Is Consciousness Just a Matter of Matter - Part 2

 

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(My discussion of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos continues from my last post. For readers' convenience, I am including the final paragraph from Part 1.)

To sum up:

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. (53) 

Cognition

Apart from the question of where our consciousness came from in the first place, Nagel raises the question of Cognition – our ability to reason and to discover the truth about the world around us. Granted that we have consciousness, it’s conceivable that we could have thoughts occur to our brains, but where would the ability come from to think thoughts that are true – i.e., that correspond to objective reality? In other words, if we assume that all our thoughts are at their base simply physical and chemical reactions, why should those thoughts caused by our brains have any basis in reality? 

We know that our senses are not fundamentally reliable. We often see or hear or feel things – or think we do – that are not there or are not what we think they are.  At a more fundamental level, what looks solid to our eyes, and feels solid to our touch, is mostly empty space (i.e., atoms are not solid material “balls” but mostly empty space). And how many thoughts and convictions that mankind has held for countless ages throughout its history have turned out to be quite false? For example, for thousands of years, beginning with the Mesopotamians and even into the modern world, people have been convinced that their lives were controlled or at least affected by the stars (astrology). For people like philosopher Daniel Dennett (a materialist and atheist), human beings seem to have an inherent proclivity (developed through evolution) toward belief in God and the supernatural. He would say that that idea (which he considers quite false – an illusion) may have been conducive to survival in times past (even though false), but today, with our knowledge of science, is no longer helpful – it is merely a relic from past evolution that we need to get rid of asap because it blinds us to the materialist atheist reality of the world. If that is true – if we really do have a proclivity toward belief in beings that don’t exist, what confidence can we have that our cognition regarding other things is not equally misguided – including such theories as evolution and materialism?  In particular, such basic forms of reasoning as logic and mathematics? Are those ideas any more true than belief in the divine? Evolution may be able to explain such basic mental abilities as are necessary to survive in the world (in order for our species to survive we must be able accurately to perceive that a lion really is chasing us!), but what about these more advanced and elevated types of reasoning as mathematics and science? Does a thorough understanding of atoms and the cosmos somehow give us a greater chance of survival? In any case, how much confidence can we have in any given theory or idea if our minds are no more than accidental products of a blind material process? Darwin himself once admitted in a private letter, "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."

Despite his conviction that mind and consciousness must have been present “at the beginning,” Nagel rejects the obvious explanation for this, namely the existence of a creator God. For one who is so inclined, it seems strange that he repeatedly avoids what seems to be the natural conclusion of his arguments: if mind and consciousness are unlikely to have originated from random combinations of chemicals, there must be an overarching Mind of some sort that brought it about. Yet Nagel insists that he does not have the “sense of divinity” that leads many people to “see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling.” Theism, he says, for him, is no more plausible than materialism. He is interested “in the territory between them.” (22) He seems to view the theory that there is some sort of Great Mind that is “outside the system” is a kind of cheating.  Instead, he prefers what he calls “monism” that tries to explain the system on its own terms, without bringing in an external deity or an external dualistic concept where “body” and “mind” are separate, or even incompatible, aspects of reality. Finally, he seems to feel that the great “problem of evil” in the world militates against the existence of God (i.e., if God is good and all-powerful, why does evil exist?).

So if mind has always been inherent in the world, but God is not the cause, where does he think our consciousness comes from? He refuses to be dogmatic in any way about his ideas in this regard, but he is strongly inclined to see some sort of inherent disposition in nature toward mind and consciousness, a disposition that materialists refuse to consider. He identifies this as a kind of “panpsychism,” meaning that “all the elements of the physical world are also mental.” In other words, “everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and non-physical.” Thus, consciousness and rationality did not need to be “invented” at some point in the past. All matter has “protopsychic” properties. His “mission” with this book appears to be an attempt to get scientists and others thinking along these lines and away from dogmatic materialism. He does not claim to have the final answer but believes he is on the right track, pointing ahead to the path that others should follow.

Most intriguing, for me, are his references to the idea of “teleology,” meaning that there is a “direction” to life, that the development of life (and consciousness) is somehow part of nature. I find this a stunning idea, because history shows that the abandonment of teleology was one of the fundamental shifts in human thought that accompanied the Scientific Revolution in and around the 17^th century. Aristotle – and Aristotelianism, which was the reigning authoritative philosophy of Europe up to the Renaissance and beyond – proclaimed that “goal” and “purpose” were an essential part of how the world worked. For the medieval Christian followers of Aristotle, this purposiveness was directly tied to God and God’s intents and purposes. But for Aristotle himself, who believed in a kind of deity but not in a personal god in the Christian sense, divinity did not have conscious “intentions,” but all things by nature had a purpose and goal of “becoming” something. The inherent purpose (goal, or telos in Greek) of an acorn is to become an oak tree, and so on, even though it has no conscious “intention” of becoming one.

