I think that many of the most ardent proponents of science (although less often scientists themselves) imagine that science can provide us with a comprehensive explanation of everything. Descartes, for example, imagined that he had completed four of the five steps necessary to achieve a comprehensive mathesis universalis that would offer a solution to every possible problem. If he lived long enough and received some public support, he was convinced that he could complete the task. Matthais Riedl points to Comte’s similar optimism. As Tim Fuller points out, the methodological adventure of modern science in this way often seems to become a metaphysical certainty. Jürgen Gebhardt suggests that this tendency to overreach has an eschatological component that can be traced back to modern science’s origins in the Reformation period. Whether one agrees with him or not, it is hard to deny the extraordinary hopes we have for science. It is probably also important to keep in mind Susan Shell’s astute observation that modern science (in contrast to ancient science) is more concerned with getting things done than with merely understanding the natures of things and is thus intimately connected to technology both in its goals and in the tools that make possible its investigations. Thus, faith in the future of science is also a kind of faith in the future of scientific technology that will allow us to penetrate to levels of being that are otherwise completely inaccessible to human perception. Here those of us who grew up with the promise that fusion power would solve our energy needs may reasonably remain skeptical that science will be able to solve many of the technical problems that stand in its way. All that said, I do not want to diminish the importance of what science does do. Science and technology have given us a profound and unparalleled understanding of the mechanism of nature and of the workings of the human organism. However, while it can help us determine how something can be more or less easily accomplished, I don’t believe, that it can tell us what should be accomplished.

Moreover, while I do not deny that in principle science can understand the workings of the human in general and human consciousness in particular, I am not optimistic that such an understanding is anywhere on the horizon. Charles Wolverton (drawing on Patricia Churchland and perhaps Alex Rosenberg) is more optimistic. In his view, neuroscience eventually or perhaps even in the relatively near future will be able to give us a demonstrable account of how consciousness works. He suggests in his later remark a hundred years is a plausible goal. I’m skeptical about this for a number of reasons. As far as we know, the individual human brain is the most complex thing in the universe (with as many interconnecting parts, to take just one example, as there are stars in our galaxy and as many possible connections as there are stars in the universe}. Understanding the brain would be a huge challenge, even if we could see and manipulate all of its parts. However, for very good reasons, we have put very tight restrictions on the kind of research we can do on the human brain. We are thus forced to conduct most of our research on non-human brains, which may or may not work in the same manner as our brains, especially when it comes to consciousness. To be more specific, most brain scientists would agree that consciousness is a phenomenon of the (neo)cortex, but, as a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago recently pointed out, there has been a rather appalling lack of research to characterize the properties of intracortical synapses—in fact a total of one paper has been written on this topic and it appeared in 1948. This is not promising. Moreover, it is not clear what sorts of tools we can use to examine cortical connections. There has been great hope for fMRI studies but their significance has recently been called into question. At best they can only tell us what is happening in regions of 10-100,000 neurons, when we know from animal studies that in order to really understand the wiring of the brain we have to know what is going on with each neuron. While I agree with David Smith, that the mechanisms of consciousness may be best explained by natural science, in view of the difficulties I have pointed to (and many I did not) it seems unlikely to me that science will understand consciousness and thus the meaning of the human any time soon.

I certainly do not mean, however, to suggest that the humanist disciplines are particularly better at understanding consciousness. As Leigh Van Valen points out, concepts are often quite fuzzy and this is certainly true of the notion of consciousness. I agree entirely in this respect with the criticism leveled by Charles Wolverton that I do not have a clear and crisp notion of consciousness. I am convinced that such clarity at the moment is not warranted by anything that we know. But just because we cannot know something with crystal clarity does not mean that we should not investigate it. I do hope, however, that I did not give the impression that I believe consciousness to be a transparent phenomenon. Here I agree with Martin Roth. In fact, my intent was to suggest that we have a very poor understanding of how it works and how it is connected to the non-conscious. I do think though that humanistic practices, as Leigh Van Valen points out, reveal or at least can reveal certain aspects of our experience that are not revealed by science, and that as a result it would be a mistake to deny their importance to our lives. My argument in this sense is not opposed to science, but opposed to the elimination of all other forms of knowing than science. I would hope in a forum such as this one that we could take the opportunity to explore the complementarities of science and the humanities on many issues rather than merely pointing out the defects of each other’s approaches. Here I heartily endorse Leigh Van Valen’s concluding observation, although I recognize that I am all too often worthy of his censure.

