The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [79]
Introspection must be wrong when it credits consciousness with thoughts about birthdays, keys, and bosses’ names. But the mistake introspection makes is so deep and so persuasive, it’s almost impossible to shake, even when you understand it. At first you won’t even be able to conceive how it could be a mistake. But it has to be. The mistake is the notion that when we think, or rather when our brain thinks, it thinks about anything at all.
I know. Your immediate reaction is that this couldn’t be a mistake. You may even go back and reread that last, italicized sentence of the last paragraph. It couldn’t have meant what you thought it said. The sentence seemed to say that when we think, we are not thinking about what we are thinking about, and that’s just a plain contradiction. So you conclude that you must have misread the sentence. You did. What the sentence said is that thinking is not a matter of thinking about things. Of course we think. No one denies that. It’s just that thinking is nothing like what conscious introspection tells us it is. Introspection’s mistake is the source of most of the mistaken answers that have been given to the persistent questions. It is also the source of most of the religious ideas people have as well. That’s because of the role of this one illusion in the emergence of our fixation with stories, as we’ll see. It’s such a deep mistake that it won’t be easy to recognize. Even after it is recognized, like the visual illusions in the last chapter, it sticks with us.
We have to see very clearly that introspection tricks us into the illusion that our thoughts are about anything at all. That’s what the rest of this chapter does. Then, in Chapter 9, we will see how the trick is done. Once science shows us the trick and how it’s done, we will be able to apply the understanding to correctly answer the most unavoidable questions raised by the mind and the self. But what follows here is the hardest part of this book. We will walk through the science we need to expose the illusion three different ways. Even after we do so, however, it will be impossible to avoid the illusion entirely. The best we can do is watch out for its insidious attempts to subvert scientism and keep them at bay.
THINKING ABOUT (IS) THE UNTHINKABLE
In 1950, Herman Kahn, a game theorist at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, wrote a book about when the United States should launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Kahn may have been the model for the eponymous character in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kahn’s book was disturbing enough even to its author, who gave it the title Thinking about the Unthinkable. He and his frightened readers need not have worried. As we’ll see, it can’t be done. You can’t think about the unthinkable, because you can’t think about anything at all.
Suppose someone asks you, “What is the capital of France?” Into consciousness comes the thought that Paris is the capital of France. Consciousness tells you in no uncertain terms what the content of your thought is, what your thought is about. It’s about the statement that Paris is the capital of France. That’s the thought you are thinking. It just can’t be denied. You can’t be wrong about the content of your thought. You may be wrong about whether Paris is really the capital of France. The French assembly could have moved the capital to Bordeaux this morning (they did it one morning in June 1940). You might even be wrong about whether you are thinking about Paris, confusing it momentarily with London. What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.
It’s this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking