There is a branch of physical science that has great relevance to the philosophy of mind: neuroscience. What has been learned about brains has very much relevance to questions such as whether the brain is the source of the human mind and whether the brain could be a storage place of human memories. The science of psychology also has great relevance to the philosophy of mind. But other sciences have much less relevance to the philosophy of mind. The science of physics has no great direct relevance to the philosophy of mind, although it does have an indirect relevance I will mention near the end of this post.
Because of a lack of any direct relevance of physics to the philosophy of mind, we should not tend to be overly impressed when physicists write on questions in the philosophy of mind, particularly when they sound like dilettantes making rather brief trips into topics of oceanic depth that they have not deeply studied. A recent example of such a thing may be found in the paper "The mind-brain relationship and the perspective of meaning" by physicist Ranjan Mukhopadhyay.
Ranjan goes wrong in his first sentence by stating that the two chief problems are "how subjective conscious experience can arise from physical neurological processes and how conscious mental states can causally act upon the physical world." We have here the same mistake that scientists so often make: the mistake of asking "how x causes y" when you don't know if x causes y. We do not actually know that human mental activity arises from physical neurological processes, and there are very many reasons (discussed in the posts of this blog) for thinking that the human brain cannot be the source of the mind. It is always a huge mistake to assume that x causes y without adequate warrant and to then limit your investigation into "how x causes y" rather than deeply diving into the question "is it true that x causes y?" Nature never told us that brains cause minds. When I retrieve an apple from a table, my senses give me two reasons for believing that my hand was involved in such a retrieval: the sight of my hand touching the apple, and the feel of my fingers touching the apple. But if I retrieve from my memories a memory of my youth, my body does nothing whatsoever to hint that my brain was the cause of such a retrieval.
On page 2 of the paper we have a quote that shows how wrong Ranjan has gone. He states this:
" The brain consists of an intricate network of neurons that communicate with each other via a combination of electrical and chemical signals (Bear et al., 2006). It appears reasonable to assume that the brain is carrying out computations in the sense of processing information from the surroundings, the information being transmitted, for example, in the form of electrical impulses, processing this information, and sending out instructions about how the body should react to the environmental cues. Given the immense complexity of the brain, maybe it’s not surprising that we do not understand the details of how the brain accomplishes this. The true puzzle is how conscious experience fits into this picture. What rules govern how the brain will interpret certain patterns of neural firings as pain, or pleasure, or sorrow, or joy? How can we explain our sensations in physical terms, given that we do not even understand how to represent such subjective mental states in physical or mathematical ways?"
We have here the very great error of making a gigantic philosophical and scientific conclusion (that we act in some way because our brain is "sending out instructions about how the body should react to the environmental cues"), a conclusion not reached by some reasoning process and pondering of evidence, but merely by making an assumption. No, it does not "appear reasonable to assume" that the brain is doing any such thing, particularly given a complete lack of any understanding of how a brain could ever make a decision on how someone should act. Computers produce computation by virtue of such inventions as an operating system (e.g. Windows or UNIX), and things such as application software. The brain has no such things, and has no unit comparable to a CPU (one that sequentially processes logical instructions). So it does not at all "appear reasonable to assume" that the brain is doing computations that lead it to "sending out instructions about how the body should react to the environmental cues." We also have in the statement above the very big nonsense of trying to speak as if there is only one puzzle in the philosophy of mind, by making the claim that "the true puzzle is how conscious experience fits into this picture." The philosophy of mind is filled with very many deep puzzles.
The problem is that humans have a huge variety of mental experiences and mental capabilities, normal and anomalous; and "the brain caused it" explanations fail all over the place. We don't have any credible neural explanations for how humans think, imagine, believe, learn, form memories and instantly recall. Ranjan gives us a lame excuse for the failures to produce credible neural explanations for such things, saying, "Given the immense complexity of the brain, maybe it’s not surprising that we do not understand the details of how the brain accomplishes this." If brains were responsible for things such as the creation of memories and the retrieval of learned information, there would be evidence of such a thing all over the place in the brain; but such evidence has not been found. Saying "the brain is very complex" is a lame excuse for such an observational failure. The truth is that we haven't found "how the brain accomplishes this" (despite very many billions in funding for high-tech neuroscience research) because the brain does not accomplish any such thing.
