★ Re: Your Brains

There are easy prob­lems and there are hard prob­lems. Examples of the former include build­ing a space elev­ator, put­ting a man on the moon, and cur­ing can­cer. They are redu­cible to steps that make sense within our the­or­et­ical con­cep­tion of how the world works. They are dif­fi­cult but there is no reason, yet, to con­sider them impossible. We might, for example, fore­see­ably con­struct a virus that infects the cells of its host to recon­struct his or her DNA accord­ing to the per­fect model those cells once held.

But when the ele­ment of impossib­il­ity is intro­duced, we might call it a hard prob­lem. Answering ‘What is mean­ing?’ is a hard prob­lem. Likewise free will. Likewise con­scious­ness. These three con­cepts are endur­ing. They are also likely to be fic­tions from which even the most hard­boiled thinker can never fully sus­pend her dis­be­lief. These fic­tions are some­what like books we can never close.

Our defin­i­tions of ‘com­puter’ are prob­ably dif­fer­ent, gentle reader. I use it to mean a class of machines that pro­cess inform­a­tion, and this class includes clocks, ther­mo­stats, the brain, and my MacBook Pro. The reac­tion to my use of this word in the con­text of the human mind is typ­ic­ally one of dis­be­lief and centres on a desire to be excluded from a list of things that do not appear to share essen­tial human char­ac­ter­ist­ics with us. (Clocks have no mean­ing­ful internal life; they have no choice but to tell the time once they are wound; they are not able to con­sider the world.)

I men­tion this because the semantic bound­ar­ies of such terms are crit­ical to any dis­cus­sion. When the bound­ar­ies are made por­ous, or trampled under boot, the debates are rendered obscure.

This is the weight on my heart this morn­ing upon read­ing an edited chapter from Marilynne Robinson’s book Absence of Mind. Robinson’s prose is elab­or­ated to the point of fog­gi­ness. It would sur­prise me if even a philo­sopher could decrypt the nuances of her argu­ment. To repeat, these con­cepts are as hope­lessly dis­tant to the human mind as stars to a tele­scope; they’re hard enough to see without someone mon­key­ing around with the tripod.

Let us say the mind is what the brain does. This is a defin­i­tion that makes the mind, whatever else, a par­ti­cipant in the whole his­tory and exper­i­ence of the body. Pinker offers the same defin­i­tion, but mod­i­fies it dif­fer­ently. He says, “The mind is what the brain does; spe­cific­ally, the brain pro­cesses inform­a­tion, and think­ing is a kind of com­pu­ta­tion” – exclud­ing the felt exper­i­ence of think­ing, with all its diverse bur­dens and colorations.

The exclu­sion of the felt exper­i­ence of think­ing is a prob­lem with natur­ism, i.e. the applic­a­tion of object­ive, verbal descrip­tions to phen­onema (like felt exper­i­ence) that are essen­tially sub­ject­ive. This is not a prob­lem that psy­cho­lo­gists — or any­one else, for that mat­ter — has been able to fig­ure out yet. It’s a hard prob­lem and the prob­lem is not with Pinker.

Later, she cri­ti­cises a fla­vour of evol­u­tion­ary psy­cho­logy (the sci­ence of view­ing the mind as a machine optim­ally designed for its envir­on­ment) like this:

Might there not be fewer of these inter­fa­milial crimes, hon­our killings, child aban­don­ments, if nature had made us straight­for­wardly aware that urgen­cies more or less our own were being served in our propagat­ing and nur­tur­ing? There is more than a hint of dual­ism in the notion that some bet­ter self – the term seems fair – has to be dis­trac­ted by ingra­ti­at­ing pleas­ures to accom­mod­ate the prac­tical busi­ness of biology.

This is not fair and it stretches Pinker’s quite defens­ible prop­erty dual­ist approach in order to imply that, being dual­ist, it some­how inher­its the flaws of extreme sub­stance dualism.

Later still, Robinson rolls up her sleeves and enters into another dif­fi­culty: the dis­tinc­tion between mind and soul. Unfortunately, this takes her back to another lin­guistic conun­drum that may not have an asso­ci­ated conun­drum in the sense of how the words are typ­ic­ally employed. It has only been since the renais­sance, as far as I’m aware, that we have been able to con­sider the mind as some­thing non­phys­ical but not neces­sar­ily syn­onym­ous with a super­nat­ural entity such as the spirit. To blend these, then sep­ar­ate them arbit­rar­ily, adds an ele­ment of obfus­ca­tion that, again, makes these dif­fi­cult pos­i­tions still more dif­fi­cult to understand.

It would be pre­ju­diced of me to imply that artists (even an Orange prize win­ner) should play in their own fields and leave the philo­soph­ical pas­tures to those who know them bet­ter. For a start, the dis­tinc­tion between art and sci­ence is a per­ni­cious one, and, second, philo­soph­ers (not to men­tion psy­cho­lo­gists like me) don’t know the answers either. These are hard ques­tions. But there is a danger that lin­guistic vir­tu­os­ity can take on the form of leger­de­main. The topic demands clearer treat­ment before any­one can do the impossible and pull a bunny from the hat.