For many people,
philosophy is a swamp, a madhouse, an ear-splitting cave filled with pointless,
hair-splitting, logic-chopping argumentation.
That may be true, but periodically we all find ourselves falling into that
swamp, that madhouse, that cave. In the early days of computers, digital technology
lured us in, asking us to ponder whether robots will one day look us in the eye
with human-like intelligence. Much hair-splitting and argumentation ensued, with
no clear results. Today the philosophical abyss opens again, thanks to sweeping
claims made by neuroscience, which believes it has found the answers to some
big questions. Does a mind exist or only a brain? What exactly is our inner
life, our consciousness? Where does consciousness take place? How can something
immaterial make connections with the material body? Is there any reality to the
self, the ego, our feeling that we are the agents of our own actions? With recent
discoveries about how our thoughts and actions depend on the brain, how can we
believe that we have free will? Most of these questions go back many hundreds
of years, and the philosophers who took them on, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant,
Russell, and others disagreed with each other in a thousand ways. Perhaps we are
nearing a day now when science will provide the final answers.
In her clear and concise
monograph, Consciousness : a very short introduction, psychologist Susan
J. Blackmore outlines the scientific findings on consciousness. The experiments
and case studies she presents are entertaining and thought-provoking, as they seek
evidence in dreaming, synaesthesia, multiple personalities, ouijah boards,
out-of-body and near-death experiences, animal consciousness, and so on. Even
ordinary experiences seem to yield insights. For example, since people can
commute to or from work for half an hour or more and have no memory of doing
it, they must have somehow been conscious to navigate and obey traffic signals.
Yet it’s not a normal sort of consciousness that leaves no trace in memory immediately
afterwards. In the 1960s one of the most startling discoveries was made when
brains were scanned of subjects performing very simple physical operations,
such as moving an arm. Parts of the brain associated with preparing for
physical movement were found to be activated a full half-second before the
conscious subject thought they had decided to move the arm. This raised grave
doubts as to whether we are really agents of our own actions, whether the self
exists, and whether we have free will.
Dubious Conclusions
Philosophical questions
are ubiquitous in Blackmore’s account. Again and again as she describes what
science says about consciousness, she bumps into the problem of explaining the
connection between what scientists observe from the outside and what we as
individuals experience from the inside, and she admits repeatedly that she
cannot give an answer. She uncovers indications that seem to undermine the
common sense view but never quite gets to proofs. To cover the gap she invokes
future discoveries—coming ”soon,” she says—when our technologies will be more
advanced. Perhaps we will even discover the elusive “neural correlates of
consciousness.” In the meantime, however, Blackmore does not bind herself to the
evidence at hand, instead deeming the preliminary indications to be, likely,
the whole truth. This leads to some peculiar theses. The mind, she believes,
that is, the self, the entire mental world, is an illusion, and we ought to live
dutifully keeping in mind that it is all an illusion: “This is tough, but I
think it gets easier with practice,” she says, without offering any tips on how
it is to be done. Free will is also an illusion, according to Blackmore, but,
since studies have shown that rejecting belief in free will increases one’s
tendency to depression, we should live “as if” we believe in free will. Her
book is an excellent introduction to the science of consciousness, but when it addresses
ancient philosophical questions, it founders badly.
A Critique of
Neurocentrism
In the recently
published I Am Not A Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century
German philosopher Markus Gabriel takes the philosophical questions head-on in
a multi-pronged attack on what he calls “neurocentrism,” the blurring, even the
identification, of mind and brain. The claims of today’s neuroscientists and
psychologists, he believes, are riddled with omissions, incoherence, and bad
logic. In a book sometimes dense with argument, sometimes light and spacious,
making its points with references to Fargo and Doctor Who almost
as often as Kant and Hegel, Gabriel subjects the pillars of
neurocentrism to close scrutiny, picking away at their logic, exposing their
presumptions, and investigating alternative explanations.
One of the most powerful
images driving us toward the neurocentric, materialistic view is that of a
machine-like universe consisting of nothing but particles and energy, all
locked into a chain of causality stretching from the beginning of the universe
until its end. Because our brains belong to that realm, and because the brain is
the originator, apparently, of all thought, it is argued that we are mere
automata (as are all other conscious creatures), our entire mental world
functioning beyond our control, inescapable and foreordained. Gabriel attempts
to weaken the force of that image, pointing out, for example, that the current
state of physics is not a closed, finished system: it cannot yet integrate
gravity with quantum mechanics, it has no account of dark matter and dark
energy, and causality seems vitiated by probabilities. However, he accepts the validity
of determinism—as applied to the world of matter. Taking it further, though, is,
he says, to over-extend one model of explanation over the entire cosmos.
