For two
hundred years materialist philosophers have argued that man is some sort of
machine. The claim began with French materialists of the Enlightenment such
as Pierre Cabanis, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d’Holbach (La Mettrie even
wrote a book titled Man the Machine). Likewise contemporary materialists like
Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, and Patricia Churchland claim that the motions
and modifications of matter are sufficient to account for all human
experiences, even our interior and cognitive ones. Whereas the Enlightenment
philosophes might have thought of humans in terms of gear mechanisms and fluid
flows, contemporary materialists think of humans in terms of neurological
systems and computational devices. The idiom has been updated, but the
underlying impulse to reduce mind to matter remains unchanged.
Materialism remains unsatisfying, however; it seems inadequate to explain our
deeper selves. People have aspirations. We long for freedom, immortality, and
the beatific vision. We are restless until we find our rest in God. And these
longings cannot be satisfied by matter. Our aspirations are, after all,
spiritual (the words are even cognates). We need to transcend ourselves to
find ourselves, but the motions and modifications of matter offer no
opportunity for transcendence. Materialists in times past admitted as much.
Freud saw belief in God as wish–fulfillment. Marx saw religion as an opiate.
Nietzsche saw Christianity as a pathetic excuse for weakness. Each regarded
the hope for transcendence as a delusion.
This hope, however, is not easily excised from the human heart. Even the most
hardened materialist shudders at Bertrand Russell’s vision of human destiny:
"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they
were achieving" and which predestine him "to extinction in the vast
death of the solar system." The human heart longs for more. And in an
age when having it all has become de rigueur, some step forward with a
proposal for enjoying the benefits of religion without its ontological
burdens. The erstwhile impossible marriage between materialism and
spirituality is now consummated, they tell us. Screwtape’s "materialist
magician" who combines the skepticism of the materialist with the cosmic
consciousness of the mystic is here at last.
For the tough–minded materialists of the past, human aspirations were
strictly finite and terminated with the death of the individual. Whatever its
inadequacies, that materialism was strong, stark, and courageous. It embraced
the void, and disdained any impulse to pie in the sky.
Not so for the tender–minded materialists of our age. Though firmly committed
to materialism, they are just as firmly committed to not missing out on the
benefits ascribed to religious experience. They believe spiritual materialism
is now possible, from which it follows that we are spiritual machines. The
juxtaposition of spirit and mechanism, which previously would have been
regarded as an oxymoron, is now said to constitute a profound insight.
Consider Ray Kurzweil’s recent The Age of Spiritual Machines: When
Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking, 1999). Kurzweil is a leader
in artificial intelligence, specifically in the field of voice–recognition
software. Ten years ago he published the more modestly titled The Age of
Intelligent Machines, where he gave the standard strong artificial
intelligence position about machine and human intelligence being functionally
equivalent. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, however, Kurzweil’s aim
is no longer to show that machines are merely capable of human capacities.
Rather, his aim is to show that machines are capable of vastly outstripping
human capacities and will do so within the next thirty years.
According to The Age of Spiritual Machines, machine intelligence is
the next great step in the evolution of intelligence. That man is the most
intelligent being at the moment is simply an accident of natural history.
Human beings need to be transcended, not by going beyond matter, but by
reinstantiating themselves in more efficient forms of matter, to wit, the
computer. Kurzweil claims that in the next thirty or so years we shall be
able to scan our brains, upload them onto a computer, and thereafter continue
our lives as virtual persons running as programs on machines. Since the
storage and processing capacities of these virtual persons will far exceed
that of the human brain, they will quickly take the lead in all aspects of
society. Those humans who refuse to upload themselves will be left in the
dust, becoming "pets," as Kurzweil puts it, of the newly evolved
computer intelligences. What’s more, these computer intelligences will be
conditionally immortal, depending for their continued existence only on the
ability of hardware to run the relevant software.
Although Kurzweil is at pains to shock his readers with the imminence of a
computer takeover, he is hardly alone in seeking immortality through
computation. Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality (1994) is
devoted entirely to this topic. Freeman Dyson has pondered it as well. Alan
Turing, one of the founders of modern computation, was fascinated with how
the distinction between software and hardware illuminated immortality.
