Edward Feser on Qualia

[Don Salmon]

We've had some posts recently claiming that materialists believe that qualia exist in a mind independent world. Apart from Michael Lockwood and a few others (and Ed Feser, of course), I've never heard any materialist say this.  If you disagree, could you actually post a quote from a published materialist philosopher?  Thanks.

Here's the main point of the article:

I’ve discussed the modern, post-Cartesian conception of matter and the role it played in generating the so-called “mind-body problem” many times in many places (including here and here).  The key point for present purposes is that in characterizing matter in purelyquantitative, mathematical terms, Descartes left no place in it forqualitative features like color, odor, taste, sound, smell, heat and cold as common sense understands them.  Accordingly, he treated these qualitative features -- as Galileo before him and Locke, Boyle, and countless others after him did -- as entirely mind-dependent, existing only in our conscious experience of the world but not in the world itself.  They are analogous to the redness you see when you literally look at the world through rose-colored glasses -- not really “out there” but only in the eye of the beholder.  What really exists “out there,” on this sort of view, is only color, sound, heart, cold, etc. as redefined in terms of physics -- surface reflectance properties, compression waves, molecular motion, etc.

Now, if these qualitative features as common sense understands them exist only in the mind and not in the material world, it follows that these features cannot themselves be material.  A kind of dualism follows, then, precisely from the conception of matter to which modern philosophers -- including materialists -- are generally committed.  Indeed, as I have also noted before (most recently here), early modern writers like Malebranche and Cudworth saw in this new conception of matter such an argument for dualism, as have contemporary dualists like Richard Swinburne.  The so-called “qualia problem” that contemporary philosophers of mind fret over has (contrary to what some of the materialists among them seem to assume) nothing whatsoever to do with an unwillingness to follow out the implications of modern science, but on the contrary is the inevitable result of the conception of matter to which modern scientists in their philosophical moments have wedded themselves.

and here's the article: 

Animals are conscious! In other news, sky is blue, water wet

A reader calls my attention to a Discovery News storywhich breathlessly declares: 

A prominent group of scientists signs a document stating that animals are just as “conscious and aware” as humans are.  This is a big deal.

Actually, it is not a big deal, nor in any way news, and the really interesting thing about this story is how completely uninteresting it is.  Animals are conscious?  Anyone who has ever owned a pet, or been to the zoo, or indeed just knows what an animal is, knows that.  

OK, almost anyone.  Descartes notoriously denied it, for reasons tied to his brand of dualism.  And perhaps that is one reason someone might think animal consciousness remarkable.  It might be supposed that if you regard the human mind as something immaterial, you have to regard animals as devoid of consciousness, so that evidence of animal consciousness is evidence against the immateriality of the mind and thus a “big deal.”  This is not what the article says, mind you, but it is one way to make sense of why it presents the evidence of animal consciousness as if it were noteworthy.

The trouble is that there is simply no essential connection whatsoever between affirming the immateriality of the human mind and denying that animals are conscious.  Aristotelians, for example, have always insisted both that animals are sentient -- indeed, that is part of whatmakes them animals in the first place -- and that human intellectual activity is at least partly immaterial (for reasons I’ve discussed in many places, most recently here).  Descartes’ reasons for denying animal consciousness have to do with assumptions peculiar to his own brand of dualism, assumptions Aristotelians reject.  And they have to do especially with assumptions Descartes made about the nature ofmatter as much or more than they have to do with his assumptions about the nature of mind -- assumptions about matter thatmaterialists (no doubt including at least some among those scientists cited in the Discovery News article) share.

I’ve discussed the modern, post-Cartesian conception of matter and the role it played in generating the so-called “mind-body problem” many times in many places (including here and here).  The key point for present purposes is that in characterizing matter in purelyquantitative, mathematical terms, Descartes left no place in it forqualitative features like color, odor, taste, sound, smell, heat and cold as common sense understands them.  Accordingly, he treated these qualitative features -- as Galileo before him and Locke, Boyle, and countless others after him did -- as entirely mind-dependent, existing only in our conscious experience of the world but not in the world itself.  They are analogous to the redness you see when you literally look at the world through rose-colored glasses -- not really “out there” but only in the eye of the beholder.  What really exists “out there,” on this sort of view, is only color, sound, heart, cold, etc. as redefined in terms of physics -- surface reflectance properties, compression waves, molecular motion, etc.

