The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Stubbornness of Neuroscientists
A few weeks ago I wrote two articles about the relationship between philosophy and psychology/psychoanalysis, and by implication science, which is always based on the philosophical understanding of the scientists involved. In the second one I discussed the idea of hidden, therefore unconscious, factors in philosophy, thus how some philosophers and scientists might be led astray by psychological factors of which they are unaware. In the words of philosopher Albert North Whitehead: “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them”¹.
In that context I am specifically interested in the fact that some scientists, especially neuroscientists, unquestioningly assume the truth of philosophical materialism, even when this leads them down a blind alley. Here I’ll give two such examples.
In the earlier article I mentioned the neuroscientist David Eagleman, who presented a series for the BBC in 2016 called The Brain, during which he made various statements asserting his unquestioned assumption that the brain generates consciousness and our sense of self. He said that he had spent 20 years trying to solve the problem of how this happens, without it would seem coming any closer to a solution.
Nothing seems to have changed for him since that series of programmes. He was interviewed earlier this year for New Scientist magazine. The title of the article was ‘How our brains could create whole new senses’². I’ve also just noticed that he was interviewed by the Observer newspaper in June³. When questioned about the nature of consciousness, and whether we are any closer to understanding it and how it’s created, he responded: “as far as understanding why it happens, I don’t know that we’re much closer than we’ve ever been. It’s different from other scientific conundrums in that what we’re asking is, how do you take physical pieces and parts and translate that into private, subjective experience… And so not only do we not have a theory, but we don’t really know what such a theory would look like that would explain our experience in physical or mathematical terms”.
He is therefore openly admitting that, despite all the effort and money invested in trying to tackle this question, absolutely no progress has been made. Yet he remains unwilling to even contemplate the possibility that the brain does not generate consciousness, so wedded is he to a materialist explanation.
Last week, also in the Observer, another famous neuroscientist was interviewed, Anil Seth⁴. Like Eagleman, he has studied, written about and described the brain for over 20 years. He has also set up a multidisciplinary team of mathematicians, psychologists, computer scientists, and cognitive neuroscientists. I’ve no idea how much all that has cost, but I imagine that it’s a substantial sum of money invested in the attempt to find “a scientific explanation for how the brain conjures consciousness”, which is still described as “the central mystery of life”. What a terrible waste of time and money that would have been, if the brain does not in fact conjure up consciousness!
Like Eagleman, Seth acknowledges that little progress has been made: “Even with advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques, large parts of that fundamental relationship remain stubbornly mysterious”. Despite this, alternative explanations seem too ridiculous for him to even contemplate, and he remains resolutely committed to the scientific/ materialist approach. When asked “presumably, the mind-body problem is never going to be entirely resolved?”, he replied: “No, but I’d like to make progress. It’s the boring answer of continuing to do rigorous science, rather than proposing some eureka solution to ‘the hard problem’ ”.
When asked whether his thoughts had ever taken any spiritual swerve, his reply included: “I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird”, but that he wanted “to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird”. “My approach is that we risk not understanding the central mystery of life by lurching to one or other form of magical thinking. While science might be a little bit slower, there is much to be done in a straightforward materialist understanding of how the brain relates to conscious experience”.
Much to be done indeed, and my belief is that it would take until the end of time to figure out how the brain generates consciousness, because it doesn’t. Perhaps Seth should begin by not considering alternative explanations ‘magical’.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. Science and the Modern World, Free Press, 1967
2. Magazine issue 3334 , published 15 May 2021
3. ‘The working of the brain resembles drug dealers in Albuquerque’ | Neuroscience | The Guardian
4. ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’ | Consciousness | The Guardian
