Kekulé Problem Revisited

You will solve problems you never thought you thought about.

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”

~Cormac McCarthy in “The Kekulé Problem”

There are influential persons among us—of whom a bit more a bit later—who claim to believe that language is a totally evolutionary process. That it has somehow appeared in the brain in a primitive form and then grown to usefulness. Somewhat like vision, perhaps. But vision we now know is traceable to perhaps as many as a dozen quite independent evolutionary histories. Tempting material for the teleologists. These stories apparently begin with a crude organ capable of perceiving light where any occlusion could well suggest a predator. Which actually makes it an excellent scenario for Darwinian selection. It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know. But all indications are that language has appeared only once and in one species only. Among whom it then spread with considerable speed.

~Cormac McCarthy in “The Kekulé Problem”

The spontaneous eureka moment is a clichéd trope from the historiography of scientific progress. It’s generally understood that most of these moments are fictionalized for the very purpose of dramatizing a moment of insight: Archimedes’ tub, Newton’s falling apple, Fleming’s open petri dish, etc. These are great stories. We need great stories for instruction, inspiration, and coordination. But stories aren’t the same thing as reality. Let us never confuse these.

The less glamorous, more realistic yet still imperfect account of scientific progress is that there are lots of ideas in circulation that scientists can select from and mix together as needed to account for trends that emerge from systematic or serendipitous observation. After a model of a particular phenomenon is developed, something that is usually the product of many minds over time and catalyzed by a propitious confluence of social and material factors, it is then demonstrated to have validity, typically through prediction or technological development. And in this way, the ratchet of scientific progress keeps turning.

However, it is hard to entirely dismiss the brilliant force of intuition. Most have the experience of a Sisyphean struggle with a particular mental puzzle, only to walk away from it for a while and suddenly be struck by the answer. An invisible and beneficent Wile E. Coyote seems to be stalking our thoughts on a high wire. But how does this actually work? Presumably, unconscious processes in our brain solved the problem that our conscious mind could not and then somehow surfaced that solution for our consciousness using some unknown mechanism, though some believe visceral metaphors and images are its preferred medium. It seems that the unconscious brain is remarkably efficient, though temperamental, when it comes to manipulating symbols without declaring its activity, though when it wants to declare itself, its avenues for doing so appear indirect by design. So, huh, what’s going on here?

The Kekulé Problem

At least, this is how Cormac McCarthy in his sole work of nonfiction describes the Kekulé Problem. The eponymous locution he coined derives from the chemist August Kekulé, who claimed that a dream about a snake coiled upon itself, the ouroboros, helped him understand that the chemical structure of benzene was ringed. McCarthy believes examples of unconscious insight like this raise fundamental questions about the origins of the unconscious and what language is, especially the relationship between the two. Why doesn’t our unconscious with a solution in hand simply provide us (our conscious brain) the answer in plain language? Why would it default to an image in a dream?

McCarthy’s explanation basically comes to "bad habits die hard," meaning the unconscious is a brain thingy that’s been there way longer— part of all animals—than we’ve been here with our consciousness and system of symbols, language.¹ He also goes on to argue there are a lot of features of language that indicate it’s not really a natural thing. It is at a remove from our biology, only feeding back into our biology at a great cost after colonizing us.² He extends this point by analogizing the spread of language in ancient human populations to parasitism rather than something that gradually emerged piecemeal like other adaptations.³ McCarthy immediately dismisses the slow convergence of vocalization, symbolic representation, and grammar into language as a normal but powerful biological and social process because it doesn’t appear in any other species. Of course, there are other adaptations besides language that are more or less the sole purview of our species too: our obligate bipedalism, our brain-to-body size ratio, our long childhoods, etc.⁴

Is McCarthy Right About the Kekulé’s Problem?

To review, McCarthy conceptualizes the unconscious processes in the human brain as a unitary and ancient biological system that has been shaped by evolution into an all-purpose problem-solving apparatus. He even calls it “a machine for operating an animal.⁵” Contrastingly, he conceptualizes language as an invented module, a product of conscious thought, that became so important it immediately became ubiquitous and then was backdoored into our biology over time but imperfectly so.⁶ His timeline on this is somewhere between two million and one hundred thousand years, though he prefers the shorter timeline.

These distinct evolutionary histories and the somewhat non-biological character of language impairs direct communication between conscious and unconscious mind. The workaround is that the unconscious, due to some unknown impetus (McCarthy defaults to “moral compulsion” and immediately undercuts it in an aside just like this), uses metaphor and images when conscious processes are quieter or shutdown, like dreaming, in order to communicate. So numinous of it.

