WHERE AND WHAT?
(A beginning)
INTRODUCTION:
My daughter, a very bright young woman,(a Med student), surprised me recently with a very good question: “Why and how are your ideas so very different from Churchland’s or Dennett’s?” she asked. “How do they explain consciousness?” It seems I had not answered the very questions that most concerned her. This caused me to consider the problem in a new and different light. Perhaps I have not answered your real concerns either. You see, I am coming at this problem from a different perspective than you are. I am working at the problem from the inside out, while you are trying to crack the maze of another’s (my) conception of an answer and evaluate it. I had, in fact, answered her questions, (mostly), further on in my book –beyond the “Mind: the Argument from Evolutionary Biology” and “Consciousness: a Simpler approach to the Mind-Body Problem”, (corresponding roughly to Chapters 1 and 2 of the book), which were as far as she had pursued my efforts.
But I had always intended these as preliminaries only –solid, scientific
conceptions which would justify and supplement my final answer. Let me
quote just a little bit from my manuscript as relevant to the point.
Along about page 75 or so, I made a crucial declaration –i.e. that
my book up to that point was in the form of a constructive reductio ad
absurdum of the ordinary scientific view of what it is that really
exists. I never considered my tactic underhanded or sneaky however
–it took Dennett about 200 pages or so to make a very comparable
declaration –i.e. that he concludes “we are all zombies”,
(robots)! Moreover he even had the nerve to chide his readers that “it
would be most unfair to quote this statement out of context.” (His
actual context never really modified the force and import of the statement
however.) I do not believe we are zombies and I make no such demand for
secrecy moreover –it just takes time to prepare the groundwork for an
assertion.
The
Mind:Body Problem: a Crucial
Turning Point
A
reductio ad absurdum argument, as you undoubtedly know, is a very fundamental
form of argument in mathematics or in logic wherein we tentatively assume the
truth of some premise and then show that under that assumption ridiculous
consequences necessarily follow. Many famous and important proofs are in
this form, (e.g. that the square root of the number two is an irrational
number, or Einstein’s classic argument against simultaneity). My
arguments are not against biology or physics per se however, nor against
our ordinary scientific way of looking at the world. But they are against
the very definite metaphysical assumptions, (assumptions about the real,
real world), which underlie them. The critical revision of these
assumptions, I believe, is the keyway to a plausible solution of the mind-brain
problem. Let me quote a little bit from my book –it is a reasonable
lead-in to the actual problem. Listen very carefully.
“A
crucial turning point in my argument:
“9.
This, (Chapters 1 and 2), I maintain, constitutes the final physical answer to
the mind-body problem. Working scientists can accept this answer as
complete, (and the problem as solved), if they like and dismiss any further
questions. But inherent in my thesis as well is the assertion that our
objects are not representative and informational. To believe that
they could still remain so becomes, (under my thesis), equivalent to a
hypothesis of "divine harmony", (possible but implausible).
This, (right here then), is a crucial turning point in my argument. I hereby
reorient the whole of my argument up to this point and declare it as a reductio ad absurdum of ordinary Naturalism,
(dogmatic, eliminative materialism). By this, I most definitely do not
reject the relationality of Naturalism or of Naturalist science –that
would be impossible. But I do maintain that I have demonstrated the
implausibility of absolute reference and absolute
information. The next chapters will elaborate this point explicitly and
invoke a variation of Cassirer’s scientific epistemological relativism,
which preserves Naturalist science in a deeper realism. The answer lies
in a new Theory of Relativity. The
argument up to this point has been in the demonstration of counterexamples for
the brain and the mind, -significantly better counterexamples I think-
which fit the presumptions of Naturalism and the facts of the problem as seen
from the Naturalist perspective [itself].”
Why have I bothered then? What is the significance of these
initial theses? It is a crucial question. It is because the
scientific relativism I will eventually espouse and the science of mind itself
will demand them. This relativism will be an explicitly scientific -and
not a laissez faire, (“politically correct”), relativism that I
will urge however. Einstein’s totally rigid equations,
(transformations), of special relativity are a reasonable example of my import.
The subject of “Ideals” in the pure mathematics of Modern Algebra
is another, purer instance. Each of these demonstrates the relativity of
perspectives while still preserving substance! This scientific
epistemological relativism, closely interleaved with the notion of metaphysical
indeterminacy is, I maintain, the keyway to the mind-body problem. It
allows the locus of the actual problem to move from deductive logic into
intentional logic and belief. The latter, I believe, is the only consistent
perspective for a biological organism -i.e. one of strategies based in
experience, not one of knowledge.
But what is it that we believe in? As realists, we
believe in some external real world. We also believe that our belief
systems, (i.e. our naive world, and the world of physics, for example)
-actually work. That is, that our predictions have a valid basis and a
high expectancy of fullfillment! But to further
say that they work because they are accurate descriptions of reality is more
than we need. They work because they embody viable strategies!
I really don’t know how
to start this paper. It is very hard to know where to start on
this problem. It is the most critical step for what I believe is a
true understanding of consciousness, but it involves a delicacy and insight
both on your part and mine. It will be hard for you and it will be hard
for me. We must thread the eye of the smallest needle in existence and
come out whole on the other side. It requires a
boldness on your part and on mine and will not be lucid for many.
