I think I am thinking
but am “I” superfluous?
Is my brain the actual thinker
– objectively speaking?
Then is “my” brain the real me
– or am I deluding myself?
Yet, isn’t it the thought that counts,
and without a subjective aura
there would be no question to ask
and no answer to find
by looking somewhere else
in ways the brain alone cannot?
Mike Laidler
Part 1
Realist: ‘I don’t see a place for God in the universe. There is no supernatural meaning to life, no divine purpose to existence, no celestial antidote to the finality of death, no sublime answer to those heart-felt ‘why’ questions – and we are quite capable of deciding matters of right and wrong for ourselves.’
Phenomenalist: ‘How do you know you are right?’
R: It’s obvious. Show me otherwise.
P: Do you regard yourself as a product of nature?
R: Of course, and that’s why I can see things for what they are.
P: Then what makes you begin to consider the status of meaning, purpose and the supernatural in the first place?
R: I’m simply responding to what others claim.
P: But wouldn’t you agree that all manner of events take place within nature?
R: What’s your point?
P: Well, things change and either nature represents everything through a plurality of natures or because it hosts a supranatural reality that goes beyond the parameters of the purely mechanistic. Either way, the idea of a universe that remains devoid of thoughts and intentions doesn’t do justice to the facts.
R: That doesn’t prove there is a meaning to existence.
P: Nevertheless, the presence of a mindful, meaningful overview represents something of a larger reality than that portrayed by the blind workings of nature in its biological forms.
R: Aren’t you are jumping the gun by claiming that this proves there is a meaning to life itself?
P: Perhaps it is you who are failing to address the facts, because you want to say that the reality can be explained in terms of its ‘building blocks’.
R: Well it can.
P: Only by redefining the facts to suit.
R: It is you who are doing that, by implying that mental life is something more than the physical properties of the brain.
P: Yet, without a sentient dimension to reality the physical functions of the brain would not be observable.
R: But there is nothing to see except the workings of the brain.
P: However, you wouldn’t expect the brain to display anything else.
R: That’s because there is nothing else.
P: Only at the level of brain processes.
R: Don’t be ridiculous. You are contradicting the accepted findings of science.
P: It was once thought that the brain changes colour when we perceive different colours, but now we know that brain processes differ from the properties of light in the outside world. Likewise thoughts differ in kind from the biological properties of the brain. The evidence suggests that effects, like perceptions, are not simple copies of their causes, otherwise nothing would change.
R: But causality is in control.
P: Although we can’t be sure what it amounts to.
R: What do you mean?
P: Causality is a transitional process – causes change, effects redefine causes and the tide of change raises questions about how to address the evidence – how do we find a basis in fact, and is it right to start by assuming beforehand what must constitute an acceptable candidate? In short, what we find is that the cause doesn’t tell us everything. We can’t even be sure about what nature is and whether we can explain it as a thing that explains other things – the cause of all causes.
R: So what are you saying?
Mike Laidler
To be continued…
We may feel that we can get to know a thing better by explaining it in terms of something else, indeed science depends upon this philosophy, but there is also a sense in which it doesn’t make sense – and the best example is ourselves.
Consider the perceived difference between our thoughts and the brain. First we must recognise a difference in order to talk about a cause, otherwise there is nothing to talk about. Then we suppose that the cause must explain things – especially if there is nothing else to see. Yet something else remains evident in the change, now perceived as an effect. However, saying that the cause has changed to create that difference leaves the fact of the change unexplained and renders the effect redundant. Typically, we diminish the reality of the difference in order to explain it by attributing the emergent properties of the effect to the cause – as if ‘causality shows us’ that change doesn’t really occasion a shift in reality. Thereby we conclude that new events, such as thought or consciousness, are really superficialities that cannot amount to changes in the nature of nature. In other words, we concede, for the sake of explanation, that change is not all it seems – as if a talking nature is really not so different in kind from one that never did, now seen as the cause.
Moreover, the mind and the body amount to differences in reality which we can’t explain by supposing that reality must be a singular ‘thing’. Indeed we are no more able to explain reality in terms of ‘things real’ than we can explain the existence of existence. In fact, we can’t pin the ‘it’ down. And perhaps reality is a fact we cannot define because it can also be seen to define us – in more ways than one. So when people say that mind and body are one and the same thing, they are calling them the same in the name of an incomplete explanation – as if causality is a thing in existence that explains the origin of things in existence and automatically clears-up the problem of change. Also, we are looking at ‘the reality’ retrospectively by leaving out of the analysis the significance of the looking – as if the change to observation can be seen as a subsidiary effect. But we have yet to explain the change to perception, together with the evidence, of itself, of the effect that occupies an additional reality to the cause – a difference that cannot be accounted for by saying that there is no real change, as if the fact of change is subsidiary to the cause instead of the other way round.
Mike Laidler
Does the brain live in a world of ideas or does the world of ideas live in the brain? Does it make sense to say that ideas are really brain processes making sense of themselves?
Can we begin to explain the way things are by saying that ideas belong to the brain in the same way that we belong to nature – to an unthinking nature? In other words, are the physical processes doing everything – so thought is not as it appears, because thinking is really a physical process? Does the brain show us what to see – so we are not as we seem to ourselves – so we are able see the reality more ‘clearly and distinctly’ in terms of the physical process that ‘make us real’?
Is this how to come to terms with the nature of thought and ‘our’ thoughts about its reality? Do we equate thought with the nature of the brain because we can think of nothing better, thereby confirming the idea that the brain doesn’t allow us to do anything else? Is there but one reality, one nature? Are we merely entertaining fantasies and illusions by thinking otherwise? What does it mean to say that ‘we entertain thoughts’? Is it true that our ideas cannot exist in a ‘world of their own’, or stand as evidence for an ethereal mind, because they are really something else, belonging to the sole reality of brain function? And how do we come to see this as a deeper truth?
Does the wider truth belong to a deeper truth? Does the idea of the ‘I’ doing the seeing belong to the eye doing the seeing? Or is the brain really doing ‘our’ seeing as the ‘eye’ behind every perceptible idea? How are we to countenance a further reality, beyond the seeming, by presuming to see that things prove to be more or less real when we discover that they are or are not as they seem? Where is the reality of presumption in nature, or indeed in the brain? And who is asking – who is the entity wanting to know? Indeed, how did the idea of reality escape from its ‘rightful’ place in nature – in a reality apart from ideas?
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 