Fed up with the current state of
Philosophy of Mind, and how every “neuroscientist”, or even worst “neurolinguist”,
“neurophilosopher”, “neuromoralist” or whatever fancy term they have coined these
days seems to be eating the lunch of good old fashioned “armchair” thinkers?
Well, so am I and I think it’s time to strike back.
Let’s start with some much needed
clarifications. The moment you make human mind the subject of your study, you
forsake the term “Science” to describe your work, as I explained in this recent
post (Of Science, Philosophy of Science and Pseudoscience). You are studying chemical reactions between molecules that happen
to be living (maybe within a brain, or constituting a functional unit called “neuron”?
Fair enough, you are a (somewhat odd, given the constraints of your field) chemist.
Do you use a complex apparatus that shows what areas of the brain have a higher
flow of blood when performing certain tasks (aka fMRI)? You are like some kind of engineer trying to
deduct what was the intent behind a complex system (like feedwater in a
combined cycle plant) by measuring the electrical consumption of an isolated
pump… you may find all sort of interesting correlations, but good luck with
getting the overall picture. Are you performing some ludicrous “experiment”
where you ask young university students (characterized by their WEIRDness, or the
fact they are predominantly White, Educated, from a Industrialized, Rich and Democratic
Country, which makes them highly Unrepresentative of humanity as a whole) to
perform some trivial task while you measure the performance of something
apparently quite unrelated? Then you are a somewhat limited (because of the
puny numbers typically involved) statistician, nothing to do with Science
again. Are you “modeling” the behavior of some bit of organic matter (a cell, a
neuron, a whole organism, an entire ecosystem) and its interactions with the
help of a computer? You are a more or less glorified programmer (and please,
spare me the awful term “computer science”, using computers has as much to do
with science per se as using a
balance, a ruler or a mass spectrometer… sorry, but knowing a syntax, which can
be argued is the ultimate contingent construct, is just the opposite of knowing
universal truths).
So if you tinker with how the brain works, you are at best an
engineer (nothing wrong with that, I myself being one), and you have some claim
to be conducting non-basic scientific work (although I suspect most of the
basic science regarding how the brain works has already been sorted out, and
what is left is adding heuristic rules to better predict some macroscopic
effects out of the aggregation of individual reactions… unless you believe in
some wishy-washy “emergent” properties, of which we will have more to say later).
And if you busy yourself with how the mind
works you are (drum roll please)… at best a philosopher, at worst (like most
nowadays) a charlatan. Again, nothing wrong with that, either (I consider myself
both, and am proud of it), but please, please don’t try to fool the poor
unsuspecting public pretending your talk of universal grammar, memes, emotional
intelligence, the role of the amygdala in emotions, the prefrontal lobe (which
seems to be active in goddamn everything the five pounds of gooey matter seem
to do!) or the existence of a “module” specifically evolved to identify arrows
pointed to the left is somehow scientific.
Not that I’m arguing that it is
unsound (not all of it at least), or that it is useless (far from it!), or even
that it is somehow untrue. If I read
Griesbach’s Textual criticism of the New Testament I may find his hypotheses
brilliant, useful and mostly true, without pretending they are any kind of
Science. What I’m trying to say is there are many ways of knowing (of
interrogating reality, and filtering the tentative answers we may arrive at),
and Science is only one of them, admirably suited for some fields, and totally
unsuited for others.
And my contention in this long and
(as usual) rambling post is that the methods of Science are valid to speak
about the gooey matter (as about any matter whatsoever), but not so much to
talk about what purportedly that matter “generates”, namely ideas, feelings,
perceptions (that require a perceiver), intents, values, and all the dreamy
stuff that takes place “inside our heads”. I know, I know, supposedly all that
stuff, it has been proved beyond any doubt, is a creation of the particular
combination of neurons, electric currents, free floating ions, ganglia and all the rest that resides inside our skull,
so it stands to reason that both things (the gooey matter and the mental
features that depend on it) are essentially the same. Any attempt to treat them
differently would be laughed off the room and labeled as “dualism”, which has
been disproved along with the belief in fairies (by jolly, even a staunch Christian
like Polkinghorne proffers to embrace what he calls “dual aspect monism”). Maybe,
maybe not. So let me stake my position here: Monism, the belief that there is
only one kind of “really existing reality”, namely matter (which can be, more
or less, weighted and measured, hence its Cartesian and old fashioned denomination
of res extensa), is an unnecessary reduction
of a (slightly) more complex reality. Sorry Mr. Damasio (and Dennett, which
expressed it more clearly and more brilliantly before), if Descartes made
indeed an error, it was not his dualism. And monism is wrong due to its
unability to tackle two fundamental problems:
·
The
existence of “ideas” (of which mathematics gives us the best instances: to take
a most obvious example the number Pi “exists” as really, forcefully and
undeniably as the planet Pluto –which by the way does not exist any more, now
being labeled a planetoid, but I don’t want to go in the shales of the denotative
theory of language and the second Wittgenstein-, and saying Pi is just the
product of different configurations of neurons inside different skulls just
misses the point that although the neurons and the skulls are different, the
number is exactly the same, beyond anybody’s ability to spell it completely)
·
The
existence of qualia (a word the neurobabblers
detest as much as I do the expression “political science”), or the nature of
the link between the perceptions we are conscious of and the physical nature that originates them,
also known as “the hard problem” (as per David Chalmers) or the “astonishing
hypothesis” (Francis Crick), it being so hard and so astonishing that some philosophers,
rather than renouncing (or at least questioning) their monism have preferred to
wish it away and declare there is nothing to explain, as we have no
consciousness anyway and we are but zombies with the illusion of being conscious
(Dennett devoted a full book, Consciousness
Explained –which I enjoyed a lot, by the way, although I disagreed almost
with every single word written in it- to dispel that “illusion”)
So to finish for today, Monism is
wrong, there are other elements to reality apart from matter, and the
scientific method, as much as I love it, may not be the most adequate approach to
explain some of them. The interesting question, of course, is how many types of
“really real” thingies are there, and how do they interact. But even hinting at
the answer is going to require another post (or a whole long chain of them).
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