Peikoff Outdid Himself

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Peikoff Outdid Himself

I normally stay out of openly criticizing Peikoff (not in the past, but for a while now). I adopted this position because I got tired of it. Bashing Peikoff leads to nowhere--people have been doing the bashing thing for years and it never goes anywhere else. Bashing qua bashing.

I finally realized this keeps me from getting what good he has (and there is some).

So let's do it again? Whoop-dee-doo.

This one is embarrassing, though. Good Kerrrrrriiist.

It's from 2010, but I just saw it in a Facebook feed.

Peikoff's Podcast of February 22nd, 2010. Ayn Rand denies instinct. What about the "fight or flight" response for evading your captors?

He shows he clearly doesn't know what the fight or flight response is.

For those interested, here is the Wikipedia article: Fight-or-flight response (in humans).

Peikoff seems to have blinders on to keep him from ever acknowledging when Rand was wrong on something important. But the level of ignorance in this particular podcast is way beneath him, even when he is bad..

He thinks a bar fight is a form of the fight or flight response, which is why it doesn't exist as an instinct. He said so.

I'm absolutely stunned.

I wonder if he thinks neuroscience is a hoax. That's a half-assed quip, but I'm not so sure anymore...

Michael

[jts]

There is a conflict between wikipedia and Ayn Rand Lexicon on what 'instinct' means.

wiki: Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behavior.

ARL: An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge.

Wiki says it's an inclination to a behavior. Rand says it's knowledge.

By wiki's definition, a plant can have an instinct. For example sunflowers follow the sun across the sky. House plants turn their leaves to the sun. My mother had a house plant that folded its leaves at night. By wiki's definition, these are instincts. By ARL's definition, these are not instincts because plants don't have knowledge unless there is such a thing as knowledge without consciousness.

The fight or flight response might qualify as an instinct by wiki's definition because it is a behavior. But it probably does not qualify as an instinct by ARL's definition because it is not knowledge.

[Guyau]

In his OPAR (1991), Peikoff indicated that the sense of instinct that is denied to human beings in Rand’s conception of them is “an unchosen and unerring form of action (unerring within the limits of its range).” That is, humans have no such faculty for their survival. They cannot survive by guidance of mere sensations or percepts, the way some animals survive. “A conceptual being cannot initiate action unless he knows the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot pursue a goal unless he identifies what his goal is and how to achieve it” (194). He cites Rand’s text in Atlas, in the OE essay, and in the FNI essay. I recall that in Atlas, Rand attacks the idea (whose?) that humans have an instinct for tool making. And as quoted in the Lexicon, to which Jerry pointed, Rand attacked in Atlas the idea that humans have an instinct to live.

Rand and Branden and Peikoff were talking about adult humans, who are key to survival of their infants and young children. A desire to live coming out of infancy can be lost or tailored in humans in their cultural setting. I incline to think that is the right view of the desire to live and likewise the view of making tools. I notice, however, that use of all tools already made is not likely to be rejected, whether adults are aiming for life or end of life. People seem to use their intelligence to some degree in both cases. It seems easier for humans to choose not to eat meat than it would be for them to choose not to use tools. Tools are us, it seems, which is to say, intelligence (and culture) is us to profound degree. We are chronically intelligent, and I’m inclined to think it would not be helpful to say we are instinctively intelligent. “The connections of logic are not made by instinct” (AS). There are animal repertoires Objectivism wants to say are improperly imputed to (sufficiently mature) humans, at least in characterization of the human faculties for survival (or for many human modes of destruction). As Schopenhauer had argued, Objectivism argues: such faculties have been supplanted in the human animal by intelligence.

Sorry for the meandering. Michael and Jerry, this is an excellent topic. Let me at least add some further references in Objectivist literature:

The Basic Principles of Objectivism lectures, as transcribed in The Vision of Ayn Rand: 11, 14, 24-26, 55, 59, 123, 151 (BB), 402-403, 405–6, 506-7. The Psychology of Self-Esteem (paperback): 20–27, 37, 66–67.

Peikoff’s remarks in his podcast ring true to me. Delighted to hear it.

Truth of Will and Value

Part 2 – Zarathustra and Beyond (conclusion)

~Rand in Full~
. . .

In The Fountainhead Rand sometimes calls certain human behaviors instinctual. Speaking to Roark, the sympathetic character Kent Lansing says: “‘Men are brothers, you know, and they have a great instinct for brotherhood. . . .’” (ET X 332). Rand also writes: “People began to ooze towards Ellsworth Toohey: the right kind of people, those who soon found him to be a spiritual necessity. The other kind did not come; there seemed to be an instinct about it” (ET IX 320). In the later years of the story, when Toohey has stopped promoting the career of Keating, the latter “tried not to think of Ellsworth Toohey. A dim instinct told him that he could preserve a precarious security of spirit so long as he did not touch upon that subject” (HR VII 612). Wynand says to Roark that second-handers will “‘accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By instinct’” (HR XII 659).

That talk of instincts, which humans have about themselves and each other, probably only meant either a deep-seated knack not requiring an articulated reasoning process or a deep-seated disposition manifest in feelings. There was a different, more elaborate, concept of instinct in use in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific characterization of animal behavior. Schopenhauer wrote of instinct in this sense as requiring will, perception, and some apprehension of elementary causal relations. In his characterization, animal instincts are infallible, like perception, and they are supplanted by reason in man (WWP I.2.136; I.2.180). Animal instincts, such as nest-building in birds or web-spinning in spiders, are not guided by the ends towards which the animal works. Schopenhauer’s picture of an animal faculty of instinct was in the tradition of medieval Aristotelians, but without supposing the faculty to have been instilled in animals by an intelligent Creator. (On concepts of instincts before Charles Darwin, see Richards 1987, 20–70.)

