Dualism, the Soul, and Science Plato, the patriarch of Western philosophy, conceived of the individual as an immaterial and immortal soul imprisoned in a material and mortal body. This concept is the very embodiment (sic) of dualism, the belief that reality consists of two radically different sorts of things— the mental or spiritual, and the physical. Plato promulgated his ideas through the academy that he founded in 387 BCE. It was the first institution of higher learning in Western civilization. I call myself an academic after the Athenian hero Akademos, for whom the olive grove that hosted his school was named. These platonic views were subsequently absorbed into the New Testament. They form the basis of the Christian doctrine of the soul, which will be resurrected at the end of time to live in everlasting communion with God. The belief in a transcendent, immortal soul that lies at the heart of consciousness recurs in the history of thought and is widely shared by many faiths throughout the world. Many readers will not have much sympathy with such an overtly dualistic belief. Yet fundamentalism, the uncompromising rejection of a rational, humanistic, liberal world view in favor of a rigid adherence to doctrine and core beliefs about the body and the soul, is on the rise worldwide. This is as true of Christian fundamentalism as it is of extreme Islamic variants. And more than ever, young men are willing to kill others and themselves in the name of their particular god. Not quite what Nietzsche had in mind when he declared in delirious tones, “God is dead!” Contemporary academic books dealing with the mind –body problem dispense with God and the soul in an aside— if they mention them at all. In a dismissive way, the author points to the obvious incompatibility of science and these antiquated modes of thinking. What a far cry from the situation three or four centuries ago, when books and buildings were dedicated ad majorem dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God! Descartes, the Enlightenment philosopher, postulated that everything under the Sun is made out of one of two substances. The sort of stuff that you can touch and that has spatial extension is res extensa; this includes the bodies and brains of animals and people. The stuff that you can’t see, that has no length and width, and that animates the human brain is res cogitans, soul stuff. The working of our brain is typically compared with the most advanced technology of the day. Today, it is the vast and tangled Internet. Yesteryear, it was the digital computer. Yester-century, it was the moving statues of gods, satyrs, tritons, nymphs, and heroes in the fountains at the French court in Versailles . Descartes argued that, like the water that powered these simple machines, “animal spirits” flow through the arteries, cerebral cavities, and nervous tubules of all creatures, making them move. In a radical break with the Medieval scholastic tradition and its endless speculations, Descartes sought mechanical explanations for perception and action. Informed by his dissections of brains and bodies, he argued that most behaviors are caused by the action of particles distinguished by their size, shape, and motion. But Descartes was at a loss to conceive of mechanisms for intelligence, reasoning, and language. In the seventeenth century, nobody could envision how the mindless application of meticulously detailed, step -by-step instructions , what we today refer to as algorithms, makes computers play chess, recognize faces, and translate Web pages. Descartes had to appeal to his mysterious, ethereal substance, res cogitans, that in some nebulous manner did the thinking and reasoning. As a devout Catholic, he safeguarded the absolute distinction between humans and soulless animals by restricting res cogitans to the former. As he wrote quite unequivocally, a dog may howl pitifully when hit by a carriage, but it does not feel pain. If I have learned anything in my lifelong exploration of the mind– body nexus, it is this: Whatever consciousness is— however it relates to the brain— dogs, birds, and legions of other species have it. As I laid out in chapter 3 and reemphasize in the last chapter, canine consciousness is not the same as ours— for one thing, dogs are much less introspective and don’t talk— but there is no question that they, too, experience life. Two recent defenders of dualism, the philosopher Karl Popper and the neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate John Eccles, made an appearance in chapter 7. Let me repeat a point I made there when discussing their views on Libertarian free will. The dualism they advocate, in which the mind forces the brain to do its bidding, is unsatisfactory for the reason that the 25-year-old Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia had already pointed out to Descartes three centuries earlier— by what means does the immaterial soul direct the physical brain to accomplish its aim? If the soul is ineffable, how can it manipulate actual stuff such as synapses? It is easy to see causality flowing from the brain to the mind, but the reverse is difficult. Any mind-to-brain communication has to be compatible with natural laws, in particular with the principle of energy conservation. Making the brain do things, like messing with synapses, takes work that the soul would have to perform and that has to be accounted for. The nature of the interaction between the two is not the only problem. How does the soul remember anything? Does it have its own memory? If so, where? What logic does it follow? What happens to the soul when the brain dies? Does it float around in some sort of hyperspace, like a ghost? And where was this soul before the body was born? These questions do not have answers that are compatible with what we know about the physical world. If we honestly seek a single, rational, and intellectually consistent view of the cosmos and everything in it, we must abandon the classical view of the immortal soul. It is a view that is deeply embedded in our culture; it suffuses our songs, novels, movies, great buildings, public discourse, and our myths. Science has brought us to the end of our childhood. Growing up is unsettling to many people, and unbearable to a few, but we must learn to see the world as it is and not as we want it to be. Once we free ourselves of magical thinking we have a chance of comprehending how we fit into this unfolding universe. The dominant intellectual position of our day and age is physicalism— at rock bottom all is reducible to physics. There is no need to appeal to anything but space, time, matter, and energy. Physicalism— a halftone away from materialism— is attractive because of its metaphysical sparseness. It makes no additional assumptions. In contrast, such simplicity can also be viewed as poverty. This book makes the argument that physicalism by itself is too impoverished to explain the origin of mind. In the previous chapter, I sketched an alternative account that augments physicalism . It is a form of property dualism: The theory of integrated information postulates that conscious, phenomenal experience is distinct from its underlying physical carrier. Informationally speaking, the experience of being sad is a crystal, a fantastically complex shape in a space of a trillion dimensions that is qualitatively different from the brain state that gives rise to sadness. The conscious sensation arises from integrated information; the causality flows from the underlying physics of the brain, but not in any easy-to-understand manner. That is because consciousness depends on the system being more than the sum of its parts. Think of this crystal as the twenty-first-century version of the soul. But, hélas, it is not immortal. Once the underlying physical system disintegrates, the crystal is extinguished. It returns to the unformed void, where it was before the system was constituted. Before such a breakdown occurs , however, the causal relationships that make up this crystal could be uploaded onto a computer . This is the infamous Singularity that Ray Kurzweil and other technologists are hoping will render them immortal —rapture for nerds. And once the associated integrated information is reduced to patterns of electrons, it can be copied or edited, sold or pirated, bundled with other electronic minds, or deleted. But without some carrier, some mechanism, integrated information can’t exist. Put succinctly: no matter, never mind. Koch, Christof (2012-04-16). Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (pp. 150-153). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Dec 2013 03:57:33 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015