Turing’s friend Christopher Morcom had died when they were teenagers. If
Morcom’s continued existence depended on his particular embodiment, then he
was gone for good. But if he could be instantiated as a computer program
(software), Morcom’s particular embodiment (hardware) would be largely
irrelevant. Identifying personal identity with computer software thus ensured
that people were immortal since even though hardware could be destroyed,
software resided in a realm of mathematical abstraction and was thus immune
to destruction.
Curiously, the impulse to render us spiritual machines comes not just from
materialists, but also from theists. Nancey Murphy, a professor of theology
at Fuller Seminary, has surprised the Christian community with the news that
humans do not have immortal souls capable of existing apart from the body
(see her Whatever Happened to the Soul?, Fortress, 1998). Murphy is
less a fan of Kurzweil’s computational reductionism than of Patricia
Churchland’s neurological reductionism. Humans, according to Murphy, are
purely physical beings, though as a believer she holds they are also
creatures made by God. Human immortality, therefore, consists not in humans
having some feature that transcends their physical bodies, but in the fact
that God will resurrect them in the coming age. For Murphy, human identity
coincides with bodily identity.
Murphy realizes that her view of the human person is at odds with much of the
Christian tradition. She therefore tries to bridge the gap by claiming that
the traditional Christian dualism of body and soul stems from the Greeks and
is not properly part of the Hebraic view of human identity as found in the
Old Testament. She also recounts the failure of Descartes’ substance dualism
to connect body and soul. But to clinch her case she points to recent
advances in neuroscience, which to her leave no doubt that we are strictly
physical beings. The view of human identity that emerges from her writings is
in the end no different from that of the hard–core neuroscientists. To be
sure, God is thrown into the mix, religious experience is affirmed, and we
have a promise of being resurrected somewhere down the line; but ultimately
the only real knowledge about ourselves is what can be extracted from our
physical composition and physical circumstances. If Kurzweil spiritualizes
the material, then Murphy materializes the spiritual. In both cases we end up
with humans as spiritual machines.
A strong case can be made that humans are not machines, period--a case I
shall make in due course. Assuming that I am right, it follows that humans
are not spiritual machines. Even so, it is interesting to ask what it would
mean for a machine to be spiritual. My immediate aim, therefore, is not to
refute the claim that humans are spiritual machines, but to show that any
spirituality of machines could only be an impoverished spirituality. It’s
rather like talking about "free prisoners." Whatever else freedom
might mean here, it doesn’t mean freedom to leave the prison.
By a machine we normally mean an integrated system of parts that function
together to accomplish some purpose. To avoid the troubled waters of
teleology, let us bracket the question of purpose. In that case we can define
a machine as any integrated system of parts whose motions and modifications
entirely characterize the system. Implicit in this definition is that all the
parts are physical. Consequently a machine is fully determined by the
constitution, dynamics, and interrelationships of its physical parts.
This definition is very general. It incorporates artifacts as well as
organisms. Because the nineteenth–century Romanticism that separates
organisms from machines is still with us, many people shy away from calling organisms
machines. But organisms are as much integrated systems of physical parts as
are artifacts. Perhaps "integrated physical systems" would be more
precise, but "machines" emphasizes the strict absence of
extra–material factors from such systems, and it is that absence which is the
point of controversy.
Because machines are integrated systems of parts, they are subject to what I
call the replacement principle. This means that physically indistinguishable
parts of a machine can be exchanged without altering the machine. At the
subatomic level, particles in the same quantum state can be exchanged without
altering the subatomic system. At the biochemical level, polynucleotides with
the same length and sequence specificity can be exchanged without altering
the biochemical system. At the organismal level, identical organs can be
exchanged without altering the biological system. At the level of human
contrivances, identical components can be exchanged without altering the
contrivance.