Like Schopenhauer, Rand saw humans as needing to use intelligence for survival. “Man cannot survive except through his mind. . . . He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought . . . . Everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind” (HR XVIII 737).

Nietzsche writes of all sorts of social instincts: an instinct for mediocrity (BGE 206); a cunning instinct of the middle classes against higher spirits (BGE 218); feminine instincts (BGE 239); and instincts for rank (BGE 263). Beneath all faith, or belief without conscious reason, is instinct (BGE 191). Beneath unegoistic morality is the herd instinct (GM I 2). We have a tendency towards self-preservation, and this is a common consequence of the more fundamental constant drive of life itself, the drive of will to power (BGE 13). Social instincts, too, are manifestations of organic will to power. The instinct for social freedom is a will to power (GM II 18).

In the walls of society and peace, the human animal lost his fitness to wilderness, war, prowling, and adventure. His instincts became disvalued. He lost his former guides, his drives regulating, unconscious, and infallible. These, unfortunate human animals, “were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, . . . they were reduced to their ‘consciousness’, their weakest and most fallible organ” (GM II 16; also AC 14). Inhibited from their outward discharge, the instincts of the human animal turned inward, giving rise to the inner world called soul and the misery of bad conscience.

The change from wild to civil, from unrestrained instinct to bad conscience “was not a gradual or voluntary one and did not represent an organic adaptation to new conditions” (GM II 17). Rather, institutional organization of nomadic men was effected by the violence of “some pack of blond beast of prey, a conquering and master race” (ibid.). These hypothetical unconscious creators of social structure were themselves without bad conscience, though they begat it.

Civilized, man turned himself into “an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness” (GM II 16). Now man “gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if within him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise” (ibid.). Tomorrow, the overman.

“The greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctual activity, and this is even the case for philosophical thought. . . . Most of a philosopher’s conscious thought is secretly directed and forced into determinate channels by the instincts” (BGE 3). In Nietzsche’s view, most of conceptual consciousness is directed by instinct, which is activity of body, physical, not spiritual. “Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit” (Z I “On Reading and Writing”). Said by a materialist, that line means also: spirit is blood.

I do not mean to suggest that mature Rand was allied to spiritualism in contrast to materialism. She rejected mysticism of the spirit equally with mysticism of muscle (AS 1027, 1035–39, 1042–47). “‘You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness’” (AS 1029). The parts of consciousness over which humans have free first-person control are not something beyond the biological nature of humans. I should mention that Rand took each person and his or her life to be something absolutely irreplaceable, therefore unrepeatable (unlike Nietzsche). So it is not clear that she would accept the traditional conception of free will as the ability to have done something different in exactly the same circumstances, including brain state. It may be enough for the physical possibility of what Rand takes to be intelligent free choice that it be free of determining physical causes that are not neurological correlates of one’s thinking self (cf. Peikoff 1991, 55, 64–65; Pippin 2010, 68–84).

Rand denies humans possess animal instincts. The concept desire should be distinguished from the concept instinct. A desire to live is not an instinct for self-preservation. One may desire to live, but that of itself would not include the knowledge required for living (AS 1013). Such knowledge is not automatic in the way of instincts. One has no instinct for tool making. Acquisition of human knowledge requires the voluntary action that is thinking (AS 1043–44). Not only conceptual thought, but even the desire to live is not automatic for human beings (AS 1013). Furthermore, man’s “moral instinct” is nothing more than his reason (AS 1017). Lastly: “Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instincts” (AS 1012).

Humans have a conceptual capability for giving integration to their existence. Man’s consciousness is an “enormously powerful integrating mechanism” given by his organic nature. “His only choice is to drive it or to be driven by it. Since an act of volition—a process of thought—is required to use the mechanism for a cognitive purpose, man can evade that effort. But if he evades, chance takes over: the mechanism functions on its own like a machine without a driver; it goes on integrating blindly, incongruously, at random” (PSL 27; contrast with GS V 360). It is then no longer an instrument of cognition, but bringer of delusion, self-torture, and fear (PSL 27; also AS 1037).

Ayn Rand did not find the coming of reason and morality into the pre-human race to be in any way unfortunate. Inner self-torture of a human being is from weakened reason. In health and innocence, there is indeed inner tension and promise in the human soul. Not for the coming of beings beyond the human. For the coming creations of man. So many days have not yet broken.

[BaalChatzaf]

In his OPAR (1991), Peikoff indicated that the sense of instinct that is denied to human beings in Rand’s conception of them is “an unchosen and unerring form of action (unerring within the limits of its range).”

The photo tropism of a plant is NOT unerring. I can get my petunia to unfold and lean over by using a sunlamp.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The fight or flight response might qualify as an instinct by wiki's definition because it is a behavior. But it probably does not qualify as an instinct by ARL's definition because it is not knowledge.

Jerry,

Most people have an innate "fight or flight" response to snakes and spiders. This has been tested over and over.

Where did that knowledge come from?

That qualifies according to Rand's meaning.

Michael

[william.scherk]

Ayn Rand's understanding of instinct limits Peikoff's interest in the question, I think. He is also limited by the format of his weekly podcast. It's casual, not scholarly, with no research literature on the table, no great cognitive demands made of Peikoff. Off the cuff, informed only by his vast knowledge of Objectivism.