The World Does Not Exist
Gabriel’s most unusual
argument was presented at length in a previous book (and TEDTalk) entitled Why
the World Does Not Exist. It is not possible, he believes, to step outside
everything that exists, comprehend it all at once in a God-like glance, and
thus see both the entire contents and the absolute limits of “the world” or
“the universe.” That’s what materialists think they have done when they declare
that only matter and energy exist. But why only matter and energy? Do numbers
not exist? The rules of logic? How about facts? Or the Federal Republic of
Germany, Hamlet (the play, not the physical words printed on the page),
relationships, democracy, love? Gabriel contends that it is a mistake to assert
that everything that exists belongs to a single class and that everything that
exists cannot be comprehended in a single frame of reference. Instead, he wants
us to accept a countless number of what he calls “fields of sense,” so that,
just as it is meaningful and true to say that chairs and rainbows exist, in
other fields of sense it can be meaningful and true to say that principles
exist, or friendship or even Ebenezer Scrooge. Of course, Gabriel’s main
interest in this argument is to clear the way for the mind and its cognates to
be recognized as existing just as surely as atoms.
A chapter is devoted to each of consciousness, self-consciousness, the self, and freedom,
as he both deals with various reductionist views of the mind and develops his
own position, which he calls New Realism. Much of it is the common sense view
of the mind — that it is real (although not a mysterious ‘substance’ and not
existing apart from the brain); the true originator of many, but not all, of
our actions; and operating with free will, even as it is subject to unconscious
processes. He offers a tricky notion, though, for the defining function of the
mind, which he takes to be its ability to think creatively about itself, ceaselessly
to form conceptions of itself. At least part of what this means is our ability to
imagine our own identities, as a Christian, for example, or a German, a
patriot, a gift to the opposite sex (the mind can make errors about itself, of
course) or a plaything of fate. This feature he takes to be absolutely crucial:
“The human mind does not have a reality that is independent of its self-images.”
Because a self-image has consequences in action and engenders a multiplicity of
further thoughts, Gabriel believes it is important to push back against neurocentrism’s
false image of the mind as illusory and unfree.
Here and there Gabriel raps
the knuckles of some incidental figures, such as Richard Dawkins for his thesis
that the human is no more than an elaborate biological mechanism devoted to the
single purpose of passing on genes, Freud for his idea that the mind is
enslaved to the libido, and Silicon Valley types who anticipate cyborgs and a
future when an individual’s human experience can be uploaded to a computer, a
network, or a USB stick. “Darwinitis” comes under fire for invoking a remote,
mythical past to explain concepts such as egoism, altruism, good, and evil in
terms of the struggle for survival and genetic transmission rather than
accepting the historical development of these concepts, already so well
documented in culture.
The Other Sciences of
the Mind
“Nothing is more human
than the wish to deny one’s humanity,” wrote philosopher Stanley Cavell. Again
and again Gabriel sees attempts to reduce our humanity to something other than,
and always less than, human. The German word for the humanities, he points out,
Geisteswissenschaften, means “sciences of the mind” and consists of
subjects such as philosophy, history, musicology, linguistics, and theatre
studies. There, he thinks, is where we learn the most about the human mind.
Neuroscience undoubtedly helps us understand the biological phenomena without
which, of course, there is no mental life. But it has not proven that we are
identical with our brains or provided satisfactory explanations of mental phenomena.
More important, it seems unlikely ever to provide the level of insight into
ourselves that we find beyond the sciences in figures like Sophocles, de
Tocqueville, Proust, or Niebuhr.
I Am Not A Brain could be much better focused. As it shifts from topic to topic, the connections can be fuzzy, sometimes leaving the feeling of a miscellany, as if portions were patched together from notebooks. Nevertheless, it is very stimulating, invites repeated readings, and provokes hours of reflection. Written with the lay reader in mind without sacrificing intellectual rigour, it offers a bracing reminder to keep our guard up against, not neuroscience itself, but its philosophical pretensions.