The replacement principle is relevant here because it implies that machines
have no substantive history. As Hilaire Belloc put it, "To comprehend
the history of a thing is to unlock the mysteries of its present, and more,
to disclose the profundities of its future." But a machine, properly
speaking, has no history. What happened to it yesterday is irrelevant; it
could easily have been different without altering the machine. If something
is a machine, then according to the replacement principle it and a replica of
it are identical. Forgeries of the present become masterpieces of the past if
the forgeries are good enough. This may not be a problem for art dealers, but
it does become a problem when the machines in question are ourselves.
For a machine, all that it is is what it is at this moment. We typically
think of our pasts as either remembered or forgotten, and if forgotten then
having the possibility of recovery. But machines do not, properly speaking,
remember or forget; they only access or fail to access items in storage. What’s
more, if they fail to access an item, it’s either because the retrieval
mechanism failed or because the item was erased. Consequently, items that
represent past occurrences but were later erased are, as far as the machine
is concerned, just as though they never happened. Mutatis mutandis, items
that represent counterfactual occurrences (i.e., things that never happened)
but which are accessible can be, as far as the machine is concerned, just as
though they did happen.
The causal history leading up to a machine is strictly an accidental feature
of it. Consequently, any dispositions we ascribe to a machine (e.g.,
goodness, morality, virtue, and, yes, even spirituality) properly pertain
only to its current state and possible future ones, but not to its past. In
particular, any defect in a machine relates only to its current state and
possible future ones. Correcting that defect is a matter of technology: A
machine that was a mass–murderer yesterday may become an angel of mercy today
provided we can find a suitable readjustment of its parts. Having at some
level come to view ourselves as machines, it is no surprise that we so often
make use of technologies like behavior modification, psychotropic drugs,
cognitive reprogramming, and genetic engineering, and that we are so sanguine
about their effects.
A machine is incapable of sustaining what philosophers call substantial
forms. A substantial form is a principle of unity that holds a thing together
and maintains its identity over time. Machines lack substantial forms. A
machine, though having a past, might just as well not have. A machine, though
configured in one way, could just as well be reconfigured in other ways. A
machine’s defects can be corrected and its virtues improved through
technology. Alternatively, new defects can be introduced and old virtues
removed through technology. What a machine is now and what it might end up
being in the future are entirely open–ended and discontinuous. Despite the
buffeting of history, unified things with substantial forms perdure through
time. Machines, on the other hand, are the subject of endless tinkering and
need bear no semblance to past incarnations.
In this light consider the various possible meanings of "spiritual"
in combination with "machine." Since a machine is characterized
entirely in terms of its physical parts, "spiritual" cannot refer
to some nonphysical aspect of the machine. This is true even for Christian
theists like Nancey Murphy, who hold that God created humans and will
ultimately resurrect them. For since they also hold that humans are purely
physical systems (and thus machines in the sense defined here), it follows
that nonphysical factors can provide no insight into human operations.
Machines don’t care how or by whom they were created. As long as
"spiritual" refers to something nonphysical, tacking
"spiritual" in front of "machine" tells us nothing
substantive about the machine.
If we therefore restrict "spiritual" to some physical aspect of a
machine, what might it refer to? Often when we think of someone as spiritual,
we think of that person as exhibiting some moral virtue like self–sacrifice,
altruism, or courage. But we attribute such virtues only on the basis of past
actions; yet past actions belong to history, which is what machines don’t
have, except accidentally. Consider, for instance, a possible–worlds scenario
featuring an ax murderer who just prior to his death has a cerebral accident
that changes his brain state into that of Mother Teresa at her most
charitable. The ax murderer now has the brain state of a saint but the past
of a sinner. Given the equation of spiritual with moral virtue, and assuming
the ax murderer is a machine, is he now a spiritual machine? Suppose Mother
Teresa has a cerebral accident just prior to her death that turns her brain
state into that of the ax murderer at his most barbaric. Mother Teresa now
has the brain state of a sinner but the past of a saint. Assuming Mother
Teresa is a machine, is she no longer a spiritual machine?