This is fine, it's Peikoff's job to promote the pure thought of Ayn Rand.

I had to do the boring thing and transcribe the file:

Ayn Rand denies instinct: what about the fight-or-flight response or evading your captor?

Well, I don't regard those as instincts or even as universally true. You know, there's supposed to be, you judge whether you fight or you fly, flee according to the threat. There's all kinds of cases where human beings fight, in bars for instance, where they should flee or do nothing? where it's just foolhardy. Or they flee where they should just fight, as when they capitulate to evil.

Or when they preach 'love thine enemy' ... if they had any instinct to fight or flee, how about prostrate yourself before your enemy? -- as the guidance of a civilization. That should wipe out the idea of fight or flight as an instinct.

Now, what about completely passive people, who just sit in a bar and drink? -- evade everything and don't fight, they don't flight, they just fall off the chair.

Now, animals judge perceptually and react automatically, but a conceptual being can't fight or flee until you can identify cognitively what is going on, and they be evaluated, and then see, decide whether you're going to act on your conclusions or not.

On those issues there is no instinct.

So, there we go. On those issues, Peikoff declaims there is no instinct. But, of course, he is not referring to a mere dictionary definition:

• 1. an inborn pattern of activity or tendency to action common to a given biological species.
• 2. a natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency.
• 3. a natural aptitude or gift: an instinct for making money.
• 4. natural intuitive power.

Looking into the roots of the word is useful: 1375-1425; late Middle English < Latin instinctus prompting, instigation, enthusiasm, equivalent to *insting (uere) presumably, to prick;

That makes sense: we have all felt such an 'IN-STING' -- a prompt from the subconscious, an instigation from the body, a rapid indwelling computation of threat, a stinging warning ... and it certainly captures the sense of heightened emotion, alarm, the intensity of the responsive organism, you, me, a child, a thug, Ayn Rand, a wash of adrenaline supercharging the body for its next move.

Peikoff seems to have blinders on to keep him from ever acknowledging when Rand was wrong on something important. But the level of ignorance in this particular podcast is way beneath him, even when he is bad..

He thinks a bar fight is a form of the fight or flight response, which is why it doesn't exist as an instinct.

Yup. The bar fight may be a decisive result of the body's emotional response to threat. The fight itself is not an instance of this response but what follows the alert: first comes the Yikes, then the Advance or Retreat.

Reading the transcripted stuff for the fourth or fifth time doesn't clarify for me the reader/listener what 'flight or fight' responses comprise in the real world. What Peikoff crucially omits as factors are the stressors, and the responses as physical, subjectively tangible reaction -- a strongly felt form of organismal Alert.

I don't think Peikoff is thinking of that which provokes this alert, nor of broader situations in which human beings suddenly are challenged emotionally. He doesn't seem to think that the fully-charged emotions undergirding the response are even interesting, since he does not mention this.

But then again, he only gave himself a minute and three quarters to settle the question!

-- it's amusing how constrained are his examples, drawn from the bar-room. If I had been on the programme with Peikoff, I would have used his example of bar-fights to explore the state, the emotional state, the stakes. I would try to get him to imagine himself in a situation of great bodily alarm, heightened vigilance, blood pumping, awareness narrowed to a threat.

Maybe by immersing himself in an imagined situation, he could see how elemental is the heightened alert state itself, how it provides the foundation for decision. I figure he could then engage with developmental psychology and evolutionary developmental biology, and understand fight-or-flight to be something we share with other primates and other mammals.

(as an aside, consider how Peikoff could explain those unfortunates who, due to brain lesion, are unable to process fear, either unable to perceive anger or fear in others, or in some way lacking important signalling of intent and motive in other people's actions, expressions, and words. Imagine someone who had no working danger detection and subsequent fight or flight response because of amygdala damage. She would not be able to ground responses to danger in felt bodily emotion -- the subconscious ranking and flavouring of mood, readiness and attention -- which would make decision-making vulnerable if not damaged. Lacking the emotive power and preparedness supplied by the state of fight or flight. she would not feel that urgent bodily whammy. She would neither flee nor fight an oncoming predator.

Knowing these unfortunates, Peikoff could make the distinction between Detection, Provocation and ensuing Alert State and subsequent Decision, thus giving an informed and nuanced view of how so-called instinctive processes are ever accompanied by cognition or executive control. He might even square the circle and show how emotion is a foundational element of the human cognitive scheme while not a tool of cognition strictly speaking. )

There is a confct between wikipedia and Ayn Rand Lexicon on what 'instinct' means.

wiki: Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behavior.
ARL: An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge.

Wiki says it's an inclination to a behavior. Rand says it's knowledge.

That's the thing, isn't it? from the lexicon page is another quote: "[Man] is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or 'instinctual' knowledge" from “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,”

I never think of Man being born, but of individual babies being born. Rand is right that a baby is born naked and unarmed, without teeth, claws, horns ... and right to highlight that the defenseless infant has effectively zero adult "'instinctual' knowledge" to play with in its early days and months and years.

The fangs are the fangs of a vigilant father, the claws a fierce protectiveness of mother, family, clan, using every tool to keep danger at bay from the otherwise defenseless infant.

Now, as others have pointed out, also at issue are further entailments, concepts of automaticity, motivation, decision-making, emotion-detection, innate developmental milestones, a blooming buzzing confusion of the baby's mental world.

