Free-Floating Rationales

40. FREE-FLOATING RATIONALES

Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder; it “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The scare quotes are to remind us that natural selection doesn’t have a mind, doesn’t itself have reasons, but it is nevertheless competent to perform this “task” of design refinement. This is itself an instance of competence without comprehension. Let’s just be sure we know how to cash out the scare quotes. Consider a population with lots of variation in it. Some members of the population do well (at multiplying); most do not. In each case we can ask why. Why did this one have surviving offspring while these others did not? In many cases, most cases, there is no reason at all; it’s just dumb luck, good or bad. But if there is a subset, perhaps a very small one, of cases in which there is an answer, a difference that happens to make a difference, then what those cases have in common provides the germ of a reason. This permits functionality to accumulate by a process that blindly tracks reasons, creating things that have purposes but don’t need to know them. The Need to Know principle reigns in the biosphere, and natural selection itself doesn’t need to know what it’s doing.

So there were reasons before there were reason-representers. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of more than a few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort, strange immaterial ideas that have no business appearing in a sober materialist’s account of reality. Not at all. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. There were nine planets before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. It is a mistake to confuse numbers with the numerals (Arabic or Roman or whatever) that we use as their names. Numerals are human inventions; numbers are not. Reasons, in the sense I am using the term, are like numbers, not numerals. We should all be happy to speak of the reasons uncovered by evolution before they were ever expressed or represented by human investigators or any other minds. Consider the strikingly similar constructions in the figures in Chapter 43.

The termite castle and Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família are very similar in shape but utterly different in genesis and construction. There are reasons for the structures and shapes of the termite castle, but they are not represented by any of the termites. There is no Architect Termite who planned the structure, nor do any individual termites have the slightest clue about why they build the way they do. Competence without comprehension. There are also reasons for the structures and shapes of Gaudí’s masterpiece, but they are (in the main) Gaudí’s reasons. Gaudí had reasons for the shapes he ordered created; there are reasons for the shapes created by the termites, but the termites don’t have those reasons. There are reasons why trees spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees’ reasons. Sponges do things for reasons; bacteria do things for reasons; even viruses do things for reasons. But they don’t have the reasons; they don’t need to have the reasons.

There are reasons aplenty for these behaviors, but in general, organisms need not understand them. They are endowed with behaviors that are well designed by evolution, and they are the beneficiaries of these designs without needing to know about it. This feature is everywhere to be seen in nature, but it tends to be masked by our tendency, adopting the intentional stance, to interpret behavior as more mindful and rational than it really is. How clever the termites are to air-condition their castles with well-placed ventilation shafts! How sagacious the squirrel is to store away food for the winter! How wily the pickerel is to hover motionless as its prey approaches! These are indeed excellent strategies for success in the unrelentingly competitive world of nature, but their beneficiaries need not appreciate what we do when we figure them out. We are the first minds to represent the reasons that account for the success of these arrangements.