For the last couple of posts I have been
groping (sometimes painfully slowly, I reckon) towards the sketch of the title
by highlighting the problems I saw with the (overwhelmingly) dominant
understanding of what constitutes reality, and I essentially dispatched the
most traditional objections to the alternative I was about to present, reducing
them to an appeal to the alleged existence of alternative explanations, which
upon close examination resulted not to explain at all the kind of phenomena I
will argue constitute an (almost) entirely separate class from purely material
ones. So we have developed, thanks to the Scientific Method, a wonderful
understanding of how the material world behaves (a material world which
includes a substantial part of ourselves, but which I am ready to argue does
not include one hundred per cent of what we are), but that method, awe
inspiring and a source of unlimited pride as it is, has precious little to tell
us about the possible existence of some additional elements of reality that are
as “real” (in the double sense of observer independent and internally
consistent –i.e. non contradictory, as is well known a contradiction can be
considered equally independent of who is contemplating it and in traditional
logic allows the derivation of any consequence) as the ones we can measure and
weight, which occupy space and are affected (and have the potential to change) by
time, the ones that have a number of properties that interact in predictable
ways with our senses, or with measuring devices that greatly enhance what our
senses can tell us about them (we’ve mentioned mass and volume, we could add
electric charge, spin and, at quark level, “color”). All I’m saying is that we
have developed wonderful tools (both conceptual and practical) to understand
and predict how matter behaves, and that success has led our civilization to
dictate that matter is all there is, problems and lacunae left by that approach
be damned. But that is like the drunkard looking for his keys under the
proverbial lamp post, just because there is more light there, regardless of
where he actually may have lost them. We happen to have more “light” (the light
of reason, in a very enlightened metaphor, if I may be forgiven for such a lame
pun) in our understanding of the material world, in our ability to predict what
is going to happen to “stuff”, and thus we confidently declare that such world
exhausts all there is to know, and that such predictions constitute all there
is to say if we do not want to descend into non-scientific (non-reputable,
non-social-prestige-conferring) blabber.
So having devoted two long posts (here
and here,
for those of you disinclined to navigate inside the blog, or reading this from
outside) to try to gain some reputation back for the possibility of
non-material aspects of reality, I am finally going to spell out what
properties that kind of reality may have, and only towards the end of that post
I will tackle with the difficulty posed by the fourth argument against dualism
(M.4). For a change of pace, I’ll write it in aphoristic mode:
SD1.1 The Material Universe (MU) was designed:
Its properties (total amount of energy, gravitational constant, Planck
constant, decay time of protons, electric charge of the electron, speed of
light, etc.) were devised by a Mind (M) which is not itself part of that MU:
(read as: There is a Mind which is not equal to
the Material Universe AND a Mind which does not belong to Material Universe so
that Material Universe implies Mind)
SD1.2 Our prima
facie impression of existing as free agents capable of having intuitions (of
mathematical truths between others) and of acting of our own accord is not an
illusion, we truly are, we truly perceive, we truly decide, and that perception
and decision require a non material substance to happen, which we will call Individual
Mind (IM):
(there are multiple Individual Minds so that
for each one of them it is not true that they belong to Material Universe)
SD1.2.1 As no currently existing IM has a
substantiated claim to having created MU, there is (or was, as far as we know
such Mind may not exist any more) a separate M that did it:
(there is a Mind distinct from every Individual
Mind which is implied by the existence of the Material Universe)
SD1.2.2 There are multiple really existing IM’s:
(for every Individual Mind i there is at least another
Individual Mind k so that the existence of the first implies the existence of
the second AND they are not equal)
Basically that’s it, that’s what (I humbly am
led to believe) we can infer from both the configuration of reality and our own
phenomenological unfiltered experience: the Universe was designed (by a
non-material entity existing outside from it), and our feeling of being a
separate entity from the matter that surrounds us is real (we are minds, and
being a mind requires a non-material substrate), and both facts are related.
The first confirms that matter is not all that there is, and the second, comprised
of being able to feel, attach value to what we perceive, and choose between
different courses of action, all of them being actions that we can not imagine
matter doing, gives us a strong hint that may be we also are (partially) a
non-material entity. For simplicity’s sake, I’m assuming both substrates (the one
that the entity that created the Universe in the first place was made of and
the one we identify everyday by having experiences that matter can not have)
are equivalent, and calling them “minds”. I’m not claiming that clears
everything, and after such astoundingly unoriginal result we can close the book
of Metaphysics and consider all its ages long discussions finished. I’ll have
more to say in a moment about how those “minds” interact with matter (hint: it’s
complicated) and what additional properties we can assign to them (hint: not
many), but I would like to spend a moment first dispelling a few likely
misunderstandings.