I have said this is a thesis for the young and I think that is true. I
think it is a thesis for the very bright young! It involves a
"gymnastic" performance that would rate at least a 9.8 at the olympics, but the
"rings" are logical ones. The current proposals would rate at
best a 7.0, (they take too many steps on landing.)
I must presume that you, like
my daughter, have read my previous papers on my web site: “Mind: the Argument from
Evolutionary Biology”, (hereinafter “Biology”), and
“Consciousness: a
Simpler Approach to the Mind-Brain Problem”, (hereinafter
“Hilbert”). If you haven’t come here by way of them, I must
insist you go back and do so if you intend to follow my
reasoning. They will be considered necessary prerequisites to
this paper and they are as good as I can make them. I will not repeat
them here.
Why is the mind-brain problem
so difficult? Why cannot all the king’s horses and all the
king’s men put them together again? How can this much brainpower
and this much resource over this much time fail to make any even credible
progress on the basic problem? (AKA: Why are you here reading
this?). Dualism is a non-answer. It throws away science and
substitutes mysticism. Materialistic emergence, on the other hand,
is a blatant contradiction in terms. It proposes that spatially and temporally
discrete process can so complicate that they are no longer separable.
But the central place these ideas have in our conceptions of mind prove that
epistemology, per se, is a central issue -if not the central
issue in our considerations of the mind and the brain.
The answer lies in what you
are willing to believe is important. I think you are willing to believe
that physics, biology, and chemistry are relevant and fundamental to the
mind-brain problem, but I think you are not willing to believe that
epistemology, (the science of "knowing" itself), could have an equal
or even a prior place in the issue. (The word even sounds
bad!) Nor, I think, are you willing to believe that it could stand as a
necessary or genuine science, (though Kant thought otherwise). I think
you demand a simplistic epistemology, (to replace the one you probably
already have), to underlay sciences, (physics, biology), which are no longer
simplistic in nature and haven't been for almost a hundred years.
But epistemology is central
to the problem of mind. It is perhaps more central than even physics or
biology. Mind is about knowing, after all. What we do
know is a subset of what we actually can know and the latter is the very
definition of “epistemology”. To solve this mother of all
problems, we must take the foundations of epistemology just as seriously and
just as scientifically as we take the foundations of physics or biology.
We must take epistemology as a real thing!
I propose that epistemology
must be taken to the same level to which physics was ultimately forced. I
propose that it must be taken to a genuine and absolute relativism which
will supplement and reflect the relativity of the purely physical
sciences! Biology, in fact, demands it! But a relativity for mind
must be a relativity of “knowing” itself. Modern biology
shows that physical, biological systems are divorced from
“knowing”; they are totally dedicated to “doing”.
Maturana makes the case beautifully, and he is strongly corroborated in the
work of Edelman and Freeman.
Does this mean we must totally
abandon ontological assertions then –i.e. beliefs about the absolute
world? No, but it does mean we must abandon the arrogance of ontological
“knowing” or even the possibility of knowing!
So how then can we even
approach this subject of “knowing”? We must reverse our
perspective from “outside in”, (information), to “inside
out”, (organic necessity). The aforementioned biologists conclude that
the essence of mind is ultimately intentional -reflecting organic process and
necessity, not representation. I have proposed an alternative to
representation, compatible with ordinary biology, (“Mind: the
Argument from Evolutionary Biology”). A comparable
relativistic, indeterminant conclusion has long since been reached in physics,
(Einstein, Bohr). How then is it possible that our own science of mind
can flippantly reject such conclusions out of hand? For the science of
mind, however, it is an even more profound shift of perspective than it is for
physics as it must reflect the very instrument we use in knowing itself.
Like all real relativity, it must take into account the perspective of the
viewer himself. It is this step which allows the first actual solution to
the mind-brain problem. How and why it is possible is the subject of this paper.
Describing the history of
physics, Cassirer might have been describing our present dilemma:
"A glance at the history
of physics shows that precisely its most weighty and
fundamental achievements stand in closest connection with considerations of a
general epistemological nature. Galileo's 'Dialogues on the Two Systems
of the World' are filled with such considerations and his Aristotelian
opponents could urge against Gallilei that he had devoted more years to
the study of philosophy than months to the study of physics.
…” (my emphasis) “..
Or, citing Van Fraassen:
"Scientism, [Dogmatic Materialism], is also essentially negative; it
denies reality to what it does not countenance. [My emphasis] Its
world is as chock-full as an egg; it has room for nothing else." (Van
Fraassen, 1991)
One last quote before we
start: It comes from Kant on the difficulty of our specific problem and talks
specifically about the difficulty of language itself in a science of cognition:
"If in a new
science which is wholly isolated and unique in its kind, we started with the
prejudice that we can judge of things by means of alleged knowledge previously
acquired -though this is precisely what has first to be called in question -we
should only fancy we saw everywhere what we had already known, because the
expressions have a similar sound. But everything would appear utterly metamorphosed,
senseless, and unintelligible, because we should have as a foundation our own
thoughts, made by long habit a second nature, instead of the
author's." (Kant, Prolegomena, p.10)
This is a start I have made on this paper. If I have piqued your
interest, the whole of the argument may be found in my book as Chapters 3, 4
and 5.