Such counterfactuals indicate the futility of attributing spirituality to
machines on the basis of past actions. Machines that have functioned badly in
the past are not sinners and therefore unspiritual. Machines that have
functioned well in the past are not saints and therefore spiritual. Machines
that have functioned badly in the past need to be fixed. Machines that have
functioned well in the past need to be kept in good working order so that
they continue to function well. Once a machine has been fixed, it doesn’t
matter how badly it functioned in the past. On the other hand, once a machine
goes haywire, it doesn’t matter how well it functioned in the past. Within
the Christian tradition the spiritual formation of the human person is an
arduous journey whose success depends on human perseverance and divine grace.
It is not a technological fix for furnishing our brains with the proper
mental state.
Attributing spirituality to machines on the basis of future actions is
equally problematic. Clearly, we have access to a machine’s future only
through its present. Given its present constitution, can we predict what the
machine will do in the future? The best we can do is specify certain
behavioral propensities. But even the best machines break and malfunction--it
is impossible to predict the full range of stresses that a machine may
encounter and that may cause it not to work. For every machine there are
circumstances sure to lead to its undoing. Calling a machine
"spiritual" in reference to its future can therefore refer only to
certain propensities of the machine to function in certain ways. But
spirituality of this sort is better left to a bookie than to a priest or
guru.
Since the future of a machine is accessed through its present, it follows
that attributing spirituality to machines properly refers to some present
physical aspect of the machine. But what aspect might this be? What is it
about the constitution, dynamics, and interrelationships of a machine’s parts
that renders it spiritual? What emergent property of a system of physical
parts corresponds to spirituality? Suppose humans are machines. Does an
ecstatic religious experience, an LSD drug trip, a Maslow peak experience, or
a period of silence, prayer, and meditation count as a spiritual experience?
I suppose if we are playing a Wittgensteinian language game, this usage is
okay. But however we choose to classify these experiences, it remains that
machine spirituality is the spirituality of immediate experience. This is of
course consistent with much of contemporary spirituality, which places a
premium on religious experience and neglects such traditional aspects of
spirituality as revelation, tradition, virtue, morality, and above all
communion with a nonphysical God who transcends our physical being.
Machine spirituality neglects much that traditionally has been classified
under spirituality. From this alone it would follow that machine spirituality
is an impoverished form of spirituality. But the problem is worse. Machine
spirituality fails on its own terms as a phenomenology of religious
experience. The spiritual experience of a machine is necessarily poorer than
the spiritual experience of a being that communes with God. The entire
emphasis of Judeo–Christian spirituality is on communion with a free,
personal, transcendent God. Moreover, communion with God always presupposes a
free act by God to commune with us. Freedom here means that God can refuse to
commune with us (to, as the Scriptures say, "hide his face"). Thus,
within traditional spirituality we are aware of God’s presence because God
has freely chosen to make his presence known to us. Truly spiritual persons,
saints, experience a constant, habitual awareness of God’s presence.
But how can a machine be aware of God’s presence? Recall that machines are
entirely defined by the constitution, dynamics, and interrelationships among
their physical parts. It follows that God cannot make his presence known to a
machine by acting upon it and thereby changing its state. Indeed, the moment
God acts upon a machine to change its state, it no longer properly is a
machine, for an aspect of the machine now transcends its physical
constituents. If we are machines, then, we cannot say that God reveals his
presence to us, and any awareness we have of God’s presence must be explained
in some other way. Which means that the awareness must be self–induced, must
come from us rather than from God. Machine spirituality is the spirituality
of self–realization, not the spirituality of an active God who freely gives
himself in self–revelation and thereby transforms the beings with which he is
in communion. I therefore maintain that modifying "machine" with
"spiritual" entails an impoverished view of spirituality.
The question remains whether humans are machines (with or without the
adjective "spiritual" tacked in front). To answer this question, we
need first to examine how materialism understands human agency and, more
generally, intelligent agency. Although the materialist literature that
attempts to account for human agency is vast, the materialist’s options are
in fact quite limited. The materialist world is not a mind–first world.
Intelligent agency is therefore in no sense prior to or independent of the
material world. Intelligent agency is a derivative mode of causation that
depends on underlying natural--and therefore unintelligent--causes. Human
agency in particular supervenes on underlying natural processes, which in
turn usually are identified with brain function.
