The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [104]
IT’S ALL DESCARTES’S FAULT
Introspection and folk psychology are not going to allow scientism to get away with its denial that there is a self, person, or soul in the body. And they seem to hold a trump card in their hand: the I, the self, the soul that has a POV inside the skull is just the mind. Scientism can’t deny that we each have a mind. In fact, it insists that we have one and that it’s the brain. That’s where introspection, folk psychology, and a couple of thousand of years of philosophy counterattack. First they try to undermine the notion that the mind is the brain, and then they use that to refute scientism’s claim that the physical facts fix all the facts.
No one can deny the mind’s existence, certainly not scientism. Now, there is an army of philosophers from René Descartes in the seventeenth century to Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth only too happy to prove to you that the mind can’t be the brain. In fact, Descartes provided an argument for its separate existence that looks absolutely airtight. But if the mind isn’t the brain, then there exists at least one nonphysical kind of thing; at least one set of facts won’t, after all, be fixed by physics. These will be the facts about the mind, the self, the person, and maybe even the immortal soul. It’s enough to roll back at least three chapters’ worth of scientism and its answers to the persistent questions.
Descartes’s argument went like this: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Even if everything I think is completely wrong, there still needs to be an “I” having the wrong thoughts, having all those false beliefs. So, there is at least one belief that can’t be wrong, the belief that I exist. How does this make trouble for the notion that the mind is the brain? Easy. The existence of my brain can be doubted. In fact, many people (especially theists) have done so. I can easily imagine what it would be like to find out I didn’t have one—say, by looking at an ultrasound of my skull and discovering that it’s empty. That’s all Descartes needed. Look, I can doubt my brain’s existence. I can’t doubt my mind’s existence. Therefore, there is something true about my mind that is not true about my brain: My mind has the property that its existence can’t (logically can’t) be doubted by me. My brain lacks that feature. So, my brain can’t be my mind!
Think Descartes has pulled a fast one here? You are not alone. Scientism may be excused from not taking this line of thought too seriously. But it gets more serious. I also can’t doubt that I am having experiences. Introspection may be all wrong about whether my experiences tell me anything about reality, about the physical chunks of matter outside my mind that cause my experiences. But I can’t deny that there are experiences “in my mind.” Scientism admits their existence when it insists that these experiences should not be taken too seriously as a guide to how the mind works. So a serious argument that experience can’t be physical would make things very sticky for scientism.
Since scientism admits that experiences exist, they will have to be physical for scientism to be true. If the facts about experience can’t be fixed by physics, scientism will be false. More specifically, if the facts about my experiences can’t be fixed, explained, accounted for by neuroscience, then scientism will be false.
Ever since Descartes, clever people have been trying to show one way or another that neuroscience can’t explain obvious facts about experience. They have been devising problems, conundrums, dilemmas, and paradoxes to disprove scientism’s assertion that the mind is just the brain. Most are just variations on Descartes’s ploy. Those skeptical of science and credulous about religion have been grasping at these straws for centuries.
Does scientism actually have to take Descartes’s argument and others like it seriously? Does it actually have to diagnose each of their mistakes, or any of them? No. Even before you hear them, science