The Excitable Membrane

James starts his first chapter by giving us a clearer picture of his enemies. He first takes aim at the “spiritualists”, who hold the view of “scholasticism, and of common sense” that we’re something like ideal rational souls endowed with diverse mental faculties. Today we’re quite accustomed to speaking about “the faculty of memory”, or “the faculty of attention”, or whatever, but we mostly mean “faculty” in a way that James was not critiquing. We know that when we say ‘memory’, we’re talking about something finite and limited, and subject to the same constraints as a computer that needs to store data, fetch it, write to disk, etc, using real stuff out there in the world (silicon, copper, etc). Instead, James was expressing an impatience with the view of mental faculties as free-floating and ethereal: an ‘attention’ or a ‘memory’ that we have no need or duty to explain in mechanistic terms. I don’t doubt that James felt this acutely, but it’s a polemic that I suspect packed a lot more punch in the nineteenth century. Today, most of us are probably too impressed by Xanax, brain scans, and antidepressants to take the spiritualists (or at least James’ caricature of them) very seriously. 

The associationists – the second set of bad guys –  have a theory that’s more sophisticated, scientific, and baroque, but at the end of the day little better than the spiritualists, in James’ view. Associationism is really a kind of catch-all term for a lot of different theories that have an “empiricist friendly core”,  but it’s basically the appealing (to many) idea that our mental life is made up of lots of very simple ideas – atoms of thought – that are jostling around, and which get knit together in ever more complicated structures, through either statistical or deterministic rules. Think: “simple idea A preceded simple idea B, therefore, ideas A and B will come to be associated, such that the presentation of A alone will prime/ignite/kindle idea B.” It’s a fine principle, and one that’s alive and well in experimental neuroscience, but James seems to be taking issue with the folks who’ve built indefensibly elaborate models of mind using association. “This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, – whence do they get their fantastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do?” If I had to summarize the critiques James has raised about his antagonists, I would say that the spiritualists ask too few detailed questions, and the associationists have too many answers that are prematurely detailed. These are still the two main reasons why different groups of Neuroscientists get annoyed with each other. 

“This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, – whence do they get their fantastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do?”

William James, The Principles of Psychology

James finds the mind’s “failure-modes” interesting, and he sees these imperfections as important clues about what minds are really up to, and what sorts of principles our mental life are built out of. He’s a decidedly Darwinian thinker, and can’t resist the temptation to straw-man the spiritualists a bit: if mental faculties like memory are God-given and transcendent, then why do our memories get worse as we age? And why does memory change when we’re drugged or feverish? And why is our memory for something that happened a minute ago better than that of something that happened a week ago? “[t]he faculty does not exist absolutely,” James asserts, but rather “works under conditions; and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist’s most interesting task.” In other words, James’ Psychology will be an effort to square felt mental phenomena with the fact of evolution. When we want to know about thought’s characteristics, the first important question to ask is “under what conditions did it evolve?” 

I keep finding myself surprised by how much and how well James describes what many would consider the central tenet of modern Neuroscience: thoughts are brains in action, and brains are material objects that evolved under constraints, for the purpose of affording movement. He’s missing the key ingredient that all of this is handled by an unfathomably large and diverse community of single cells, but we can hardly fault him – the neuron vs. nerve-net controversy was still red hot and far from resolved in 1890, when James published ‘The Principles’. Another thing that really surprises me is how little what I’m reading resembles the caricature picture of James I got in graduate school. He’s certainly mined for his pithy one-liners about attention and memory, but he’s usually dispatched in the same breath as someone who put all his stock in introspection as a method of study. I think this is a really shallow read of James. He was way too smart and critical to think that introspection alone was going to yield a succession of lasting truths and treasures. Instead, I think he was just saying that what is available to introspection is a worthy object of study. And the fact that there is anything ‘available’ at all, that our inquiry can run in some inward direction is profound and mysterious, whatever its mechanical or chemical origins might be. If the contents of felt experience are hard to shoehorn into the scientific concepts of 1890 or even 2023, that’s just our tough shit, and all the more reason to keep working.