How well have natural processes been able to account for intelligent agency?
Cognitive scientists have achieved nothing like a full reduction. The French
Enlightenment thinker Pierre Cabanis remarked: "Les nerfs--voilà tout
l’homme" (the nerves--that’s all there is to man). A full reduction of
intelligent agency to natural causes would give a complete account of human
behavior, intention, and emotion in terms of neural processes. Nothing like
this has been achieved. No doubt, neural processes are correlated with
behavior, intention, and emotion. But correlation is not causation.
Anger presumably is correlated with certain localized brain excitations. But
localized brain excitations hardly explain anger any better than overt
behaviors associated with anger, like shouting obscenities. Localized brain
excitations may be reliably correlated with anger, but what accounts for one
person interpreting a comment as an insult and experiencing anger, and
another person interpreting that same comment as a joke and experiencing
laughter? A full materialist account of mind needs to understand localized
brain excitations in terms of other localized brain excitations. Instead we
find localized brain excitations (representing, say, anger) having to be
explained in terms of semantic contents (representing, say, insults). But
this mixture of brain excitations and semantic contents hardly constitutes a
materialist account of mind or intelligent agency.
Lacking a full reduction of intelligent agency to natural processes,
cognitive scientists speak of intelligent agency as supervening on natural
processes. Supervenience here means a hierarchical relationship between
higher order processes (in this case intelligent agency) and lower order
processes (in this case natural processes). What supervenience implies is
that the relationship between the higher and lower order processes is a
one–way street, with the lower determining the higher. To say, for instance,
that intelligent agency supervenes on neurophysiology is to say that once all
the facts about neurophysiology are in place, all the facts about intelligent
agency are determined as well. Supervenience makes no pretense at reductive
analysis. It simply asserts that the lower level determines the higher
level--how it does it, we don’t know.
Certainly, if we knew that materialism were correct, then supervenience would
follow. But materialism itself is at issue. Neuroscience, for instance, is
nowhere near underwriting materialism, and that despite its strident
rhetoric. Hardcore neuroscientists, for instance, refer disparagingly to the
ordinary psychology of beliefs, desires, and emotions as "folk
psychology." The implication is that just as "folk medicine"
had to give way to "real medicine," so "folk psychology"
will have to give way to a revamped psychology grounded in neuroscience. In
place of the psychologist’s couch, where we talk out our beliefs, desires,
and emotions, tomorrow’s healers of the soul will ignore such outdated
categories and manipulate brain states directly.
At least so the story goes. Actual neuroscience research is by contrast a
much more modest affair and fails to support such vaulting ambitions. That
should hardly surprise us. The neurophysiology of our brains is incredibly
plastic and has proven notoriously difficult to correlate with intentional
states. Louis Pasteur, for instance, despite suffering a cerebral accident,
continued to enjoy a flourishing scientific career. When his brain was
examined after he died, it was discovered that half the brain had atrophied.
How does one explain a flourishing intellectual life despite a severely
damaged brain if mind and brain coincide?
Or consider a more striking example. The December 12, 1980 issue of Science
contained an article by Roger Lewin titled "Is Your Brain Really
Necessary?" In the article, Lewin reported a case study by John Lorber,
a British neurologist and professor at Sheffield University:
"There’s a young student at this university," says Lorber,
"who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first–class honors degree in
mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually
no brain." The student’s physician at the university noticed that the
youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber,
simply out of interest. "When we did a brain scan on him," Lorber
recalls, "we saw that instead of the normal 4.5–centimeter thickness of
brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just
a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled
mainly with cerebrospinal fluid."
Against such anomalies, Cabanis’ dictum, "the nerves--that’s all there
is to man," hardly inspires confidence. Yet as Thomas Kuhn has taught
us, a science that is progressing fast and furiously is not about to be
derailed by a few anomalies. Neuroscience is a case in point. For all the
obstacles it faces in trying to reduce intelligent agency to natural causes,
neuroscience persists in the Promethean determination to show that mind does
ultimately reduce to neurophysiology. Absent a prior commitment to
materialism, this determination will seem misguided. On the other hand, given
a prior commitment to materialism, this determination becomes readily
understandable.