I believe that a greater openness to disciplinary approaches is particularly important because I am convinced that without some understanding of human purposiveness whether naturally given (such as health) or established purely by human designation (e.g., the Nobel Prize) and thus some notion of the good (e.g., that it is better to be healthy than sick, or that it is better to win a Nobel Prize rather than toil away in obscurity), we could not make choices that extended beyond fulfilling our momentary desires. This is particularly true when we are concerned with public goals and purposes (such as those of science itself) that extend to and involve millions of individuals whose actions have to be ordered and coordinated. Thomas Pfau’s discussion of the inevitable hermeneutic element in these activities seems to me to be right on the mark. I think that this is an area where humanistic investigation is particularly valuable. I admit, as Catherine Zuckert rightly points out, that I do not sufficiently explain how the different forms of knowledge would contribute to such an investigation. This would be an interesting topic for further discussion and one that would have to account for the different domains of the imaginary that Yaron Ezrahi points to, the connection to the objects of ordinary experience that Stanley Rosen rightly calls to our attention, and the coordination of the micro and macro levels that Tracy Strong urges us to consider.

Finally, several respondents, drawing on Patricia Churchland as well as a great deal of solid anthropological research, suggest that we don’t need to worry about the kind of nihilism that Rosenberg defends because evolution has selected in our case for cooperation and self-sacrifice or simply niceness. This is a point that seems to me to underlie much of the disagreement among the remarks although it is seldom explicit. When we study primates it is fairly clear that they do not for the most part kill other members of their troop, although, as Robert Sapolsky has pointed out, this is not always the case and it is certainly true that they kill members of other primate troops. Moreover, this may be a more salient problem for humans because the awareness of our own mortality renders us particularly vulnerable to threats to our existence. Violence thus may be more common among humans than other primates because it is more effective. But perhaps of greater importance, we do not live in small, relatively isolated troops but in civilizations (and increasingly in a global community) that are vast beyond comparison to our primate beginnings. Our concern with the well being of all other human beings in our current circumstances seems to be much diminished by their physical and emotional distance from us. We thus are perhaps much more willing to kill, torture, and enslave them in ways that would be unthinkable within a family group. The niceness that evolution has built into us is almost certainly unable to deal with large-scale conflicts of the sort we face. Nihilism under these circumstances is certainly a greater concern than it would be in a troop of primates who were all affectively related to one another. Deepening this problem further are obviously the technologies of destruction, which, as Susan Shell points out, are produced by the application of modern scientific methods.

Much more could be said on the many other interesting topics raised by the responses, but this must suffice for now. My thanks to everyone. I learned a great deal.

I too think we are largely in agreement. So, just some clarifications. First, from your first comment:

“it seems to me possible to retain the reality of brain-states without being reductionist. At which point, of course, one has made a lot of progress in understanding brain-states but none in understanding the painting.”

Rereading this, I think I better understand it and see it as related to my last comment in response to Prof Roth. I tend to look at this from the “different vocabulary” perspective noted therein. If one is doing neurophysiology, reductionism to the “micro” seems inevitable, which necessitates a certain vocabulary; if doing psychology, perhaps the vocabulary of brain-states is applicable; if doing art appreciation, a quite different vocabulary is appropriate. Which was the point of the “fantasy” in my response to Prof Gillespie’s essay: I’m about as “disenchanted” in Prof Rosenberg’s sense as one can get and additionally am interested in some “technical” aspects of art, but in hundreds of visits to art museums and galleries, I’m pretty confident that I never once thought “Oh, this is nothing ‘but’ bosons and fermions”.

Re causality, here we perhaps have to agree to disagree. Although I consider the free-will vs determinism distinction (I’m assuming this is the essence of your causality concerns) has minimal practical import at the human level (eg, perhaps some rethinking of legal responsibility) and warrants much less attention than it gets, I’m pretty much a strict determinist at all levels. As such, I can dispassionately imagine us as organisms that respond to stimuli by autonomously changing biological state and possibly producing an observable response. A possible consequence of this view is that rather than being an a priori state of the organism that combines with inputs to produce a “decision” as to how to respond to an input, consciousness may instead be an a posteriori report of some aspects of an autonomous response. This would of course be consistent with Libet’s (and apparently others’) observations (assuming, as usual not necessarily correctly, that I understand them).

By “brain reconfiguration” I mean things like changes in action potentials in neurons and the growth of new terminals on axons. A sentence which, I should note, I can write only because of having recently read Eric Kandel’s book “In Search of Memory”, a very accessible introduction which I recommend to anyone who – like me – is interested in that subject but knows almost nothing about biochemistry, brain physiology, etc.

