If your mind is your brain, how would you know?
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In a paper first published in 1945, CS Lewis wrote: “If… I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, I cannot fit in even science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”
That statement cuts against the current orthodoxy that assumes we are mere bodies and that any appearance of a mental life above and beyond that is chimerical (to be explained away rather than accommodated).
Lewis was too intelligent to be a philosopher. Those of us less gifted would point out that, of course, it is possible for A to be dependent on B without them being the same thing (that’s actually what dependency is). But what he meant was correct: if we identify the soul with the mind and the mind with the brain then it seems that we have little reason to believe in what the mind tells us, given that it is — on this analysis — no more than a piece of meat.
Too often we read that a certain part of the brain has been shown to be the bit that does empathy; or that lights up when you do a mathematical calculation. This is all very interesting, but has very little to do with the relationship between those mental events and the brain events with which they are correlated. Why could one set of events not shadow the other? How do the neuroscientists know that the MRI scan isn’t the other way around, and that the mental event is the ontologically superior one?
What experiment would settle any of that? The neuroscientists’ use of correlation has long been a version of philosophical alchemy: turning uncertainty into legitimacy. But as ever, Lewis was ahead of the curve. Certain contemporary philosophers of mind have noticed a problem in the idea that we are just our brains and the problem is this: how would we know?
Given the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that your brain is nothing more than the accumulated survival residue of millions of years of adaptation, why would you believe anything it tells you? If what you believe is reducible to a set of neuronal firings, ordered not in the direction of Truth but as a sophisticated mechanism of passing on your genetic inheritance, why could it not be lying to you to get you through the day?
The neo-Darwinian picture dismisses all ideas of cosmic purpose from the scene. Complex things come from simple things on the basis of ultimately random processes. That is the chief claim, that evolution is unguided, that things survive because they are adapted to survive and that the way to understand adaptation is in aggressively non-teleological terms. It’s the Doris Day of modern science. What will be will be. And it is because that’s how it’s turned out to be.
If you believe that your beliefs are just transient processes instantiated in your brain’s architecture, and you believe also that your brain architecture is a survival inheritance, why believe either of the previous two beliefs? Why could it not be the case that it was a useful survival mechanism to believe the Darwin stuff?
Richard Dawkins, the Grand Avatar of this Village Reductionism, is on record on saying that the content of any religious belief can be explained away in terms of adaptation. If that’s the case why does the same point have less force when it comes to the content of his own belief system? If it’s useful to have false beliefs then why not concede that Darwinism might be one of the usefully false beliefs?
CS Lewis’s insight has been developed in a recent book by the American philosopher of science Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: why the Materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Nagel is an atheist, to the extent that he is on record as saying he doesn’t even want God to exist.
Nagel argues that the Darwinian view can be rescued only by reintroducing the idea that there is purpose in the cosmos, and the main question then becomes whether that teleology is a brute fact about our universe or whether it requires an explanation from outside it.
It’s a beautiful idea though isn’t it? That scientific materialism may well be true but that, by their own measure, those who espouse it quite literally don’t know what they are talking about.
Of course, if they’re right, then neither do I.
