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Nicholas Humphrey The Mind Made Flesh Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution Oxford University Press (2003)
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Nicholas Humphrey, School Professor at the London School of Economics and Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, is a theoretical psychologist, internationally known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His books include Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Leaps of Faith. He has been the recipient of several honours, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize and the British Psychological Society's book award. NICHOLAS HUMPHREY For Ada and Samuel This is a volume of essays, lectures, journal entries, newspaper articles that I have written in response to opportunity, when something happened that set me thinking on new lines-a surprise turn in my life, a serendipitous discovery, a left-field thought, a provocation or an invitation that could not be refused. The themes are various and the lines do not all converge. Still, these chapters do have this in common: they all concern the uneasy relation between minds and bodies, and they all take issue with received ideas. In 1983 Oxford University Press published a previous volume of my essays, under the title Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of Mind. I wrote in the Preface: `The theme that runs through this collection is a concern with why human beings are as they are ... The answers that most interest me are historical and evolutionary. Human beings are as they are because their history has been (so we may guess) as it has been.' Twenty years-and four hooks-later, my interests are still centred in evolutionary psychology: a field which had yet to be named, but which has emerged as the most fertile field of all psychology. I have continued to be fascinated by the perennial issues: consciousness, justice, social understanding, spirituality. I hope I have better answers to some of the philosophical issues that puzzled me then. Some political and social problems have disappeared from view, others remain as pressing as ever, new ones have emerged. My grandfather, A. V. Hill, in the Preface to his own collected writings (The Ethical Dilemma of Science, 1960), quoted Samuel Johnson: `Read over your compositions and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.' I cannot claim to have followed this advice to the letter. I am happy to be the author of most of what is in here (and, for those parts for which I am not, I can still offer good excuses). But I have taken the chance to strike out certain passages that I now reckon redundant, outdated, or wrong. My constant companion in this work has been my wife, Ayla. My constant distraction has been the two rascals to whom this book is dedicated, Ada and Samuel. Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, Arlen Mack and Judy Friedlander at the New School, and Max Steuer at the LSE have been good friends and critics at every stage. Shelley Cox, of Oxford University Press, and Angela Blackburn have been editors beyond compare. 1. On Taking Another Look 1 SELVES 2. One Self: A Meditation on the Unity of Consciousness 7 3. What Is Your Substance, Whereof Are You Made? 15 4. Speaking for Our Selves: An Assessment of Multiple Personality Disorder 19 5. Love Knots 49 6. Varieties of Altruism-and the Common Ground Between Them 52 FEELINGS 7. The Uses of Consciousness 65 8. Farewell, Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing 86 9. How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem 90 10. The Privatization of Sensation 115 DISCOVERIES 11. Mind in Nature 129 12. Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind 132 13. Scientific Shakespeare 162 14. The Deformed Transformed 165 PRETENCES 15. Tall Stories from Little Acorns Grow 203 16. Be