Fallacious Emptiness of a "Mind Is Like Wetness" Account

At the Aeon web site recently, we have a post by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci entitled "Consciousness Is Real." At some length Pigliucci makes a superfluous rebuttal of the boundlessly silly claim that consciousness is not real (a claim on the same credibility level as the claim that nothing exists).  Then Pigliucci offers his explanation for the mind, which is something very lame indeed: an analogy that the mind is like wetness.  I can see why Pigliucci has preceded this "mind is like wetness" account by attacking the mindless idea that consciousness does not exist.  It is so that some readers might think something like "the other idea was crazy, but this idea makes sense." But we should not think along such lines.  It is very silly to claim that consciousness does not exist, and it is also silly to try to explain the human mind by saying that it is rather like wetness. 

Pigliucci follows the typical strategy of reductionists offering goofy explanations for minds. The strategy is to use the word "consciousness" as much as possible to refer to human mentality. What's wrong with that is that consciousness is merely one aspect of human mentality. Human mentality consists of very many things, such as:

• the ability to perceive the outside world;.
• the ability to form memories;
• the ability to recall memories of things learned or experienced decades or a half-century ago;
• the ability to instantly retrieve facts when given some prompt such as a name, place or event;
• the ability to understand complicated things;
• the ability to form abstract ideas;
• the ability to form beliefs and maintain beliefs;
• the ability to feel certain emotions;
• the ability to experience mental and physical pleasure and delight;
• the ability to have paranormal experiences that are not neurally explicable.

A person who talks about a "problem of conssciousness" rather than a "problem of human mentality" is like some person who describes baseball as "base-running" and who then tells us that gorillas can play baseball because gorillas can run between bases.  Such talk would be very fallacious, because baseball is a complex thing involving much more than just base-running: things like pitching, umpiring, hitting, fielding and score-keeping. Similarly, human mentality is a very complex thing involving a wide variety of different capabilities and aspects.  The instant we hear someone mainly using the word "consciousness" to refer to the human mind, we should suspect that we are once again being subjected to a ridiculous reductionism, in which a person is trying the old trick of trying to explain something by first describing it as a hundred times simpler than it is. 

Speaking often rather as if human mentality is mere consciousness, like someone speaking as if baseball is mere base-running, Pigliucci tries to explain the mind by suggesting that consciousness is an "emergent property" like wetness.  He states, "I think of consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon, not dissimilar from, say, the wetness of water (though a lot more complicated)."

In explaining the idea of emergence, an emergentist will typically give an example involving water. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and neither has any such property as wetness. But when oxygen and hydrogen are combined to make water, then we have something with the property of wetness. It is claimed that such a property could never be predicted by just analyzing hydrogen or just analyzing oxygen.

According to the emergentist, this example shows that amazing new properties can arise when matter combines in different ways. The emergentist tells us that human consciousness is simply such a property, a property that just arises from certain complex combinations of matter.

But this reasoning is not sound. The human mind is not a property of the brain or a property of the body.

In general, a property is a simple intrinsic characteristic of something, which can be completely expressed by giving a single number. For example, the properties of a rock are hardness, weight, height, width, length, and depth. Each of these simple properties can be expressed by a single number. (You may not think hardness can be expressed by a number, but there is something called the Mohs scale used to numerically express the hardness of rocks.) We might also think of the color of the rock as being a property, although that requires a simplification (since the rock will actually be multiple colors). If one makes such a simplification, then that color can also be expressed as a single number, such as a number on a color scale. Even wetness can be expressed by a single number (we might, for example, create a wetness scale of 1 to 10, and reasonably assign liquid water a value of 10,  a thick soup a value of about 5, and arid dust with a value of 1 or 0).

But the human mind is not a simple characteristic that can be numerically expressed by a number. When we consider all of the facets of the human mind (memory, intelligence, personality, emotions, spirituality and many others), we certainly do not have anything like a simple characteristic that can be expressed by a number. The human mind is also something mental, something much different from a physical property such as width, weight, or wetness.

In light of such facts, the argument of the emergentist falls apart. To some it may sound persuasive to make this shallow, sketchy comparison:

"When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we see the emergence of a new, unexpected property of wetness. This can help explain how our consciousness could suddenly arise from the combination of certain types of neurons."

But it does not at all sound convincing to make this deeper, more complete comparison.

"When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we see the emergence of a new, unexpected property of wetness, which is a simple, physical property that can be expressed by a single number. This can help explain how certain combinations of physical neurons could produce human mentality that is not physical, mentality that is extremely complicated and multifaceted, and not capable of being expressed by a single number."

