Barbelith Underground > Temple > The part of you that can survive death or terrible brain injuries

If, as your co-worker said, everything we are could be taken away by a Mazda hatchback, are we just loads of hormones and electric impulses?

Alright, I've gone back through the book I mentioned above while working my way through a Meat Lovers Scramble and some coffee. It has been pretty illuminating, but to get the ideas across I might just have to quote from the book verbatim. As it turns out, Phallicus himself is in the chapter! How awesome for him. Let's read on:

We all share an overwhelming intuition that our mind is seperate from our body. There is also the conflicting intuition that mind and body are the same--as when we are in bodily pain. Additionally, we intuit that we have a self seperate from the world, an individual self that is conscious of what is going on in our minds and bodies, a self that wills (freely?) some of the actions of the body. The philosophers of the mind-body problem examine these intuitions.

First, there are philosophers who posit that our intuition of a mind (and consciousness) seperate from the body is right. These are the dualists. Others deny dualism; they are the monist. There are two schools of monists. One school, the material monists, feels that body is primary and that mind and consciousness are but epiphenomena of the body. The second school, the monistic idealists, posits the primacy of consciousness with mind and body being epiphenomena consciousness. In Western culture, particularly in recent times, the material monsit have dominated the monist school. In the East, on the other hand, monistic idealism has remained a force.

So you, Phallicus, have decided to head down to the University of Mind-Body Studies, where the traditional faculty from throughout history teaches the solutions--old and new, dualist and monist--to the mind-body problem. You have decided that, regardless of what you hear, you will retain your skepticism and always refer any philosophy to your own experience before you invest your allegiance.

You take the bus down to the university, pass through the gate and look around. The buildings are of two distinct styles. On one side of the street there is an old, very elegant structure. You have a weakness for classical architecture, so you turn that way . The modern highrise on the other side can wait.

As you approach the building, however, a picketer stops you and hands you a pamphlet that reads "BEWARE OF DUALISM: the dualists are taking advantage of of your naivete to teach outdated ideas. Consider this: suppose one of the robots in a Japanese automobile factory were conscious and you asked for its opinion on the mind-body problem. According to our leader, Marvin Minsky, "When we ask such a creature what sor of being it is, it simply cannot answer directly; it must inspect its models. And it must answer by saying that it seems to be a dual thing--which appears to have two parts--a 'mind' and a 'body' Robot thinking is primitive thinking. Don't succumb to it. Insist on monism for solutions that are modern, scientific and sophisticated.

"But," you say to the picketer, "I sometimes feel myself that way, as mind and body, seperate. You are not saying...but who the fuck asked you anyway! And, FYI, I like old wisdom. I want to check it out myself, if you don't mind getting the hell out of my way." Then you cold-cock him with a blackjack and step over his unconscious body.

In front of the building there is a sign that reads "Hall of Dualism, Rene Descartes, Dean". In the first office you come across you find a normal looking fella staring at the ceiling. On his desk you notice an insignia that reads COGITO, ERGO SUM, which makes you realize that this is, of course, Descartes himself. He explains: "Phallicus, security is after you for smacking the shit out of that dude, but before you take off, dig this: I can doubt everything, even my body, but I can't doubt that I think. I cannot doubt the existence of my thinking mind, but I can doubt my body. Obviously, mind and body must be two different things." He goes on to explain that there are two independent substances, soul substance and physical substance. Soul substance is indivisible. Mind and soul--the indivisible, irreducible part of reality that is responsible for our free will--are made of this soul substance. Physical substance, on the other hand, is infinitely divisible, reducible, and governed by scientific laws. But only faith governs the soul substance. "Freedom of the will is self evident," he says, "and only our mind can know that."

"Because our mind is independent of the body?" you ask.

"Yes."

But you, Phallicus, are not satisfied. You've had most of a bottle of Chianti for lunch and you get the feeling that Cartesian dualism violates the laws of conservation of energy and momentum that physics has established beyond doubt. How could mind possibly interact with the world without occasionally exchaning energy and momentum? But we always find the energy and momentum of objects in the physical world to be conserved, to remain the exact same. When Descartes is distracted, you throw down a smoke bomb and escape in the confusion.

