Sometime years ago, I attended a couple of sessions of an informal thinktank that friend Steve organized, where a small number of smart people would sit around and talk about interesting things. (I think he’s still doing that, but remotely now because of pandemics and travel and stuff.) One set of things we talked about included the mind-body problem and the nature of scientific explanation and so on, and as part of that I started reading Colin McGinn’s “The Mysterious Flame”, as an accessible introduction to the “mysterian” viewpoint on the mind-body (or mind-brain, or consciousness-brain) problem, which says essentially that we don’t, and to some degree that we will never, or can’t, know the answer.
I apparently got to like page 52 and then put in a bookmark and put it aside. :)
In search of an interesting book to start yesterday, I picked it up and dusted it off, and started from page 1 again. Today I finished it, and I’m going to write down some thoughts about it. I’m guessing that I’m not going to finish this and post it tonight, but probably I will eventually.
One thing that’s really obvious to me is that McGinn and I just think differently: we have different cognitive styles, different intuitions on things, different tastes if you will. He’s also writing a consciously popular and informal book here, and likely being less careful and thorough than he is in his several more academic books (perhaps I should read one). So I’m trying to keep both of those things in mind when thinking and writing about this book here; we’ll see how well I do.
My reconstruction of the main argument set out in the book here is:
- The hard problem of consciousness is hard, for basically the usual reasons,
- Materialism and dualism are wrong, for basically the usual reasons,
- Other solutions, like positing divine agency, or that everything has mental properties, or a few others, also don’t work,
- It’s not unreasonable to believe that our cognitive facilities, as shaped by evolution, might be unable to solve certain problems, not because they are objectively hard, but just because our brains didn’t evolve with the required skills or faculties or what have you,
- Physical things like brains seem inherently spatial, whereas consciousness seems inherently non-spatial,
- It’s not unreasonable to believe, and it’s likely true, that we can never know (or understand, or explain, or something like that) how brains cause (or are caused by, or relate to, or interact with) consciousness.
He also says some … odder things, mostly later on in the book, but I’ll focus on the main plot first.
I can more or less buy that there might be things that our brains, as evolved, have a hard time with; that seems plausible. I have a harder time thinking that there are things (in the cognitive sphere) that they just can’t do at all, outside of trivial examples like memorizing million-digit numbers. I would take convincing.
McGinn’s case doesn’t seem very strong, although he writes about it at great length, restating it in many different ways. He gives some examples, but they are all examples of things that are perhaps harder for us than other things, but that we can still do. He cites the Chomskyan theory of Universal (human) Grammar, but takes it farther than as far as I know Chomsky ever did, seemingly implying that humans cannot learn languages that don’t have the grammar our minds are wired for; I see no reason to think that’s true. He talks about how the Square in Abbott’s Flatland can’t conceive of higher dimensions; but we humans can conceive of dimensions higher than three, so that seems bootless. He talks about not trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver, but even there that’s possible eventually, it’s just not efficient.
He seems to claim at one point that we can think only about things that work by essentially simple combinations of smaller things, after the model of classical physics / chemistry / biology and the structure of linguistic grammar, embedded in three-dimensional space; he says “that way of thinking is the essence of the scientific picture of the world”. But that’s unconvincing; we do all sorts of cognitive and/or scientific things (complex analysis, say, or for that matter social psychology, or music theory) that don’t fit that picture; they may be hard, but they aren’t impossible.
He writes that “The scientist is a skilled thinker, but she cannot remember more than her finite memory capacity allows, and she cannot think a million thoughts a second”, which is entirely true; but given the existence of external memories in notepads and computers, and the basic irrelevance of the speed of thoughts, this again doesn’t seem to imply that there are insoluble problems.
The whole spatial / nonspatial thing seems rather like a red herring to me. It’s mostly an argument from incredulity: “If the brain is spatial, being a hunk of matter in space, and the mind is nonspatial, how on Earth could the mind arise from the brain?” and so on. But nonspatial things arise unproblematically from spatial things all the time: political parties aren’t located at a particular point in space and don’t have physical dimensions, but no one wonders how on Earth nonspatial political parties could arise from spatial human beings. Or how nonspatial web pages could arise from spatial networking and storage hardware. Being incredulous about this seems to be just a lack of imagination, or something.
Various other smallish things bother me throughout the book. He uses “cognitive closure” to describe the notion that the solution to the mind-body problem is “closed” to our knowledge; but that’s not what “closure” usually means, you don’t ask the bartender “when is closure?”. Closure in this context is commonly a mathematical term, meaning that when you apply some operation to one element of a set, you get another element of the set, not something outside the set. That’s just a bit of a solecism, but it annoyed me. He also repeatedly refers to the connection between mind and brain as “intelligible”, which given his main thesis is rather unaccountable. Intelligible in principle to things other than humans, or something? He never says what he means by the word, and that bothered me.