This explanation is compelling in a lot of ways because it merges an antediluvian mysticism with a streamlined view of our evolutionary history that at least superficially lines up with some important mile markers. However, I see a couple issues.

My first gripe is with McCarthy’s somewhat Freudian conception of the unconscious. It’s not a unitary thing. We have plenty of neuroscience to back this up. And virtually all of brain activity is unconscious. It’s not hidden away. It’s the neural origins of consciousness that are the greater mystery, and even then the “hard problem” itself may be a bit invented...

McCarthy doesn’t venture a theory of consciousness in his essay, accepting it as is phenomenologically and operationalizing it only as language. The other issue embedded here is that conscious thought doesn’t have to use language either (i.e. mentalese), which has been popularly demonstrated by psycholinguists like Steven Pinker.⁷ We need language because we need communicate clearly about complex subjects with other people. We are a social species after all, and the intensity and capacity of our sociality is itself biologically distinct.

My second gripe concerns McCarthy’s false framing of some human capacities as being biological and others as non-biological. Everything we are, everything we can be, and everything we do is in some way informed, enabled, or constrained by our biology. There is no escape. All our behavior is under evolutionarily review even if its but a dim projection of the genome, the only substrate on which evolution can ultimately act. In my frame, language has clearly added to human fitness. It’s rudiments have origins in deep biology. It is something we acquire via socialization like many behaviors and forms of knowledge and probably required reciprocal interaction between our biology and the human culture that has organically emerged from socialization under different conditions over time. But our biology anticipates that we will acquire language (something McCarthy does acknowledge but doesn’t entirely reckon with), which is why children pick up language so easily and why, when this critical developmental period has passed, full language acquisition has been lost.⁸

McCarthy is right to plumb the mysterious depths of conscious and unconscious processes. He does so with an unadorned philosophical profundity that speaks to a brilliant mind. He is right to wonder about how something as seeming arbitrary and abstract as language came to be and how it could possibly be part of our evolved biology. However, along these lines of thought, language itself has become a trap. It pushed him toward a conception of distinct and diverse neural processes as a unified entity, quite a literary turn there, and it induced him to draw a hard line between the biology that occurs within an individual and the extended biology shared by a population of social animals, quite a reductionist turn there. Nonetheless, “The Kekulé Problem” is a thought-provoking essay that more or less makes a defensible argument for the origins of language and the mysterious powers of the unconscious that have taken others many thousands of words more to make.

Related Reading at Holodoxa

• Homo Largiloquus

• Phonemes and Genes

Source

• The Kekulé Problem

1. His phrasing verbatim is: “The unconscious is just not used to giving verbal instructions and is not happy doing so. Habits of two million years duration are hard to break.”

2. The “great cost” I’m referring to is the risk of choking. Here’s McCarthy’s wording:

The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously. The immediate problem would seem to have been that there were more things to name than sounds to name them with. Language appears to have originated in southwestern Africa and it may even be that the clicks in the Khoisan languages—to include Sandawe and Hadza—are an atavistic remnant of addressing this need for a greater variety of sounds. The vocal problems were eventually handled evolutionarily—and apparently in fairly short order—by turning our throat over largely to the manufacture of speech. Not without cost, as it turns out. The larynx has moved down in the throat in such a way as to make us as a species highly vulnerable to choking on our food—a not uncommon cause of death. It’s also left us as the only mammal incapable of swallowing and vocalizing at the same time.

3. If reader’s will recall, this is exactly how Madeleine Beekman described the evolution of language in here recent book The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why. McCarthy also makes similar observations about children and pidgin languages. However, in my review of Beekman’s book, I highlight some of the limitation of such a model.

4. Of course, there is much to debate about these things too.

5. This view is very much consistent with his type of godless Calvinism.

6. This model shows some similarity to the switch flip argument for language acquisition that was forwarded by Noam Chomsky, though Chomsky believes it the switch being flipped is a biological one. Many have pointed to the human version of FOXP2 as this switch, but this is controversial, and, for geneticists, clearly cannot be an account of the architecture of a trait or rather an ability like language.

7. Here, I’m referring to Pinker’s books on language and thought:

8. Arguably, the importance of childhood to language acquisition can be played in an adaptionist or spandrel frame. My review of Beekman’s book explores this in a little more depth.