Neurons Fire; Therefore, I am.

May 24, 2011 at 3:15 P.M. Happy Birthday, Gemini!

Alison Gopnik, "The Great Illusion: A Psychology Professor Offers the Theory That Consciousness is a Show We Stage for Ourselves," in The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, May 22, 2011, at p. 19.

Colin McGinn, "Can We Solve the Mind/Body Problem?," in The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1-22.

"Malign Neglect: In Declining a Case Brought by Torture Victims, The Supreme Court Undermined the Rule of Law," (Editorial) in The New York Times, Sunday Opinion, May 22, 2011, at p. 7.

Brand Blanshard & B.F. Skinner, "The Problem of Consciousness: A Debate," in Jerry Hill, ed., Philosophy Today, No. 2 (New York: MacMillan, 1969), pp. 183-209.

Introduction.

The enduring appeal of the problem of consciousness in our time has something to do with the division between scientific and humanistic sides of American intellectual culture. In reviewing this book Alison Gopnik (or an editor inserting words into her text) conveys thinly-hidden disdain for philosophy and a much more disturbing contempt or disgust for humanity, with the possible exception of scientists who are admired when they agree with our reviewer.

I suspect that this essay by Ms. Gopnik was influenced by the golden prose of Natasha Vargas-Cooper or Manohla Dargis. Indeed, it may be that a single person has contributed to the writings appearing under all three of these names. GOPnick?

In commenting on this review, I will focus on three issues: First, errors in grasping the mind/body problem will be examined; Second, contempt for humanistic learning and the Western philosophical tradition -- possibly based on misunderstanding or ignorance -- will be identified; Third, hatred of humanity or a view of men and women as "object-like" will be criticized.

I believe that Ms. Gopnik's view of human nature that is stated here with astonishing brutality is not only mistaken, but evil. I hope to make my reasons for this conclusion clear during the course of my discussion. I fervently hope that the person writing this review for the Times is not a Jew.

I.

"Humphrey ... may not have solved the mind/body problem, and there is something to be said for the awkward geekery of philosophical analysis and experimental data. But he has some really interesting and original ideas about consciousness." (p. 19, emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, our reviewer either does not understand Humphrey's ideas about consciousness or is unable to communicate them to readers. I will make use of the writings of several "awkward geeks" -- Jerry Fodor, Colin McGinn, Thomas Nagel and others, who are all well-versed in contemporary brain science -- to explain things to Ms. Gopnik or her unhelpful editor/politician/boss. ("Menendez Charged With Selling His Office.")

It misses the point to write " ... Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about." (p. 19, emphasis added.)

The mind/body problem is not about explaining the neurochemistry that accompanies our subjective experience of anything, but with why there is something "it is like" to have any subjective experience at all. This is not quite the same thing. ("Mind and Machine.")

We are aware of what we feel. We also sense or ponder the meaning of what we feel, at any time, and no matter the emotions or sense data involved in our "experiencing" anything.

The mystery of consciousness has to do with the distinction between experience and behavior, meaning and event, brain chemistry and mental phenomena as dual aspects of the single protean selves that we are as persons who mind about things.

The difficulty with the metaphor of a "show that we stage for ourselves" is that it ignores the question of who is doing the staging or what it means "to be" an experiencing agent of cognition, or accounting for qualia.

Consciousness makes us both performers (in perceiving or constructing knowledge and our worlds of meanings) as well as audience members (absorbing and being absorbed into a life-world that confers or validates identity and purposes for each of us). ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

II.

Explaining the mechanics of what makes perception possible (the backstage stuff) is relevant but not dispositive concerning the nature of subjectivity (the meaning of the performance), phenomenologically, for the agent/observer.

What philosophers "care about" is what makes any conscious experience possible, subjectively, or what it feels like to be aware beings perceiving as we construct our worlds. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Meanings are excluded from biological accounts as social or ideational, aesthetic, spiritual, linguistic phenomena. Accordingly, a purely physiological description of sexual intercourse for two persons is totally external to the meaning and importance of "love-making" for the same two persons, as lovers. Colin McGinn notes: " ... the intrinsic nature of an object is logically independent of the manner of its genesis." (This quote is taken from the final essay in the collection by Professor McGinn listed above.)

Culture is logically excluded from brain science. We live and experience, however, within human cultures in a way that birds and rodents do not because we are linguistic animals. Compare B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: MacMillan, 1953) with Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) and Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1972). (Among the "environments" shaping humans are non-empirical and linguistic-cultural structures or spaces -- religions, for example, or cinematic imagery -- which are not found "in" any single brain.)

The issue is not how it is that "the moon looks the way it does to us" given the anatomy of the human eye or our brain chemistry, but for and to whom does the moon "appear" in one way rather than another and why does the moon provide an infinite possible range of meanings or symbolic resonances for persons from all over the world. ("Consciousness and Computers.")

Does the "moon for the misbegotten" seem different than it does for astronauts and scientific behaviorists? How is it possible that the moon becomes a trope or figurative device, symbol or metaphor, seen as "female" as contrasted with the "masculine" sun in our civilization?

Yes, such archetypal representations affect how and what we see as "the" moon. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

III.

To say that these qualia (subjective experiences and values) are illusions that we create because we need or enjoy them misses the point, again, because one can say the same of science or scientism. 

We "like" clear explanations so much that in order to get a clear explanation we may be willing to ignore the complexity and ambiguity of what we are trying to explain.

Even illusions are experiences and to like something is also a subjective or conscious state or experience not enjoyed by a stone, for example, that is unconscious.

For that matter, disliking something is also only possible for conscious creatures. You have to be conscious before you can like or dislike anything.

Ms. Gopnik, unknowingly, (one hopes!) paraphrases Dr. Mengele: "Just keep whispering you're really special to that SACK OF WATER AND PROTEIN and you can get IT to do practically anything." (p. 19, emphasis added.)

This theory of persons as biochemical objects ("it?") leads straight to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, just as it led to Dachau earlier in our history. I am not best described as a "sack of water and protein."

Getting "beyond freedom and dignity" in our thinking about persons makes it O.K. to use and discard people (women who are made into prostitutes); or to experiment on persons against their will so we can learn from them (psychological tortures); or to make persons into slaves, or virtual equivalents of slaves, paid subsistence wages to make our luxury goods (globalization).

Worse, one may shoot an eleven-year-old child and escape all consequences for the act since the boy is only a "sack of water and protein." ("America's Holocaust.")

By disregarding the dignity of persons and reducing them -- men and women -- to objects of manipulation, we behave unjustly to them. We injure persons whose rights and autonomy are violated. ("John Rawls and Justice" and "The Experiments in Guatemala.")

Conclusion.

Ms. Gopnik's view of persons and consciousness is not simply mistaken or wrong, as I say, it is evil.

Perhaps much of the anti-Americanism we experience today is one result of this so-called "American scientism" directed against the world, an ideology that results in "robot bombs" and the horrors of Guantanamo rather than dialogues or mutual attempts at understanding.

"It is hard to see why in a behaviorist world" -- where subjectivity is an illusion, pleasant or not -- "[some] consequences should be better than others. Why should I not impose suffering on another if [his or her suffering] is only a mentalistic unreality?" (Blanshard, p. 208.)

Wisdom about consciousness or anything else arrives when we realize that life is often not about imposing suffering or control on others, but understanding the suffering imposed on us by others, because we must learn to love them despite their horrors and our pains.