According to Bergson “the intellect is characterized by an inability to comprehend life.” Kant was certain that “the origin of the cosmos will be explained sooner than the mechanism of a plant or caterpillar.” How outlandish then is the belief that the intellect can fathom men’s soul.

How can science unravel the chemistry of the soul when what we have here is actually an alchemy? Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and error, love and hatred, the sublime and the ridiculous continually pass into each other. And alchemy is ruled not by the intellect but by magic.

Before the Sabbath, p. 79

Magic? Really? Well, let’s see how it goes; we’re only just getting warmed up. And we’ve already made surprisingly good progress with those caterpillars.

Have a look at this exchange with a reader, one who patiently tries to explain, as I have often done myself (see, for example, here, here, and here), why biologists use the language of intentionality when discussing evolution. We speak, without any qualms, about the “purpose” of the various “designs” of evolved organisms: a wing is “for” flying, a fang is “for” injecting venom, etc. The point is that designed things have purposes — a proposition with which even Mr. Auster would agree — but what he and others refuse to accept is that the rationale behind the existence of a wing or a fang need not be anyone’s consciously conceived or represented rationale: that there is in Nature a process from which design can emerge without the need for any teleological agency at all. Yes, there is a rationale for the existence of a wing, but it is not the bird’s, or even evolution’s, rationale; it is what Daniel Dennett has called a free-floating rationale. But it seems that Mr. Auster and like-minded like others simply cannot conceive of design — real, functional, finely tuned design — arising in the absence of a conscious and purposeful Designer. I am reluctant to psychologize, but perhaps their intuitions are simpy too irrevocably conditioned by their embedding in the world of human agency.

Mr. Auster’s reader, Richard Hoste, quotes a long passage from Daniel Dennett’s book Kinds of Minds, in which Dennett explains what he calls the “intentional stance”: the fact that it is easier to predict the behavior of a goal-seeking system by understanding the goal. The example Dennett uses is that of a skillful chess-player: if the situation on the board is such that there is only one move that will avoid checkmate, we can predict with near-certain confidence that the chess-player will make it. What is more, this is true whether or not the player is human: the behavior of a chess-playing computer is every bit as predictable, from the intentional stance, as that of a person.

Mr. Auster, during this exchange, shows promising signs of “getting it” — but then, just as we think he is about to grasp the nettle, disappoints us once again with this stupendously question-begging assertion:

[Darwinians] are stuck with a contradiction that they cannot escape, namely that it’s inherently impossible that organisms whose bodies carry out millions of highly purposeful functions came into being by a radically purposeless process.

What a pity, and how mistaken. Of course we can escape it; indeed, on our view, natural selection’s “radically purposeless” process is the only plausible account of how such purposeful functions can arise that doesn’t just “kick the can down the road”: to an invisible, immaterial agency whose own origin and purpose is simply left unaccounted for.

But it is clear, by now, I suppose, that there is little hope of rapprochement on this subject; the division between these two camps seems deep and unbridgeable. Each side thinks the other is in the grip of a delusional fixation upon axioms that are simply wrong, and as Luther said (and Bill V. recently reminded us): Contra Negantem Prima Principia Non Esse Disputandum — “One should not dispute with those who deny first principles.”

To be clear about the difference: reasons are understood by us to be normative and logical abstracta. If I am heading for work, and the sky is grey and heavy, I’ll take my umbrella, for the reason that I am likely to get wet if I don’t. Causes, on the other hand, are exactly what we are referring to when we talk about determinism: my brain sends a signal down my arm that causes my hand to grasp my umbrella.

Part of the confusion that arises in this subject has to do with an ambiguity about what moves us from one step to the next: we don’t mind, it seems, being forced to choose a particular option as long as the choice is the only “reasonable” one to make. I’ve just severed an artery in my hand. Should I apply direct pressure and call 911, or go take a dip in the bay? The choice to seek help is “forced” upon any sane person, but that sort of “determinism” is OK, apparently.

What does seem repellent to many is the idea that we act not in response to to reasons, but “merely” to a cause-and-effect chain taking place in our heads. C.S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, seized upon this, and called it “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. If our choices are not driven by reason (what Lewis called a process of “ground and consequent”), but rather by “mere” cause and effect, then what grounds do we have for trusting them? How can we have confidence in the processes of our own reasoning?

