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A History of the Mind - Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness
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A History of the Mind - Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness
von: Nicholas Humphrey
BookBaby, 2013
ISBN: 9781626753310
238 Seiten, Download: 1741 KB
 
Format: EPUB
geeignet für: geeignet für alle DRM-fähigen eReader Apple iPad, Android Tablet PC's Apple iPod touch, iPhone und Android Smartphones Online-Lesen PC, MAC, Laptop

Typ: A (einfacher Zugriff)

 

 
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1

MIND AND BODY

Everything that is interesting in nature happens at the boundaries: the surface of the earth, the membrane of a cell, the moment of catastrophe, the start and finish of a life. The first and last pages of a book are the most difficult to write.

I am beginning this book on December 25, the anniversary of my father’s death. Perhaps I shall finish it by the time my own first child is born.

When my father died, I flew back from America to England and arrived home the next day. He was lying out in his bed in our farmhouse near Cambridge, proverbially asleep. The undertaker came and asked me to show him where the body was. Better, he said, that the family should remain in another room while he and his assistant carried “it” downstairs. The “it,” for me, was curiously relieving. My father was no longer there.

For seventy years my father had been a vessel of awareness, a bubble of conscious humanity carried along in the dark foam of insensate matter. For that bounded period he had been a subject to himself, an object to all others. His consciousness was self-contained. What was inside his mind was always outside ours. He had been the center of ideas. He had enjoyed the present tense of raw sensations. He had known what it is like to be a human being. But then, at last, the golden bowl was broken, the bubble burst. From there on, the inside/outside distinction disappeared; or rather there was no inside left to be.

At his funeral we read a passage from The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan: “When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river side, into which as he went he said, ‘Death where is thy sting?’ And as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Grave, where is thy victory?’ So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”7

I thought at the same time of the Cypresse Grove, by William Drummond: “If two pilgrims, which have wandered some few miles together, have a heart’s grief when they are near to part, what must the sorrow be at the parting of two so loving friends and never-loathing lovers, as are the body and the soul?”8

There have been serious attempts, even in this century, to observe the “flight of the soul” by scientific measurement. Dr. Duncan Mac-Dougall wrote in the 1907 volume of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research that he had placed dying patients on a light bed, mounted on a set of carefully balanced scales. He reported sudden weight losses at the time of death of between three eighths and one and a half ounces for six different patients. When he carried out similar experiments with dying dogs, he observed no weight losses at death.9

MacDougall’s results have not been replicated. When death comes to a person, scarcely an atom need be gained or lost. It is just that the atoms that the person had been made of have been rearranged, and in their new arrangement they no longer constitute a person.

At a church service in Harlem two Sundays back, I heard a black preacher give a sermon on “Taking what is ours.” The question, he said, is “Is you is, or is you ain’t?” Hamlet put it differently: “To be, or not to be?” It is a question that allows no middle answer. Either it is like something to be oneself, or it is not. A person is, or he ain’t. The implications of the is are the subject matter of this book.

I have a big fish to fry. But I shall have to spend the first half of the book in catching it; and until I have done so I am reluctant to make any great claims about its size or weight. Its shape, however, I can tell you right away. It has the shape of the Mind-Body Problem.

The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how states of consciousness arise in human brains. More specifically (and I shall have to be more specific in due time) it is the problem of explaining how subjective feelings arise in human brains.

The vocabulary I have to work with may not serve me well. “Subjective feeling,” already, is too vague a term. It is however the term commonly used, even in relatively technical discussions by philosophers, to capture the sense of what it is like to experience consciousness from the inside. Examples of subjective feelings are the sensed redness of a rose, the feeling of a shiver down one’s spine, the taste of Roquefort cheese.

Each of us experience such feelings in the “privacy” of our own consciousness, or so it seems. Their “quality” is transparent to us, although it is not something we could easily communicate to someone else; and because quality is so important, indeed intrinsic to the feeling, philosophers sometimes refer to subjective feelings simply as “qualia.” No one doubts that subjective feelings have quantitative aspects too: I might be able to tell you, for example, that one sensation of red was twice as intense as another. But what I could not tell you (if you did not already know) would be wherein the quality of redness lies.

Now here is the problem, as it emerges from three obvious facts of human life:

Fact 1 is the fact that when, for example, I bite my tongue I experience the subjective feeling of pain (and to remind myself of what that means, I am doing it now). This experience exists for me alone; and were I to try to tell you what it is like, I could do so only in the vaguest and most metaphorical of ways. My felt pain has an associated time (right now), an associated place (my tongue), an intensity (mild), and an affective tone (unpleasant), but in most other respects it seems beyond the scope of physical description. Indeed my pain, I would say, is not a part of the objective world, the world of physical material. In short it can hardly count as a physical event.

Fact 2 is the fact that at the same time as I bite my tongue there are related processes occurring in my brain. These processes comprise the activity of nerve cells. In principle (though not of course in practice) they could be observed by an independent scientist with access to the interior of my head; and were he to try to tell another scientist what my brain-based pain consists in, he would find the objective language of physics and chemistry entirely sufficient for his purpose. For him my brain-based pain would seem to belong no-where else than in the world of physical material. In short it is nothing other than a physical event.

Fact 3 is the fact that, so far as we know, Fact 1 wholly depends on Fact 2. In other words the subjective feeling is brought about by the brain processes (whatever precisely “brought about by” means).

The problem is to explain how and why and to what end this dependence of the nonphysical mind on the physical brain has come about.

It is a problem that has over the centuries filled philosophers with frustration, desperation, almost panic. Three hundred and fifty years ago René Descartes expressed his sense of helplessness: “So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.”10

Descartes’s own solution was to deny the obvious implication of Fact 3, and to plump for the hypothesis of dualism. Dualism asserts that the universe contains two very different kinds of stuff, mental stuff (of which subjective feelings are made) and physical stuff (of which brains are made), and that these exist semi-independently of one another. Thus in principle there could be minds without brains, and brains without minds. If and when these distinct entities meet and interact—as Descartes of course acknowledged that they do—it involves a handshake across a metaphysical divide.

The trouble with dualism is that it explains both too much and too little, and few philosophers have felt comfortable with it. More recently they have embraced various forms of monism. Monism asserts that there is in reality only one sort of stuff, of which both minds and brains are ultimately made. And in its most extreme form, physicalism, it claims that particular subjective feelings are actually identical to particular physical brain processes (in the same way that a bolt of lightning is identical to an electrical discharge in the air).

Few feel comfortable with this either. It would imply, for a start, that only carbon-based living organisms like ourselves (with carbon-based brains) could have conscious feelings anything like ours. And philosophers have been loath to deny consciousness in advance to other kinds of life forms with differently constituted brains. It would seem chauvinist, to say the least, to suppose that if humanoid creatures had evolved on a faraway planet, using different elements as building blocks, these individuals could have none of the subjective feelings we do—no matter how intelligently and sensitively they behaved. It might be true that they could not, but the truth is certainly not self-evident.

In any case, even if subjective feelings are as a matter of fact identical to physical states, this matter of fact would still cry out for explanation. If we were simply to acknowledge the identity we would have done nothing to dispel the sense of mystery about how it comes to be so. Analogies with lightning bolts would not help either. For in the case of lightning there really is no mystery: any competent physicist could predict that an electrical discharge in the atmosphere would under appropriate conditions produce...



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