Obviously the latter argument does not work. Our minds are not at all a property. They are far too complicated, multifaceted, and functional to be a property, which is a simple physical thing, like a single facet of something.

An additional reason for rejecting "mind is a property" reasoning comes from near-death experiences. In these experiences a person will often report floating above his body, and looking down on it. A property is something that cannot be separated from the object with which it is associated. So it would be absolutely nonsensical to say something like, “The rock is on the left side of the room, but the length of the rock is on the right side of the room,” just as it would be nonsensical to say, “I have your bicycle in my garage, but I have the weight of your bicycle in my kitchen.” But judging from near-death experiences, it is possible for a human mind to be separated from the brain, at least briefly. Since properties can never be separated from their associated objects, such experiences supply an additional reason for thinking that the human mind cannot be considered a property of the brain.

Pigliucci states this: "It follows that an explanation of phenomenal consciousness will come (if it will come – there is no assurance that, just because we want to know something, we will eventually figure out a way of actually knowing it) from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, once our understanding of the human brain will be comparable with our understanding of the inner workings of our own computers."  This is actually an embarrassing confession, the confession that evolutionary biology and neuroscience currently have no explanation for the human mind.  Pigliucci  merely suggests that maybe some day they will, after we understand the details of the brain better.    Got it, professor -- you have no explanation for the human mind, but you are just keeping your fingers crossed that one day such an explanation will arise, from more activity in two areas that have failed thus far to produce such an explanation. Why would someone think that after 150 years of failing to produce an explanation for minds, that evolutionary biology and neuroscience would one day produce them?  That's kind of like saying, "I have failed to find my car keys after 100 days of looking inside my living room, but if I ever find them, I will find them by further looking in my living room."

We already understand the physical details of the brain very well indeed. We can examine it with incredible detail using technologies such as two-photon microscopy.  Billions have been poured into multi-year projects clarifying the brain's physical details. What we have learned are facts (discussed in great detail in the posts of this site) that contradict all claims that the brain is the source of our mentality. We know, for example, that no has found any sign of any stored information in brains other than the genetic information in every cell.  We know that the proteins in brains are so short-lived that they have average lifetimes of only two weeks or less --- 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time that humans can remember things. We know that because of factors such as cumulative synaptic delays and the relatively slow speed of dendrites, brain signals in the cortex only travel relatively slowly, way too slowly to explain instant human recall and the blazing calculation speed of math savants. We know that protein formation in brains takes minutes, too long to explain human memories that can form instantly. We know the brain has no sign of any indexing or position notation system that might explain instant memory recall.  We know that there is nothing in the brain like the read mechanism and write mechanism in computers. We have found no trace of any encoding system in the brain by which information learned in school or daily experience could be translated into permanent neural states or synapse states. In short, we have learned very much that discredits the idea that the brain is the source of our minds and the storage place of our memories.  There is no credible scenario under which additional neuroscience findings will give us a neural explanation for our minds.  

Pigliucci insinuates that some special arrangement of neurons in the brain produces mental phenomena, and says "it is not just how they are arranged in the brain that does the trick." When water is frozen, water molecules have a kind of ordered lattice arrangement; but pure ice isn't wet. When water is wet in a liquid state, water molecules are not arranged in any structure (in terms of structure, a barrel of water is like a barrel of sand).  The fact that you get wetness from molecules that have no arrangement does nothing whatsoever to suggest that mental phenomena would arise from some special arrangement of neurons.  

Speaking of wetness, if we think about water we might get some clue about a source of minds. Let's imagine some father and son in Kansas 3000 years ago speculating about the source of rainfall:

Son: Dad, where does rain come from?

Father: I don't know, but things come from similar things.  Branches come from trees, not rocks. So there's probably some big source of water, somewhere, and I bet the rain somehow comes from that. 

The father in this case would have been on the right track, because the water in clouds arises through evaporation from the water in the ocean. And the ocean is the "big source of water" that the father speculated about.  An intelligent speculation about a source of human minds would be that there is some great mind source or oceanic mind, and that mind comes from that source, directly or indirectly,  one type of thing arising from a similar type of thing.  That makes more sense than believing that mind arises from something totally unlike mind (matter).  If we suspect that a human mind comes from some source that is itself mental,  that is like suspecting that a branch came from a tree. If we believe that a human mind comes from a brain, that is like thinking that a branch came from a stone.