Shucks, it’s hard to be a materialist!
I have these two smart, atheistic, science-respecting-type friends. Their respect for science falls short of any active pursuit of the subject. Each one can enjoy a good documentary that bashes creationism or socially conservative evangelism- such low-hanging forbidden fruit!- but the interest ends about there. Still, I think of them both as rational, generally skeptical thinkers.
My intellectual pursuits run more to the science side than do theirs. I’m only a lowly social sciences buff, with a truly shaky grasp of the “hard” stuff, but I have taken enough courses in research methods and statistics to understand much of the philosophy of science. I often have to represent science to these smart but humanities-focused friends.
Image by GaetanLee at Flickr (creative commons)
I can’t remember how materialism came up between the three of us, exactly. I remember attempting to stumble my way through a question about social cognitive neuroscience, and the fact that some criticize the field as nothing but “gee-whiz, lookit what lit up right there!” I said that it comes as no surprise that a real-life mental process has visible, biological trappings.
Or maybe it came up when discussing the classic battle of therapy versus medication for depression. I told my friends that major depression probably always involves real, observable changes in serotonin or other neurtransmitters. I said that this doesn’t prove that medicine is the answer in all cases. Maybe a depressing situation can push a distressed person into having the chemical trappings of depression. Therapy that cheers a person up could cause the chemical problem itself to recede.
For some reason, my rational friends struggled with the marriage of the mental and the chemical. How strange, how eerie it was that every mental process has a biological sign, they said.
I shrugged at this and set my sarcasm level to stun. “Well of course it’s biological,” I moaned, “If you’re a materialist, this shouldn’t surprise you.”
They blanched. What did I mean?
Like any good secular scientist, I said, a materialist holds that all of the mind’s processes can be explained as the sum of its parts. The magical sensation of self-awareness must just arise naturally out of the brain’s many inner workings.
These smart friends thought that the concept was a little alarming, and hard to imagine. I felt like show-boating, forcing them to admit that the human mind was not “special” in any way. Their disbelief obviously had its roots in some reverence for the mental as inorganic. Maybe it was part of being a special “human being” instead of an animal.
I told them that if we built a perfectly functioning model of a brain, if we really reverse-engineered a brain that worked just like ours, it should have all the awareness of a real brain. Thoughts, imagination, self-identity, all of it should arise from the gears and grease. “If you are a materialist, you have to believe that, ” I pushed.
My atheistic friends had to admit that they probably were not materialists.
“I don’t think I believe that,” one protested. His main complaint was simply that the human mind couldn’t possibly consist of just chemicals and hardware, and nothing else. It didn’t seem right.
“We don’t know that much about the brain,” the other said. My understanding is that he is right- modern neuroscience still has great depths to explore. But I told him that this shortcoming of science is mostly a shortcoming of time and technology- that we can know more, and will in the future. I told him that this complaint was irrelevant, and that limited tools should not push us to invoke something supernatural.
These two who do not believe in gods or ghouls chose instead to believe that there is a ghost in the machine. As far as I could tell, this belief rested on the inability they both had to imagine that the brain is purely physical. It’s a textbook example of an argument from ignorance, or perhaps an argument from personal incredulity. It utterly flabbergasted me to hear them express such silliness.
“If you don’t think the mind is physical, where does the mind come from?” I pushed. They didn’t know. “It has to be supernatural,” I reminded. “You two are believing in the supernatural just because you can’t believe that self-awareness comes from the physical brain?”
I think they realized how senseless this all seemed. They know the foolishness in invoking a god to fill their gaps. But they just couldn’t shake that sensation that our human experience, rife with unique thoughts and complex emotions, couldn’t just come from scratch.
I wonder how many other casually freethinking individuals would grapple with this same topic. How many people, if pressed, would agree that a fake, functioning model of a brain should have all the mental processes of a real “human being”? And how many, disturbed by the lack of reverence for the wonderful human mind, would balk?
