The philosophical entries in my blog are a record of my wandering thoughts about issues of brain, mind, consciousness, free will, and the nature of human thought over the past couple of decades. For those who just want the gist of it, here is a shortened version of “the story so far.”
First, some context. Over the last decade I have become more comfortable with the idea that there is a “mind” that is not purely physical and is not simply an epiphenomenon of the physical processes of the brain. But when I was in high school I was a strict materialist. I believed only physical things existed. To me this meant there was no God and no free will.
Materialism, far from being “cold hard rationalism,” is a comfortable perspective because it allows the illusion of certainty and control. It is reassuring to feel that you understand the universe and how it works, and that understanding will only grow with further investigation based on observed fact. Reality is clear-cut and mundane, and we can use tools and methods to comprehend and master it.
The alternative is believing in the immaterial, supernatural, sacred, or what have you, which cannot be measured or explained with certainty. Something as simple as believing there is a non-material “mind” interacting with the physical brain opens a Pandora’s box whence come ghosts, miracles, the afterlife, telepathy, and God with a capital G.
Science is a very powerful way of understanding and investigating the universe. But it can be just as doctrinaire as religion. Science postulates that only what we can observe and measure exists (or at the very least, is worth thinking about), and that this matter obeys laws that can be expressed mathematically.
But there are two obvious problems here:
- Nobody can measure or explain what they experience in their thoughts. I can compare two objects–a pen and a ruler, say–and thus make a measurement. But I cannot compare the color red as I experience it with a particular wavelength of light. The light enters the eye and is transformed into a signal carried by the optic nerve. At some point the brain translates this into the sensation of redness. But how does this happen? How can I measure this redness? Is the red I see the same as that everyone else sees? The conscious experience of seeing a color is of a fundamentally different order than the wavelengths, electric impulses, and chemical processes that evoke it.
- Free will is impossible in a materialistic system where everything follows mathematical rules, including the processes of our brains. We can “explain away” our constant experience of making choices by saying that upper level processes don’t fully perceive what is happening at lower levels. But this is a fundamentally unscientific way to proceed. We shouldn’t discount something we all experience all the time just because it doesn’t fit with our preconceived, materialist notions.
I think a lot of materialists (or those who believe in the practical, the objective, and the measurable) understand this on some level, but they continue to act according to the old paradigm: judging people for thoughts and actions that are the product of nature and experiences, not choices. Our basic social paradigm rests on the individual’s responsibility for their own decisions. We experience “choice” ourselves all the time. Yet many believe that all our actions are determined by calculations made by the organic computer in our skulls.
Thus I have come to feel that I must accept an immaterial “mind” interfacing in some unknown way with the material brain. I must accept my experience of color, shape, and sound as things that cannot be explained in physical terms. Above all I must accept that my experience of constantly making choices, including my current choice of what words to type, is not just an illusion.
Black Hole Radiation 