The Mind and the Brain (6 page)

Even this abbreviated rundown of mind-brain philosophies would not be complete without what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls “don’t-have-a-clue materialism.” This is the default position of those who have no idea about the origins of consciousness or the mind but assert that “it must be physical, as materialism must be true,” as Chalmers puts it. “Such a view is held widely, but rarely in print.” One might add that many working scientists hold this view without really reflecting on the implications of it.

Although none of these worldviews has ended the mind-matter debate, most philosophers who study consciousness nevertheless hew largely to some form of the reductive materialist creed. But there are notable exceptions. Dave Chalmers is one of those arguing for what he calls “a non-reductive ontology of consciousness”—in other words, an approach that does not reduce consciousness to a (mere) physical process. Chalmers says that he “started out life as a materialist, because materialism is a very attractive scientific and philosophical doctrine.” But he became more and more dissatisfied with the dogmatic materialist ontology that posits that all aspects of consciousness are a logically entailed and perhaps metaphysically necessary outcome of materialist processes. He therefore began to focus on the explanatory gap between the material and the mental—between explanations of how neurons work, on the one hand, and our felt, inner awareness on the other. Even if we knew everything about every field and iota of matter in the universe, in other words, it is hard to see how that knowledge would produce that elusive “Aha!” moment, when we all say,
Oh, right, so that’s how consciousness is done
(in the way we might react, say, to a materialist explanation of how the liver produces bile). Those neuronal mechanisms, Chalmers concluded, would never in and of themselves add up to consciousness. Physical form and function
add up to more physical form and function. “To truly bridge the gap between the physical nature of brain physiology and the mental essence of consciousness, we have to satisfy two different conceptual demands,” Chalmers told the public television series “Closer to the Truth” in 2000. “It’s not yet looking very likely that we’re going to reduce the mind to the brain. In fact, there may be systematic reasons to think there will always be a gulf between the physical and the mental.”

If that gulf is unbridgeable, Chalmers therefore argues, consciousness might profitably be regarded as what he calls a “nonreductive primitive,” a fundamental building block of reality, just as mass and electric charge, as well as space and time, are nonreductive primitives in theories of the physical world. Taking consciousness as a primitive rather than as an emergent property of the physical brain, Chalmers’s search for a nonreductive ontology of consciousness led him to what he calls panprotopsychism. The
proto
reflects the possibility that the intrinsic properties of the basic entities of the physical world may be not quite mental, but that collectively they are able to constitute the mental (it is in this sense of
proto
that physics is “protochemical”). In this view, mind is much more fundamental to the universe than we ordinarily imagine. Panprotopsychism has the virtue of integrating mental events into the physical world. “We need psychophysical laws connecting physical processes to subjective experience,” Chalmers says. “Certain aspects of quantum mechanics lend themselves very nicely to this.”

In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental—that is, a primary element of reality—then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the mind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning of
the twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. “Quantum theory casts the problem of the connection between our conscious thoughts and the activities of our brains in a completely new light,” argues my physicist friend Henry Stapp. “The replacement of the ideas of classical physics by the ideas of quantum physics completely changes the complexion of the mind-brain dichotomy, of the connection between mind and brain.”

As the millennium turned, a smattering of neuroscientists finally began to accept that consciousness and the mind (as opposed to mere brain) are legitimate areas of scientific inquiry. This is not to say that the puzzle of how mind is interconnected with brain is anywhere close to solution, but at least researchers are letting it into the lab, and that is a signal change from the recent past. “When I first got interested in [the problem of consciousness] seriously and tried to discuss it with brain scientists,” recalled John Searle in 2000, “I found that most of them were not interested in the question…. Consciousness seems too airy-fairy and touchy-feely to be a real scientific subject.” Yet today neuroscientists flock to conferences with
consciousness
in their names, write books with
consciousness
in their titles, and contribute to a journal that boldly proclaims itself the
Journal of Consciousness Studies
. Two Nobel laureates have moved on from the work that won them an invitation to Stockholm, to pursue the puzzle of consciousness: Francis Crick, who with James Watson shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for determining the structure of DNA, mused in his book
The Astonishing Hypothesis
that the seat of volition might be found in a deep crevasse in the cortex called the anterior cingulate sulcus; Gerald Edelman, who shared the 1972 Nobel for working out the molecular structure of antibodies, argued that consciousness arises from the resonating interplay of assemblies of neurons. More and
more scholars are concluding that our deep inner sense of a mental life not fully encompassed by the electrochemical interactions of neuronal circuits is not delusional. As the German neuroscientist Wolf Singer puts it, these elements of consciousness “transcend the reach of reductionistic neurobiological explanations.” More and more neuroscientists are admitting to doubts about the simplistic materialistic model, allowing, as Steven Rose does, that brain has an “ambiguous relationship to mind.”