Ranjan sounds like he hasn't done his homework in studying human mental phenomena (a topic of oceanic depth) and that he hasn't done his homework by making a very deep study of the human brain and whether it actually has the characteristics we would expect it to have if it was the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories that can last for 60 years and can be instantly recalled. On page 5 he claims that a deep analysis of quantum mechanics is important in dealing with these issues. It sounds like someone who hasn't done the studies he should have done trying to compensate by appealing to some esoteric topic that he does know well. It's kind of like someone who hasn't learned how to fly a plane claiming while trying to fly a plane that he does know well how to ride a motorcycle, and this will be sufficient.
Quantum mechanics has no very big relevance to topics of the philosophy of mind. I could list 100 books you should read before writing a book about the nature of the mind, and a book on quantum mechanics would not be one of those books.
Ranjan then spends several pages discussing quantum mechanics (not very clearly), and uses his discussion as some justification for some claim that there is some "underlying proto-consciousness" that might help to explain minds. We seem to get nothing of much value in the next pages, which wander around a large variety of topics, failing to offer much of anything in the way of insights or credible ideas. But then the author in his conclusion makes this triumphal proclamation: "In this paper, I have developed a framework which can successfully unsnarl the knot and provide a convenient starting-point for developing a systematic theory of the mind and consciousness, thus converting a seemingly unsolvable philosophical mystery to a problem that can then be addressed using the methods of neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience." No, it sounds more like author has just said a few things about quantum mechanics and "proto-consciousness," and fooled himself into thinking this was some great insight.
Ranjan errs in claiming that his idea is a top-down theory of consciousness. You have a top-down theory of the human mind when you postulate a human mind being produced by something greater than a human mind, and a bottom-up theory when you postulate a human mind being produced by something less than a human mind. The "proto-consciousness" Ranjan imagines is something less than a human mind, so his theory is a bottom-up theory.
Alas, our physicist sounds like a dabbler and a dilettante making a quickie sojourn into the philosophy of mind, a topic far beyond his expertise. He shows no signs of having very deeply studied either brains or minds, and makes some statements sounding like he has not done either. Brains plus some vague quantum-mechanics-flavored "proto-consciousness" do not explain human minds, which have such a rich variety of characteristics and capabilities beyond any neural explanation. The topic of minds and human mental experiences is a topic of oceanic depth, and we should not expect much from those who just briefly wade around in such an ocean.
Part of the problem seems to be that in this paper and another similar paper Ranjan (like many others) seems to have fallen "hook, line and sinker" for the "one big thing left" myth promulgated by philosopher David Chalmers. Chalmers has long taught the extremely misconceived idea that the problems in the philosophy of mind are all easy problems, except for one big problem he calls "the hard problem of consciousness," a problem of explaining subjective awareness. Chalmers arguments for this idea have always been fallacious. He has repeatedly argued that the other problems in the philosophy of mind are easy because we can conceive of brain observations that might solve them. Chalmers failed to study all the reasons why what we have already observed rules out the brain as the explanation for quite a few mental things other than consciousness: things such as rapid thinking, life long memories and instant knowledge recall. You can imagine someone observing someone on some other planet, observing a brain very different from our brains, a brain that had indexes, addresses, a unit for writing memories, a unit for reading memories, blazing fast and low-noise transmission pathways, a vastly complicated encoding system for translating experiences and learned knowledge into brain states, and also a stable system for storing memories for 60 years. A person observing such features might then be able to say, "I know how people on this planet use brains to recall instantly and accurately things they learned 60 years ago." The problem is that neuroscientists have already exhaustively studied the brain, and they have found none of the features just mentioned. So it's a huge fallacy to talk about hypothetical observations that could be made that might solve problems of explaining phenomena such as instant memory retrieval, blazing fast arithmetic calculation, and life-long memories, when we already can be confident that such observations will not ever occur in regard to human brains, because the imagined units and components and tendencies would have been discovered long ago if they existed in the human brain.