I think that observations of infants and toddlers show them performing behaviours of increasing complexity in a more or less set sequence -- suckling behaviour, eye-fixation, mother-voice recognition, facial recognition, grasping, babbling, edge-detection and so on. I don't think the fight-flight behavioural response would be detectable in a little human being unable to crawl of walk. It comes later in development. What might be detected in the younger infants is the startle reflex and then fear. I would argue that stages of development are a mixture of inborn patterns of activities coming 'online' -- and the necessary inputs, correctives, reinforcements from the environment. (an example of an inborn capacity to bring forth complex behaviour is the metaphorical 'language instinct.'**)

I think, then that 'inborn patterns of activities' revealed in development are real, interesting, and crucially important to normal human growth and intelligence.

None of this necessarily contradicts strict Randian criteria of unerring knowledge. By defining instinct as knowledge rather than patterns of activity or behaviour, it does however mean that discussing infant psychology is somewhat uninteresting in Objectivist terms. There is no research project inspired by Objectivist thought on infants, no programme that is bearing fruit.

Which takes me back to the baby and its emotions. And to the conditions or situations or events that instigate the flight or fight response. It's necessary to understand that the behavioural response is to fear. What elicits fear in a newborn? What elicits fear in an older infant, a toddler, and so on? I don't know that there is much Objectivist thought on the subject of fear, and I rather doubt that this thought engages with recent scientific work.

I find these things absolutely fascinating in themselves -- and less interesting when constrained by Randian precepts and exclusions. When and how does a developing child express emotions -- is it a set sequence? How do fear, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, sadness, acceptance come on-line in a little growing human? How does a child effortlessly learn to 'read' emotions in other individuals? How does a child leap from pidgin to creole, how does a deaf infant 'babble' ... ?

This is the stuff I find interesting -- objective inquiry -- it gives me much to work with cognitively. In contrast, Peikoff trying to bat away a quibble with Rand just doesn't give me much mental product to work with.

I do listen to the podcasts from time to time. They strike me as mostly bizarre. In the style of an open-mike radio show (but with no open lines), one of the worst speaking voices on Earth, trying to tackle the important philosophical issues of the day in brief capsules of wisdom.

In other words, for me the capsules are curiosities, concerning mostly creepy and off-putting doctrinal issues of no great import to my quest for knowledge.

In his OPAR (1991), Peikoff indicated that the sense of instinct that is denied to human beings in Rand’s conception of them is “an unchosen and unerring form of action (unerring within the limits of its range).” That is, humans have no such faculty for their survival. They cannot survive by guidance of mere sensations or percepts, the way some animals survive. “A conceptual being cannot initiate action unless he knows the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot pursue a goal unless he identifies what his goal is and how to achieve it” (194). He cites Rand’s text in Atlas, in the OE essay, and in the FNI essay. I recall that in Atlas, Rand attacks the idea (whose?) that humans have an instinct for tool making. And as quoted in the Lexicon, to which Jerry pointed, Rand attacked in Atlas the idea that humans have an instinct to live.

Rand and Branden and Peikoff were talking about adult humans, who are key to survival of their infants and young children. A desire to live coming out of infancy can be lost or tailored in humans in their cultural setting.

How wonderful it would be for an Objectivish scholar/researcher to plunge headfirst into data about the developing human, from womb to speaking, goal-seeking, willful, fully-emotional little creature.

Maybe Objectivists are not interested in Man as Baby, Infant, Toddler, Walker ... Pubertal Teen, only in man the Adult.

Peikoff’s remarks in his podcast ring true to me. Delighted to hear it.

That talk of instincts, which humans have about themselves and each other, probably only meant either a deep-seated knack not requiring an articulated reasoning process or a deep-seated disposition manifest in feelings.

[...]

Rand denies humans possess animal instincts. The concept desire should be distinguished from the concept instinct. A desire to live is not an instinct for self-preservation.

I am happy enough to set the dictionary meanings aside from the Randian meanings. I can muse about the 'looking instinct' and the 'talking instinct' and the 'walking instinct' and the 'crying instinct,' and about many other human behavioural complexes emergent in Man the Baby. I can muse about the 'mating instinct' without reference to Randianisms.

I would pay good money for a Peikoff podcast entitled "Fear, the Amygdala, and Provoking 'Fight or Flight': An Objectivist Understanding of Emotional Instigation." Or "What instigates 'Fight or Flight' Responses in Objectivsts?"

Ultimately, I think Peikoff misunderstood what fight/flight response is, or he would have been able to say something like this:

"Fight or Flight is a state of alert, not an 'instinctive' kind of knowledge. It is one of man's many intense 'stomach feelings.' This state of alert in Man is his response to a perceived threat. The response can be instigated rapidly by environmental cues or alarms, by cognitions, by sudden events and suddenly perceived danger. This intensely emotional state does not however provide Man his decision to flee nor his reason to fight -- only his rational mind can take that step."

Peikoff in a bar with his wife. In walks McCaskey and David Harriman. Peikoff spots the pair, experiences a sudden thrill of alertness. His heart pounds. His muscles contract. His pupils dilate. His fists clench. His mouth is suddenly dry ...

Does he run, or does he confront evil and vanquish it?

____________________

** -- Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. I recommend this 1994 book highly. It is surpassed only by his more recent The Stuff of Thought.