But not obligatory. Most cognitive scientists do not rest their hopes with
neuroscience. Yes, if materialism is correct, then a reduction of intelligent
agency to neuro physiology is in principle possible. The sheer difficulty,
both experimental and theoretical, of even attempting this reduction,
however, leaves many cognitive scientists looking for a more manageable field
in which to invest their energies. As it turns out, the field of choice is
computer science, and especially its subdiscipline of artificial
intelligence. Unlike brains, computers are neat and precise. Also unlike
brains, computers and their programs can be copied and mass–produced.
Inasmuch as science thrives on replicability and control, computer science
offers tremendous practical advantages over neurological research.
Whereas the goal of neuroscience is to reduce intelligent agency to neurophysiology,
the goal of artificial intelligence is to reduce intelligent agency to
computation. The idea is to develop a computational system that equals or, if
we are to believe Ray Kurzweil, exceeds human intelligence. Since computers
operate deterministically, reducing intelligent agency to computation would
indeed constitute a materialistic reduction of intelligent agency. Cognitive
scientists would still have the task of showing in what sense brain function
is computational (that is, Marvin Minsky’s dictum "the mind is a
computer made of meat" would still need to be verified), but they would
be much closer than the neuroscientists are now.
So can computation explain intelligent agency? First off, let’s be clear: no
actual computer system has come anywhere near to simulating the full range of
capacities we associate with human intelligent agency. Yes, computers can do
certain narrowly circumscribed tasks exceedingly well (like play chess). But
require a computer to make a decision based on incomplete information and
calling for common sense, and the computer will be lost. Artificial
intelligence researchers call this the frame problem, the problem of getting
a computer to find the appropriate frame of reference for solving a problem.
Consider, for instance, the following story: A man enters a bar. The
bartender asks, "What can I do for you?" The man responds,
"I’d like a glass of water." The bartender pulls out a gun and
shouts, "Get out of here!" The man says "thank you" and
leaves. End of story. What is the appropriate frame of reference? No, this
isn’t a story by Franz Kafka. The key item of information needed to make
sense of this story is this: The man has the hiccups. By going to the bar to
get a drink of water, the man hoped to cure his hiccups. The bartender,
however, decided on a more radical cure. By terrifying the man with a gun,
the bartender cured the man’s hiccups immediately. Cured of his hiccups, the
man was grateful and left. Humans are able to understand the appropriate
frame of reference for such stories immediately. Computers, on the other
hand, haven’t a clue.
Ah, but just wait. Give an army of clever program–mers enough time, funding,
and computational power, and just see if they don’t solve the frame problem.
Materialists are forever issuing such promissory notes, claiming that a
conclusive confirmation of materialism is right around the corner--just give
our scientists a bit more time and money. John Polkinghorne refers to this
practice as "promissory materialism." But a promissory note need
only be taken seriously if there is good reason to think that it can be paid.
And the fact is that the artificial intelligence community has offered no
compelling reason for thinking that it will ever solve the frame problem.
In sum, the empirical evidence for a materialist reduction of intelligent
agency is wholly lacking. Indeed, the only thing materialist reductions of
intelligent agency have until recently had in their favor is Occam’s razor,
which has been used to argue that materialist accounts of mind are to be
preferred because they are simplest. Yet even Occam’s razor, that great
materialist mainstay, is proving small comfort these days. Specifically,
recent developments in the theory of intelligent design are providing
principled grounds against the reduction of intelligent agency to natural
causes (cf. my October 1998 article in First Things titled
"Science and Design").
To this point I have argued that attributing spirituality to machines entails
an impoverished view of spirituality, and that the empirical evidence doesn’t
confirm that machines can bring about minds. But if not machines, what then?
What else could the mind be except an effect of matter? Or, in the words of
Nancey Murphy, what else could the soul be except "a functional capacity
of a complex physical organism"? It’s not that scientists have traced
the workings of the brain and discovered how brain states induce mental
states. It’s rather that scientists have run out of places to look, and that
matter seems the only possible redoubt for mind.