As you run down the hallway, you spot security and duck into a nearby office. At his desk sits Gottfried Leibniz who politely asks what the fuck is going on. After a brief explanation, Liebniz laughs and says "What were you doing in there with old Descartes? Everybody knows that the good Descartes' interactionism doesn't hold water. How can an immaterial soul be so material localized in the pineal gland?"

You ask if he has a better explanation.

"Of course. We call it psychophysical parallelism." He summarizes: "Mental events run independent of but parallel to physiological events within the brain. No interaction, no embarrassing questions." You start to hate his complacent, smug smile so you kick him in the face and bolt. Plus, you realize the philosophy does not explain your intuition that you have free will, that your self has casual power over the body. It sounds suspiciously like sweeping the dirt under the rug--out of sight, out of mind. You leap down the staircase smiling at your own private pun when you notice somebody beckoning to you.

"I am Professor John Q. Monist. Your head must be spinning from all that dualistic talk about the mind," he says. You think to yourself that it's probably just all the persription painkillers mixed with the wine, but you decide to humor him until you can find an escape route not gaurded by security. "The mind is the ghost of the machine." He notices your blank expression and continues. "A visitor came to Oxford and was shown all the colleges, the buildings, and so forth. Afterward, he wanted to know where the university was. He didn't realize that the colleges are the university. The university is a ghost."

You answer "I think mind must be something more than a ghost. After all, I do have self-consciousness..."

The man interrupts you. "It's all mirage; the problem is one of using improper language," he says testily. "Go to the monists on the other side. They will tell you." You give him the finger, leap through the window and run towards the next-door building.

But there is a picketer there too. "Before you go in there," the picketer pleads, "I just want you to be aware that they will try to bamboozle you with promissory materialism; they will insist that you ought to accept their claims because 'surely' the proof is forthcoming." You promise to be careful.

You wander into a lecture hall where the work of the Dean, behaviourist B.F. Skinner, is being discussed. "According to Skinner, the mentalist problem can be avoided by going directly to the prior physical causes while bypassing intermediate feelings or states of mind," the speaker is saying. "Consider only those facts that can be objectively observed in the behavior of one person in its relation to his prior enviromental history."

You are suspicious and a little loopy from all the reckless drug and alcohol abuse. "Skinner wants to dispense with the mind--no mind, no mind-body problem--the same way the parallelists try to eliminate the problem of interaction. To me they both smack more of running away from a problem than of solving it," you tell a professor in a nearby office while sharing a joint.

"True, radical behaviorism is too narrow in scope. We should study the mind, but only as an epiphenomenon of the body. Epiphenomenalism," he says as he holds his hit, "is the idea--the only idea, by the way, that makes sense in the mind-body problem--(here he blows out the smoke) that mind and consciousness are epiphenomena of the body, secreted by the brain as the liver secrets bile. Tell me, Phallicus, what else can it be?" He passes you the joint.

"You tell me, jerk-ass. You're the philosopher. Explain how the epiphenomenon of self-consciousness arises from the brain."

"I haven't found out yet. But surely we will. It's only a matter time," he insists. You become enraged and set his office on fire. "Promissory materialism, just as that picketer dude warned!" you scream. Soon you run out of the office, determined to destroy the entire building. Down the hall, though, Professor Identity is insistent that you refrain from leaving until you get a whiff of the truth. He tells you that identity is truth--mind and brain are identical. "They are two aspects of the same thing, Phallicus!" he says.

"But that doesn't explain my experiences of the mind; it that's all you have to say, then eff you and the horse you road in on." You start to leave. But the Professor insists that you understand his position. He says that you must learn to replace mental terms in your language with neurophyiscal terms because corresponding to every mental state there is ultimately a physiological state that is the real McCoy.

"Somebody else was selling that bullshit--parallelism, he called it. I kicked that fat fuck in the mouth."

Prof. Identity gives another interpretation: "Even though the mental and the physical are one, we distinguish between them because they represent different ways of knowing things. You have to learn the logic of categories before you fully understand this, but..." Here you stop him with a blow to the neck. "Look, I've been hauling my drunk ass all over the place trying to answer a simple question: What is the nature of our mind that gives it free will and consciousness? All I hear is that I cannot have such a mind."