This seems like a good case on the face of it, but it isn’t, really (we took a closer look at it back in April of 2006). The principle weakness in the argument is its absolutism; what Lewis overlooks is that we don’t need to be Godlike, perfect deliberators to get by, nor do we need to have confidence in the perfection of our reasoning abilities in order to rely on them on a day-to-day basis. We know from psychological observation that our cognition is susceptible to all sorts of illusions and intuitive error; once we know the way it’s all wired up to work, it’s easily fooled. But it has evolved, over a very long time, to give good, practical results and a whole lot more; that it isn’t perfect should come as no surprise.

So, yes, our mentation, fine-tuned as it has been over the eons to effectively track and model the “reasons” that affect our well-being, can proceed according to neurological cause and effect with results that aren’t perfect, but are usually “pretty good” – good enough to get us this far, at least.

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

I winced when I read this. As Bill V., an unrepentant dualist, correctly points out, it is the purest hogwash. It is so incoherent that, as scientists often say of a poorly organized hypothesis, “it’s not even wrong”.

That we are deepening our understanding of how our brains bring about our minds — and learning that other animals may perform some of the same tricks — undermines not in the least Descartes’s cogito, which is simply a demonstration by the mind, to the mind, that the thinker exists.

The aspect of Descartes’s model that is almost universally rejected among scientists these days is his assumption that the mind is a “substance” unto itself, capable of independent existence, and that it is in this nonmaterial substance that all our reasoning, decision-making, hoping, fearing, hypothesizing, and, of course, doubting, take place. The Mind, in this dualist model, then exerts its Will upon its puppet body in some unknown way; Descartes speculated that the point of entry might be the pineal gland.

The way that all this actually happens in the brain is now at the convergent focus of a number of scientific disciplines, equipped with brand-new tools of amazing power and resolution, and as has been the case in so many other areas of scientific inquiry, much that was previously regarded as ineffably mysterious is beginning to be understood as explicable natural phenomena. The manner in which the physical processes of the brain result in subjectivity itself is still outside the circle of illumination, but that we have not yet explicated how the trick is done is not in itself evidence for interactionist dualism, any more than not understanding the physics of lightning was evidence that thunderbolts were hurled by Zeus.

However, there is still deep resistance on the part of many philosophers, such as Dr. Vallicella (and Titus Rivas, whose paper on epiphenomenalism we looked at here and here, and will return to in a forthcoming post), to the idea that our subjective awareness can be the product of, or an aspect of, our material brains. In a comment in the thread linked to above, Dr. Vallicella says:

There is this incredible naivete on the part of science writers and most neuroscientists. They don’t think about what a correlation is or proves. A correlation is not an identity. To establish a correlation presupposes the distinctness of what is being correlated. And the correlations are consistent with substance dualism.

Yes, to establish a correlation is to presuppose the distinctness of what is being correlated, but that is often merely a first step toward a deeper synthesis that establishes that the correlated concepts have as their referent the same underlying phenomenon. For example, consider the commonplace phenomenon, familiar since time immemorial, that we call “heat”. As we delve into its physical underpinnings, we find that there is always a correlation between the state of motion of a physical object’s individual molecules, and how “hot” the object is. “Well, that’s all very interesting,” one might say, “but all you have done is establish a correlation; you still haven’t told me where the ‘hotness’ comes from. Indeed, the very fact that you establish a correlation between ‘heat’ and molecular kinetic energy presupposes that they are philosophically distinct.”

But this is misguided, of course; heat simply is molecules in motion. Scientific inquiry often begins with correlation and ends up establishing identity; it’s commonly the way our understanding of nature advances. Time and again in the history of science correlations have led investigators to deeper, more fundamental symmetries, to the realization that apparently disparate phenomena are in fact merely different aspects of a single natural entity.

Another example: to the ancient Greeks, the morning star, Phosphorus, and the evening star, Hesperus, were distinct objects. We might imagine observing that changes in the appearance of one were always correlated with changes in the other, and argue that there is some supernatural influence that passes between them: but pace Dr Vallicella, it turns out that they are one and the same object, namely the planet Venus.

Might substance dualism be true? Yes, perhaps it might, though the only reason to think so is that we have yet to understand the nature of subjectivity; and one can hardly be blamed for seeing it as just another “god of the gaps” spackle-job. Dualist philosophers simply declare that material systems cannot possibly be conscious, or intentional (as if they were already in possession of an exhaustive understanding of what “mere” matter is and is not capable of), and then adduce that “fact” as evidence for their position. Is there any justification whatsoever for considering mind-body dualism the only respectable postion, and for saying that to assume otherwise is “incredible naivete”? Of course not. It really does get downright tiresome and unhelpful after a while.