First of them, I’m not sure about the validity
of conflating those minds I think we are warranted to consider as “really
existing” with the traditional concept of “soul”, at least if we think of that
soul as a timeless reality which somehow can exist outside of the body, has
full control over it, survives its demise and is afterwards either rewarded or
punished forever for its behavior. Second, the acceptance of the Universe being
designed (and thus the acceptance of a mind that designed it) does not
necessarily imply the acceptance of the tenets of faith of some revealed
religion or other. A mind created the Universe, allrighty, but that doesn’t
automatically mean that such mind is still around, or that it has dictated how
we should behave in a book centuries old whose meaning has somehow survived
unscathed through the countless evolutions of concepts and systems of
interpretation that have afflicted every other creation of the human spirit
(and that for some reason seems more involved with how we should dress, what we
should eat or with whom we should have sex than with how we should organize our
society or what kind of respect should we show towards the Natural world). I’m
not claiming either that those additional deductions would be entirely
illegitimate, but I see them as much less warranted than the ones I’ve
formulated about the existence of minds distinct from our own, and not entirely
dependant on their material basis).
For the record, I do believe that the original
mind that created the Universe is still around (being powerful enough to create
a vast and complex Universe like ours, immortality, or just standing outside of
the passing of time, seems like small potatoes), and that having organized things
so we came into existence, being sentient, and intelligent (or aspiring to be
so), and free was an act of love which warrants our belief in the overall
goodness of such mind, and that such goodness, when conjoined with the
universe-creating power before mentioned allows us to believe that we will also
be granted more life, and a fuller life, than the one we can enjoy whilst tied
to this material substrate, subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics
(unavoidably subject to corruption and decay). But I also recognize those
beliefs are clouded by hope and by desire, desire for a fairer, more just world,
where the multiple wrongs and injustices we contemplate daily in this one may
be corrected. I couldn’t claim for those beliefs a level of certainty similar
to the one I have for statements SD1.1 to SD1.2.2, and in no way would I
pretend to impose them on anybody else, or proselytize about them being myself
so uncertain.
Let’s get back, then, to those humbler statements,
and how they could resist the encounter with the opposite argument we still had
to tackle, M.4, or the problem of the evident influence of the physical state
of a certain part of the material world (the brain) in that substance
postulated as separate and different (the mind). Keeping to the basics, I
stated in SD1.2 that the justification for postulating the existence of our own
mind as separate from the rest of the material universe was threefold:
·
we
could perceive (not just apprehend aspects of the material world through our
senses, but additionally to realize that we are apprehending them, we have the
ability to “perceive ourselves in the act of perceiving”, to self-referentially
notice our own conscience in the act of being conscious),
·
we
could assign value to what we perceived (so it was not just marked by its “intensionality”,
using Brentano’s words, but also and most crucially by its “mattering to us”,
of being important in reference to our very particular an impossible to
interchange with any other self, regardless of what any other could think of
that) and
·
we
could decide (which, if it is not an illusion as monists have been massively forced
to believe, just invalidates the whole chain of causation which supposedly runs
unbroken from the Big Bang to whatever the final fate end of the Universe ends
up being)
You may have noticed that all three barely
justify postulating a different substance, as you may ascribe all three capabilities
to everyday matter (if being termed a hylozoist or a panpsychist, a moral
objectivist and an indeterminist does not scare you). I just think it is more
economical, given the limited instances we see of those behaviors happening (or
seeming to happen), to recur to this separate substance only in this case, and
thus define only persons as participating of it.
So if we settle on a different type of entity
(mind, the old res cogitans)
preferring it to the alternatives (either all matter thinks, and lucky us when
it is configured in a brain that thinking becomes self conscious, or no matter
thinks, and our conscience is an illusion) nothing prevents us to propose
whatever functional dependencies we see fit between that type and matter. Minds
may require brains to develop their potential. They may very well depend on the
neural configuration within our skull to interact with the rest of the universe,
to learn, to store their own experiences, to execute mechanical calculations,
even to run those parts of their everyday functioning that can be translated
into algorithms (something I have the hunch constitutes a much smaller percentage
of mental activity than what proponents of strong AI would like to think), thus
creating the impression (entirely justified and real) of an unconscious part of
the mind which works following purely mechanistic rules, entirely supported by material
circuits made of neurons and neurotransmitters, and affected by the delicate
chemical balance within our skull (and adjacent parts). If the neural machinery
starts malfunctioning (be it by trauma, injury, lack of nourishment, outright neglect
or simple old age) the mind shrivels and withers, and may completely cease
functioning in a process that can be as gradual or as sudden as the changes in
its bodily support.