“while we are still materialist, what exactly have we eliminated”

The Ramberg essay to which I alluded earlier addresses this issue (at least obliquely), specifically the ontological status of “the mental” (which presumably subsumes brain states). I’m still fuzzy about the full scope of the conclusion reached in the essay, but I think at the least it includes the contention that brain states are OK to “talk about” in an appropriate vocabulary and that “facts” stated in that vocabulary should not be rank ordered as in some sense (ontological or other) “inferior” to the underlying “facts” stated in the vocabulary of physics. My guess is that Prof Rorty’s final opinion would have been that the ontological status of mental events, and consequently eliminative materialism, are irrelevant.

The parenthetical “in the geometric sense” was intended to indicate that I wasn’t using “perspective” in the philosophical (relativist) sense but in the physical sense: our eyes can’t be at the same point in space and in any event have different retinal structural details, so the light from the painting will excite the rods and cones differently and result in different sensory neuronal behavior (recall that I labeled this difference the “most trivial”). But unquestionably nontrivial is our long term memory that includes much of our unique personal histories and is neurologically distinct because of the physical changes involved in memory. Hence, in my view, for each viewer the sensory inputs due to a painting, the processing of those inputs, and the deterministic response will be unique for each person. And if one understands those viewers to be in every way physically unique and to have unique reactions to stimuli, I see no inconsistency being “disenchanted” and a humanist.

Sorry for the length but I have no other outlet for my musings, so the temptation is irresistible.

Charles

many thanks for your thoughtful comments, which point out to me where I should have been clearer.

In sequence:
“I am in agreement with Gillespie in rejecting the claim that human activity is “but the result of electrochemical processes playing out across the structure of our brains.”

I was trying to question the notion that they were the RESULT, which seems to me to imply a standard sense of causality. I am aware of the studies that show that changes in brain states precede the experience of intentionality but i do not conclude from that that there is a causal relation in the usual way we think of cause. (Inevitably this is going to involve us in a rethinking of what we mean by causality.)

“I suspect any approach will have trouble, but why EM more than others”

Here the question depends on how one understands “brain reconfiguration.” I do think that this takes place (and there is some evidence that it does) but then it must be at some level constantly going on — and while we are still materialist, what exactly have we eliminated?

“Say we both look at Van Gogh’s painting: shall we say that we see the same thing neuro-chemically speaking. On a reductionist view this would imply that our brain-states are identical”

After the colon was intended to be a question. We are clearly looking at the SAME painting (I do not think that one can legitimately add “different for me” here or anywhere — but there is an argument to be had here — so I resist that ‘different perspectives argument’ as a useful thing to say). Even accepting the differences you go on to enumerate (how do we know these differences? what differences are they?) we still need to account for a) that it is the same painting and b) we understand it differently and c) we can change our minds about it (what then is the “it”?). If I change my mind, my brain has apparently reconfigured itself — pretty motile the brain must be (and i think that it is) Here the most interesting way to approach this would be to see if PET scans showed anything different when a subject was engaged in (Kantian terms) determinative judgment as opposed to reflective judgment (See Third Critique).

Thanks again for the comments and clarification — I do not think that we are that far away (see the section on eternal return in my first book on Nietzsche for a sense of why this is like Nietzsche (whom Dennett after all uses as an epigraph…)(my text was written well before I knew anything about these particular matters).

You presumably can imagine how pleased I was to read your comment.

Your allusion to “privileged status” motivated me to resurrect a comment composed earlier but unposted. Based on your comment, I would guess that the cited material will not be new to you, but others might find it useful:
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Part of Bjorn Ramberg’s essay in “Rorty and His Critics” appears to be directly on point for the present discussion. An attempt to summarize the relevant parts in a comment for this forum revealed my continuing confusion on some of its subtle points. But FWIW, my take on the bottom line is that from the perspective of some who have taken “the linguistic turn” (eg, Davidson, Rorty, and Ramberg), rather than worrying about differences in perspective among the relevant disciplines on “the human condition” – differences framed in terms of ontological status, underdetermination/indeterminacy, nomological relationships, reducibility, etc. – we could more profitably view the disciplines pragmatically as employing different vocabularies as tools useful in pursuing different human objectives. And by thereby avoiding attempts to “rank-order’ the “truths” (ie, facts) discovered by the disciplines, Rorty’s goal of “putting physics and poetry on equal footing” would be advanced, perhaps resulting in peace between the humanities and the sciences, a peace I infer from the comments is not currently at hand.
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“who really believes in this kind of foundationalism any more?”

Having little or no exposure to living, breathing philosophers (other than via a couple of blogs), I have no idea what goes on in the profession, but I found this (rhetorical) question surprising. Is the implied answer really true?