Philosopher of Neuroscience Patricia Churchland has worked all her life to warn us of the seductive power of the “argument from ignorance,” which is widely applied to neuroscientific phenomena such as consciousness:
I’m absolutely convinced that all of us believe things we can’t prove (e.g., free will, which dovetails with your topic, Erika). Why do we all believe (really truly believe) in things we can’t prove? I am also reminded of Nietzsche’s repeated argument (I know that he made this in his book, The Gay Science) that it’s often not a matter of what is “true,” but rather of how much truth you can withstand. It might also be a matter of how much we are prepared to understand. I’ll refer again to Pat Churchland (from a 2/12/07 New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar entitled “Two Heads”:
The deep realization that human beings are robots, even gooey, living robots that constitute complex adaptive systems, is a nightmare to many people, even to many deep-thinking self-critical people. To me, the evidence seems to point to the lack of a supernatural mind/soul, so I provisionally assume that the mind is the brain-doing-its-thing, which means that the mind is “merely” the exquisitely complex brain interconnecting thoroughly with its resident body, and out beyond skin and skull into the environment. This is not a terrifying thought to me, but it horrifies most people.
I’m starting to wonder whether we are all pretty well set with an aesthetic for what we are capable of accepting as true. Just like I can’t imagine ever liking fruit cake, there are many people for whom the soul-less body is, and will always be, a wretched nightmare.
Will your acquaintances ever become comfortable with the idea of thinking meat? Not likely. But maybe you could help pave the way for them with a new metaphor for what the brain is like.
One other thing. This post also complements Hank’s post on muffins.
I agree with you Erika but feel for your friends.
A mystery I can’t wrap my head around is why *my* consciousness occupies this body at this point in time. I have no idea what the answer is or even how to approach answering it. On the hand “I don’t know” is a perfectly good answer.
I note that I have no evidence that my awareness has any independence of my physical being. For instance I have been knocked out a few times in my life. I recall events up to being knocked out and immediately after but none of the time between. Why would a traumatized brain disable an independent spirit?
On free will as mentioned by Erich, of course we have it. Managing our lives requires managing our choices using our intellects and values. Not to do so is not an option (consider painting your car windows black if you feel your fate is predetermined independent of your choices).
The observation that your choices might be predictable by someone with infinite information on the situation including your state of mind, values, beliefs and smarts is interesting but irrelevant.
Pat: Your example is elegant and convincing. If indeed, your consciousness wasn’t the work of your brain–if a non-material “soul” was responsible for your consciousness–why would you become unconscious just because your brain got injured? And why, if it isn’t the result of your brain, is your mind stuck with YOUR body? How is it, for example, that I don’t sometimes wake up as Karl, walk into his classroom and teach his kids some disciplined science?
I will someday have more to say about free will, which was an unfortunate example here because it is so riddled with definitional ambiguities.
We may not know everything - but we’re learning more every day.
Recent studies have included the specific mechanisms for learning (reported in Sciam among others) based on activity in the hippocampus and amygdala.
We know that depression is not serotonin deficiency, but is due to shrinkage (the mechanism for shrinkage is under investigate)
We also have a lot of ideas on the underpinnings of consciousness (your topic) - and neuroscience gets closer to predictive theories every day.
My currently favored idea related to consciousness as an emergent property. Much of our supposedly conscious life is in fact carried out somewhat autonomously (have you ever realized you don’t remember the last five or ten minutes - especially when driving, running, or strolling).
Our ‘conscious mind’ is actually an amalgam of many ‘minds’ - the sum of which is our identity. This provides a potential answer for multiple-personalty disorder as a ‘clash’ of internal sub-mind states, our propensity in childhood to have ‘imaginary friends’ as our primary identity grows ascendant, and so on.
All entirely mechanistic, but definitely emergent behavior (complex interaction), rather than the ‘old-school’ view of mechanistic and deterministic processes. Being able to point to the specific neuron that codes for my liking of chocolate, for instance, is now considered ‘unlikely’ although there are indications that specific combinations of neurons do code for specific learned ‘concepts’. The activation of gestalt groups (’like’ ‘chocolate’ ‘dessert’ ‘creamy’, etc) would coalesce as ‘I like chocolate’. some of the same may activate in ‘I don’t like chocolate cake’
Lots and lots of opportunity for wild speculation and new learning in this field for many years to come. Exciting, eh?
[snark]
because waking up as Karl wouldn’t be waking up -it would be a nightmare?
[/snark]
I also think ‘free will’ is merely a complex emergent property of our hardware and software. I really don’t see it as anything more complex(!) or difficult than that.