Now, if these qualitative features as common sense understands them exist only in the mind and not in the material world, it follows that these features cannot themselves be material.  A kind of dualism follows, then, precisely from the conception of matter to which modern philosophers -- including materialists -- are generally committed.  Indeed, as I have also noted before (most recently here), early modern writers like Malebranche and Cudworth saw in this new conception of matter such an argument for dualism, as have contemporary dualists like Richard Swinburne.  The so-called “qualia problem” that contemporary philosophers of mind fret over has (contrary to what some of the materialists among them seem to assume) nothing whatsoever to do with an unwillingness to follow out the implications of modern science, but on the contrary is the inevitable result of the conception of matter to which modern scientists in their philosophical moments have wedded themselves.

In any event, if we say that these qualitative features -- redness, coolness, etc. as we know them from introspection -- exist only in a mind-dependent way, only in conscious experience, that raises the question of what a mind is.  And for Descartes, a mind is just the sort of thing whose existence he is left with when everything else has been doubted away by the end of the first of his Meditations -- the sort of thing which can think to itself “I think, therefore I am,” and which can know that it and its conscious experiences of the world exist even if the external material world itself does not.  

This gives us Descartes’ novel form of dualism.  The human body, as he understood it, is just one entirely mathematically definable bit of the material world among others, entirely devoid of qualitative features and thus of the consciousness that, as he saw it, is presupposed by them.  What makes a human being more than a mere unconscious mechanism is that conjoined with this body is a res cogitans in which alone consciousness resides.  Apart from that, a human being would be no more conscious than a toaster oven, even if it acted like it was conscious -- which is precisely why the post-Cartesian understanding of matter and mind has given rise to the notion of a “zombie,” in the technical sense familiar from contemporary philosophy of mind.  This notion of a “zombie” -- and thus the “hard problem of consciousness” which has gotten so much attention in recent years and which many philosophers and scientists falsely suppose is a scientific problem susceptible of a scientific solution -- are artifacts of an entirely philosophical, historically contingent, and eminently challengeable (indeed, I would say clearly false) conception of matter.  

Be that as it may, Descartes’ strange view about animals pretty naturally falls out of this set of assumptions.  If the entire material world, including the human body, is utterly devoid of anything like the qualitative features we know from conscious experience, and consciousness resides only in a res cogitans, then whatever lacks a res cogitans cannot be conscious.  But the mark of a res cogitans is the sort of higher cognitive activity represented by fancy philosophical thoughts like “I think, therefore I am,” and (more generally) expressible in language.  Whatever gives every sign of being devoid of the sort of intellectual activity associated with language accordingly gives every sign of being devoid of consciousness.  Hence we have (again, given the assumptions in question) every reason to conclude that non-human animals are essentially “zombies” -- they act like they are conscious, but they are not.

Now, this crazy outcome is, certainly for us Aristotelians, a clearreductio ad absurdum of the premises that led to it, and just one of the many evidences that the moderns were wrong to abandon the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature (which is, of course, not to say that they were wrong to abandon the erroneous scientific ideas that had gotten entangled with that philosophy of nature).  But there is nevertheless a kind of logic to Descartes’ position.  One sometimes hears stupid remarks about Descartes to the effect that his views about animals reflected mere anthropocentric prejudice or the like.  (See this golden oldie from the long-defunct Conservative Philosopher group blog, wherein I criticized one such attack.)  Descartes was wrong, but no one who shares his basic assumptions about the nature of matter -- which probably includes most contemporary philosophers and scientists, albeit they share those assumptions unreflectively and only in broad outlines (namely Descartes’ emphasis on quantitative and mathematically definable features) rather than in the details (e.g. Descartes’ commitment to plenum theory, which no one accepts any longer) -- has any business dismissing his views out of hand.  For it is precisely those essentially anti-Aristotelian, anti-Scholastic assumptions that led to his bizarre views about animals.  

Another reason some might think animal consciousness is noteworthy is that they might think it supports materialism.  In particular, they might suppose that given that animals are purely material and yet are conscious, that gives us reason to think that the human mind in its entirely is material.  But this is just a non sequitur, and once again presupposes an essentially Cartesian understanding of the relevant issues.  Because he took all consciousness to reside in the res cogitansand regarded the res cogitans as immaterial, Descartes’ position implies that sensation and imagination are immaterial.  Hence if sensation and imagination turn out to be material after all, the post-Cartesian philosopher understandably concludes that the remaining operations of the res cogitans, and higher cognitive activities in particular, might be susceptible of materialist explanation as well.

