Tag Archives: Markus Gabriel

Minds, Matter and Mechanisms

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Will the mind ever be fully explained by neuroscience? A good discussion from IAI, capably chaired by Barry C. Smith.

Raymond Tallis puts intentionality at the centre of the question of the mind (quite rightly, I think). Neuroscience will never explain meaning or the other forms of intentionality, so it will never tell us about essential aspects of the mind.

Susanna Martinez-Conde says we should not fear reductive explanation. Knowing how an illusion works can enhance our appreciation rather than undermining it. Our brains are designed to find meanings, and will do so even in a chaotic world.

Markus Gabriel says we are not just a pack of neurons – trivially, because we are complete animals, but more interestingly because of the contents of our mind – he broadly agrees that intentionality is essential. London is not contained in my head, so aliens could not decipher from my neurons that I was thinking I was in London. He adds the conceot of geist – the capacity to live according to a conception of ourselves as a certain kind of being – which is essential to humanity, but relies on our unique mental powers.

Martinez-Conde points out that we can have the experience of being in London without in fact being there; Tallis dismisses such ‘brain in a vat’ ideas; for the brain to do that it must have had real experiences and there must be scientists controlling what happens in the vat. The mind is irreducibly social.

My sympathies are mainly with Tallis, but against him it can be pointed out that while neuroscience has no satisfactory account of intentionality, he hasn’t got one either. While the subject remains a mystery, it remains possible that a remarkable new insight that resolves it all will come out of neuroscience. The case against that possibility, I think, rests mainly on a sense of incredulity: the physical is just not the sort of thing that could ever explain the mental. We find this in Brentano of course, and perhaps as far back as Leibniz’s mill, or in the Cartesian point that mental things have no extension. But we ought to admit that this incredulity is really just an intuition, or if you like, a failure to be able to imagine. It puzzles me sometimes that numbers, those extensionless abstract concepts, can nevertheless drive the behaviour of a computer. But surely it would be weird to say they don’t, or that how computers do arithmetic must remain an unfathomable mystery.

What it is, but not what it means.

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The way we think about consciousness is just wrong, it seems.

First, says Markus Gabriel, we posit this bizarre entity the Universe, consisting of everything, and then ask whether consciousness is part of it; this is no way to proceed. In fact ‘consciousness’ covers many different things; once correctly analysed many of them are unproblematic (The multilingual Gabriel suggests in passing that there is no satisfactory German word equivalent to ‘mind’, and for that matter, no good English equivalent of ‘geist’.) He believes there is more mystery about how, for example, the brain deals with truth.

Ray Brassier draws a distinction between knowing what consciousness is and knowing what it means. A long tradition suggests that because we have direct acquaintance with consciousness our impressions are authoritative and we know its nature. In fact the claims about phenomenal experience made by Chalmers and others are hard to justify. I can see, he says, that there are phenomenal qualities – being brown, or square – attached to a table, but the idea that phenomenal things are going on in my mind separate from the table seems to make no sense.

Eva Jablonka takes a biological and evolutionary view. Biological stuff is vastly more complex than non-biological stuff and requires different explanations. She defends Chalmers’s formulation of the problem, but not his answers; she is optimistic that scientific exploration can yield enlightenment. She cites the interesting case of Daniel Kish  whose eyes were removed in early infancy but who has developed echolocation skills to the point where he can ride a bike and find golf balls – it seems his visual cortex has been recruited for the purpose. Surely, says Jablonka, he must have a somewhat better idea of what it is like to be a bat?

There’s a general agreement that simplistic materialism is outdated and that a richer naturalism is required (not, of course, anything like traditional dualism).