In strangled chokes, the Prof. says that consciousness is a woolly concept. "Oh. Really. Woolly. So I'm woolly, and so are you. So why do you take yourself so seriously?" You kick him in the stomach and run. As you stroll, you muse to yourself that your action was a conditioned response initiated in your brain and simultaneously arising in your mind as what seemed like free will. Can one really know if one has free will by any philosophical trick, or is philosophy hopeless? Philosophy can wait, you think, and decide to get some beer and pizza.

But a dimly lit part of the building diverts your attention. On closer examination, you discover that thus building has older architecture. The new building has been built on parts of it. There is a sign: "Idealism. Enter at your own risk. You may never again be a proper philosopher of the mind-body." The warning, naturally, only increases your curiousity.

The first office belongs to Professor George Berkley. "Look," he says. "Any statements you make about physical things are ultimately about mental phenomena, perceptions, or sensations, aren't they?"

"Sure," you say.

"Suppose you wake up all of a sudden and find that you've been dreaming. How can you distinguish material stuff from dream stuff?" You admit that you probably can't. "There is, however, the continuity of experience," you say.

"Continuity be damned! Ultimately, all you can trust, all you can be sure of, is mind stuff--thoughts, feelings, memories, and all that. So they must be real." You decide you like this idea; it makes your free will real. But you are hesitant to call the real world a dream. You'd like to think that the extensive property damage has taken place in a true, real world, or it's no fun...besides, something else is bothering you.

"There doesn't seem to be any place in your philosophy for those objects that are not in anybody's mind." Berkley answers "Well, they are in God's mind." This sounds so much like dualism that you become enraged and cut his throat with a straight razor. "Gurgle...choke...Phallicus! Check out the shadow play in next room...gurghhbleeeahh..."

You shrug. "Awright."

Anyway. Next post I will finish the chapter and reveal whether or not Phallicus ever finds the answer to his questions re: self, body and mind/consciousness/spirit, or if he is ever brought to justice for his inexplicable and criminally violent outbursts. Hopefully, with this information I'll be able to answer red frog rising's questions as well.

Back to Phallicus’s adventures at the Mind-Body University:

At Berkley’s suggestion, you go next door to a semi-darkened room. There is a shadow show on the wall projected by light from the back, but people watching the show are so strapped in their seats that they cannot turn. “What the hell is this shit?” you whisper to the woman with the light.

“Oh, this is Professor Plato’s demonstration of monistic idealism. People see only the shadow show of matter and are beguiled by it. If only they knew that the shadows are cast by the ‘realer’ archetypal objects behind them, the ideas of consciousness! If only they had the fortitude to investigate the light of consciousness, which is the only reality…sad, no?” You contemplate the tragedy, and find you have little to no sympathy.

“Fuck that noise. What straps people to their seats so they can’t turn around?” you ask.

“Oh, these thick leather straps and big-ass buckles. They hold you down pretty--“

“No, I mean in real life.”

“Why do people like illusion better than reality? I don’t know how to answer that. I know there are those in our faculty—Eastern mystics I think they’re called—who say it’s due to maya, which means illusion. But I don’t know how maya works. Perhaps if you wait for the professor….” But you don’t wait, because you notice she is holding a pistol behind her back. Before you can bludgeon her with a chair she puts a couple bullets in your thigh. On your way out, you decide that rather than get out of dodge you’d rather follow the arrows marked “To Eastern mysticism”. You are curious. You are also suffering from blood loss, but you also still want beer and pizza. The mystics can wait.

After you limp out the emergency exit, you take cover from roaming security guards in a large debate going on outside. A sign on one side says Mentalism, and you can’t resist hearing these mentalists out. “Who are the opponents?” you wonder. There! A sign says Physicalism. Presently the Physicalists have the floor. The speaker seems pretty confident: “In the reductionist view, mind is the higher level of a hierarchy of levels, and the brain, the neuronal substratum, is the lower level. The lower level is the casual determinant of the higher; it cannot be the other way around. As Jonathan Swift explains: ‘So, naturalists observe, a flea/Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;/And these have smaller fleas to bite ‘em/and so proceed ad infinitum’. The smaller fleas bite the bigger, but the bigger fleas never affect the behavior of the smaller fleas.”