This concept of teleology as something that is an aspect of nature was taken for granted throughout the medieval period, but was rejected with the rise of science, which chose to focus narrowly on mechanical aspects of nature – how an acorn becomes an oak tree rather than why. Thus it is quite stunning for Nagel to try to revive the notion of teleology in connection with science. He admits that such a way of accounting for life and consciousness may have “serious problems,” but again, he is attempting to split the difference between traditional science and traditional religion, and his solution is to argue that there must be some aspect inherent in nature that brings about life and consciousness, even without the existence of any conscious mind contributing to the process. “The tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the nonteleological laws of physics and chemistry. This seems like an admissible conjecture given the available evidence.” (124)

As a Latter-day Saint, I am intrigued by this thesis/conjecture. On the one hand I believe that there is definitely a place for an intentional, preexisting Mind (i.e., God) in the creation of this earth and its inhabitants. Furthermore, the simplest and most obvious reason that the appearance of life seems to be a miracle (as Francis Crick admitted, as well as Brian Silver, above) is that it is one. And the reason that both the origin and the development of life seems to be designed by an agent (as the evolutionists fully admit), is because it was so designed. On the other hand, Latter-day Saints do not conceive of a God who simply created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), purely in accordance with the dictates of his own mind. To some extent (and we don’t know enough to say to what extent), God was following preexisting law as well as logic in formulating the world. Certainly the moral laws of good and evil are eternal in their essence, and not only because God decreed them to be so. Again, we have not been given enough knowledge to understand how all this works, but Latter-day Saint theology asserts that although God is all-powerful, he must still work within the confines of “universal law.” So the idea of some kind of inherent bias in the cosmos toward life and consciousness is not farfetched, to my way of thinking. I would suggest that that concept is probably true (again, in some sense!), and that God’s role in creation is not to create everything (i.e., natural law) from scratch but to harness those natural forces in an organized way. Anyone who would like to pursue this question further, take a look at James McLachlan's recent article (2021) in BYU Studies Quarterly (see their website), "Is God Subject to or the Creator of Eternal Law?"

 

Is Consciousness just a matter of Matter?

 

The Believing Skeptic is back! (and hopefully will be for a while, barring further health and other issues . . .)

I recently read an intriguing book that at the time of its appearance was dubbed the most despised science book of 2012. What was the book? Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel.

Why was it so despised? You probably have a pretty good idea after reading the subtitle – probably no subject is more likely to raise the hackles of the scientific community than the questioning of evolution, Darwinism. And one naturally assumes that the author of such an argument is doubtless a blind religionist, probably an ignorant fundamentalist Christian, with either no proper understanding of science or (in the case of those few such doubters who are trained scientists) with a willful blindness to a scientific theory that is so well established that it is often referred to as a “fact.”

There is only one problem with such a characterization of the author in this particular case: Thomas Nagel is not only a respected philosophy professor at NYU but also an atheist.

Yet he argues in this book that Darwinism is false – or, as he declares in the subtitle with just a bit of his tongue in his cheek, almost certainly false.

In order to understand Nagel’s perspective, it is important to read the title carefully: he is not questioning the idea of biological evolution per se, but rather the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature. In other words, his beef with the widely accepted modern conception of the (neo-)Darwinian view of nature is its basis in the philosophy of materialism. Materialism is closely associated with science, but it is not a scientific theory that can be verified or falsified based on empirical observations. It is, rather, a philosophical or metaphysical belief that matter comprises all that exists—that is, that nothing exists that is not entirely composed of physical matter as we see it all around us. The corollary is that because the nature and behavior of matter is the province of science, science can tell us all there is to know about the world. Although materialists readily concede that there remains much to be learned, it is, in effect, only a matter of time before we will be able to explain everything. In other words, science is on the proper track to eventually discover everything there is to know about the world. The inverse of that is that there is nothing about the world that cannot ultimately be explained by physical science.

Nagel takes issue with this stance from the very beginning. “Intellectual humility,” he observes, "requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole” (p. 3). In other words, he says, time alone may not be enough. It’s quite possible that there are aspects of the world that are not reducible to material realities that can be measured and studied by science; we should be open to the possibility that science (at least as currently conceived) is not capable of understanding the world thoroughly and completely. 

I already addressed this concept in an earlier post, posing the question, is there any way that one can scientifically explain Cleopatra’s attractiveness? Is there any way to measure her appeal to men? Since she did not have a beautiful face, it cannot be reduced to a matter of bone structure or some such obvious feature. Rather, it is a matter of various intangible qualities she possessed—her “feminine appeal” for lack of a better term. Can such “femininity” be quantified, measured in a laboratory?  What was it about Marilyn Monroe that drove (drives?) men crazy? Surely it was a certain inexpressible something, or a variety of different “somethings” that are difficult even to identify, let alone measure. By the same token, there are many aspects of human existence for which the same is true. How to scientifically study love, friendship, joy? The eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it best:

The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

In other words, when it comes to understanding the inner experience of being human, science is helpless—that is, at least, science as it is currently conceived, based on the concept of materialism. That “inner experience” can be referred to as “consciousness.” For Nagel, consciousness is the wrench that jams the gears of biological science.

