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It’s hard to give up the insistent assertions of introspection that common sense endorses. Even those who are prepared to let science trump common sense when the two conflict would rather find some acceptable compromise between them. In particular, scientists and philosophers have sought a way to reconcile science to the aboutness of thoughts and the feeling of purposefulness that fill up our lives. Among philosophers, this quest has come to be known as naturalism: the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century attempt by philosophers to reconcile natural science with as many of common sense’s answers to the persistent questions as possible. It’s not for lack of trying that none of them have succeeded (by their own standards) in their effort to naturalize the self, the will, the purposes, projects, and plans that seem to guide people’s lives, along with their moral, aesthetic, and other values. By now it is clear why naturalism has not worked out for human affairs.

As we’ll see, the last nail in the coffin of naturalism is hammered in not by scientism, but by those who oppose both scientism and naturalism. In the next chapter, we explore their demonstration that science can never capture the subjective point of view of the self, the thinker and spectator, the person inside the human body. The conclusion that scientism comes to is that objections to naturalism are correct. If there were a subjective point of view that belongs to the self, then this would indeed be a fact not fixed by the physical facts. Since the physical facts do fix all the facts, there is no such point of view, no self, no person, no soul. That is the last illusion of introspection.

Chapter 10

YOU’VE GOT

TO STOP

TAKING YOURSELF

SO SERIOUSLY

THE ILLUSION THAT THERE IS SOMEONE INSIDE that has thoughts about stuff is certainly as old as the illusion that there are thoughts about stuff. They almost certainly evolved together as a package deal. But if the physical facts fix all the facts, there can’t be a me or you inside our bodies with a special point of view. When it fixed the facts, physics ruled out the existence of selves, souls, persons, or nonphysical minds inhabiting our bodies. It’s easy to see how it ruled them out, much easier than it is to see the illusion of aboutness that fostered them. Seeing the illusion of self helps loosen the hold of the illusion of purpose, plan, and design. If there is no one to cook up and carry out plans, purposes, and designs, then they couldn’t be real, could they? As for free will, it’s also hard to see its point without a self to have free will.

COULD ANY DAY BE “FREAKY FRIDAY”?

The simplest way to see why scientism makes us give up the self is by reflecting on a couple of silly movies that show how totally incompatible with science a self or person in the body really has to be. Freaky Friday and Vice Versa are movies that have been remade at least seven times between them. A teenager and her mother (or a father and his son) exchange bodies, and mayhem ensues. The audience watching the movie, including little kids, thinks it understands the story perfectly well: we have no trouble with people switching bodies because we have no trouble with people not being their bodies (or their brains for that matter). They are the very same individual people, despite the fact that each has exchanged bodies, including brains, too. If this exchange were even slightly hard for children to understand, Disney would not have filmed the story so many times.

But this scenario only works if the self, the person, the mind, that moves from one body to the other in this story is not a physical thing at all. Notice that mom and daughter don’t trade anything physical at all, not the tiniest fermion or boson, when they make the body switches. So, the self has to be completely nonphysical. Of course, it always has a location in space and time. One of the two selves in the switch is first somewhere