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
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
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