The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [69]
Who am I, really, and why am I me instead of someone else (usually someone I would rather be)?
What makes me the same person who went to sleep in this body last night, one year ago, ten years ago?
I feel that my choices are really up to me, but do I really have free will? And if I do, why is exercising it such hard work?
Can my mind, my soul, my person, can I survive the death of my body? Might my mind, my soul, might I be immortal?
The last question on this list will concern even the least introspective among us. And introspection—just sort of watching what we are thinking about from the inside—won’t answer it. The other questions seem like ones that could be settled quickly just by looking into our own streams of consciousness, right? That there is a “me” in my body, that I remain the same person while everything in my body changes over the years, that it’s really up to me when I make choices, that right now I am thinking about what I am reading on the page or screen before me: these are all things we just feel we have to be right about. Immediate experience, conscious introspection tells us so. How can we be mistaken about these things?
Alas, we must be. Science provides clear-cut answers to all of the questions on the list: there is no free will, there is no mind distinct from the brain, there is no soul, no self, no person that supposedly inhabits your body, that endures over its life span, and that might even outlast it. So, introspection must be wrong.
Why trust science more than introspection? We have already seen that science gives us compelling reasons not to trust our gut feelings about right and wrong. In this chapter, we’ll see that science gives us even more reason to be suspicious of what we think we know “from the inside” about the mind, the self, the person, or the will. It will be very hard to give up the wrong answers about the mind. Introspection has been insisting on them ever since conscious thought came to have words for its experiences. Scientism requires that we give up almost everything introspection tells us about the mind.
Science reveals that introspection—thinking about what is going on in consciousness—is completely untrustworthy as a source of information about the mind and how it works. Cognitive neuroscience has already established that many of the most obvious things introspection tells you about your mind are illusions. If the most obvious things consciousness tells us are just plain wrong, we can’t trust it to tell us anything about ourselves. We certainly can’t trust it to answer our unavoidable questions about the mind or the self or what makes us the persons we are.
Scientism can be confident about the right answers to these questions. First, its answers follow immediately and directly from the physical and biological facts. Second, the only arguments against its answers start by taking introspection seriously, something the empirical evidence shows we should never do.
In this chapter, we’ll see how conscious awareness tricks us into profound mistakes about how the mind works. In the next chapter, we’ll use the diagnosis to show how wrong introspection’s answers are to the persistent questions. Then we’ll get the right answers that science provides. Introspection is so seductively convincing, however, that it’s hard not to be taken in, even when we understand its tricks. That will need explaining, too.
To escape from the snares of consciousness, we won’t really need much empirical science about the mind. This is fortunate, since there isn’t much yet. The real science of psychology is only just getting started now that we have some tools for figuring out how the brain works. Producing results in psychology is going to be very difficult because it is the hardest science. It is harder than quantum mechanics or superstring theory. This is not because the right theory of how the brain works