But the Aristotelian tradition has in the first place always regarded sensation and imagination as corporeal faculties, and as having nothing essentially to do with the reasons why our distinctivelyintellectual activities are incorporeal.  It is only because they take for granted the desiccated, purely quantitative post-Cartesian conception of matter that contemporary philosophers and scientists regard sensation and imagination as at least philosophically problematic and are impressed by any evidence for the essentially bodily character of sensation and imagination.  The Aristotelian finds himself stifling a yawn.  “Big whoop.  We’ve been saying that for centuries.”

In any event, merely to insinuate that evidence for the corporeal nature of conscious awareness is evidence for the corporeal nature ofabstract thought would just be to beg the question against the Aristotelian tradition, which maintains that strictly intellectual activity on the one hand and sensation and imagination on the other differ in kind and not merely degree, so that to establish the corporeal nature of the latter is irrelevant to the question of whether the former is corporeal.  (I’ve addressed this issue many times as well, once again most recently here.)  Hence, to establish that animals have conscious awareness of a sensory and imaginative sort -- something the Aristotelian not only has never denied but has insisted upon -- simply does nothing to show that the distinctively intellectual powers of human beings might be given a materialist explanation.  (Though in fairness, the Discovery News article doesn’t say otherwise.  I’m merely speculating about why anyone might find remarkable the inherently unremarkable claim that non-human animals are conscious.)

[Don Salmon]

And here we have Graham Martin on qualia - a professor of philosophy for many years, he wrote this, I think, either shortly before or just after retiring. I've written him - he's a VERY nice guy (and very smart!).  Here's the selection on qualia - and below is an article summarizing his book on materialism. 

Qualia

Is consciousness in the brain? Now one might have supposed that contemporary neuroscientists could tell you where consciousness is to be found, but no, its location has never been discovered. Nor has that of longterm memory, or of tacit memory. (This is almost equally interesting, but I cannot discuss it here.) Moreover, no one has explained how the sense information coming along the neural pathways in the brain is transformed into conscious experience. This is the problem of qualia, one of the most discussed issues in contemporary philosophy.

What are qualia? They are the ‘feel’ and ‘look’ of colours, the ‘feel’ and ‘flavour’ of musical sounds in all their infinite variety, the felt texture of objects, the rich (but literally indescribable) tastes and odours of things. Qualia are the raw sensory material of conscious experience, they are what we feel and how we feel it. Though they are the way all our experiences come to us, they are incommunicable to others, for the reason that we have no means of transmitting these ‘feels’, these ‘experiences’, directly from one brain to another. Talking about them is quite inadequate. For instance, how do you describe the goldengreen of a James Grieve apple2, or its individual flavour? You can appeal only to other people’s similar experiences — provided they have had such. If we haven’t had the experience of a particular quale, then we cannot imagine it. Even Wittgenstein recognises this, and says as much (apropos of the smell of coffee).3

Now how does this happen? By what unknown process does the electrochemical message conveying “Sense this as RED!” make whatever unknown entity that does that kind of feeling actually sense it? WHAT does it do to WHAT so as to make WHAT experience the sensation RED ? The answer is that none of these WHATS can be found in the brain, and the whole business of experiencing a quale is completely mysterious. As indeed is the whole business of experiencing anything at all. Experience itself is the great mystery.

There is thus an absolute gulf between the electrochemical message and the subjective experience of RED (or COOL or WET or ANGRY or any other sensation). The experiential side of the process is completely invisible to the scientist. It’s as if, once something passes from the world of physical process over the threshold of consciousness, physical instruments fall silent, cease to operate.

Now there are about ten different senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; heat & cold, pain, proprioception, muscle sense …) Every one is completely different in its suchness from any of the others. Yet the physical processes in the brain are all of a kind4 – so (1) not only can we not tell how any sensation arises into consciousness, but we have the further problem: (2) how do you get ten different kinds of sensation, each more different than chalk from cheese, out of one same type physical process? And in fact they are more different than that; they are as different as the taste of cheese from the squeak of chalk on a blackboard. This is David Chalmers’ famous Hard Problem, much discussed in contemporary philosophy.