The first is that, as Charles Wolverton points out, it’s not the actual scientists who are declaring the death of purpose, consciousness, value, and meaning. In fact, some of the most prominent scientists studying consciousness (Christof Koch and Francis Crick, to name two) take quite seriously that there are features of conscious experience that will not easily give way to explanatory reduction (which is not necessarily the same thing as elimination, by the way, or type-type identity theory). Those who are most famously associated with deflationary and/or eliminativist accounts of consciousness are philosophers, e.g. Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland (Rosenberg is a philosopher, too, remember!).

Furthermore, the “scientism” being attacked here appears to be a conception of science that basically died in the 1950s, and both Dennett and Churchland were deeply influenced by some of the most ardent critics of positivism, e.g., Sellars and Kuhn.

What Dennett and Churchland share is an antipathy towards Cartesianism, by which I mean the assumption that the reality of our mental lives is introspectively transparent. In this respect, Dennett and Churchland side with, e.g., Rorty (and Hegel!), in denying immediacy. But now, as far as I can tell, most of the commentators here are deeply sympathetic to all of this. So what’s going on?

That’s the second irony. No one here is defending consciousness in the way that, say, Thomas Nagel would. No one wants to embrace Cartesian epistemology about self-knowledge. And yet–and yet–there is something strangely Cartesian about the attacks on science here. Descartes could see the implications of the new sciences for what humans beings are, and he made it his job to insulate the self, the mind, the free and rational person, from the emerging mechanical philosophy. So we get substance dualism. Since substance dualism is no longer deemed respectable among the sophisticated, it gets replaced with other dualisms, among them the dualism of nature vs. culture (read: science vs. humanities). An inevitable by-product of this, of course, is that we look for the “proper limits” on this or that, or we try to subordinate one to the other (science is “exposed.” By…whom? Philosophers? Literary critics?).

I would have thought that the “lesson” of thinkers like Nietzsche was that these Archimedean points are not there, and thus the very arguments which generate this conclusion cannot claim this privilege. To be sure, this does expose the claims that some philosophers and scientists have made in the name of science, but who really believes in this kind of foundationalism any more? Or, more to the point, what reason is there for thinking that those who look to be challenging purpose, meaning, value, consciousness, etc., assume such a foundationalism?

Which brings me to a final point. Both the sciences and the humanities have to explain themselves from within, but not in the sense of ‘within the humanities’ and ‘within the sciences,’ but rather within what Quine called ‘the entire web of belief.’ Alterations within the web are possible, but they cannot be made by isolating some portion of those beliefs and declaring them immune from revision, for this would presuppose the very foundationalism that can no longer be sustained. But for those who are sympathetic to this Quinean perspective, the consequence is that there can be no “critique” of this or that activity that can claim a privileged status. It is no longer a viable option to challenge the claims of science at some sort of “meta” level–the challenges have to be first-order, as it were.

When addressing the relationship between science and a human being, it is important to make clear what level of organizational complexity (cf Tracy Strong’s macro/micro distinction) is being addressed. At lower levels of organizational complexity, the human organism obviously is viewed by science as exhibiting “merely” natural phenomena. But describing that as “treat[ing] human beings” – a phrase appropriate to higher levels of organization – seems a serious abuse of language. This could be written off as the careless editing typical of blog comments were it not for introduction of the Kantian means-ends distinction and explicit reference to how human beings should be “treated”. This suggests a moral axis, and it is clear who is assumed to sit where on it. (This is not an effective way of enlisting “honest scientists” to a cause.)

An error I see running through the consistently anti-scientism essay and comments is the implicit assumption that a Rosenberg-style science-induced nihilism inevitably has some dangerously deleterious effect on one’s attitude towards other human beings – an assumption belied by numerous public humanists, who I feel confident are nihilists of that stripe, and by humanist friends who I know are. Consistent with that assumption is the assertion “neuroscience proclaims an image of man that is beyond freedom and personal responsibility”, a sweeping indictment. Since “freedom” and “personal responsibility” are not elaborated and neither argument nor evidence is offered, a direct response is precluded. However, one can make the general observation that attributing to “neuroscience” a consensus view on any issue appropriate to higher levels of organization – eg, an “image of man” – seems rather premature. As I recall, a guest on Charlie Roses’s “brain series” speculated that some critical neurological issue might be resolved “in a hundred years” – hardly grounds for proclaiming an imminent threat from a foe with a unified view of “man”.

Note: Brain scientist Eccles was – according to wikipedia – a “devout theist” and – according to his colleague Eric Kandel – a lifelong dualist. Some might find that more of a paradox than that he expressed insight into the “essential uniqueness of man”.