It is a gigantic fallacy to think there is merely some "problem of consciousness" when there is a billion times bigger "problem of explaining human minds and human mental phenomena" that is almost infinitely more complicated. Once you realize this, you may realize that imagining some quantum "proto-consciousness" does very little to solve the explanatory problems in the philosophy of mind, which are huge and "all over the place."
The trick of posing a mere "problem of consciousness" is a ridiculous ruse. A human being is not merely "some consciousness." A human being is an enormously complex reality, and the mental reality is as complex as the physical reality. You dehumanize and degrade human beings when you refer to their minds as mere "consciousness." The problem of human mentality is the problem of credibly explaining the thirty or forty most interesting types of human mental experiences, human mental characteristics and human mental capabilities. Instead of just being "some consciousness," human beings are minds that have a vast variety of mental capabilities and mental experiences such as these:
- imagination
- self-hood
- abstract idea creation
- appreciation
- memory formation
- moral thinking and moral behavior
- instantaneous memory recall
- instantaneous creation of permanent new memories
- memory persistence for as long as 50 years or more
- emotions
- desire
- speaking in a language
- understanding spoken language
- creativity
- insight
- beliefs
- pleasure
- pain
- reading ability
- writing ability
- mental illness of many different types
- ordinary awareness of surroundings
- visual perception
- recognition
- planning ability
- auditory perception
- attention
- fascination and interest
- the correct recall of large bodies of sequential information (such as when someone playing Hamlet recalls all his lines correctly)
- eyes-closed visualization
- extrasensory perception (ESP)
- dreaming
- pattern recognition
- social abilities
- spirituality
- philosophical reasoning
- mathematical ability
- volition
- trance phenomena
- exceptional memory such as hyperthymesia
- extraordinary calculation abilities such as in autistic savants
- out-of-body experiences
- apparition sightings
It is always a silly, stupid trick when someone tries to reduce so complex a reality to try and make it sound like the faintest shadow of what it is, by speaking as if there is a mere "problem of consciousness," and talking as if humans are just "some consciousness" that needs to be explained. Such a shabby, pathetic trick (which can be called consciousness shadow-speaking) is as silly as ignoring the vast complexity of the organization of the human body, and speaking as if explaining the origin of human bodies is just a task of explaining how there might occur "some carbon concentrations." The person attempting so pathetic a trick is acting as silly as a person who stands at the seashore, fills a glass with seawater, and says, "Oceans are easy to explain -- they're just water." Just as the ocean includes trillions of deep, baffling complexities such as all of the organization and biochemistry of sea creatures -- something infinitely more complex than mere water -- the human mind and human mental experiences involve trillions of complexities, and such a reality is something almost infinitely more complex than mere "consciousness." The reductionist who engages in consciousness shadow-speaking is someone engaging in a trick as misleading as someone who says, "Mathematics is real simple -- it's just counting."
The vast majority of people who try to reduce the mountain-sized problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences in all their variety into the mouse-sized problem of explaining some mere dry abstraction of "consciousness" are people who were too lazy to deeply study minds and brains, and who used this stupid trick of shadow-speaking to try to make their explanation job a million times easier. People who lack credible explanations for very complex realities (whether physical or mental) love to use shabby word tricks in which they try to make the complex realities sound a million times simpler than they are.
The dialog below illustrates the stupidity of trying to explain human minds by describing a human mind as mere "consciousness" and then trying to create a "theory of consciousness" that applies to everything conscious.
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James: John, I've made great progress in explaining how the human body arises during a mother's pregnancy. John: Great, tell me about it. James: I call my explanation a “theory of solidity.” John: A theory of solidity? James: Yes, because that's the essential nature of human bodies, that they are solid. So my theory attempts to explain how solidity arises. John: I think you've gone in the wrong direction, and made a big mistake. James: Why? John: Because a human body is something gigantically greater than mere “solidity.” A human body is a state of vast hierarchical organization, with a oceanic level of functional complexity. For example, in our bodies are 20,000 different protein inventions, most very special arrangements of many thousands of atoms. And we have 200 types of cells, each so complex they are compared to factories. You would do nothing to explain so impressive a reality of physical organization by merely explaining “solidity.” Your body is something gigantically more than mere “solidity.”
