Since this series aims to confront dualism in its primary form as a mind/matter split, we should devote some time to mental matters. What are the central arguments for mind—or associated consciousness—as a phenomenon unto its own, not “reducible” to mind-numbingly complex material interactions (just reducible to a label of “mind,” apparently; simpler!). What is it, in fact, that we do with our brains, and how much of it depends on matter (i.e., physiology)?

Subjectivity: What it’s Like

At its core, belief in mind rests on the truth that one individual can’t experience another’s “inner” experiences. Language helps tremendously in providing a foggy window into others’ experiences. And while clumsy, language does at least help to confirm predominantly-similar sensations among humans. Yet even via language, how can we really know what another’s pain feels like? How can we know that seeing blue feels the same to them as it does to us? We can’t, really. And since individual life-experiences create differing associations within each of us, the full impact of seeing (or imagining) the color blue is surely a bit different from individual to individual. To my dad, it meant the Kentucky Wildcats, for instance.

Because our form of language is not shared among other species, we have far less insight into the quality of their experiences. It is understandable, then, that a default position could emerge that only chatterbox humans possess minds. Thankfully, only the hard-core supremacists still hold firm to the idea that only humans have “mindful” experiences, which is becoming less culturally tolerated. But we still have a long way (back) to go. It’s worth noting that lack of explicit communication did not stop animists from assuming that every animal, plant, river, mountain, and rock has experiences (that it is “like” something to be a rock, for instance).

Anyway, the essence of “mind” is that individuals hold a subjective, private sense of what it’s like to be them, and to feel all that they do. We do not have the means to measure, quantify, or compare any but the broadest similarities in experience. Functional MRI scans can reveal patterns of remarkable similarity in how different brains react to the same stimuli, but that’s not the same as being able to compare how something feels to a person. Scientific methods will likely never be able to cross this bridge of proving any two experiences to be the same.

The “what it’s like” phrase shows up constantly in philosophical discussions of mind or consciousness—sometimes under the fancier term of qualia. It’s what the whole argument for mind seems to boil down to: that unique “inner” experiences accompany various “outer” conditions, and these experiences are fundamentally intangible and incomparable. Asserted to be irreducible (out of incapacity and impatience, I would suggest), it’s where the buck often stops. “I feel it, therefore it is“—seems to be what it comes to… amid lots of discussion about the sensation of color!

As an aside that this series will address in more detail in the ninth installment, the word “irreducible” implies that something has already been reduced to the simplest form it can possibly take, brooking no further attempt to unpack or expand complexity. Ironically “reductionist” materialism explodes something like “mind” as a hyper-complex, multi-layer, hopelessly intricate collection of interacting phenomena beyond our capability to track, whose boundaries elude definition, and whose roots stretch back to deep time. Such practice hardly sounds like a “reduction” of any sort, whereas slapping on a label of “mind” and balking at attempts to break it up is, well…awfully reductionist. To an idealist or dualist, the suggestion that every experience is “made of atoms, somehow” is rejected on the grounds that it doesn’t seem remotely capable of accounting for how we perceive the experience—at least not obviously so (a key hangup). Meanwhile, it’s unclear to me whether individual experience is any more profound than the trivial fact that events are necessarily localized in space and time: no electron in the universe can have the exact same experience as another, for instance.

Other than that last caveat, I’ll save for later challenges to the convincing perception of mind—returning the the question of “what it’s like” in the eighth installment. For now, I just wanted to represent the standard take that mind/consciousness arguments rest heavily on this elusive concept of qualia: perhaps not the firmest of foundations.

Mental Models

Why do we—or any animal—possess brains? They demand a lot of energy, so must provide some net benefit or they would not have been tolerated and expanded by evolution. Well, it is probably obvious that brains are tools by which organisms make sense of the world to aid in finding food, avoiding danger, assessing novel situations, and—for social animals like us—navigating complex interpersonal relationships. Note that brains are not the only way to achieve many of these goals, and in fact are not employed by most successful living beings. Even amoebas (in slime molds) navigate a complex political decision when it’s time to make spores: some assume structural roles and thus forgo the chance to propagate their DNA.

A central feature of brains is: that’s where signals from the world are delivered. Sensors for touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell, balance, heat—and others that humans do not enjoy—are routed into brains (for the minority of organisms possessing them). No matter the hemisphere, the brain’s chief job is to synthesize a representation of reality from these inputs that has enough fidelity to guide responses that are—on average—appropriate and beneficial: fast enough to matter and flexible enough to deal with surprises. More complex brains often sport additional layers like the prefrontal cortex to provide an extra oversight function: monitoring and then encouraging or inhibiting reactions across the brain: a form of hard-wired self-awareness, or meta-cognition.

But the main take-away is that brains create mental models that try to capture reality. They never can get the full, actual reality, and are not even required or constrained to be correct. Nonetheless, they are generally good enough to provide adaptive advantage, or else they would not have developed under evolution as they did.

