The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI)

Throughout my "Quickening to Qualia" series (see "Thouness" and Self) I've made a case for a God with whom we can be in meaningful dialogue. I've based it upon a nonreligious, philosophical argument that consciousness arises out of our brain's complexity for ineffable reasons that can perhaps be best ascribed to a God-given law of nature.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker is not one who would embrace such a position. The professor of psychology and head of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT presents a range of other approaches to the mind's enigmas at the end of his excellent book How the Mind Works.

Pinker and I agree that consciousness, or sentience, defies explanation. Pinker deftly sets aside the other meanings of the word consciousness — self-knowledge and access to information. He then describes sentience as "subjective experience, phenomenal awareness, raw feels, first-person present tense, 'what it is like' to be or do something, if you have to ask you'll never know" (p. 135).

As I wrote in Water Into Wine, Pinker says that consciousness or sentience

has struck a great many thinkers as not just a problem but almost a miracle" (p. 132). One such thinker, Thomas Huxley, the English biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog" for defending the theory of evolution by natural selection, called it "just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Philosopher Colin McGinn, adds Pinker, speaks of "the water of the human brain ... turned into the wine of consciousness."

Pinker asks, "How could an event of neural information-processing cause the feel of a toothache or the taste of lemon or the color purple? How could I know whether a worm, a robot, a brain slice in a dish, or you are sentient? Is your sensation of red the same as mine, or might it be like my sensation of green? What is it like to be dead?" (p. 558)

Further, "What good is consciousness? ... Is consciousness an impotent side effect hovering over the symbols [used in information processing], like the lights flashing on a computer or the thunder that accompanies lightning? And if consciousness is useless — if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it — why would natural selection have favored the conscious one?" (p. 132)


There are other features of the human mind, says Pinker, that are equally hard to explain. The imponderables include (pp. 558-559):

• The self as a "unified center of sentience"
• Free will or unforced choice in deciding among possible actions
• The ability to know the meaning of abstract propositions such as "the set of natural numbers is infinite"
  
• The ability to know the truth of universals such as "the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, everywhere and for all eternity"
• A sense of moral truth as something absolutely real: "How did ought emerge from a universe of particles and planets, genes and bodies?"
  

There are, says Pinker, five ways to deal with knotty issues such as these which "give us a sense of bewilderment, of intellectual vertigo" (p. 559). The first, the one I favor but Pinker eschews, is the God hypothesis. I'll talk more about it presently.

Numbers two through four on Pinker's list don't satisfy Pinker either. One can say, first of all, "that the mysterious entities are an irreducible part of the universe and leave it at that" (p. 560). That consciousness, will, selves, ethics, etc., are brute facts — just like space, time, matter, energy, and other things physicists study — is the "irreducibility theory." It, Pinker complains, offers no insight and leaves us feeling cheated.

Or, one can simply deny the problems exist by claiming that statements about consciousness, will, etc., don't even rise to the level of uncertainty. These statements are, rather, meaningless, since there is no way to verify them; the philosophical position is called positivism. Pinker says it "leaves us incredulous, not enlightened" (p. 561). Something we know as supremely well as the fact of our own consciousness simply "cannot be defined out of existence."

Third, one can claim that all these mental imponderables can successfully be reduced to problems we are able to solve, by recourse to physical causality. For example, "consciousness is activity in layer 4 of the cortex" (see p. 561). Pinker rejects this approach, as do I, by arguing that our free will and moral choice are ruled out by it. We cannot be held morally responsible for choices we make if they are just "the causal effects of the cingulate sulcus," a portion of the brain. Furthermore, if our moral sense is reduced, per evolution theory, to a matter of "kin selection and reciprocal altruism," whither then our "conviction, as unshakable as our grasp of geometry, that some acts are inherently wrong, even if their net effects are neutral or beneficial"?


Pinker's preferred way of dealing with the mind's imponderables is "cognitive closure": saying there is no particular reason to suppose the human mind even has the power to answer every question that perplexes it. Our cognitive faculties are closed off from these answers, says Pinker, by the sheer fact that an ability to settle such highfalutin' questions was not part and parcel of our evolutionary design, brokered by natural selection.

From this perspective, all the things that make us persons — consciousness, will, a sense of morality, of comprehensible meaning, and of invariate truth, etc. — exist in a higher stratum of reality than we can ever hope to account for or explain.


