Over the years I’ve managed to treat my insomnia in various ways, to the point that nowadays I can get a reasonably good sleep most nights. Mindfulness meditation – prescribed to me medically before I called myself a Buddhist – has been one big help with that. But just as big has been a medication called trazodone: primarily used as an antidepressant, trazodone in smaller doses helps one stay asleep and avoid the typical insomniac anxiety spiral where you wake up and worry that you can’t get to sleep and find that the worry makes it harder to get to sleep so you worry more. It does a great deal to take the edge off.
Meanwhile my dog, Christmas Belle (so named because we got her in a snowstorm on December 22), faced various anxiety issues that made her resistant and fearful to getting in the car and going to the vet. To help her cope with those situations the vet recommended… trazodone.
Humans share a lot biologically with other mammals. So it’s to be expected that many aspects of our biology work the same way. It likely doesn’t come as a big surprise that the same vaccine for Lyme disease, say, works on both humans and dogs (though it’s not legally available for humans because of anti-vax fearmongering). We do like to think of our minds, though, as something set apart from other mammals’, qualitatively different from them. But if that were so, the same psychological medications shouldn’t work similarly on two different species. And yet they do.
There is indeed something that separates us from other animals. Just consider the device you’re reading this on, the constructed environment you’re reading it in – and the very fact that you are reading, taking in information in a purely symbolic visual form. We humans do have mental capacities that other animals do not, especially when it comes to abstraction. But those additional mental capacities are built on a much bigger layer of mental commonalities.
Those commonalities are especially strong when it comes to emotion: it’s easy to see other animals feeling anger, fear and other feelings we have. That’s why I don’t buy Martha Nussbaum’s theory that emotions are primarily cognitive judgements: they go down to something deeper, more primal. It’s why bad emotions are so hard to shake. It is possible to talk ourselves out of them – that’s basically what cognitive behavioural therapy does – but that change doesn’t just happen through an acknowledged verbal change in belief, we have to practise it, repeat it, get in the habit.
In a New York Times article two decades ago, Amy Sutherland pointed out that the behavioural techniques used by animal trainers – such as rewarding desired behaviour while ignoring undesired behaviour – often work well on humans too. It is not just our bodies but our minds and behaviours that are deeply animal.
And I think that’s what makes so many of those behaviours so pervasively irrational, even purposeless: there are so many things that we just do, irrespective of whether it’s sensible to do them. It’s easy to observe this phenomenon in other animals. When I take Christmas Belle out for a poop, she usually kicks up the dirt or leaves afterwards, in a manner that would suggest she is trying to bury the poop – except that the dirt or leaves rarely if ever land on top of the poop. She just kicks the dirt up anyway, without any burial happening. Like most dogs, she has an instinct related to burying her leavings – but the leavings rarely end up buried, and this doesn’t seem to bother her. Trying to bury the poop doesn’t seem to characterize what she’s doing, because she not only doesn’t learn from any apparent failure to bury it, she doesn’t seem to view the not-burying as a failure at all. The instinct is what matters, not the goal.
But such purposeless behaviours are similarly present in humans. Bryce Huebner in The Moral Psychology of Anger note how he gets angry at others easily when because he has himself consumed gluten, which causes him significant discomfort because of his celiac disease. There’s nothing rational about the emotion; it just happens. Likewise a person suffering depression will often engage in self-sabotaging behaviour with no purpose, no goal, that even he can see. Just like for other animals, many of our behaviours and emotions are things we just do. Why? Evolutionary psychology, which is based on this continuity between us and other animals, can supply some answers – as long as it’s carefully evidence-based, which too often in the past it hasn’t been. Jumping too quickly to “We do X because it’s an evolutionary adaptation” can make the concept of adaptation a mere tautology, and the explanation a just-so story.
Sigmund Freud, for his part, is often viewed as having an irrationalist view of human nature. But in my view the problem with Freud is that he isn’t irrationalist enough. Repression, in my view, makes little sense as a general theory of the unconscious mind: the unconscious is unconscious not because it’s repressed, but because it’s not conscious. The idea of repression suggests something that we do for a goal, a purpose, like hiding something uncomfortable to us. But I think that gives us too much credit! Rather, far more of the irrational behaviours Freud noticed are just there, with no purpose or goal at all: they’re part of our animal inheritance, instincts we have a hard time getting away from – like kicking up dirt without covering up the poop.
Incidentally, dogs have scent glands in their paws; scratching the ground with their hind feet is a marking behavior.
Yeah… my wife noted that to me after I wrote the post. If that’s the case, I may have chosen a bad example. But I don’t think it’s too hard to find other examples of instinctual animal behaviours that serve neither the interests of the individual animal nor the species-propagating end that might have caused them to evolve – like moths being confused by a flame and flying into it.
But even the example of moth phototaxis (which varies among moths from species to species and even across the life cycle of at least one species) is not purposeless, and so doesn’t support the claims of purposelessness that appear several times in the post above.
In a separate comment that I submitted yesterday but that hasn’t appeared yet (perhaps it’s caught by a spam filter?), I said more about this post’s claims of purposelessness and noncognitiveness, which I think need to be more carefully qualified.