“Not so fast,” cautions the mentalist, pushing the speaker off the soapbox. “According to Roger Sperry, our guru, mental forces do not violate, disturb, or intervene in neuronal activities, but they do supervene; mental actions with their own causal logic take place as something additional to lower-level brain actions. The casually potent reality of the conscious mind is a new emergent order that arises from the organizational interaction of the neuronal substrata, but is not reducible to it.

“Sperry holds subjective mental phenomena to be primary, causally potent realities as they are experienced subjectively, different from, more than, and not reducible to their physicochemical elements. The mental entities transcend the physiological just as the physiological transcend the molecular; the molecular, the atomic and sub-atomic; and so forth”. Just then a flaming arrow strikes the speaker in the sternum and he falls screaming to the ground. The physicalist with the bow now has the floor.

He begins by denouncing Sperry’s reasoning as hocus-pocus, that what any conglomerate or configuration of neurons does is inevitably reducible to what the component neurons do. Every so-called causal action of the mind ultimately must be traceable to some underlying neuronal components of the brain. Mind initiating changes in the lower level of the brain substratum is tantamount to having brain substratum acting on brain substratum without a cause. And where does the causal potency of the mind, free choice, come from? “Dr. Sperry’s whole thesis is built on the unprovable theorem of holism—that the whole is greater than its parts. So fuck him and fuck you too.” The speaker sits down.

The mentalist pulls the arrow from his chest and with his last breath spits out “Sperry says that free will IS that very aspect of mental phenomena that is more than their physiochemical elements. Somehow this causally potent mind emerges from the interaction of its parts, of the myriad neurons. Clearly, the whole is greater than the parts. We just have to discover how.” Then he vomits blood and dies. You applaud his conviction.

Just then somebody with a big button that reads “THINK FUNCTIONALISM” takes the stand. “We functionalists look at the brain-mind as a biocomputer, at brain as structure or hardware, and at mind as function or software. As you mentalists surely will agree, O ye misguided supporters of mentalism, the computer is the most versatile metaphor ever invented to describe the brain-mind. And as you know, we don’t completely accept the reductionist view. Mental states and processes are functional entities implementable in different types of structure, be it the brain or the silicon computer. We can prove our point by building an artificial intelligence machine with mind—the Turing machine. But here again, although we use software language to describe mental processes as programs acting on programs, ultimately we know that all is the play of SOME hardware.”

“But there must be high-level programs of the mind that can initiate actions at the hardware level…” a mentalist tries to interrupt, but the speaker does not yield. “Your so-called high-level program, any program, is always implemented as hardware! So you have a casual circle, hardware acting on hardware without cause. That is impossible. Your holism is nothing but dualistic thinking in disguise.”

You are barely paying attention now, as you are desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood from your wounds with strips of cloth torn from your clothing. In the middle of your efforts, someone calls out “You are wasting your time! The physicalists are right. Mentalist thinking is pseudomonism; indeed, it does smack of dualism, but Sperry is also right. Mind does have supervention powers. The solution is a modern form of dualism. Here’s the philosopher Sir John Dual. He will explain it to you.” You finish your makeshift bandaging and pay attention.

Dual begins to speak. “According to the model that Sir John Eccles and Sir Karl Popper have developed, mental properties belong to a separate world, world 2, and meaning comes from a still higher world, world 3. Eccles says that a liason brain located in the dominant cerebral hemisphere mediates between the brain states of world 1 and the mental states of world 2. Look, how can you deny that the capacity for creative freedom requires a jump out of the system. If you are all the system is, your behavior is bound to be determined because any proposal of action-initiating mind is bound to end up in the paradoxical causal loop, brain-mind-brain, that snared Sperry.” Maybe it’s all the dope, but you’re definitely digging Dual’s shit. Maybe it’s just his accent though. But what about the conservation laws? And doesn’t Eccles’s liaison brain sound like another form of the pineal gland? It does to you. More dead ends! Maybe, you think, you need to start decapitating these motherfuckers until you get some good answers.