Edited January 23, 2015 by william.scherk

[Guyau]

Another view on language instinct:

The Language Myth

Why Language Is Not an Instinct

Vyvyan Evans (Cambridge 2014)

From the back cover:

Language is central to our lives, the cultural tool that arguably sets us apart from other species. Some scientists have argued that language is innate, a type of unique human 'instinct' pre-programmed in us from birth. In this book, Vyvyan Evans argues that this received wisdom is, in fact, a myth. Debunking the notion of a language 'instinct', Evans demonstrates that language is related to other animal forms of communication; that languages exhibit staggering diversity; that we learn our mother tongue drawing on general properties and abilities of the human mind, rather than an inborn 'universal' grammar; that language is not autonomous but is closely related to other aspects of our mental lives; and that, ultimately, language and the mind reflect and draw upon the way we interact with others in the world. Compellingly written and drawing on cutting-edge research, The Language Myth sets out a forceful alternative to the received wisdom, showing how language and the mind really work.

William, I don’t think it is a philosopher’s merit as philosopher to be inspiring or formulating scientific research programs. Philosophy can be informed by modern science, as I exhibited in Capturing Concepts and in Capturing Quantity. My essay “Volitional Synapses” (Part 3) required a little tour of tropisms, taxes, kineses, reflexes proper, fixed action patterns, and two concepts of instinct (lineages of Tinbergen or Freud) (also what Schopenhauer meant by it) along its philosophic way. Philosophy has a niche for discerning careful distinctions, discerning types of conceptual dependencies, and drafting broadest pictures of human being and the extra-human world (informed by modern science, of course), providing widest context and widest rules of knowledge method. That’s plenty of philosophic work, and interesting work for some of us, especially when informed by science, mathematics, and the history of philosophy. A psychologist such as Susan Carey is being a bit of a philosopher, of course, in getting her developmental psychology research done, but I wouldn’t hold it against any general philosophy for not spawning scientific research programs.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

When a newborn is learning to see in the first days of life outside the womb, its main focus is on the face of the mother or other person caring for it.

This has been documented over and over, filmed over and over, studied over and over, etc.

Where did this knowledge come from--that faces are the deal to focus on, not other things?

Conceptual volition? Reasoned analysis?

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

When a newborn is learning to see in the first days of life outside the womb, its main focus is on the face of the mother or other person caring for it.

This has been documented over and over, filmed over and over, studied over and over, etc.

Where did this knowledge come from--that faces are the deal to focus on, not other things?

Conceptual volition? Reasoned analysis?

Michael

Back off, Michael-- before you ruin this thread!

--Brant (The Protector)

[Guyau]

Thanks to William for the effort in #6.

Michael (#8), to say that a behavior is not an instance of conceptual volition or of reasoned analysis is not to say that the right way to describe the animal behavior, in the context of modern science, is as instinct. My impression is that Schopenhauer and Rand are right in the way they took instincts in the arc of animal life to have been supplanted by intelligence in man. The kinds of examples they were considering: “The one-year old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds a nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins a web” (Schopenhauer). Rand and Branden attacked the explanatory usefulness of various notions of instinct, but I think, and perhaps they did too (I gave the specific pages in Branden), that some notions of instinct are specific enough to be useful things to isolate among animal and human infant behaviors. That does not affect their big point that humans do not build houses or happiness, or make traps for animals by instinct (or by stimulus-response, which Rand was also attacking as a fashionable reduction of human behavior in ’57).

Schopenhauer studied a lot of biology and anthropology. His take on instincts, such as nest building was that they “require will, perception, and some apprehension of elementary causal relations.” Orienting-preferences in human infants would not have been known to him, and indeed he was just before the breakthrough of evolution. But he would have had to locate infant orienting-preferences short of what he meant by instinct. That quote from him was from my 1996 essay “Volitional Synapses,” and it continues:

Bergson also contrasted instinct with intelligence. The distinctive mark of intelligence, in his view, is extensive tool-making, the sort of making that requires inference (and experiment, I would add).

Today the term instinct has come to refer to complex unlearned behavior that is recognizable and predictable in at least one sex member of a species. Instinctual complex behaviors, such as nest building, consist of predictable sequences of stereotyped responses to precise “releasing stimuli” (Tinbergen 1969). A given animal behavior may be only partly instinctive. “In the movements of a goose’s head in rolling an egg back to the nest, the stimuli that guide and release the sagittal movements are not the same as those for the side-to-side movements. One movement is instinctive, the other a taxis (under the control of visual feedback)” (Dretske 1988, 30n7). [A taxis is an oriented response, a genre of direct reflexive responses to environmental change.*] A behavior that is instinctive in one species may not be instinctive in another. Some bird species have to learn (operant conditioning or trial-and-error) what materials are suitable for building a nest; others seem to have an inborn tendency to select the right materials.

There is also a secondary modern meaning of the term instinct, a derivative of Freud’s concept. In this secondary sense of the concept, formulated by Ronald de Sousa, instinct is simply that which determines emotional dispositions, which then motivate but do not determine behavior. Such instincts determine not the response, but the desired outcome. They are unconscious, but manifest in feelings.

Instinctive behaviors are largely inherited. The genetic nature of instinctive behavior is evident in aggressive and submissive sexual behaviors, in fighting of various kinds, in methods of obtaining and eating food, in grooming, in escape from predators, and in bodily positions assumed in sleep. Much instinctive behavior, such as playing and exploring, is modifiable, and the detailed form of behavior may vary according to present circumstances and past experience of the individual. Some instinctive behaviors, though unlearned, may be forestalled by lack of crucial environmental experience at a critical stage of development. (200–201)

*Direct responses are genetically programmed and stereotyped (unlearned). They vary according to internal state (e.g., body temperature) of the animal. Though genetically instituted, direct behaviors may be modified somewhat by experience. (198–99)

It would be nice to recount what all Branden covered on his pages I cited, but I have my own project to attend to. That project includes documentation of large misses by Rand and Rand-Branden on what is the nature of human beings, informed by modern science. But any miss concerning the role of instinct in human nature is, I think, sleight. (At the risk of belaboring the obvious, notice from #3 that Rand further pushed back on human “instincts” in her understanding of human nature between ’43 and ’57.)