Yes, you were correct, the first comment got caught by a spam filter – thanks for pointing that out. I’ll have to watch for that happening again; it really should know not to do that with people who have been commenting on my blog for years!
I think that’s true up to a point, but I’m concerned in this and your other comments about what constitutes a “purpose”. It sounds like you may be referring to evolutionary adaptations as “purposes”; that makes for a teleological understanding of evolution which I don’t accept, discussed a bit more in an earlier post. Mammals evolved sexual pleasure because it leads us to propagate the species, but that propagation is not the purpose for which a mammal seeks sex; most mammals don’t even know that sex produces offspring. As organisms get simpler, acting merely in terms of stimulus-response (which might be the case in the moth example, I’m not sure), I suppose the question may be whether it’s even appropriate to speak of “purpose” at all.
Yes, the issues around “purpose” are similar to those around “cognition” and “judgement”. Both in your original post and in my comments, I take the word “purpose” to be equivalent to “function”, with the latter being the better word, because people often take “purpose” to imply conscious intention, but we’re not talking about conscious intention here. There’s a big literature on function in philosophy of biology, partly summarized in the SEP article “Teleological notions in biology”. I looked at the earlier post that you linked to, and I agree that teleology in the Aristotelian sense is outdated. In the 1960s, the biologist Tinbergen proposed a modern replacement for Aristotle’s four explanations, summarized in the Wikipedia article “Tinbergen’s four questions”, where function replaces teleology. I also agree with your earlier article that analysis of function (as an updated/corrected conception of teleology) needs to be individualized, i.e. needs to include analysis of individual ontogeny and other questions, so it can’t be limited to Tinbergen’s question of function, which only pertains to the species. In my longer comment, this is expressed as the need for individual case formulation/diagnosis. In this sense, Tinbergen’s view is also outdated now (e.g., Patrick Bateson and Kevin N. Laland, “Tinbergen’s four questions: an appreciation and an update”, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2013). There’s a new edited collection from MIT Press that I want to read: Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems (2023).
So in the present context, I’d say intention is at the heart of “purpose” in the sense I’m talking about. It could be unconscious intention – that’s what the Freudian repression in the last paragraph would be – but part of the previous point is that I don’t see “purpose” as being merely “function”, but involving some degree of intention, aim, goal-directedness. (At least, not if “function” simply means something like “characteristic activity”.) On a theistic understanding of biology, every bodily and behavioural activity had a purpose in that sense of intention; it just wasn’t the organism’s own purpose. But on a reasonably careful evolutionary understanding, there is no such thing. There are features and behaviours that happen to have been useful in propagating the species over millions of years – functions in that sense. But those aren’t purposes as I understand them; to see those functions as purposes is to slide back toward a theistic conception of intention, of what God made them for.
Thanks, that’s interesting. At some level, I’m comfortable with viewing even human conscious and unconscious intentions, including human social norms, in addition to nonintentional behaviors, purely in terms of complex control systems, a view that is thoroughly nontheistic and even nonhumanistic, and essentially explains away all goal-directedness, though I don’t consider this view reductionistic, just a “scientific image of man” à la Wilfrid Sellars. In this post you may be fighting against a certain “manifest image of man”, while I’m advocating for a more detailed “scientific image”: these don’t seem to be opposed projects, though they may result in different kinds of philosophy.
Yeah, I think our disagreement here doesn’t go super deep; it’s basically about the meaning or use of the word “purpose”. And it seems to me that substituting “function” for “purpose” would be fine in the contexts of interest to you.
I mentioned above Bateson & Laland’s 2013 update to Tinbergen’s four questions. I thought it might be helpful to quote a paragraph from that article to show that current biology addresses your concerns about function (Bateson & Laland say that they prefer the term “current utility” to “function”, but given all the other issues that they discuss in this paragraph about the malleability of function, it’s not clear to me that their term is a good replacement):
I loved seeing the photo of your dog—cute! Somewhat analogous to your dog and trazodone, my vet recommended that I give my cat an over-the-counter “human” medication, Pepcid (famotidine). My cat later died, but I still have the Pepcid in case I need it!
I commented on your earlier post linked above, “Emotions are not primarily judgements”, that whether emotions are “judgements” or “cognitive” depends on how one defines those terms, and I noted that Gustavo Ortiz Millán in his article “Nussbaum on the cognitive nature of emotions” (2016) criticized Nussbaum for conflating different definitions.
Here I would note that while Nussbaum’s cognitive account of emotions has a definition/account of “cognitive” that is too narrow, I think that sometimes, including in this post, you seem to think of emotions as too narrowly noncognitive: “it just happens“.
In both Nussbaum’s and your account, I think what is needed to correct the narrowness of both accounts is more attention to scientific research that connects/correlates different people’s or organisms’ behavior (and, for people, their reported subjective experiencing) with the structure and functioning of their brains/bodies and with general knowledge of brains/bodies. The narrowness, and error, of psychological schools such as cognitivism and behaviorism and their predecessors is due in part to their brainlessness/bodylessness, their insufficiently detailed knowledge of situated minds/brains/bodies and their differences. By drawing on more detailed knowledge of those differences, we can explain more exactly how your dog’s brain/body differs from yours, and how your brain/body differs from mine, and how those differences connect/correlate with our different behaviors and experiences.