Now, you may say, what is the difference between
such a (heavily dependant on its bodily “vessel”) mind and the purely physical
mind of the monists? Aren’t you just taking those features of the mind that the
physical sciences still can not account for and ascribing them to a shadowy
entity (“the mind”) which happens to have by definition all the “mindy”
features you could not explain otherwise? How is that watered down dualism
different from the “double aspect monism” postulated by Polkinghorne and the
like? (for the record, I see also some merit on Polkinghorne’s approach, and he
treads more water from his monism than me from my dualism, as he sees it as a precondition
for the future resurrection of the body in which he believes with more apparent
conviction than I). All valid concerns, for which I’m afraid there is no
definitive answer, other than my dualism allows me to do some predictions that
monism would have difficulties defending:
·
Contrary
to what many people would have you believe, we will not see any AI “appearing”
in our lifetime (or in anybody else’s lifetime, for that matter). Intelligence
is non algorithmic, dependant on a peculiar substance (that mysterious mindstuff)
we do not know how to replicate, or to bind to any artificial contraption. We
will see computers doing more and more wonderful things, and replacing more and
more human capabilities, but we will never (a strong word) make them care about
anything (we do not even know how to start with that one!) or (as it is
necessarily a non-algorithmical event) recognizing that it has finally
understood a theorem (although in that particular case it can already do the
next best thing, which is “prove” it in a limited number of steps from a well
defined set of initial axioms)
·
Due
to the possibility of minds breaking the chain of causation, we will not see
the consolidation of any “science of the Spirit” with any actual predictive
power. Psychology will keep on being a hodgepodge of heuristic rules and
tautological assertions that are either commonsense and self evident or
abstruse to the point of becoming unfalsifiable, or outright false. Ditto for Economics.
If the litmus test of those “Sciences” is becoming something similar to Asimov’s
“psychohistory” able to predict precisely the evolution both of individuals and
of society, sorry but it is not gonna happen
·
As
the person is made by the conjunction of body and mind, and we know only how to
treat the ailments of the first part, knowing very little (after all those
centuries, what a shame), every attempt to substantially increase the life
expectancy of advanced societies is doomed to fail woefully short. I’m standing
on one leg here, as nothing I’ve presented so far indicates that the influence
of the body on the mind can run the other way also, and I’m extremely,
extremely skeptical of every claim that it is so (all those pseudo medicines
that become periodically fashionable under the label of “holistic medicine”,
and which unfailingly are exposed for those who know how to see as quackery of
the worst species). However, I would be surprised if the mind would not also
become frailer with time, and ended compromising the capability of the body to
keep going
·
At
some point in the near future, when the deceleration of technological progress
sinks in (unless we really get rid of the current way of organizing society,
a.k.a. capitalism, which lays at the root of such deceleration) and we realize
we have failed in both the development of AIs (the singularity of Kurzweil
& Co), the effective lengthening of human lifespan (the prediction of
everybody living beyond 300 years, or nay such ludicrous figure), and the
deciphering of human behavior, we may even consider that particular phase of
our History characterized by the consideration of reality as being formed
exclusively by matter as finally over (and may then transition to a more “Ideational” culture,
in Sorokin’s terms, probably in some new center distinct from the one ruling world destinies today)
So there you are. For each of those predictions
that get disproved I’ll seriously reconsider my current dualistic stance (maybe with the exception of the third one, as I'm not really that sure about it in the first place), and
if all four prove to be wrong, I’ll admit monism is the most serious contender
for a full description of what is “really out there”. Now, I’ll finish with a
question for all of my readers (which are most likely monist, as the vast
majority of the denizens of these enlightened times are wont to be). If
(hopefully many, many years from now) you find yourself in your last throes and
remember this crusty old post, and discover much to your surprise and unlikely
as you thought that was, that all my four predictions are still standing… will
you reconsider your materialist monism then? If you answer in the affirmative,
all the friggin’ time I’ve devoted to writing this series will have been well
spent.
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