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James: John, I've made great progress in explaining how the human mind arises. John: Great, tell me about it.
James: I call my explanation a “theory of consciousness.” John: A theory of consciousness? James: Yes, because that's the essential nature of human minds, that they are conscious. So my theory attempts to explain how consciousness arises. John: I think you've gone in the wrong direction, and made a big mistake. James: Why? John: Because a human mind is something gigantically greater than mere “consciousness.” You and I are not merely “some consciousness.” We are thinking, believing, seeing, reading, hearing, loving imagining minds with insight, emotions, viewpoints, and a great variety of mental powers such as instant learning ability, the ability to hold memories for decades, and the ability to instantly recall knowledge when only hearing a word or seeing a face. Human minds and human mental experiences are a reality of oceanic depth, so much more than mere “consciousness.” |
The same complaints I make above about Ranjan's sojourn into the philosophy of mind apply with equal force against a recent article by cosmologist/physicist Ethan Siegel, one entitled "Can the known particles and interactions explain consciousness?" As far as I can guess from many years of reading his articles that are too-frequently promoted by Google News, Siegel seems to have never lifted a finger to seriously study minds, brains or human mental experiences. So he spends almost all of his article telling us about what he does know about (physics), without doing anything to explain how what he is discussing has any relation to explaining minds. We hear nothing that is of any value in explaining how particles or physical interactions could give rise to human minds. We get what sounds like a "laziest effort" sojourn into the philosophy of mind. We get the silly claim, "We should, therefore, be able to take these fundamental constituents of matter — quarks, gluons, and electrons — and assemble them in various ways to explain everything that we encounter in everyday life." Humans are no more capable of creating a living and thinking human adult body by assembling subatomic particles than fish are capable of building aircraft carriers; and every human body is a state of organization greater than any object humans have constructed.
Consider the human body. The human body is a fantastically complex arrangement of matter. The very many types of complex molecules and cells in the human body contain various different elements, including hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium and iron. Now suppose someone were to try to analyze a human body by only analyzing the hydrogen in it, the simplest element in it. That would be folly. A body having molecules made of multiple different types of elements cannot be meaningfully or wisely analyzed by restricting yourself to an analysis of the simplest element in that body. Anyone trying to analyze a human body by some restricted "hydrogen analysis" has gone hopelessly astray. Similarly, human minds and human mental experiences consist of a very great number of things rather than some mere primitive of "consciousness." The person who tries to analyze human minds and human mental experiences by mainly analyzing what he calls "consciousness" is typically someone who has made as big a mistake as someone trying to analyze human bodies by mainly analyzing hydrogen in human bodies. No real insight can be gained by analyzing some very complex reality so that you center your analysis on the simplest thing or simplest aspect of that reality. People who try to analyze minds by "consciousness analysis" are people as blundering as someone who might try to analyze a human body mainly by "hydrogen analysis."
The person trying to simplify the problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences by shrinking the problem a million-fold to become a mere problem of explaining some dry abstraction of "consciousness" is like some metaphysician who tries to simply the problem of explaining the universe a million-fold by reinventing the problem as a mere dry "problem of existence" rather than a problem of explaining a universe like the one we have.
Physics does have an indirect relevance to the philosophy of mind, although it is something entirely different from what Ranjan has discussed. The fundamental constants of physics are enormously fine-tuned in a way that makes possible the existence of life, as I discuss here, here, here and here. We would not expect such fine tuning to exist in any of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 random universes. The fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and the fine-tuning of the universe's laws strongly suggest that our universe was produced by some enormous mind of vast power. Realizing how fine-tuned our universe is, and also studying biology which provides evidence of fine-tuning everywhere, it becomes more plausible to believe that our minds have as their source not brains but some transcendent mind vastly greatly than our own minds.
Below we see some of the pillars of an advanced philosophy of mind and biology. The fine-tuning of the universe's physical laws and fundamental constants is one of the pillars of such a philosophy. For a discussion of how these things all fit together to be pillars of a single well-justified and evidence-based philosophy of mind and biology, read my long post here.