About that bar room scene: I don’t think I’ve been in that situation, though I’ve been in bars years ago during police raids in Chicago. (Mostly they were harassments to close the bar for the night.) And there are some decisions about stay-or-flee in those situations. Pretty sure I was just plain thinking, even under the influence. There were a couple of times in Chicago in which I intervened on the street when one man was beating another. My decisions in those cases, were driven overall by thinking—decision to intervene at all, decisions about use of voice and stance, and thinking about specifics of the attacker. I’d be cautious before classing as instinctual even some very instant, seemingly unthinking behaviors. In my case, that comes up notably in catching nearby objects falling from counters or hands. I’m regularly able to catch things in their fall, faster than thinking any word, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with learning and automatization, especially from playing baseball as a child.

[Brant Gaede]

There were a couple of times in Chicago in which I intervened on the street when one man was beating another.

I'm still pissed off at that. I was winning.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

I've studied too much neuroscience (layman's version, but still neuroscience) to adopt the either-or version of instinct, meaning that instinct disappeared in humans during evolution.

In the way the brain is constructed, the concept-forming part builds on the instinctual part. It does not replace it.

Babies need to be cared for, true, but not because they don't have instincts. It's because the brain and skull take so long to develop.

I will grant this. Instinctual behavior patterns in humans are weaker than in other primates, but they didn't just disappear when the prefrontal neocortex evolves, in mankind and in the baby becoming adult.

If you want some great instinctual cognitive behavior, take a look at the slew of cognitive biases, or heuristics as people like Daniel Kahneman calls them. Do we learn those patterns from experience? No. We just do them. In fact, we have to fight against them. The great part of the higher brain is that, even though it is "lazy" from all the extra energy it consumes, it can override our instincts.

But just because it can override them, that does not mean they no longer exist.

In my view, this is one area where Rand took a view from Locke (through Isabel Paterson probably) that man is tabula rasa and just ran with it because she liked the idea and it fit with other ideas she had.

So I'm left with two options. Either accept the evidence as it increasingly comes in (but which was common sense, even back in Schopenhauer's day--and evidence I observe all the time), or accept the declaration that man is tabula rasa without instincts. Why? Because Rand said so. There is no why.

I will never go that way, not even with Rand.

But since this is a sensitive topic with a lot of people who are into Rand, I am going to read your stuff on it with close attention.

At any rate, re the opening post, there is simply no excuse for Peikoff--at the level of learning he has--not knowing what "fight or flight" means and just pulling a notion of it out of where the sun doesn't shine so he can deny it.

He's better than that except when he doesn't want to be. (I believe that wanting is called that a "blank out." )

Michael

[Guyau]

Michael, small historical point: Not Locke, but Aristotle. The metaphor of blank slate is from Aristotle, and Rand's exposure to him stepped up (beyond college) in '45. She later always credited him with that and its companion idea that all knowledge is derived from the senses. (She had some sensitivity to the intellectual history, as when in writing of Descartes' cogito, she is sure to mention Augustine.) She did some defense and contouring of the blank-slate empiricism, you may recall. Slates and brains have specific natures, in her mature view. I see there is some Rand pertinent to this thread handy from another composition of mine:*

Recall that in Rand’s view acquisition of knowledge includes acquisition of the specific skills by which the content of knowledge is obtained. By age two, the human being is running around and speaking in two-word sentences. In his first two years, the little one has learned an amazing lot.

Quote

To focus his eyes (which is not innate, but an acquired skill),[*] to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant’s tasks and achievements . . . . (Rand 1970, 883)

I should note that what is being claimed before the "ultimately" would naturally be her view of how it goes with development of the animals she thought had percepts. Bambi of course does not walk upright, but needs to learn to walk. His eventual gaits will be set by fixed action patterns, below the level of instinct, and not by very explicit learning (such as when a child is learning some vocabulary), though requiring trial-and-error experience.

[dldelancey]

Stephen, what is infant sucking behavior, if not instinct? Or sucking behavior in the womb prior to birth? Like the bird who builds a nest without having any notion of the eggs to be laid in it, the newborn infant has no notion of the milk in her mother's breast or the role of that milk in her survival.

[Guyau]

Yes, Deanna, I presume that sucking behavior in the human infant is instinctive, or at least possibly instinctive in having structuring causes from evolutionary history and triggering causes from cues in development of the fetus and perhaps triggering causes from environmental stimuli for the neonate leading to involuntary response. I imagine, however, that more has been discovered than I know about neural circuitry and process in play in sucking behavior of other mammals, and such findings could have reasonably inferred analogues in human infant brain processes. There may be reasons in those details for not classing this as instinctive behavior (reserving instinctive for another noteworthy class of behaviors), but I don't know. Meanwhile, I say instinct. I notice that calling that instinct, we would probably not call infant facial response differences between tastes salty, sour, bitter, or sweet instincts. We'd want to keep instinct for behaviors with import of survival value of individual or species and with some intentionality or seeming intentionality. I'd not be inclined to call sucking behavior of the infant a form of knowledge or even a form of know-how, that is, a skill. (Not to say it can't be elaborated into a skill, and not only for drawing milk.)

