Colin McGinn wrote a thought-provoking three paragraph blog post the other day in which he speculated on an analogy between mass and consciousness. I hadn’t planned to write many response pieces here, but his analogy, although flawed, is too delightful to pass up, and helps draw out some of my own thinking on the subject. He begins—
In “The Mysteries of Mass” Jorge Cham and Daniel Whitestone write as follows: “We have many descriptions of mass but very little understanding of what it is and why we have it. We all feel mass. As a baby, you develop that sense that some things are harder to push around than others. But as familiar as that feeling is, most physicists would struggle to explain the underlying technical details. As you’ll see in this chapter, most of your mass is not made out of the masses of all the particles inside of you. We don’t know even know why some things have mass and some don’t, or why inertia perfectly balances out the force of gravity…” (58-60) Here we can substitute “consciousness” for “mass” in certain places and get something both sensible and true. In particular, consciousness is a mystery, and despite the fact that we all feel it we don’t know why some things have it and some don’t. The authors go on to observe that inertia is a mystery and that we don’t understand why some things have it and some don’t (64, 68). They also note that particles have very different masses for which we have no explanation: it seems arbitrary what mass a particular type of particle has. Particle mass is not predictable from such properties as charge or spin; it seems like a brute fact of nature. The authors sum up: “It’s amazing to think that something so fundamental to our existence [mass] can still be a mystery” (74)
For McGinn, consciousness is mysterious. I don’t share his sense of mystery, probably for the same reasons I don’t think philosophical zombies are really conceivable and that the “hard problem of consciousness” sometimes seems more related to the limitations in philosophers' imaginations than to consciousness itself. I was still intrigued by the analogy, however, because it illuminates a deep truth in human inquiry, namely that whenever we are stuck on a “mystery” or other supposedly insoluble problem (think free-will, or most theological questions), it is very likely that we are spinning our wheels with words we think mean something but in fact don’t. Or, at least the words don’t mean what we think they mean.
I think adding another analogy will help. Perhaps consciousness is “mysterious” in the same way the phenomenon of life was mysterious to philosophers for millennia? This is what occurred to me as I continued reading: could we replace the word “consciousness” with the word “life” and “get something both sensible and true”? He continues:
The analogies to consciousness are staring us in the face, though our authors make no allusion to them. Specifically: (a) we don’t know why some things are conscious and some are not, and (b) the reason why some neurons are associated with consciousness and some are not is opaque to us (not predictable from their physical-chemical properties). The mysteries thus take an analogous form in both cases. Our familiarity with both things may blind us to their mysteries, but a little probing reveals a deep lack of comprehension. I would put the point this way: some things have mass/inertia and some don’t (space, time, neutrinos, numbers, maybe thoughts), just as some things are conscious and some are not (particles, rocks, numbers, space and time). We don’t understand why this is—we just know that it is. Nor do we know why these things are mysterious (the mystery is a mystery). Nor do we see any method by which we could resolve the mystery. The mysteries are deep, intractable. Did mass evolve from an earlier massless state of the universe? If so, evolved from what and by what mechanism or process? Did consciousness evolve from an earlier non-conscious state of the universe? If so, evolved from what and by what mechanism or process? We might compare the massless neutrino with the insentient zombie: both behave like objects with mass/consciousness, yet these attributes are lacking. In short, the parallels are remarkable and instructive.
Now consider my proposed substitution:
The analogies to [life] are staring us in the face, though our authors make no allusion to them. Specifically: (a) we don’t know why some things are [alive] and some are not, and (b) the reason why some [molecules/cells/whatever] are associated with [life] and some are not is opaque to us (not predictable from their physical-chemical properties)…I would put the point this way: some things have mass/inertia and some don’t (space, time, neutrinos, numbers, maybe thoughts), just as some things are [alive] and some are not (particles, rocks, numbers, space and time). We don’t understand why this is—we just know that it is. Nor do we know why these things are mysterious (the mystery is a mystery). Nor do we see any method by which we could resolve the mystery. The mysteries are deep, intractable. Did mass evolve from an earlier massless state of the universe? If so, evolved from what and by what mechanism or process? Did [life] evolve from an earlier non-[living] state of the universe? If so, evolved from what and by what mechanism or process? We might compare the massless neutrino with the insentient zombie: both behave like objects with mass/[life], yet these attributes are lacking. In short, the parallels are remarkable and instructive.
One could imagine philosophers and scientists up to the turn of the 20th century talking about life like this (and they did). Prior to the development of evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, genetics, and related fields in the 19th and early 20th-centuries, theories of Élan vital or other life-forces were still fairly common. How else could one explain the difference between a living and dead body, with no mechanistic explanations available?
Today, of course, life is much less mysterious. Sure, it is still mysterious in the poetic sense that it is amazing and beautiful in all kinds of ways, and many unanswered questions remain, including the ultimate origins of life; but the question “what really is life, anyway? Where is the lifeness of a living thing?” is much less mysterious. We now know that the question doesn’t even really make sense and that there is no one essence of life, no Élan vital, but rather that the word “life” signifies a whole series of complex interactions of certain kinds of matter leading to process we call metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction, morphogenesis, and so on. The mystery of life naturally dissolves as the subject matter (no pun intended) of the question becomes clearer.
Why should consciousness be any different? After all, it, like life itself, is not a thing, but a process—in this case the physiologic processing of a meat machine1 in your skull. It is not one thing even from your own point of view, but only appears so to naive introspection, and it is possible to observe and experience its disunity and discontinuity via meditation, drugs, mental illness, or dementing illnesses and traumatic injuries. Why should we expect that, when all the “easy problems” of neuroscience are solved—when every neural pathway is charted out and the precise physical correlates of every thought, emotion, and perception are mapped and catalogued—there will be any mystery left? The deeply-rooted folk-dualist within us says there will be something left over, some remainder, some mystery, but I see no reason to believe him. If you are someone who says “yes, but what about the subjective quality of the experience, the undeniable first-person-ness of it all, how could that ever be explained away?” then you are still residing, unknowingly, in your Cartesian theater.
Future title for the autobiography of a philosophical materialist: “Memoirs of a Meat Machine”.
Well this was a surprisingly interesting post. I had thought that the mysterions had had their day! Intriguing but worn away. Makes all my old reading and thinking somehow (nostalgically) relevant, though I do not hold these views. Thank you.
I do not subscribe to the meat-machine point of view but I'm curious to know if and how these points of view influence the way we treat our mentally ill patients, or better yet how our patients value mental health providers according to the latter's point of view.