Now all this is most encouraging. Materialists will put their head in their hands and weep — or rather they’ll call up a team of philosophers and get them to change the goalposts. But this gives us hope. Maybe consciousness is not a material product, not in the last resort subject to the brain, but a spiritual reality.

The End of Materialism

Graham Dunstan Martin, Edinburgh

This article summarises the arguments of Graham Martin’s book Does it Matter? The Unsustainable World of the Materialists, which was the joint winner of the 2005 Network Book Prize. Here Graham takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the difficulties facing a materialist account of consciousness, demolishing a number of common fallacies on his way.

Originally published in Network, Vol. 90 (April 2006)    Reprinted at www.newdualism.org

Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. 
A.N. Whitehead

 

Last week I attended the most enormous, festive and entertaining dinner party. A guest expressed interest in my new book, so I began to explain that (1) scientists have not found consciousness in the brain, and that moreover (2) our experiences of colour, touch, sound and all the other senses are apparently not part of the physical universe (as at present defined), and that furthermore (3) …

This was already too much for him. He was overcome with disbelief. ‘Are you sure? They must have found it in the brain. Of course our senses can be explained by science. Of course …’

It’s rare not to meet this reaction. Just as some Christians believe that the Church has got the Universe all wrapped up in cosy little swaddling clothes labelled ‘Truth’ – so that there’s no need for any thinking, but just to believe the Creed (whatever ‘believe’ might mean) – so, for many, science is imagined to have explained everything. ‘Soul’ has become a word with no reference, one indeed which it is embarrassing to pronounce. Yet common sense rebels when we read a respected psychologist writing:

The existence of something called consciousness is a venerable hypothesis; not a datum, not directly observable [...]

Sorry, but Professor Hebb has got it all completely upside down. Consciousness is the only thing which is directly observable. Indeed, it’s the only thing which isn’t a hypothesis. All data come through it.

Hence my new book Does It Matter? The Unsustainable World of the Materialists (Floris, Edinburgh 2005). I have inspected the claims of materialist philosophy and science, and found them wanting. Spiritual realities remain unassailed. Naturally I can take only a very abbreviated look at some of these issues here.

Qualia

Is consciousness in the brain? Now one might have supposed that contemporary neuroscientists could tell you where consciousness is to be found, but no, its location has never been discovered. Nor has that of longterm memory, or of tacit memory. (This is almost equally interesting, but I cannot discuss it here.) Moreover, no one has explained how the sense information coming along the neural pathways in the brain is transformed into conscious experience. This is the problem of qualia, one of the most discussed issues in contemporary philosophy.

What are qualia? They are the ‘feel’ and ‘look’ of colours, the ‘feel’ and ‘flavour’ of musical sounds in all their infinite variety, the felt texture of objects, the rich (but literally indescribable) tastes and odours of things. Qualia are the raw sensory material of conscious experience, they are what we feel and how we feel it. Though they are the way all our experiences come to us, they are incommunicable to others, for the reason that we have no means of transmitting these ‘feels’, these ‘experiences’, directly from one brain to another. Talking about them is quite inadequate. For instance, how do you describe the goldengreen of a James Grieve apple², or its individual flavour? You can appeal only to other people’s similar experiences — provided they have had such. If we haven’t had the experience of a particular quale, then we cannot imagine it. Even Wittgenstein recognises this, and says as much (apropos of the smell of coffee).³

Now how does this happen? By what unknown process does the electrochemical message conveying “Sense this as RED!” make whatever unknown entity that does that kind of feeling actually sense it? WHAT does it do to WHAT so as to make WHAT experience the sensation RED ? The answer is that none of these WHATS can be found in the brain, and the whole business of experiencing a quale is completely mysterious. As indeed is the whole business of experiencing anything at all. Experience itself is the great mystery.

There is thus an absolute gulf between the electrochemical message and the subjective experience of RED (or COOL or WET or ANGRY or any other sensation). The experiential side of the process is completely invisible to the scientist. It’s as if, once something passes from the world of physical process over the threshold of consciousness, physical instruments fall silent, cease to operate.