[Brant Gaede]

I think there are things about human infants we can never explain, just note and describe what they do. This is because we cannot get inside the brain and describe what is going on in the womb, right after birth and then in the next two or three years from the infants' perspective. The infant will not remember. Frankly, while we can speculate and speculation can have value, it needs to be labelled speculation. I do know that separating a baby from its mother and isolating it will have tragic, life-long consequences for the child.

Brain development and learning go hand in hand and the unborn child is already learning something in the womb. It's chicken or egg first when it comes to the relationship between brain structure and knowledge, but the structure must absorb data and of a certain kind dictated by the environmental input. No knowledge can be absorbed without a welcoming structure. This continues well into young adulthood if not longer. Sense data to conceptual data and analysis. Discipline for children means protecting them from their lack of brain content and lack of brain maturity by their parents' more mature brains. I don't think we'll find much philosophy inside natural human developmental physiology. Philosophy is all about free will and choice. No cognitive ability no philosophy, just be natural and go out and catch and eat fish; be a parasite on your prey. Being human means disowning the parasitism of cannibalism by creating free to produce and create societies and defending them from without and within, especially the latter for the former needs the latter just like structure needs data.

--Brant

[Nerian]

It seems he just completely misunderstands the fight-or-flight response, because of what it is called. It is just the heightened metabolic response when faced with danger which enables greater physical activity temporarily. But the dismissal of all instinct to me has always seemed unwarranted. Sure, we are conceptual tabula rasa, but instinct does not require conceptual content.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

Thanks for the comment about Aristotle. I love it when I am corrected by someone smarter than me.

(To the others reading, don't get too enthusiastic. )

I've always had a problem with Rand's claim that learning to see an acquired skill, not an innate one. And here's the reason.

A baby cannot stop from learning to see by choice. It can't not do it. Left to its own, it has to do it.

If that's not innate, I don't know what is.

In this case, I believe Rand sidestepped the entire issue of innate characteristics (and yes, some kinds of knowledge) being due to growth, not just experience. She used the phrase "the given" a lot, but I don't recall where she meant "the grown into."

Sometimes it seems like Rand's metaphysics--re human nature--are about adults, by adults, and for adults.

I'm not one to say this case is only growth because I think that would be silly. I dislike the approach of nailing down a principle, then fitting reality to it when reality doesn't fit. Also, I dislike the approach of trying to boil down complex issues to one cause only. I believe a lot of mistakes are due to this, including Rand's claim that humans have no instincts.

If there is no instinct to see in a child, it will never see. There's a word for that, too. It's called blind. A child can't choose to be blind. And just because this instinct takes time to develop, that is no reason to say the instinct doesn't exist.

Little birdies don't hatch with the immediate ability to fly. But the ability to fly is instinctual--Rand certainly would agree with that--but with one caveat: their instinctive ability to fly only results in actual flight once they grow into it.

Ditto for human sight.

Experience is present, but the instinct is there, too. In a case like this, I don't know how to claim the bird's experience with gravity (interaction with reality) is merely instinct, but the baby's experience with light waves is in a special category, a human category. What is the standard? I can only think of one: Rand said so.

Building on the instinct to see, humans can train their eyes to see what they want (by choice) and add meaning to it, like letters. But I don't understand how someone can claim seeing is a choice in an infant that has no capacity to choose such things.

That claim is deducing reality from a principle, not looking at reality and inducing principles.

It also makes hash out of the definition of man as a rational animal since it eliminates the genus animal, or at least voids it of observed conceptual meaning and makes it arbitrary.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't think we'll find much philosophy inside natural human developmental physiology. Philosophy is all about free will and choice. No cognitive ability no philosophy, just be natural and go out and catch and eat fish; be a parasite on your prey. Being human means disowning the parasitism of cannibalism by creating free to produce and create societies and defending them from without and within, especially the latter for the former needs the latter just like structure needs data.

Brant,

I don't think anyone would claim that philosophy is an instinct.

But instincts and volition can--and do--run hand in hand.

Talk about a false dichotomy: experience or instinct--choose one because you can't have both at the same time.

Well why can't there be both? Obviously there can because there are.

Rand's claim has led to a lot of weird stuff in O-Land.

I can point to people in our subcommunity I have discussed this with who claim non-human animals have no choice at all about anything. Nada.

And I can point to others, several in fact, who claim cannibalism is perfectly rational, albeit distasteful.

There's a lot of damage one can do to one's mind if one insists on deducing reality from premises that one doesn't check.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Long pig. Just don't eat the brain.

--Brant

yum, yum

[Guyau]

Michael (#18), Rand clearly thought that whenever she could argue (as informed by likes of my second link, the one about infant eyesight, within #13) that if something depended on experience, then it was necessarily not innate, and if it was not innate, it was not instinct. That is not original with her. As I recall, an empiricist like Helmholtz, thought like that also. (Correct me if I’m wrong, anyone; I can’t dig in to confirm recall on that for this nice but by this stage for me too time-consuming thread.) Empiricists tended to exaggerate what exactly the Rationalists, like Descartes and Leibniz, actually maintained in their defense of innate ideas and their independence of experience. I’d be careful not to exaggerate or oversimplify Rand’s view, taken across all her writings from ’57 to her death, including those pages in Branden. Neglect not the subtle and more refined in her (and in Branden’s) writings. I’d give Rand a little credit (and Branden more than a little) for opening some books on child psychology and education (including on emotional development), but I’ve mustered that credit in specifics in the first link-note in #13, and I’ll resist fetching further pertinent text over; for readers interested in that, my linked composition is available easily enough.