Before you can act, something grabs your attention: a sign, THE CHINESE ROOM, adjacent to a closed box with a couple openings. “This is a debunking device, built by professor John Searle of U.C. Berkley, that shows the inadequacy of the functionalist, Turing machine view of the mind. I”ll explain how it works in a minute,” says the friendly man next to the box. “But suppose you get into the box first.” Realizing you’ll probably never leave the campus alive anyway, you agree.

Soon a flash card comes at you through a slot. On the card are scribbled characters that you suspect are Chinese, but not knowing Chinese, you don’t recognize their meaning. There is a sign in English telling you to consult a dictionary, also in English, where an instruction is given for the response card that you have to find from a pile of cards. After some effort, you find the response card and present it to the outgoing slot as instructed. As you exit the box, the smiling fella asks “Did you understand the semantic situation at all? Do you have any idea what the meaning was conveyed by the cards?”

“Fuck no,” you answer. “I don’t know Chinese, nor can I read minds.”

“Yet you were able to process the symbols just as a Turing machine does!”

You begin to catch on. “So, like me, the Turing machine need not have any understanding of what communication goes on when it processes symbols. Just because it manipulates symbols, we cannot be sure that it also understands.” The box man smiles more. “And if the machine cannot understand when it processes symbols,” he says, “how can we say it thinks?” Even in your inebriated state, you have to admire Searle’s ingenuity. But then if functionalists’ claim is wrong, their picture of the mind-body relation must be wrong, too. Sperry’s idea of emergence is akin to dualism. And dualism is dubious even when sold in the new Popper bottle. “Is there any way to understand consciousness and free will?” you wonder to yourself.

“Maybe old Skinner is right—we should just analyze behavior and be done with it.” Just then you see a commotion near the yonder fountain. You are only moderately surprised to see an East Indian Buddhist monk on a chariot arguing with somebody who could only be a king—throne, crown and all. The monk dismantles the chariot, grabs the horses and asks “Are these the chariot, O noble king?”

The king replies “Of course not.” The monk then grabs the wheels and asks, “Are the wheels the chariot, O noble king?” Receiving the same reply, the monk continues the process until the only part left is the chassis, which he points to and asks “Is this the chariot, O noble king?” By now the king looks a little angry, and you are also almost ready to shoot the monk down in cold blood. But you see his point: where is the chariot?

By now, you can no longer stand. You slump down, leaning against the fountain, a pool of blood growing under you. You never even got your beer and pizza! Perhaps you are hallucinating, but John Q. Monist appears once more in front of you. “See, Phallicus, I told you. There is no chariot without the reductive parts. The parts are the whole. Any concept of chariot apart from the parts is a ghost in the machine.” His smile is a little too smug for you. You pull out the gun stolen from the unconscious projectionist, idly wondering how a bona fide eastern mystic who is supposed to belong in the idealist camp could make an argument that gives ammunition to this prick.

Then it hits you: there is no puzzle. The Buddhist monk Nagasena (for that is who it was, and the king is King Millinda) may sound the same as that asshole Monist, since they both deny self-nature to objects. However, according to material monists, there is no self-nature in objects apart from the ultimate reductive components, the elementary particles that make them up. Nagasena’s position—monistic idealism—is radically different. There is no self-nature in objects apart from consciousness.

As you watch police cars smash through the campus gates, you realize that there is no need to ascribe self-nature to subjects either. In vintage monistic idealism, only transcendent and unitive consciousness is real. The rest, including the subject-object division of the world, is epiphenomenon, maya, illusion. This is philosophicaclly astute, but as the sirens get closer and closer you realize it is not completely satisfactory. The doctrine of no-self does not explain how the individual self-experience arises. It does not explain our very personal “I”. Thus one of our most compelling experiences is left out.

But, you say to yourself, they can all go fuck themselves. You lift the gun and are shot to death almost immediately by the police, who don’t care about any of this.

I'd like to apologize to Amit Goswami, Ph.D., author of The Self-Aware Universe, whose material I have quoted and injected into a lot of profanity and violence.

Alright. Next post, I answer some of Red Frog Rising's questions, without resorting to an entire half-chapter of someone else's book.