Now there are about ten different senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; heat & cold, pain, proprioception, muscle sense …) Every one is completely different in its suchness from any of the others. Yet the physical processes in the brain are all of a kind⁴ – so (1) not only can we not tell how any sensation arises into consciousness, but we have the further problem: (2) how do you get ten different kinds of sensation, each more different than chalk from cheese, out of one same type physical process? And in fact they are more different than that; they are as different as the taste of cheese from the squeak of chalk on a blackboard. This is David Chalmers’ famous Hard Problem, much discussed in contemporary philosophy.

Now all this is most encouraging. Materialists will put their head in their hands and weep — or rather they’ll call up a team of philosophers and get them to change the goalposts. But this gives us hope. Maybe consciousness is not a material product, not in the last resort subject to the brain, but a spiritual reality.

Whence Consciousness?

Since materialists claim that, fundamentally, there is nothing but matter, they have to claim that consciousness wasn’t there at the start of the Universe. They are obliged to claim that it evolved – out of absolute unconsciousness – like a hole in the ground magically turning into a symphony, like something emerging from its own negation.

Here we’ll have to ask what “Matter” is. The man-in-the-street usually claims to ‘know by experience what matter is’. Dr Johnson famously thought he could show what it is, by kicking a stone. On investigation, however, we find that this ‘knowledge’ is no more than how his senses present the outside world to him, namely as hard, painful, resistant, coloured, noisy, cold, etc. Thus matter is merely the way mind perceives its surroundings, i.e. matter is appearance. This is exactly how Indian philosophy has always seen it. The quantum physicist Nick Herbert says we’re like King Midas. Everything he touched turned into gold – including his food, so he would have starved to death had the god Dionysos not taken pity on him. Herbert says we ‘can’t directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter.’⁵ (Midas would have died of gold. We die of matter.)

The physicist on the other hand does not claim to ‘know what matter is’. Whatever it is, however, it provides calculations and pointer readings, i.e. it is that aspect of appearance which can be quantified, reduced to measurements, and thereby manipulated.

The ‘true nature’ of matter is absent from both these views, nor is it possible to ascertain what that ‘true nature’ might be. For the philosopher Berkeley, there are only two fundamental elements in nature: percipere (what perceives and cannot by its nature be perceived) and percipi(what is perceived and cannot by its nature perceive). We may term these Reverse or Polar Twins, for each is the complementary opposite of the other. Contemplating these ‘twins’, one is reminded of the YinYang symbol.

Materialists (which might be thought surprising considering their dislike of Berkeley) entirely agree with this definition. That is, they define unconscious matter (to them the only sort of substance that exists) as ‘that which is perceived and cannot by its nature perceive.’

They deny the reality of consciousness, and believe that unconscious matter is all there is: yet they seek to derive the former from the latter. They thus face the challenge: ‘How are unconscious molecules to begin to have conscious experience?’ There are innumerable accounts by reductionists explaining in small detail exactly how it’s done – and none of them makes sense.

To take one typical example, Nicholas Humphrey⁶ assumes that (at the outset of evolutionary history) animals are completely unconscious. They evolve consciousness. How? As they evolve, their senses respond with increasing sensitivity to stimuli (for sensitivity promotes survival.) This sensitivity (as yet completely mechanical & unconscious) increases until (hey presto!) the animal becomes conscious of this sensitivity. Has Humphrey triumphantly proved his case?

Certainly not. It’s based on the most barefaced of fallacies. First of all Humphrey uses the word ‘sensation’ to mean ‘a delicate, but mechanical and unconscious reaction.’ He can’t claim these initial processes are conscious, because he has to start with the nonconscious so as to show how the conscious emerged from it. Then he pretends that sensation¹ (meaning ‘it reacts but doesn’t feel’) spontaneously transforms itself into sensation² (meaning ‘it reacts and does feel’). This is Marvo-the-Magician stuff. He’s introducing consciousness into his account surreptitiously, in the manner of a conjuror concealing a white rabbit up his sleeve.. Every account of consciousness emerging from nothingness proposes the same conjuring trick. Anyone who takes this seriously is deeply confused.

Consciousness therefore remains a mystery. (1) It cannot be seen how neurochemical stimuli turn into conscious experience. (2) It cannot be understood how they do so. (3) It cannot be explained how conscious experience might evolve out of unconscious matter. (4) The elements of conscious experience, e.g. the overwhelmingly real qualia, seem beyond scientific explanation. (5) Consciousness can’t be found in the brain.