I find Pinker's preference for dealing with the range of mental imponderables as problematic as he finds all the other options. To show why, I'll need first to discuss his objections to the God hypothesis.

Pinker cites H.L. Mencken to the effect that "theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing" (p. 560). Allusions to the divine to explain the mind's imponderables simply, Pinker says, "pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong?"

Pinker also asks, "How does he [God] infuse them [the enigmas] into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? Hoe does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."

The question about what accounts for God's own aspects of personhood — mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong — is one I believe I can deal with. God would not be worthy of the name unless he is understood as self-revealing to humankind. In his self-revelation to Moses he called himself Yahweh: "I am that I am." He thereby tells us his existence requires no further explanation; there is no need to look for an infinite regress of causes atop causes, where the Most High is concerned.

Thus, not believing in the God hypothesis because it permits of no explanations of God's own existence or personal qualities is logically inconsistent. The God hypothesis is specifically one which says, right up front, that an uncaused God cannot and need not be explained or accounted for.


Furthermore, it is God's self-revealing personhood that, to this theist, counts as what's the most "worth knowing," of all that we can know.

If what's worth knowing is the criterion of choice, I don't see how Pinker's "cognitive closure" outstrips the God hypothesis. It puts all the personal attributes that theists say we share with God — consciousness, will, etc. — beyond a cloud cover impenetrable to cognitive inquiry. How does that tell us anything worth knowing?

True, it sidesteps questions such as that of human suffering. So I'll take a wild shot at that one: we suffer because we find ourselves hard put to cease saying the primary word I—It, instead of saying I—Thou (German Ich—Du). According to the Wikipedia subtopic on the philosophy of Martin Buber:

One key Ich—Du relationship Buber identified was that which can exist between a human being and God. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an Ich—Du relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.

Buber's philosophy is basically that I—Thou represents a relational attitude wholly different from I—It. In the latter, we simply use or are used by. One of the relatants is always an object. In the former, we are in a two-way dialogue. Our interlocutor is a subject whom we take to have independent moral stature, just as we do.

As I said in my previous posts, I consider Buber's philosophy profound, if hard to put into practice. I don't know how one could take it at all seriously without suspecting that the flaw in Steven Pinker's outlook is his tacit assumption that God, if real, is an It, like all the other candidate accounts of imponderable mental phenomena. Irreducibility theory, materialism, reducibility to the physical, and cognitive closure — all are It. God alone is Thou.

Suppose God:

• is real
• has personhood
• possesses will, consciousness, moral sensibility, etc.
• reveals himself to us as being/having all the above
  
• wants us to speak to him always as Thou

Wouldn't that list of "facts" about God be wholly consistent with the problems of our mental imponderables, our suffering, etc.? Doesn't the very existence of these enigmas fairly cry out for us to put aside the I—It of ordinary thought for a relationship of fruitful dialogue with the Most High, or at least with his beloved creatures?


It is out of such dialogue that comes the one aspect of religion/spirituality which Pinker extols: "our higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings" (p. 555). But Pinker quickly disparages religion for its faults, excesses, and inconsistencies. For example: " ... even the Ten Commandments, read in context, prohibit murder, lying, and theft only within the tribe, not against outsiders."

Yet it's my conviction that the late astronomer Carl Sagan, nominally an atheist like Pinker, had a spiritual, dialogic relationship with the universe, the subject of his 1980 television series Cosmos. Though not a religious man, he was manifestly a man of higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings.

Carl Sagan's Contact

"It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness," a character says in Sagan's science fiction novel Contact (p. 153). The speaker, a biologist, has been asked what he will do with a caterpillar he has been keenly observing on a held twig: kill it? The scene is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, where 55,000 names of the honored U.S. dead are engraved in black, reflecting granite. The allusion: the caterpillar is not a miniature monster, eligible for killing like an enemy soldier. Neither, really, is the soldier. Both are Thou.

Sagan quotes Albert Einstein in the epigraph to the same chapter: "I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research." With the right spiritual attitude, everything is Thou.

This is what I think Steven Pinker misses in speaking as disparagingly of religion as he does. Despite its blemishes, it is the strongest voice in history for consciousness of Thou.