Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects. Lately, I've noticed an increasing tendency towards pragmamorphism, my name for the naïve materialism involved in attributing to humans the properties of inanimate things.
You'd think physicists would see everything in material terms, but it's biologists and neuroscientists who seem to gravitate to that view. Richard Dawkins, the biologist and evangelical atheist, wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the scientific "vandalism" involved in hanging Saddam Hussein: "His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research, a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars." Fellow neuroscientist Sam Harris argues for a scientific approach to moral questions, a contradictorily moral stance itself. Another neuroscientist, David Eagleman, wrote: "If we desire our medical treatments to be biologically informed, shouldn't we demand the same from our courtrooms?"
These remarks strike me as stunningly naïve. Dawkins understands little about human nature if he thinks we can avoid the creation of monsters by questioning Hitler or Stalin. Eagleman assumes that crimes are unambiguous, like illnesses. Doesn't he notice that illnesses are illdefined, that treatments go in and out of fashion?
Lobotomies are out; stomach banding is fatly in.
Physicists know that the apparent solidity of matter disguises the mystery that lies beneath. In 1944, Schrödinger, the father of the quantum-mechanical wave equation, summarised his personal views in his What is Life? lectures on the material basis of living matter: "My body functions as a fine mechanism according to the laws of nature. Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions...in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them."
He understood the conflict between scientists' ability to discover nature's mechanical laws and the autonomy that must lie beneath any attempt to discover them. He concluded: "Every conscious mind that has ever said 'I'...is the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the laws of nature."
The world is complex and you lose a lot by insisting things you don't understand already fit into the boxes you imagine you do.
Don't be pragmamorphic.
Emanuel Derman is co-head of risk management at Prisma Capital Partners and a professor at Columbia University. His book Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disasters on Wall Street and in Life (Free Press) is out on October 25
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