Now this is after a century or more of research and argument by materialists, in the course of which for 70 years or so psychology departments forbade all mention of consciousness. I would suggest it seems less and less probable that one might explain consciousness by materialist principles. We are at liberty to think that (1) consciousness did not develop from unconscious matter, in which case (2) it must be at least as fundamental as matter — that (3) it is not a product of brain activity, that (4) it is not material (according to current definitions), (5) that it is not in the brain.  All this is not 100% proven (what ever is?), but I think probability is on our side. The brain is not the mind after all –it’s the computer that the mind uses.

Can Mind Produce Matter?

If, however, it is inconceivable how matter could produce mind, can mind produce matter? Yes, for the simple reason that mind has an imagination, and matter has none. Certainly this is much more thinkable, as the evidence of dreams, hallucinations such as the Charles Bonnet syndrome, placebo phenomena, etc. shows. The human mind can produce convincing simulacra of reality, and we should recall that in Indian philosophy, the fundamental metaphysical division is not drawn between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’, but between ‘consciousness’ and ‘appearance’. We have not created Matter, of course, but it is perfectly thinkable that the Universal Mind did so at the beginning of our Universe.

Where is Consciousness Located?

Now if consciousness is not in the brain, where is it? It is hardly surprising that we do not know. I provide, however, four contemporary speculations as to its possible whereabouts (those of JE. Charon, John R. Smythies, Ervin Laszlo and Peter Marcer).

Opponents will of course bitterly contest all such ideas. Frank Jackson for instance writes:

[Why do I] not follow the lead of those who locate mental objects in a special private space? To me this is like saying ‘I find it mysterious that mental objects are in normal space, so I will locate them in mysterious space.’⁷

It is nonsense on Jackson’s part to claim that mental objects are in normal space. It is evident that they are either not in normal space or not in space at all. Nor is mental space any more ‘mysterious’ than so called ‘normal’ space, which, as Kant showed two centuries ago, is a category of our perceptions and understanding, and cannot be shown to be anything more.

My provisional conclusion is: consciousness is real, is nonmaterial, and is perhaps a fundamental element of the Universe.

How fundamental? Does the Universe not merely contain consciousness, but was it also created by consciousness? Take the calculation by Roger Penrose. The U is constructed out of all the forces in physics. If one is to produce a universe which contains life of our sort, then – at the point of its creation — all the forces of physics need to be very precisely fine tuned. So fine is the tuning that the odds against a universe with life in it are enormous. For these odds are one against a figure so large that, taking all the elementary particles existing in the Universe, and writing one digit on each particle, there are not enough of them to write the figure out in full.⁸ I take it this makes the argument for an intelligent creator rather likely.

The usual way to avoid the evident conclusion that the Universe came into being through intelligent design, is to adopt the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics. This interpretation is exceedingly popular, but suffers from several problems. For instance (1) it tells us that, every time a quantum superposition collapses into reality, all the alternative possibilities happen – in different universes. But events are happening continually. Thus, the Universe is splitting into myriad copies of itself at every instant. Has this been going on since the moment of creation? How many Universes are we expected to believe in? Is this hypothesis not an absurdity? Besides (2) Occam’s Razor declares that one should not introduce additional entities beyond the necessary minimum. We may easily rewrite this as “Do not introduce additional Universes beyond the necessary minimum.” Moreover each Universe necessarily contains many additional entities. One may raise further objections, but these will do to be getting on with.

Evolution

Then there is the question of the evolution of life. When I set about researching this book, I discovered to my amazement that orthodox neoDarwinism is simply very unlikely. At this point I was somewhat alarmed. For here we reach the great Shibboleth, the point where most educated people stop listening. I must therefore utter two warnings. First, of course the world is four and a half billion years old, and its denizens were not created ex nihilo by Yahveh in 4004 BC. Secondly, of course evolution occurs. However, (pace any blasphemy against the conventional wisdom) it is easy to be convinced that evolution is not a total explanation.

For orthodox neoDarwinism denies purpose: evolution operates by pure chance and mindless causality. But let us read Paul Davies in The New Scientist,⁹. He mentions calculations made by Seth Lloyd of MIT: treating the Universe as a computer, how many ‘bits’ could it process throughout its known duration? His answer is 10¹²⁰. He then calculates that pure accident cannot account for ‘a typical small protein ... made up of about 100 amino acids of 20 varieties,’ since merely the number of possible combinations is about 10²⁰⁰. And that’s just one small protein. There are thousands. How did they all evolve together, during the same period of time, against such enormous odds?

