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. . . ]