The only alternative to a materialist conception of mind appears to be a
Cartesian dualism of spiritual substances that interact preternaturally with
material objects. We are left either with a sleek materialism that derives
mind from matter or a bloated dualism that makes mind a substance separate
from matter. Given this choice, almost no one these days opts for substance
dualism. Substance dualism offers two fundamentally different substances,
matter and spirit, with no coherent means of interaction. Hence the
popularity of reducing mind to matter.
But the choice between materialism and substance dualism is ill–posed. Both
are wedded to the same defective view of matter. Both view matter as primary
and law–governed. This renders materialism self–consistent since it allows
matter to be conceived mechanistically. On the other hand, it renders
substance dualism incoherent since undirected natural laws provide no opening
for the activity of spiritual substances. But the problem in either case is
that matter ends up taking precedence over concrete things. We do not have
knowledge of matter but of things. As Bishop Berkeley rightly taught, matter
is always an abstraction. Matter is what remains once we remove all the
features peculiar to a thing. Consequently, matter becomes stripped not only
of all empirical particularity but also of any substantial form that would
otherwise order it and render it intelligible.
The way out of the materialism–dualism dilemma is to refuse the artificial world
of matter governed by natural laws and return to the real world of things
governed by the principles appropriate to them. These principles may include
physical laws, but they need hardly be coextensive with them. Within this
richer world of both material and nonmaterial things, physical laws lose
their status as absolutes and become subject to principles that may be quite
metaphysical (principles like intelligent agency and divine providence).
Within this richer world, the obsession to seek mind in matter quickly
dissipates. According to materialism (and here I’m thinking specifically of
the scientific materialism that currently dominates Western thought), the
world is fundamentally an interacting system of mindless entities (be they
particles, strings, fields, or whatever). Accordingly, only atomistic,
reductionistic, and mechanistic science is available to study the mind. After
things are reduced to their mindless parts, equally mindless principles of
association known as natural laws allow them to assemble in ever greater
orders of complexity (even the widely touted "laws of
self–organization" fall in here). But the world is a much richer place
than materialism allows, and there is no reason to saddle ourselves with an
artificially sparse ontology.
The great mistake in trying to understand the mind–body problem is to suppose
that it is a scientific problem. It is not. It is a problem of ontology
(i.e., that branch of philosophy concerned with what exists). If all that
exists is matter governed by natural laws, then humans are machines. If all
that exists is matter governed by natural laws together with spiritual
substances that are incapable of coherently interacting with matter, then,
once again, humans are machines. But if matter is merely an abstraction
gotten by removing all the features peculiar to unified things, then there is
no reason to think that combining it with natural laws (or anything else for
that matter) will entail the recovery of things. And in that case, there is
no reason to think that humans are machines.
Owen Barfield described the material or the physical as a
"dashboard" that mediates things to us. But the mediation is
fundamentally incomplete, for the dashboard can only mirror certain aspects
of reality, and that imperfectly. Materialism deconstructs the things of this
world, and then tries to reconstitute them. Yet it can never put things back
together again. This is not for want of cleverness on the part of
materialists. It is rather that reality is too rich and the mauling it
receives from materialism too severe for even the cleverest materialist to
put things right. Materialism itself is the problem, not the brand of
materialism one happens to endorse.
Over a hundred years ago William James saw clearly that science would never
resolve the mind–body problem. In his Principles of Psychology he argued that
neither empirical evidence nor scientific reasoning would settle this
question. Instead, he foresaw an interminable debate between competing
philosophies, with no side gaining a clear advantage. The following passage
captures the state of cognitive science today:
We are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the
one hand, with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon
a priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts
need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephistopheles to Faust, he can
say to himself, "dazu hast du noch eine lange Frist" [for that
you’ve got a long wait], for from generation to generation the reasons
adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous, and the discussion more
refined.
William A. Dembski is a fellow of the Center for the Renewal of Science and
Culture at the Seattle–based Discovery Institute. His new book, Intelligent
Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, will be published in
November by InterVarsity.
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