To the Editor:

Jeffrey Marsh’s critique of Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul [Books in Review, April], illustrates once again the seeming incapacity of certain gifted scientists like Crick and other members of the “touch-and-count” school to apprehend those intuitive aspects of behavior which cannot be quantified and which will not register on an MRI, on a CAT scan, or be calculated in grams or drams.

Harry Stack Sullivan in The Interpersonal Theory of Psychoanalysis expressed this difficulty with humorous frustration while trying to convey to interns the concept of empathy:

I have had a good deal of trouble at times with people of a certain type of educational history; since they cannot refer empathy to vision, hearing, or some other special sense receptor, and since they do not know whether it is transmitted by the ether waves or what not, they find it hard to accept the idea of empathy. . . . So although empathy may sound mysterious, remember that there is much that sounds mysterious in the universe, only you have got used to it; and perhaps you will get used to empathy.

Mr. Marsh’s review also points to a significant contradiction in Crick’s theory that free will is something “we think we have” because we do not yet have a complete understanding of the visual system, and that those of us who find “something inexplicable about man and his soul . . . are captives of a view ‘predetermined by a slavish adherence to religious dogma.’” . . .

I wonder whether Crick himself is not captive to a mechanistic teleology which precludes even the possibility of considering free will. For if, in essence, our thoughts, philosophies, and consequent actions are all controlled by genes, then there surely must be a gene which dictates that very thought itself. Thus, we say we have no free will because there is a gene which compels us to believe we have no free will. To pursue this kind of reasoning convinces me that Abraham Joshua Heschel was more correct than he realized when he said, “Man does not live by explanations alone.”

Francis Crick’s difficulty is characteristic of . . . behavioral psychology in that behavioral psychologists still, in the words of R. D. Laing, continue “to find the issues of consciousness and unconsciousness as two reified systems, both split from the totality of the person.” Laing sums it up concisely: “In a science of persons, . . . behavior is a function of experience; and both experience and behavior are always in relation to someone or something other than self.” That is something that the Cricks and Skinners, despite their brilliance, are not able to grasp.

Gerson Silverstein
Brooklyn, New York

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Jeffrey Marsh writes:

Gerson Silverstein oversimplifies Francis Crick’s picture of the human mind and his conception of free will. Crick would agree that behavior is in part a product of experience (otherwise people could not learn) and he does not believe that people’s specific thoughts and decisions are predetermined by genes or anything else. Crick does essentially regard free will as an illusion because he denies that human consciousness has any reality beyond the workings of the brain. But he would say that what a particular person will decide under particular circumstances is inherently unpredictable because there is a random element in the decision-making process, which evolution has selected as the best response mechanism to a complex and unpredictable world.

I assume Crick would not deny that empathy exists, but he would simply regard it as another aspect of mental activity that persists because those who possess it derive some advantage in the struggle to survive and reproduce successfully. That is the standard evolutionist explanation, which, as Mr. Silver-stein implies, cannot be falsified without going outside that particular mode of thought.