Even if God commands it, this does not mean that it is anything that would be good according to our natures.

*** Which is why I find the concept of cephalopod intelligence so fascinating. They are already intelligent creatures, but from an entirely different region of the evolutionary chain and without our social instincts. I really want to write something about a cephalopod (anti-?)civilization at some point.

**** Of course, someone is responding at this point with the theological answer of "sin." But it seems that this is a cheap answer, when there are genuinely explanatory and natural accounts available. Evolutionarily speaking, communities which preserve each other against competitors survive. Aggression helps creatures survive. Even atrocious acts such as rape are found within the natural order (go research ducks - nasty things), and there seems to be no reason to explain them as a result of some fall rather than a brutal way for nature to accomplish its purposes of perpetuation. "Sin" only makes sense if you expect that everything should be perfect in the first place and then find that it isn't. But I have yet to see one iota of evidence for such an expectation unless one has already assumed a set of theological claims, or is expecting a different sort of perfection than one which would mean anything for the daily lives of human beings.

Non-conceptual Religious Experience: Continued

I had started a discussion of non-conceptual religious experience earlier (http://pulpitumvulpei.blogspot.com/2010/09/non-conceptual-religious-experience.html), and started to think of an alternative way around the issues involved. I'm currently working on the paper supporting that conclusion, so I figured that I would post the sequel here as well.

Traditions of any sort, let alone religious traditions, are not actually closed off from each other. They do engage in dialogue, and they do find similarities amongst themselves and occasionally borrow practices and modes of expression. This is as much a part of the formative influence on experience as anything else. We must also look at ways in which the different religions talk about their experiences amongst each other. This will not always lead to similarities - indeed, a good deal of the time such discussions turn polemical - but sometimes it does, and both these elements (of similarity and of dissimilarity) must be preserved in order to do the traditions justice in their own self-conceptions.

Starting from the external aspects of experience, we are not stuck in externals. We can look at the way in which a given tradition shapes both the experience itself and its interpretation, but the experience is no longer interchangeable as it would be under the theory of extrinsic evidence. Once it can be matched up with elements from a different tradition, the experience gains a certain level of independence from the tradition which shaped it and provides some measure of evidence for something in itself. This, however, does not lead to the theory of intrinsic evidence insofar as the experience is not completely independent from the tradition either.

As an illustration, we can look at the Pythagorean theorem. There still can be seen to be some experience associated with "discovering the Pythagorean theorem". Similar enough experiences were encountered in the Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions, each using different mathematical methods and different standards of rigor. In particular, the Greek tradition focused on strict logical proofs, while the Indian and Chinese traditions resorted to more empirical methods with more of a communal sense of how one goes about doing math. These different practices lead to a different characterization of "discovery of the Pythagorean theorem", to the extent that Indian and Chinese methods may not be appreciated as mathematical by someone steeped with the Euclidean Greek tradition.

One could then quibble with the Indians, and say that their discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could not be the same as that of the Greeks', since an essential element of the former is a strictly rational basis while the former uses empirical methods of proof. The contradictory phenomena would supposedly disprove any similarity of experience. Despite this logical analysis, however, the different traditions have been able to come together and agree that they have something similar in this theorem. Therefore, precisely through the assessments within the traditions and their own practices and not by presupposing some a priori realm of mathematics, we can talk about a shared experience not reducible to any single tradition even though descriptions of it within the different traditions conflict.

The conceptualizable portion of the evidence is still something mediated by the traditions. We still cannot look directly at a non-conceptual experience and have support for concepts. It is only in looking at the ways in which similarities appear across the traditions and as mediated by them that we can have any idea of what evidence the experience itself provides. As a result, the experience itself is never directly rendered conceptual, nor is it ever exhausted - it is always possible that something similar enough would show up in a new tradition with its own sets of practices and beliefs through which it understands the experience.