The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. But at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. (p. 8)

 This statement makes an important historical point about science that is rarely discussed and poorly understood. It is easy enough to make the valid claim that over the last couple of centuries science has a superb track record of success in understanding how the physical world (in its many aspects) works, and presenting “laws” of nature that can be harnessed by technology: the telephone, the airplane, the cell phone, the GPS, antibiotics,  to name only a few. However, it is an invalid inference from that record of success to then conclude that science provides the only “real” knowledge and that science comprehends (or eventually will comprehend, given enough time) all of reality. When modern science was first being “invented,” so to speak, in the 17^th century, one of the key realizations by theoreticians of the time—Galileo in particular—that “science” (referred to at that time as Natural Philosophy) should be limited to what could be observed with the senses and measured (e.g., size, shape, weight, number), while qualities like color, taste, touch and smell were too subjective and should be excluded from consideration.  The decision to limit scientific study to objective, measurable, physical aspects of the world has had very fruitful results. But the conscious choice to exclude mind and the subjective aspects of our existence from science does not mean that those aspects do not exist!

 Moreover, Nagel says:

The conflict between scientific naturalism and various forms of antireductionism is a staple of recent philosophy. On one side there is the hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology. On the other side there are doubts about whether the reality of such features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at the most basic level only of physical facts - facts, however sophisticated, of the kind revealed by the physical sciences. (13)

In other words, the basic question is, how will science ever be able to adequately deal with such “non-material” aspects of our lives as mind, consciousness, meaning and purpose—when those things were deliberately excluded from the parameters of science? Neuroscientists have been trying for decades to understand and explain how mind and consciousness are related to the physical brain. From a materialist perspective, the mind and human consciousness must be products of our physical brain. And yet, they do not yet have a clue as to how the brain produces our inner consciousness. [Alva Neo, a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at UC Berkeley puts it this way: “After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue. Even enthusiasts for the new neuroscience of consciousness admit that at present no one has any plausible explanation as to how experience—the feeling of the redness of red!—arises from the action of the brain. Despite all the technology and the animal experimentation, we are no closer now to grasping the neural basis of experience than we were a hundred years ago.”]

Nagel’s “guiding conviction,” as he puts it, “is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature.” Mind, in other words, did not simply magically appear or develop over time out of a world of simple matter in which mind did not exist, but in fact was somehow present from the beginning. Mind and consciousness are somehow woven into the basic reality of the world. The problem of the origin of mind and consciousness are similar to the problem of the origin of life. Where did life originally come from? How did it originate in a world of lifeless matter? Brian Silver, an Israeli chemist who accepted the materialist philosophy, put the problem thus:

I do not know the origin of life.  Those of us who hold, like I do, that life emerged spontaneously from inanimate matter are, we must admit, at a distinctly embarrassing disadvantage: we have not yet come up with a convincing mechanism for abiogenesis.  In his presidential address to the 1871 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin stated, “Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive.  This seems to be as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation.”  If he is right, which I doubt, then life must have been present in the universe for all past time.  Either that or we must turn to the finger of God in the Sistine Chapel, and indeed, after reading this chapter you may well conclude that is our only hope.”

Silver thus poses the possibility (which he nonetheless rejects) that life was “present in the universe for all past time.” Nagel takes this same approach toward mind—it must some how be inherent in the natural order from the beginning, inasmuch as life without mind cannot give birth to consciousness.

The question of consciousness is closely related to the classic mind-body problem—the puzzle about the relationship between our minds and our bodies. If the mind is somehow non-physical, then how does it relate to the body? If it entirely a physical phenomenon produced in or by the brain, why does it feel like there is a “me” inside my body, separate from my body, which controls, to a large degree, my body? The problem of course dates back at least to Descartes, who posited that Mind, our subjective awareness (what he called res cogitans) was separate and distinct from the objective world composed of matter.

But Nagel holds that the problem is not restricted to the place of mind in a given body, whether human or non-human. Rather, it “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history” (1). Why? Because the reigning paradigm of biology is a mechanistic one that takes the position that all biology is in its essence nothing but physics and chemistry, which he refers to as reductionism – i.e., the attitude that the fulness of life is in essence reduced to physics and chemistry. Nagel points out that there are at least legitimate doubts that such a paradigm is adequate to explain the origin and development of life, including the appearance, at some point in that development, of consciousness. He acknowledges that this position of doubt may seem outrageous to many people but that is only, he says, “because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.”(!) (7)

I must stress again that Nagel is not arguing in favor of a god of any sort. He is quite secular himself in his views. But he believes that the materialists have gone too far in avoiding the “taint” of anything that smacks of deity. He is surprisingly sympathetic to some of the arguments posed by such scientists as Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer, who are among the leading proponents of Intelligent Design theory. Nagel opines that even for those who do not believe in a Designer, “the problems these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met.”(10)

To sum up:

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. (53)

 [to be continued. . . ]