I agree that current definitions of ‘free will’ are extremely confused, ambiguous, and often self referential. I’d enjoy hearing your views on the matter.
Consider this letter appearing in the February 27, 2009 edition of Science. The letter was authored by Martha J. Farah and Nancey Murphy:
If you were to wake up as Karl you would have all of Karl’s memories and none of your own. So you wouldn’t experience that last night you were Erich and this morning you are Karl. You would feel that you are and always have been Karl.
Just a thought.
** Turning mind inside out **
‘Mind.’ That what’s left of soul after the philosophers got through with it. ‘Body’ and ‘mind’ are opposite sides of the same counterfeit $100 bill.
‘Mind’ is the last immaterial bolt hole for ’soul’. ‘Body’ is a misleading abstraction. Zombies are animated bodies. (Neuroscience deals only with zombies.) Persons are not animated bodies.
‘Human being’ is a misleading abstraction. A society consists of persons living in nature, sharing a common highly artificial, web of interactions called a culture. Outside of culture there are no persons. Inside of nature there are no machines, no plans, no purposes, no aims. Nature is silent.
Culture blabs incessantly. Whatever can be explained by language, including my experience of so-called “private” perceptions, belongs solely to culture, not to nature. Language is our abstract, interactive, collective consciousness. Conscious ‘mind’ disappears into language.
‘Body’ is merely an abstraction from ‘person.’ Specifically, part of a failed attempt by ancient peoples to account for the difference between a “living” person and a “dead” body.
One of hellenistic xianity’s darkest gifts is its focus on the so-called individual soul. Western philosophy gets nowhere by having been theology’s lickspittle. Basically, we must jettison xianity’s focus on the ’soul’ of each individual, cut off, alone under the pitiless gaze of the eternal judge.
The irreducible locus of investigation must be culture — a vital, shared, abstract reality which only we humans are able to inhabit. Explanations drawn from neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary biology cannot be expected to provide a full account of culture. They were not designed to do so. They will not do so.
Persons, language, and culture arose simultaneously. (Do I need add without the assistance of any divine anthropomorphic pseudo-person?) In that sense culture is irreducible; it is the “invisible” given. Science itself is derivative, a cultural creation. (A very peculiar one. But that’s another matter.)
anti-supernaturalist
The more I read about the brain, the clearer it becomes to me that all those parts of ourselves that philosophers put somewhere outside of our bodies are, in fact, firmly housed in that most amazing organ. Studies of people with similar injuries to the brain consistently reveal similar affects to personality and function. Injuries to the body that require neurological adaptation are predictable enough from person to person for therapies and treatments to be developed. Brain activities and responses can be stimulated and measured in many ways with repeatable results. It’s truly amazing. Exploring the brain is a fascinating journey that we’re only beginning, and the new discoveries will be even more wonderful because they’ll be facts and lead to even more paths of study.
On the flip side, “mind” and “soul” are amorphous concepts that lead only to philosophical ideas, none more valid than the other for practical purposes. If you enjoy playing “what if?” or holding debates that can’t be won just for the sake of arguing, that’s fine for you. I find that it’s a waste of mental energy when compared with actually finding answers.
Anti-supernaturalist: I’m with you as you discuss the fallacious reasoning that goes into dualism, but you’ve lost me once you get into your discussion of culture.
Culture has created the abstractions of “body” vs “mind”, of “soul” and even of “human being”. Culture creates the language that warps our language and understanding of reality, sure. Is culture not, however, the natural byproduct of a social animal’s drive to group and bond?
Aren’t some cultural mores perhaps selected for by nature, or predisposed by biology? See Erich’s post on the shocking sameness of human behavior. Even the cultural beliefs tied to religion- are they not partly the product of our naturally faulty logic, or perhaps nature-given instinct to assign agency to inanimate things?
I generally agree with you that the separation between body/mind/soul are fake, culturally created abstractions. But isn’t the separation of “nature” and “culture” similarly so? If all human animals have cultures, cultures with shockingly similar values, is culture not “natural”?
Perhaps you are saying as much when you describe culture as irreducible. I’m not so certain that culture holds the responsibility for every human value, word and belief. I think culture itself may owe much of its underpinnings to human biology. Even silly traditions that have no function continue to flourish thanks to a seemingly natural trend toward path-dependence.