It will not do, for serious resolution by truth of the matter(s) available in our own scientific culture, to fail to learn what are the current exact definitions of instinct in science, what are its contradistinctions. That means that I too would need some study, especially of work in the last twenty years. Common parlance, especially loose parlance, won’t do. This is a continuing philosophic development, one progressing, coordinate with science, on what is human nature. Happily today, philosophy informed by modern science is the norm in epistemology, from Churchland’s Plato’s Camera to Burge’s Origins of Objectivity to Prinz’s Furnishing the Mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS

Rand did not say that learning to see as an infant was something that was resistible. Her choice "acquired skill" instead of "learning" in her portrayal may well have been for sake of barring that sometimes connection. Anyway, we distinguish many kinds of learning, and not all the varieties are stoppable.

Also, talk of an instinct to see suggests a switch from the primary to secondary sense of instinct I mentioned in #10 (from my 1996). I don't know offhand what Rand or Branden thought about the concept in that usage.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

I'm still confused on a point about how you think.

Still within the context of Rand's meaning: is the bird's ability to fly an instinct or not?

And how would that fundamental process (innate knowledge of what to do plus interaction with reality) differ from an infant's ability to see, being that the infant has an innate knowledge of what to do and interacts with reality?

If you claim there is a difference, that the bird has innate knowledge of what to do while the infant does not, more questions. Does the bird as a chick lack an instinct to fly and only grow the instinct later? The bird obviously can't fly as a chick. Or is the ability to fly something entirely learned by the bird? Rand insinuates (and probably states clearly somewhere about somthing similar) that the bird is moved only by instinct.

I don't understand how the bird develops an instinct, but a human, going through the same fundamental process, is absent an instinct, but instead learns to see by volition.

Rand wrote (in the Objectivist ethics): "Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are 'tabula rasa.'"

Why aren't the bird's knowledge and emotions tabula rasa at birth, but those of the human are?

Doesn't the bird need learning?

Michael

[Guyau]

. . .

I should note that what is being claimed before the "ultimately" would naturally be her view of how it goes with development of the animals she thought had percepts. . . .

My claim there is that Bambi's learning to walk would not be an instinct ability, by Rand's later-day characterization of the way the human infant learns to walk. Whether she then is contradicting her earlier views of such animals, we'd have to check. It was "higher animals" she spoke of in the early '60's as having percepts and being guided by them, and I don't know if she thought birds in that class. Probably not spiders, though in ITOE, she indicated she thought insects have some consciousness. Beyond Rand we have seen in preceding quotes about nest building by birds that it is a mix of instinct and not instinct for various kinds of birds in our present scientific understanding. Suppose birds pass for what Rand had in mind by "higher animals." Then potentially nest building might be shown to be by learning, hence not instinctive, as with first walking by baby and Bambi. As we have seen, with our later scientific lights, likely surprising to Schopenhauer, Rand, and some of us too, there are instinctive cases of avian nest building---no learning---but other cases by learning of some sort in some parts of the process. So far as I see, Rand and our scientists could concur on what does and does not count as instinct ability in nest building. I don't know what sort of mix of instinct ability and learning goes into various birds reaching ability to fly, but Rand's concept of instinct (ability sense of the word) seems in step with our scientists' (as of twenty years ago, anyway) who can or have found out.

[william.scherk]

Another view on language instinct:

The Language Myth

Why Language Is Not an Instinct

Vyvyan Evans (Cambridge 2014)

Thanks for highlighting this book. I have it on order now, after having read many reviews and hard-argued debates on its merits. It has attracted great praise as well as great criticism. Have you already read the book (or perhaps excerpts or articles on Evans' website)?

I enjoyed reading your 'synapse' article at Objectivity ... and along the way, found a new hangout: The Language Log ...

Thanks to William for the effort in #6.

Appreciate the notice -- I was trying to figure out for myself how Peikoff could have so bizarrely misunderstood 'fight or flight' responses. The result was a long ramble, something I allow myself from time to time. You win some, you lose some.

In re synapses, I'll lighten the mood and post again a bit of work from Greg Dunn, a micro-etching called Brainbow Hippocampus. Click the image for a brilliant video explanation of its design and properties ...

[Guyau]

William, I haven’t read the Evans book or excerpts. I don’t expect to be ordering it as the issue does not come up in my own book in progress, and I have to confine books I get to those needed in the making of mine, now apparently four years away to the finish.

Thanks for sharing the Brainbow Hippocampus. I’d like to share an amusing thing that reminds me of. This last fall, we had been talking to Jason, Walter’s elder son, on the phone, and he mentioned that his partner Aimee’s uncle had just won the Nobel prize for medicine, that he shares the prize with another researcher, and that the uncle is the one named O’Keefe. You’ve seen a picture of him with Aimee, Jay, and Julian on my Facebook page. But this is the amusing part. The evening of the day after that phone conversation, Walter and I were watching the PBS News Hour. They began to talk about the newly announced Nobels for medicine, I heard them say hippocampus, and I burst out “Oh, that O’Keefe!” The name John O’Keefe had been familiar to me since Objectivity days in connection especially with his paper “Kant and the Seahorse.” (From the Objectivity Name Index: V1N2, 52; V2N5, 17.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS - 1/24/15

You are surprisingly sharp for a person of such advanced age. Happy Birthday, William!