Are You or Are You Not

207.

PART ONE

Theory

CHAPTER ONE

Cognitive Science and the

Psychological Problem of Dualism

Automata, clever machines having the forms of animals or humans, have a long history. By era of the philosopher Rene Descartes in the 1600s, there were very sophisticated examples, usually created as toys or as displays for entertainment or scientific purposes. Descartes concluded that the bodies of animals, including those of humans, were machines as well. So the question of how to distinguish human-like automata from human beings arose: is a human being nothing more than a machine?

What is a machine? The functions of any machine are determined by physical causality. Fundamental to the concept of physical causality is the absence of purpose and the elimination of choice. Physics flourished as a science only after eliminating action with intent (choosing to achieve a purpose) as a factor in physical causation. The operation of physical forces in causing physical change is purposeless and blind. Persons, however, have purposes, make choices and can be held responsible for those choices. So Descartes concluded that the difference must lie in something not bound by physical causality: a non-mechanical, non-material entity, a soul, controlling the mechanism of the body by a mysterious connection to the brain. The soul is the I which thinks. The existence of a self is summed up in Descartes’ famous saying: I think, therefore I am.

This is called metaphysical dualism. Reality is divided into two different kinds of things, material and non-material.² Your body is made of matter, extended in space and subject to physical causality but unable to think, intend and choose. It is a machine. Your self, or soul, is non-material. It has no spatial extent and is not subject to physical causality. It has freedom to think, intend, choose and take responsibility. It is not a machine. Thus, you and every other human being are machines governed by non-mechanical souls. But there’s a snag: since body and soul differ at an absolute level, it should be impossible for one to influence or interact with the other. Yet they are said to be connected. On this view, you and every human being is stuck in a state of unavoidable contradiction.³

Over the long course of history, metaphysical dualism has been the dominant view. But it is a mistake, caused by confusing a psychological condition with a problem of fundamental reality. The division in the psyche is real, but it is not expressive of a split in nature: It is a theoretically remediable psychological conflict. The remedy however is not only extremely difficult to find, it is obscured by an almost impenetrable smokescreen of entrenched beliefs and prejudices. Descartes just added to the confusion by codifying this psychological problem as metaphysics, which gave it a renewed force and rendered it even more damaging. Promoting a condition of the psyche to the status of an unchangeable metaphysical absolute creates the ground for a sense of alienation leading to a thoroughgoing nihilism, which then exhibits itself in destructive behavior.⁴ We can see that behavior everywhere.

For a time, the metaphysicalized version of this condition, known academically as the problem of dualism, was thought to require a philosophical solution. Today most philosophers and scientists consider it of little interest. One reason is that under the dominant paradigm no permutations of scientific or philosophical analysis reach to the underlying psychological disturbance. It is seldom if ever even thought of as a psychological problem. Yet it is something real about human selfhood denied only at our peril. It is the psychological problem of dualism, a pathological condition affecting humanity.⁵ Because of its tendency to erupt into metaphysics and therefore hopelessness, it ultimately engenders either self-destructive madness or a constant insidious socio-cultural malaise.

And to this unfortunate circumstance, something worse has been added. There is one seeming way out that has been spreading throughout the popular mind. It is a metaphysical choice originating from the dominant paradigm of materialistic reductionism. Since consciousness is not explained by materialism, the existence of consciousness ends up being denied. Peculiar tricks of language are used to support the denial. Critical concepts are arbitrarily redefined: Mind is cognition. Cognition is data manipulation by the brain. The brain is a computer. Then we have the mind-brain-computer identity theory (MBCI for short).⁶ Instead of consciousness, your brain may even be deliberately confusing you to keep you from committing suicide, as Carter said (using totally irrational logic).

But MBCI is a false solution. It is not a scientific position. It is metaphysics. And there is a destructive feedback between the dominant paradigm of materialistic reductionism and the psychological condition of dualism. Even from a strictly metaphysical perspective materialistic reductionism fails. It disguises itself as a monism (only matter exists) but it is not a true monism. It is a tacit acceptance of the division of mind and body which tries to sweep mind under the rug, where it still exists but is hidden and nascent.⁷ Its nagging voice keeps on interrupting, crying for recognition. It does so every time such words as you and we and us are used – words that Carter uses without apology, not realizing she is undermining her own view. This cannot succeed. The factor that has been denied surfaces and re-surfaces again with desperate regularity.⁸ This persistent pressure from the heart of consciousness is then pushed back repeatedly by the dominant metaphysics, continually blocking the search for a corrective paradigm – the understanding that would let us find ourselves, and our true world, at last.