Optical (and other) illusions are a good way to illustrate that our mental perceptions are not correct, yet still utterly convincing. Dreams are another place where it becomes clear that our brains are perfectly capable of producing convincing non-realities.

Our mental models must necessarily limit the contextual breadth of consideration: they only have to be good enough to apply to the most relevant context and be right-enough often-enough to serve us well. An example that I will return to in the next post: thousands of years ago most people lived their entire lives without going very far from their place of birth. They sampled a tiny fraction of Earth’s surface. In this limited context, a Flat Earth model was perfectly valid and useful. Only when becoming connected to more distant places could one possibly learn, through keen attention to detail, that the sun is directly overhead in some places while it is not in others. Even then, it is easy to account for the phenomenon by a sun that isn’t terribly high in the sky, so that shadows of vertical poles might differ on the same day in different locations. Once, however, the scope expands to a global scale and it becomes clear that part of Earth is dark while another part is in daylight, the mental model of a flat Earth no longer matches the broadened context.

Hardware Dependencies

As we encounter the world, we place primary value on our direct experience, limited as we are by the senses we possess. Jakob von Uexküll used the term “umwelt” to describe the unique and diverse windows to the world various beings possess—recently explored in Ed Yong’s An Immense World. It is not surprising, therefore, that our mental models of the world would be impacted and limited by our particular portfolio of sensory input and cognitive processing capability. Now, communication and technology have augmented what we as individuals can directly and personally sense, so that any of us may benefit from experiments we personally have never performed, and learn about tiny particles we cannot perceive using our own direct senses, like atoms and their constituents. That said, our sense of the world is still strongly influenced by hardware constraints—in both corporeal and technology domains.

Note that in using the term “hardware,” I am not lining up to compare humans to computers running “software” (another dualist framing, after all). Rather, it’s a convenient term to denote the material or physiological basis of humans.

Because of a mostly-shared physiology between humans, it’s a really good bet that the contrasting experiences of a pinprick to the finger versus stepping into a hot tub share a rather similar contrast from one person to the next, or even across species to some extent. As a counter-example, colorblind people experience different visual sensations from most of the population, but this again traces to hardware differences rather than some habit of “mind.” Similar hardware produces similar experience. We’re not utterly clueless as to how things feel to others: it’s not particularly random—sharing an inherited material/structural basis as it does. Similarities—often taken for granted—vastly outnumber subtle differences, and the biggest differences likely originate from differences in physiology and/or life history. Subjectivity is, therefore, highly constrained (defined; constructed) by material reality. The pain of a stubbed toe for one person almost certainly doesn’t taste like chocolate to another, or we’d know… and life would be simultaneously far more entertaining and delicious… and bruising.

Our mentally-reconstructed reality, whatever the inputs, is necessarily limited by the architecture and capacity of our cranial and sensory hardware. Some people are allergic to the word “limited,” but rejection of limits, too, is an aspect of filtered reality: part of a mental model or even acculturated ideology. We can hope that our models are faithful representations of the salient features of reality, but such fidelity is not guaranteed.

Self-Limiting Models

Faith in our mental models can be unreasonably strong, however. A crazy person will seldom acknowledge that they are crazy if their mental model tells them they are not, while other “bad-actors” try to convince them that they are. How can we expect anyone to reject what their own brains—in no way obligated to truth—tell them? It’s our only conduit: our only constructed sense of reality. We have no choice in the matter. Thus, mental models become mistaken for core truths, even when overtly wrong.

It is perfectly understandable that the map becomes the territory in our heads, because our heads can only ever hold and access a map—never the actual territory. We then project our own limitations onto reality, forgetting the direction of flow. It is important to recognize that our mental models do not define what’s real (though I suppose an idealist says that’s exactly how it works). To the extent possible, we’re better off letting the universe itself dictate what is real, adding minimal cognitive embellishment—because that’s where things tend to go wrong.

While on the topic of mental models, one thing I’ve been slow to learn is that when presenting an unfamiliar or unpopular perspective, elements that I fail to articulate invite others to fill the void with mental models based on assumptions I do not share. It is then assumed that I am saying something I am not (have not; would not), which derails the process. Example: I might say “Modernity will fail.” Without explicitly painting the process as far from monolithic and transpiring over generations, the instant assumption is the Hollywood version, and then I’m perceived as being off my rocker for having “suggested” such a spectacle—even if said spectacle is 100% fabricated by the other. I will try to be careful in this series to anticipate and address likely misinterpretations, which is part of why I’m taking it so slowly and why I led with an exaltation for the universe and a paean to animism. All the same, I can’t anticipate all misinterpretations, and I certainly can’t address them all at once—leaving cracks that might get filled with erroneous assumption and solidified before I get to them (if I even do).

The next post will examine other major shifts in worldviews and how those experiences might guide us in consideration of ditching dualism.

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