He appears in most of the book to be unaware of the Problem of Other Minds, talking as though it’s relatively obvious what’s conscious and what isn’t. Only brains can produce consciousness, he says, not kidneys or stones or anything else: “we know from introspection that [the brain] is unique among physical objects”. I can’t imagine what he means by this; introspection certainly tells us nothing of the kind.
He also refers to ants as having minds; how does he know that? Is it just because we label their densest neural clumps as “brains”? Is he confident that jellyfish have no consciousness, because our biologists don’t usually label any part of them as “the brain”? This becomes particularly annoying when he considers the possibility of inorganic consciousness, when he says that since all the consciousnesses we know about are organic, he thinks that’s probably required, although he could be wrong. What a weird intuition to state without any support! It seems no more valid than to say that consciousness probably requires being a biped, or living on Earth, both of which I hope are uncontroversially implausible.
I see I’m wandering into some of the smaller oddities that mostly occur later in the book, so here’s my summary of what I take to be the argument of those chapters:
- Even if we can’t understand the mind-body connection, we can still say some things about the subject.
- A thing can’t be conscious just because it’s running a certain computer program or manipulating certain symbols; we don’t know what else is required, but his guess is that a thing at least has to be organic to be conscious (omg, Searle!), while noting that he could be wrong about that,
- Brains aren’t purely spatial, because they somehow interact with consciousness, which is non-spatial (but see below),
- There are things that we don’t know about space, and things we don’t know about consciousness and the self, and some of those things are such that, if we knew them (and were able to understand them), we could explain the relationship between brains and consciousness,
- It could be that space actually has extra, consciousness-compatible, properties (or dimensions or something), that were there before the Big Bang, and are still there, even though ever since the Big Bang there have been all these non-consciousness-compatible aspects of space sort of getting in the way, but brains can somehow access them in ways we inherently can’t understand,
- It might turn out that consciousness is actually spatial, in a superior (but unknowable-by-us) analysis of space, so then brains and consciousness would just be interacting in space when properly understood (which seems similar to the last bullet, but he presents them in separate places as separate arguments),
- DNA contains information that explains the relationship between brains and consciousness,
- If various parts of our brains were enhanced, particularly the introspection parts, we might be able to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness; but it might mess up our brains in other ways, and in general we might regret it.
- Science progresses so much faster than philosophy, because philosophy works on those problems that our brains haven’t evolved to be able to solve.
I don’t think I’ve exaggerated the oddity of some of those latter points. He writes, for instance, “The laws and principles that underlie the connection between mind and brain are somehow encoded into the genes … they [our genes] contain information which is such that if we were to know it we would know the solution to the mind-body problem.” Which seems to me like saying that I dunno the plans of a steam engine contain information sufficient to derive gas laws and the heat equations (which they really don’t).
Some of those may have been sort of throw-away thoughts, though, just so he could write lines like “how does it feel to be less intelligent than your big toe?”, so maybe we should give him a pass on that.
The bit about philosophy dealing with insoluble problems would have been more convincing if he’d cited even a single philosophical problem that he considers insoluble, other than the one that the book is about. He didn’t, though, which leaves the claim sort of twisting in the wind.
The attempt to sort of outline what a solution to the problem might look like, in terms of space having properties or dimensions that we’re not aware of, that allow for “nonspatial” minds to interact with “spatial” brains all while both are embedded in space, comes out sounding a whole lot like dualism, except with “something unknowable to us” inserted where dualism’s problems are.
And finally, the claim that a somewhat-enhanced human brain might be able to understand the thing that he is confident that normal human brains can’t, seems to undercut the entire thesis of the book. If it’s possible that enhancing the human brain somewhat, in degree but not kind, would allow solving the mind-body problem, then it seems clear that there’s nothing inherent in the brain as it is now that prevents us from solving it; it’s just that certain bits aren’t up to it. And in that case what evidence could we possibly have that it’s insoluble with current brains, rather than possible but just so hard so that no one’s done it yet? It made me doubt that he really meant the whole mysterian thing after all.
So that’s a bit of a scathe, I suppose. :) He wrote the book twenty-four years ago (Good Lord it’s 2024), for a general (and perhaps therefore less demanding?) audience. His thinking on the subject may well have evolved and sharpened, and been more consistently expressed in other works; I should perhaps read some of them. But to the extent at least that this is one version of the mysterian argument about the mind, I was not convinced (and I was in spots rather annoyed).
ceoln 
Hm?