Descartes claimed a machine, with adaptability under the guidance of reason, to be impossible. But that was before digital computers, machines which incorporate instructions, called programs, which respond to whatever input is provided. Such a machine can adjust to a multiplicity of circumstances by creating new instructions, then instructions which modify instructions, and then instructions which modify the modifications of instructions, replacing the sufficient diversity of organs demanded by Descartes. They are then said to possess Artificial Intelligence. Knowledge becomes acquisition of data. Memory becomes the coding and storage of data. Cognition becomes the use of data to solve problems by means of algorithms, and learning is redefined as modification of instructions by previous instructions.

It is but a short step from this wholesale redefinition of mental capabilities to the idea that eventually we will create mechanical bodies controlled by machines (computers) surpassing human beings in cognitive as well as physical abilities. Then the immaterial soul invoked by Descartes is replaced by a computing machine. Instead of the ghost in the machine we have the machine within the machine. But a mechanical body is not a body at all, and not all the properties attributed to the mind can be subsumed within the capabilities of a computer. Among these is freedom to act according to one’s intentions outside the sphere of physical causality. Since the Cartesian soul is what allowed I think, then along with dumping the Cartesian soul into the trash heap of theory, so must go I.

But I is the mark of freedom. With the loss of I freedom is lost; with the loss of freedom, creativity is lost; with the loss of creativity, value is lost; and with the loss of value, hope is lost. It is a syllogism heralding the loss of humanity. Instead of resolving the problem of dualism we have a recipe for a humanesque automaton. To such an emasculated creature psychology is a meaningless term.

Presently MBCI is not merely dominant in science; it is increasingly present in popular culture. We are propagandized daily by reports informing us that neuroscience has found the location in the cells of the brain of things formerly thought of as properties of a self and as having no location, such as thought, emotion, love, empathy, and belief. Trying to put such things into brain cells proves possible by committing what is called in logic a category mistake and by uncritically adopting a faulty view of causality.⁹ More and more scientists and philosophers get around this problem simply by denying the existence of the characteristics normally attributed to selfhood and consciousness; and finally denying the existence of consciousness entirely. ¹⁰ To treat what it is to be human so shabbily is a shame beyond compare.

The problem with all this is that it rests on the unproven presupposition that the brain is a computer rather than a living organ of a living body in a living socio-cultural milieu. The redefinition of humanity as mechanism is not a conclusion from experience. Instead it is a misguided interpretation of experience based on the metaphysical view of materialism, a form of mechanistic reductionism: All energetic complex structures in the universe are assumed to be reducible to purposeless physical causality. Since everything psychological and biological is already taken to be no more than a complex distribution of matter operating under causal law, to the theorist it is automatic to infer that eventually a complex machine will exhibit all aspects of human behavior – all aspects that count for anything, that is. If anything is left over it is considered illusory or nonexistent. Selfhood, meaning, belief, value, consciousness and freedom to act autonomously are dismissed with breathtaking ease. We have already seen how Carter has done this, and we will see many more examples as our quest continues. First, however, I must fulfil the promise made in the Introduction: that we would run Carter’s view through the filter of rationality to show its weaknesses.

So, her view informs us, our computer-brains are deliberately feeding us illusions to keep us from committing suicide. Though not a self and not conscious, your brain deceives itself into believing it is a self, which means that it deceives itself into thinking it is conscious – all the while being deprived of consciousness and consequently being unable to be deceived or even to think. It is a programmable machine that cannot accommodate the data that it is a programmable machine so it manufactures self-delusion without being a self. We are self-mesmerized for our own good even though we are not selves and we have no good. You are not merely conned by your computer-brain into believing something untrue, such as believing that the earth is flat; you are asked to believe that you have no beliefs, for only selves can have beliefs, and programmable machines are not selves; they are robots. With a single sweep of the wand of misinterpreted neuroscience, you and every human being on the planet becomes a computer: one that is insane, because it is unable to face its own reality and so has to delude itself – even though it is incapable of belief and thereby not able either to manufacture or to suffer from a delusion.

But it is not Harry’s wand enforcing the spell; it is Voldemort’s.

Shaking off the spell, we ask how a programmable machine can suffer from illusion, much less create an illusion for itself when it is not a self. Only persons can be so bewitched. That nasty I keeps poking out from under the rug. The failure of intellectual honesty here is given away by the speaker’s casual use of we and us. These have no meaning applied to a machine. They refer to selves. The statement falls apart by its own weight. Why should a programmable machine be in danger of becoming suicidally fatalistic upon learning that it is a robot? Learning as it has been redefined is just the juggling of bits of data, and there is no one there to learn anything. Why should a machine care about survival, when it is not alive and is incapable of caring? It is life, not mechanism, which can care and wish to stay alive. We are asked to avoid suicide by believing that we are dead.

