Discussion Group Report

Jerome W. Elbert, a retired physics professor from the University of Utah, in his book, Are Souls Real? presents a provocative theory of human motivation. He describes it in a chapter with the same title as the present article. Following is a summary:

Once there was no consciousness on Earth. There were animals which had no consciousness; their actions were instinctive responses. As time went by, they became capable of improving their responses by learning from their experiences. When the capabilities of their brains became advanced, they began to combine information coming from various senses, and constructed mental images of what was happening in the world outside their bodies. Gradually consciousness came into being.

The new conscious part of its nervous system can be called the New System. But the organism still had the old instinctive part, which consisted of automatic behaviors inherited from its ancestors. That part can be called the Old System. The New System could use its sensory data and knowledge from previous experience to form a mental picture of its current situation. Then it could evaluate various options and make informed decisions about what action to take. The NS was flexible in matching responses to the perceived situation, while the old system could trigger only its built-in responses. This meant that many actions requiring flexible responses to complex situations in the external world were brought under control of the NS, while the OS kept control of routine functions, like breathing, operating outside of consciousness.

The NS's extra flexibility increased the evolutionary fitness of the organism by making possible choices that were more appropriate for specific situations. To accomplish this the conscious organism needed goals and values to help it select options that would enhance its chances of surviving and reproducing. This was done by transferring the values of the OS to the NS. During previous eons the OS had gone through a painful trial-and error design process and had developed a suitable repertoire of standard responses that helped the organism's ancestors survive. The practical wisdom embodied in the OS was passed on to the NS through the transfer of value signals.

The neurons that triggered the OS standard responses sent their value signals to the NS to tell it what to do. But the NS did not use these signals in the same way as the OS. Instead, in the NS the OS signals were compared with other signals generated by the NS, and a decision would be made.

Where did the NS get the criteria it used to judge the relative merit of the different possibilities? Options based on standard OS responses were evaluated using the value signals sent from the OS. Options suggested by the NS were assigned merit according to their innate or attached values. Directly or indirectly, all of the value signals were produced by the preexisting mechanisms for generating values in the OS. Thus the OS values played extremely important roles in controlling the conscious decisions of the NS. Even the subconscious process by which attention selected the most important information streaming from the outside world needed criteria for evaluating what is important. This evaluation was ultimately based on the OS values.

"Even today our brains probably operate under something like this scenario," explains Elbert. "The OS is the limbic-brain system; the NS is the thalamocortical system."

Above I have given you an introduction to the basic elements of Elbert's theory. The rest of his chapter is an elaboration on these elements, but space limitations for my article does not allow me to describe the elaboration adequately. Let me, then, summarize some points that Elbert advocates in his elaborative schema (1. We come to have subjective feelings that are aligned with the values favored by natural selection, (2. The value signals of which we are conscious are our feelings, (3. A value signal seems like a sort of mental force that tends to control the decision-making process.

Elbert concludes, "The picture of motives and conclusions painted here suggests a particular view of human nature. It implies that it is misleading to claim we are basically rational. Although we have a much higher ability to reason than other animals, reasoning does not control our everyday decisions. Typically we use reasoning as a tool to help us decide whether a proposed course of action would achieve what we want it to do. The basic goals do not result from the reasoning process. What really counts is whether potential choices are in harmony with our basic evolutionary values. Although our complicated thought processes may hide our fundamental motivations, subconscious mechanisms inherited from our animal ancestors motivate our behavior and determine our decisions.

"The conclusion that mechanisms within the brain determine our choices indicates a conflict between the picture of decision making given here and some common ideas about free will," says Elbert.

What about it, humanists, do you agree?