Some years ago the astronomer Fred Hoyle tried to calculate the likelihood of creating the set of enzymes (there are about 2,000) needed for the duplication of one simple bacterium. (There are about 100,000 in complex creatures like ourselves.) He came up with the figure of 1 in 10^40,000(= 1 followed by 40,000 zeros). Hoyle says that this compares to the likelihood that ‘a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.’¹⁰ We are again dealing with figures which exceed by many magnitudes the total number of fundamental particles in the entire observable Universe. Surely there must be some process other than chance driving the processes of life.

What could this purposive alternative consist in? It must be admitted that these gaps in evolutionary theory allow room for a god or gods. Or should we, in the mists of our present ignorance, favour Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance – his hypothetical 'field' controlling the forms of life – or look for some as yet undreamed of new theory? At the very least, neoDarwinism contains a yawning chasm at its heart.

A Supreme Being?

One reads philosophers saying ‘I know of no evidence for a divine power.’ On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence, namely the experience of the mystics, who report very similar experiences, no matter in what epoch they may live, no matter to what religion they belong, or indeed regardless of any religious faith. Mystical experience provides an assurance that there is indeed a divine intelligence because — despite vast differences in dogma and imagery between different religions – there is astonishing agreement between the mystics, i.e. their reports conform to the rules for good evidence.

What should we conclude? If consciousness had been found in the brain — IF it could be put together artificially — IF qualia were explicable physically – or even appeared to be part of the physical universe – IF free will could be explained away (i.e. IF consciousness had no causal effects) — IF the creation of the Universe could be said to be a mere chance — and IF neoDarwinism could explain all the problems about life – THEN it might be more difficult to believe in the spirit. On the contrary, however, I believe we have the better of the argument, there being far too many things that materialism is by its nature inadequate to explain. People should stop taking physicalism so seriously. The weight of evidence favours the reality of the soul, and a deliberately created Universe.

The philosopher Jaegwon Kim writes: ‘It is not obvious how positing immaterial souls helps us with our problems.’¹¹On the contrary, it’s easy to see how it assuages everyone’s most serious problem. It puts purpose back into the Universe, and meaning back into life.

References

¹ Donald Hebb, quoted in Martin 1981, p172 
² In the philosophical ‘literature’ it’s always the Granny Smith they talk about. Let’s use a less familiar apple! 
³ Wittgenstein p 610. 
⁴ Dawkins says so most distinctly, quoted by me, p65.
⁵ Herbert 1985,p194. 
⁶ Humphrey2000. 
⁷ Quoted bySmythies 1993, p225. 
⁸ Penrose,p 3424. 
⁹ 5 March 2005,pp 3437. 
¹⁰ Hoyle 1996,pp 133,156.

Bibliography

Charon, Jean Emile (1977) La Relativité Complexe, Albin Michel. 
Dawkins, Richard (1991) The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin. 
Green, Celia & Charles McCreery (1975) Apparitions, Hamish Hamilton. 
Hoyle, Fred & N.C.Wickramasinghe (1996) Our Place in the Cosmos, Orion. 
Humphrey, Nicholas (2000) ‘How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem’, J. of Consciousness Studies 7, 520, 98. 
Kim, Jaegwon (2006) Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed., Westview. 
Laszlo, Ervin (1993) The Creative Cosmos, Floris. 
Martin, Graham Dunstan (1981) The Architecture of  Experience, Edinburgh U P. 
Penrose, Roger (1989) The Emperor’s New Mind, OUP. 
Smythies, John R. (1993) ‘The Impact of Contemporary Neuroscience …’ in Edmond Wright New Representationalisms, Ashgate. 
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1967) Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell.

[RHC]

Don 

Graham Martin seems like a great person for Bernardo to send a copy of WMIB to. 

[tjssailor]

Ok,  Descartes is recognized as a bright guy but isn't it obvious that it should be "I AM, therefore I think"   ......

[George]

Unless Descartes is indicating that the "I" that he thinks he is, the small self: If he did not think, he would not have the thought of "me" and therefore "he" would not be.

[Don Salmon]

i am he as he is me as i am the walrus, koo koo ka chu.