It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labor. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything w (...)
Article
Thinking Again
What Do We Mean by Mind?
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And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us.
The rarity of sentient life should not be conflated with assertions about its improbability. For example, diamonds are rare but the Earth's geology makes their occurrence highly probable. The same might be true of the Universe we inhabit. Thus, an assertion of 'staggering improbability' requires a knowledge of possible alternative outcomes applicable throughout the vastness of the universe -- to that, we must plead ignorance.
Robinson's shrewdly precise philosophical reflection would be impossible without the author's remarkable mastery of language. The language achievement--the intelligible marking of her path--is as much of a contribution to contemporary thinking as her critique of bad science.
That anyone like Robinson could write so well about the limitations of mind reductionism is itself evidence of the limits of such reductionism. Even the writing of those like Wilson and Pinker who believe in reductionism is evidence of its limits. Pinker says that "Religion is a desperate measure that people resort to when ... they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success." It could also be said that his and Wilson's assertion that consciousness and free will do not exist, that all is physical and determined, is a desperate measure.
For a good discussion of how complex our mind actually is, see the essay by renowned psychologist Albert Bandura, available on his web site at Stanford University, "Reconstrual of 'Free Will' From the Agentic Perspective of Social Cognitive Theory."
The mind. Like the title of the recent movie, "It's Complicated."
Actually Bandura's essay is more easily found at
des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html
and then scrolling down a bit to the essay and clicking it on.
Robinson's ideas about the limitations of mind reductionism are nothing new.
The issues are discussed at length in Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind. Searle is a thorougoing materialist who believes the problem is the conceptual inadequacy of reductionism as currently understood. As he says, "...consciousness is as empirically mysterious to us now as electromagnetism was previously, when people thought the universe must operate on Newtonian principles....When I speak of the irreducibility of consciousness, I am speaking of its irreducibility according to standard patterns of reduction. No one can rule out a priori the possibility of a major intellectual revolution that would give us a new -- and at present unimaginable -- conception of reduction, according to which consciousness would be reducible."
Invoking the 'improbability' of sentient life as a marker of some ethereal 'specialness' is both tired and wrong. 'Improbability' compared to what? And to what underlying processes does the improbability of sentience link? Until we fully understand the processes that underpin emergence (of anything) then we cannot talk of an event's probability. WE understand the chemical and physical processes that underpin the formation of water, if we were to reverse engineer them and produced a vintage claret then that would truly be 'improbable'. Sentience is the result of processes of which we have no understanding whatsoever. Wittgenstein must be spinning in his grave.
It is clear that a good share of those prominent scientists and thinkers who wish to reduce Mind to Brain wish to prove the valuelessness of religious experience. ie. to contend that there is no God.
I appreciate the elegance of this article in writing against thid trend.
No human understanding however perfect, and there are good reasons for believing that human understanding can never possibly be perfect , can come as substitute for what God may give us.
There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamnt in, or possibly can be dreamnt in all our Science and Philosophy.
This is just the Argument from Personal Incredulity: "I don't understand how X occurs naturally, therefore God did X." But just as the fact that I don't understand, say, quantum physics, doesn't mean that God is responsible for it, so the fact that nobody yet understands the operation of the mind is no reason for calling in a supernatural 'explanation'. Science as we know it has only been running for about 500 years; it's the height of arrogance for theists to assume that if we haven't come up with all the answers in that short time then there must be something wrong with the method -- especially since the 'method' of religion has been running now for 5000 years and has failed to come up with even one plausible answer or explanation.
Which approach are you going to bet on: the one that has produced computers, planes, smallpox vaccinations, Google, building materials, central heating and contact lenses; or the one that has produced Popes, Ayatollahs and the Spanish Inquisition? It's a no-brainer, surely.
It is clear from the cosmic background radiation that the vast cosmos is istropic. There is a progression from the physics of the Big Bang, to the creation of elements in star formation and supernovae, to the creation of DNA and life on planet Earth. Consequently, the likelihood is that civilizations of sentient life number in the tens if not hundreds of billions, too distant from one another in time and space to be able to communicate. The more interesting question is whether we find life forms -- most likely extremophiles -- elsewhere in our own solar system.