The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [89]
These neural markers in consciousness will have all the same problems being about Paris, about capitals, or about France that any nonconscious neurons in the brain have. The basic neural processes going on in conscious thought have to be just the same as the basic neural processes going on when the brain nonconsciously thinks. These processes are the only things neurons and sets of neurons do. Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process. Introspection certainly produces the illusion of aboutness. But it’s got to be an illusion, since nothing physical can be about anything. That goes for your conscious thoughts as well. The markers, the physical stuff, the clumps of matter that constitute your conscious thoughts can’t be about stuff either. The real problem is to explain away this illusion. Doing so is going to dispose of a lot of other illusions as well.
In the next couple of chapters, we’ll see how deeply wrong consciousness is when it comes to the self, free will, human purpose, and the meanings of our actions, our lives, and our creations. It’s all because of the illusion that thought is about stuff. And we’ll explain why introspection keeps screaming at us that thoughts, whether conscious or not, really are about anything at all.
Introspection is screaming that thought has to be about stuff, and philosophers are muttering, “Denying it is crazy, worse than self-contradictory. It’s incoherent. According to you, neither spoken sentences nor silent ones in thought express statements. They aren’t about anything. That goes for every sentence in this book. It’s not about anything. Why are we bothering to read it?”
Look, if I am going to get scientism into your skull I have to use the only tools we’ve got for moving information from one head to another: noises, ink-marks, pixels. Treat the illusion that goes with them like the optical illusions in Chapter 7. This book isn’t conveying statements. It’s rearranging neural circuits, removing inaccurate disinformation and replacing it with accurate information. Treat it as correcting maps instead of erasing sentences.
Chapter 9
FAREWELL TO THE
PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE™
FOR SOLID EVOLUTIONARY REASONS, WE’VE BEEN tricked into looking at life from the inside. Without scientism, we look at life from the inside, from the first-person POV (OMG, you don’t know what a POV is?—a “point of view”). The first person is the subject, the audience, the viewer of subjective experience, the self in the mind.
Scientism shows that the first-person POV is an illusion. Even after scientism convinces us, we’ll continue to stick with the first person. But at least we’ll know that it’s another illusion of introspection and we’ll stop taking it seriously. We’ll give up all the answers to the persistent questions about free will, the self, the soul, and the meaning of life that the illusion generates.
The physical facts fix all the facts. The mind is the brain. It has to be physical and it can’t be anything else, since thinking, feeling, and perceiving are physical process—in particular, input/output processes—going on in the brain. We can be sure of a great deal about how the brain works because the physical facts fix all the facts about the brain. The fact that the mind is the brain guarantees that there is no free will. It rules out any purposes or designs organizing our actions or our lives. It excludes the very possibility of enduring persons, selves, or souls that exist after death or for that matter while we live. Not that there was ever much doubt about mortality anyway.
This chapter uses the science of Chapter 8 to provide scientism’s answers to the persistent questions about us and the mind. The fact that these answers are so different from what life’s illusions tell