This manifest tangle of confused ideas leads to the unavoidable question: what psychology is at work? Across centuries of history, one of the most damaging results of mind-body dualism has been the despising of the biological, organic body, the body that is alive. This body is defective: it induces impulses, emotions, desires, motivations, and ultimately, it dies. Well, if the mind is separate from the body why not dispense with the body altogether? Or, if suicide is proscribed, what about simply doing away with the closest tie to biology by celibacy or at least ritual flagellation or self-castration, a common practice in the early church. Saint Augustine of Hippo, we read, was awakened to Romans 13:14 which says, Put on Christ ... and make no provision for the flesh.

Reviling of the flesh reflects the Platonic doctrine of the inferiority of changeable, unpredictable matter and the superiority of eternal non-material forms of thought. Here MBCI enters with a way out of Augustine’s agony without suicide. There is another way to escape from animal embodiment. First the material world is stripped of its own freedom to undergo unpredictable change, so that the inferiority of material substance assumed by Plato is denied. Mathematical laws of Nature replace Plato’s realm of eternal forms.¹¹ This dodge requires assuming absolute causal determinism as the number one characteristic of material behavior. Scientific laws as discovered by physics are given absolute authority over all reality. Instead of being a tool in the service of consciousness, science becomes the arbiter of all reality.

This establishes the second requirement: that the brain is a computer following physical laws, whose pre-programmed activity constitutes the explanation for all our behavior, eliminating anything not ultimately predictable. Then if we upload our programming and memories (stored data) into a flash drive, and put that brain consisting of programming and stored data into a mechanical body, we escape the damnable biological urges: a cognitive scientist’s way of accomplishing Augustinian castration – with the added benefit that such a body would be potentially immortal.¹² But even if uploading one’s alleged programming and data into a computer should prove impossible, the cognitive scientist may revel in a kind of vicarious experience of the universe’s ultimately mechanical-mathematical nature – and a sense of godlike power – by creating cognitive machines freed from vulnerable organic bodies.

This hidden desire for the certainty of a mechanical humanity in a mechanical universe, controlled by the masters of mechanism, the physical scientists, I offer as a psychological explanation for MBCI in particular and on a broader canvas for the dominant paradigm of mechanistic reductionism. Like the escape of castration, it is an escape from life. If we believe to the contrary that we are living things possessed of mind, freedom and creativity, such a level of denial and escapism can be understood as a manifestation of the negative, life-denying effect of dualism.

Yes, there is a ready answer to such impertinent applications of logic by critics. Cognitive scientists have resorted to that answer. The entire conceptual framework employed by critics is subjected to a wholesale redefinition of the crucial terminology to suit the theory.¹³ If certain concepts, such as those of self, belief and consciousness, resist such redefinition, they are dealt with by denying that they refer to anything real at all. On the one hand, we find MBCI advocates denying the existence of belief,¹⁴ while on the other asserting what they believe; then denying that this is self-contradictory on the ground that folk psychology which mistakenly imagines there are such things as beliefs, is faulty and should be replaced by scientific language,¹⁵ When denying that belief exists, they are using scientific language. But when saying they believe belief does not exist they must use the language of imperfect and deceptive folk psychology, because the concept of belief does not exist in scientific language.

But the very idea of a folk psychology does not fit the MBCI paradigm, since if there is no self there is no psychology. How a programmable machine could invent a folk psychology for its non-self is not explained. Just as we and us and you and I are not applicable to machines, neither is psychology; just as we and us are not applicable to machines, neither is folk, which implies a community of selves. To an array of programmable machines, folk psychology is a meaningless expression. And so it goes indefinitely, back and forth between selfhood and non-selfhood, sense and nonsense, twisting and turning under the knife of logic. The only way out for the theorist is to abandon logic: intellectual suicide. We are asked to give up our minds so that we will no longer recognize insanity.

This situation has an unsettling affinity to the methods of conceptual revisionism as practiced by the totalitarian rule in Orwell’s 1984: Call White Black and call Black White. If behaving irrationally, call your opponent irrational. Destroy the logical landscape. Divest of meaning the ideas that would reveal the underlying truth of the situation, by re-framing every vulnerable aspect of your program in such a way as to render criticism impotent. And do this to yourself, so that you become impervious to any contrary view.

Surely, many will say, this is too extreme. To which I reply, yes indeed it is too extreme. When MBCI