I think the following statement of yours, for example, generalizes too much from your noncognitive conception of psychology, and is the kind of statement that needs to be corrected by a deeper knowledge of individual differences and their causes: “Likewise a person suffering depression will often engage in self-sabotaging behaviour with no purpose, no goal, that even he can see.”
To determine whether the behavior really has no purpose or function, we need to know more about the causes of the depression, and exactly what the behavior is, its context, and other information about the individual. Even if the behavior turns out to be purposeless or functionless, it is probably, to some degree, influenced by other purposes or functions, because an embodied brain is not a purposeless and functionless organ. A brain has purposes and functions even if the individual can’t “see” them. Some of those are products of an organism’s evolutionary past and some are products of an organism’s individual development. For example, even if my brain has biologically inherited a susceptibility to mood disorder, I also have unconscious learnings that I have acquired over my lifetime that are likely to be partly responsible for triggering particular bouts of emotional instability, or, to the contrary, I may have acquired unconscious learnings over my lifetime that protect me from such instability. It doesn’t “just happen” because “genetics”. The causes have to diagnosed for each case based on knowledge of situated minds/brains/bodies.
The example of this “just do” that comes up in our household:
I cannot control my irrational, abject fear of centipedes. The bug creates zero threat, but my body sees it as a monster.
This can only be explained as instinct that no longer has a functional goal.
The function/purpose of fear is to protect us from threats/dangers. Phobias are disorders of fear where the level of fear response is not commensurate with the level of threat. Insect phobias are quite common. There are hundreds of specific phobias. They can be considered malfunction, not an absence of function; the functionality is actually in “overdrive”. The intensity of the fear can often be reduced with therapy.
Similarly, in Amod’s description of his insomnia, I see a system of different functions/purposes rather than an absence of function/purpose. We need sleep. So a lack of sleep is a threat to us. The function of anxiety is to protect us from threats, so it makes sense to be anxious about not being able to sleep. But it’s a malfunction, of course, when, as Amod described, anxiety creates a negative feedback loop that further disrupts sleep. The trazodone helps disrupt that malfunction.
Welcome, Rona – and yes, that’s very much the kind of example I’m thinking of. We can explain how that fear came to exist by talking about evolutionary adaptation, but that’s not the same as saying it has a purpose. It just happens to you, without your wanting to, without your aiming at any goal.
I mentioned Tinbergen’s four questions in other comments above after I responded to Rona’s comment, and it may be worth noting that those four questions are relevant here as well, because I think it’s important to emphasize that there is a lot more to say about symptoms like Rona’s than “it just happens”.
After we carefully identify the behavior or symptom or characteristic (What is it?), we can ask about it, like Tinbergen did: What is it for (function)? How did it develop during the lifetime of the individual (ontogeny)? How did it evolve over the history of the species (phylogeny)? And, how does it work (mechanism)? (Other scientists have added other questions as well, such as how do all four of these interrelate.)
Once we ask these questions, we may find that—contrary to our first impression that it “no longer has a functional goal”—there is some functionality in some aspect of the characteristic (even if it is manifesting as a malfunction), and if we can understand how it works, we may find that—contrary to our first impression that it is something we “cannot control”—there may be some treatment we can apply that gives us some control over it.
It can be easy to give the wrong answers to these questions, though, which can make the characteristics seem more senseless and uncontrollable than they could be if we had better answers.
What do you make of the moral implications of these undeniable similarities between animals and humans?
This seems like an especially relevant question given your commitment to Buddhism—Buddhism’s radical extension of moral concern to animals is one of the things I admire most about it.
It’s a good question. I think it is good reason to avoid cruelty to nonhuman animals where we can, trying to avoid causing them unnecessary pain – recognizing that they do suffer as we do. I wouldn’t go the further step of saying we have the kinds of universal moral obligations to them that we have to other humans (like refraining from killing); the idea of such obligations is something that we introduce in that extra rational layer that humans have on top of the emotional substrate we share with other animals. Nonhuman animals that are capable of killing other species frequently do so without hesitation. (I’ll add the note that vegetarianism is not the norm in most Buddhist societies.)
The model of an “extra rational layer that humans have on top of the emotional substrate we share with other animals” that Amod just mentioned is the kind of outdated psychology that I think needs to be updated by more detailed knowledge of situated minds/brains/bodies, as I mentioned in a previous comment. I’m not sure what moral implications one could infer from such more detailed knowledge, but it certainly has implications for more accurately answering Tinbergen’s four questions about any characteristic of people and other animals.
A short article that clearly refutes the model to which Amod just referred is: “Your brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside” (Current Directions in Psychological Science 29.3, 2020):
Other recent sources with the same message include, for example, the chapter “You have one brain (not three)” in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2021), and “The brain is adaptive not triune: how the brain responds to threat, challenge, and change”, by Patrick R. Steffen et al. (Frontiers in Psychiatry 13, 2022).
Thanks for the references, Nathan. I’ve put them on my reading list.