The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [105]
Scientism isn’t required to figure out what is wrong with these proofs that experience can’t be physical, so minds can’t be brains. That’s the job of science—neuroscience in particular. Scientism can ignore the conundrums, dilemmas, and paradoxes that the arguments generate. Science cannot. These problems are signposts in the research program of the science of the brain. Unraveling them will be some of its marks of progress. Meanwhile, scientism can already be confident that they will be unraveled.
Nevertheless, there are a few reasons to sketch the most entertaining of these arguments, even though scientism already knows they have to be wrong. First, they are wonderful, entertaining, thought-provoking riddles. Second, it’s important for scientism to see how these arguments cheat. Third, the arguments are among the last serious challenges to scientism. Science has managed to dispose of all the other arguments that have been advanced to show its limits, ever since the fifth century bc.
It was then that an Athenian named Zeno provided a knockdown argument that motion through space was impossible. The argument seemed to show that it was logically contradictory for things to move even the smallest amount through space. For something to move an inch, it will have to cover ½ inch. To do that, it will have to go ¼ inch, and so on, through an infinite series of smaller and smaller distances. Since an infinite series of events can’t ever be finished, the thing’s motion can’t even get started. Everyone knows that things do move. There must be a paradox, a problem here that physics has to solve. It took science about 2,000 years to figure out what was the matter with the “paradoxes” of motion that Zeno devised. It required Newton’s invention of calculus and 100 years of further development in mathematics to solve Zeno’s paradox. Zeno may have been a smart-ass, but he did physics a big favor. Unraveling the paradox was important for the advancement of math and physics. There is a lesson here for the conundrums facing neuroscience.
It will probably take less than 2,000 years for science to show what type of a neurological phenomenon consciousness is and thus to unravel the arguments against the mind’s being the brain. At any rate, let’s hope so. But it won’t be easy, because the arguments against the mind’s being the brain cheat. They stack the deck against neuroscience so that it cannot succeed in meeting their challenge. The arguments demand that neuroscience take conscious introspection seriously. But they subtly deny it the use of any tools to do so. Naturally, if science cannot apply any of its methods to understand introspection, scientism won’t be able to show what is wrong with the arguments.
Most of these arguments were cooked up by philosophers. The first one that we will explore starts with the fact that each person’s introspective experience is subjective and qualitative. It gives an example of subjectivity that everyone can grasp, then tries to show that the subjectivity of experience everyone can grasp can’t be described by any amount of correct neuroscience. If experience can’t be described by neuroscience, then experiencing is something neurons can’t do, at least not by themselves. Whatever it is that does have the experiences, it just can’t be the brain. Something or someone has them, and it must be the self with its subjective point of view. So, the mind, where the experiences occur, can’t be the brain at all.
The argument gets its neatest force from an example dreamed up by a contemporary philosopher, Thomas Nagel. Ask yourself, “What is it like to be a bat?” Remember, bats detect their surroundings by echolocation. Nagel could have used a dog or a whale or any animal. But because bats echolocate instead of using their eyes, asking what it would be like to be a bat