As a result, a whiff of dualism is once again rising, like the smoke from a long-extinguished campfire, within the scientific community. “Many people, including a past self of mine, have thought that they could simultaneously take consciousness seriously and remain a materialist,” writes Dave Chalmers. “This is not possible…. Those who want to come to grips with the phenomenon must embrace a form of dualism. One might say: you can’t have your materialist cake and eat your consciousness too.” Instead, Chalmers argues that it is time, and it is necessary, to sacrifice the simple physicalist worldview that emerged from the scientific revolution and stood science in good stead for the last three centuries. Although philosophers and scientists both have been known to argue that materialism is the only worldview compatible with science—“dualism is inconsistent with evolutionary biology and modern physics and chemistry,” Paul Churchland asserted in 1988—this is simply false. Nor is it justifiable to hew to materialism in the misguided belief that embracing dualism means embracing something supernatural, spiritualistic, nonscientific. To the contrary: scientists questioning reductive materialism believe that consciousness will turn out to be governed by natural law (even if they haven’t a clue, yet, about what such a law might look like). As Chalmers says, “There is no a priori principle that says that all natural laws will be physical laws; to deny materialism is not to deny naturalism.”

In a welcome irony, centuries of wrestling with the mind-matter
problem that arose from the clash between dualism and materialism might come down to this: dualism, with its assertion that there are two irreconcilable kinds of stuff in the world, and materialism, with its insistence that there is only the material, should both be tossed on the proverbial trash heap of history. Dualism fails to explain the relationship between mind and matter, in particular how the former can be functionally conjoined with the latter; materialism denies the reality of subjective states of sentience. Dualism leads us to a dead end; materialism doesn’t even let us begin the journey.

At a meeting on consciousness held in Tucson in the spring of 2000, I was delighted when the philosopher John Searle asserted his belief that volition and the will are real, able to influence how the material stuff of the brain expresses itself. After the session, Dave Chalmers needled me for enjoying Searle’s talk so much. Well, I had: it seemed to me that Searle was the first mainstream philosopher to question whether the physical realm could account for all our mental experiences. Chalmers said that’s not what he heard Searle say. In fact, Dave grinned, he would bet me twenty dollars that Searle had not at all denied “causal closure of the microphysical”—that is, the belief that only physical causes can bring about physical effects, which would preclude the nonmaterial mind’s affecting the physical brain. I took the bet. Let’s ask him, Dave said. No no, I objected: he’ll deny it; let’s get a copy of his paper and see for ourselves. During the break I went to the exhibit hall and found the
Journal of Consciousness Studies
booth, where Searle had dropped off a preliminary version of his paper. I wheedled a photocopy out of them. In it appeared this argument for the causal efficacy of the rational mind:

We found Searle after the session, and Chalmers asked him point blank. “Of course I do not deny causal closure,” Searle shot back. I wasn’t surprised; most scientists seem to have a morbid fear of saying that anything nonphysical can have causal efficacy in the physical realm. The furthest most scientists and philosophers are willing to go is to acknowledge that what we think of as mental events act back on the brain only through the physical states that give rise to those mental events. That is, brain state A may give rise to mental state A? as well as brain state B—but the causal actor in this case was brain state A and not mental state A?.

Anyway, at an end-of-conference party that evening at Chalmers’s house, I paid Dave the twenty dollars we’d bet. I did note, though, that Searle’s insisting on causal closure of the physical world was logically inconsistent with his argument that volition is real and able to affect the physical matter of the brain. I hope the
beginnings of an answer to this quandary will emerge from the data I will present showing the critical role of willed effort in generating self-directed cerebral change. In any event, as I said to Dave when I handed him the twenty dollars, “This story still has a long way to go.”

Wrestling with the mystery of mind and matter is no mere academic parlor game. The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century—with the attendant attempt to analyze all observable phenomena in terms of mechanical chains of causation—was a knife in the heart of moral philosophy, for it reduced human beings to automatons. If all of the body and brain can be completely described without invoking anything so empyreal as a mind, let alone a consciousness, then the notion that a person is morally responsible for his actions appears quaint, if not scientifically naïve. A machine cannot be held responsible for its actions. If our minds are impotent to affect our behavior, then surely we are no more responsible for our actions than a robot is. It is an understatement to note that the triumph of materialism, as applied to questions of mind and brain, therefore makes many people squirm. For if the mysteries of the mind are reducible to physics and chemistry, then “mind is but the babbling of a robot, chained ineluctably to crude causality,” as the neurobiologist Robert Doty put it in 1998.

In succeeding chapters we will explore the emerging evidence that matter alone does not suffice to generate mind, but that, to the contrary, there exists a “mental force” that is not reducible to the material. Mental force, which is closely related to the ancient Buddhist concepts of mindfulness and karma, provides a basis for the effects of mind on matter that clinical neuroscience finds. What is new here is that a question with deep philosophical roots, as well as profound philosophical and moral implications, can finally be addressed (if not yet fully solved) through science. If materialism can be challenged in the context of neuroscience, if stark physical reductionism can be replaced by an outlook in which the mind can exert causal control, then, for the first time since the scientific revo
lution, the scientific worldview will become compatible with such ideals as will—and, therefore, with morality and ethics. The emerging view of the mind, and of the mind-matter enigma, has the potential to imbue human thought and action with responsibility once again.