of) the brain.
The task of mind-defenders is to fend off the regimentists and reductionists who offer the dictum that we can locate all this flotsam of thinking, willing, feeling, creating, wanting, loving, hating, despairing—time past and time future—within the brain-scans etc., offered by neurologists in the laboratories.
Such an empirical fix can be seen as a laudable ambition, but its realization would create a brave new world that I, for one, would not want to live in. Theoretical advances can diminish as well as enhance the “quality of life”—in the sense that the “explained” subject is often smaller —definitionally impoverished—than the earlier one to be explained. In this case, the subject is conscious life. So (in the non-linear way of mind-ists) I look at the conflict from the vantage of a different place.
The study of physics (as I limitedly understand it) has gone far beyond location-in-place in its search for reality. Quarks, in experimental situations, appear in time-spans that occur only in our recordings— the accelerators, i.e., that produce ever-smaller, more basic variants of known particles, are increasingly subject to (or independent of) observational parsimony. One question is: How miniscule can these variants be before it can only be said that they are fictionally observed—although they perhaps are not really fictional—for they really exist as they are used—sometimes satisfying theorems, sometimes inspiring art—even when not observable.
Then we have string theory—a celestial conceit if ever there was one—which is offered as (finally) underlying the whole of material nature—no more problems reconciling the forces of celestial mechanics with the forces inside the atom. Although strings can be figured and reconfigured in theory—as being the most inclusive and explanatory ur-phenomena we yet have, they, by their very formulation, are not subject, being ur-dimensional, to perceptual verification in plain old time and space. They cannot, alas, be so strummed (by us) as to (adequately) sound the music of the spheres. They cannot even, so I’m told, account for the workings of our world’s particular place in the new inclusiveness.
The notion of consciousness is analogously difficult. Consciousness, too, is a phenomenon in and of the world—but it is not reducible to the empiricism of place and time—even (especially) when it is purportedly explained via a tangle of firing neurons. Someday we may sort out each and every tangle—who knows? The ideal of adequacy lurks behind every scientific theory. But for now, the philosophically ambitious mind risks becoming a captive of the medically innocent brain. Acknowledging the value of historical error, we might call the brain the new pineal gland—the doorway (transfer station) through which we will bring body and mind together. Parenthetically, in a religious context, where we would accept another entity—soul—into our schema, we might then say that mind is the pineal gland between body and soul—a transfer between existence and belief.
Descartes’ hope for a seamless transition between the ineffable soul and the matter-of-fact mind foundered, among other things, on bad physiology. But there is no doubt these days (do you still have some?) that everything the mind conceives has correlation with actions in the brain.
Where else? Well then, let’s ask the metaphoricians:
Correlations can be found between cold toes and a runny nose —
or maybe also in a field of ancient thistles
that prick your quick, but bloom at end of winter.
Or even in the hallowed courts that decide
(with diagrams) the proper pathways
between the what’s when’s and how’s of lovers—
(recent courts have trouble with the why’s).
There are correlations everywhere—look not here but there.
“Where else?”—that arrogant question—implies that someday we can cap it all: We will finally find the ultimate physical particle, match technologically advanced observation to the increasing expansion of the universe—and, at the same time, we will stuff mind and its misbehaving surrogate, consciousness, so completely into the brain that there will be no distinction left to pester us.
But some things, you know, are always left outside—those peripheral irritants that test the boundaries of every explanation. Think about the defunct certainties (just recently) that girded the attempts to reduce language to sense-data and then, through logical construction, into objects: “Erlebs” join “Qualia” (Carnap and Goodman) in the salon of benighted visions of transparent reference. But there still may be good conversation in way-stations with the older advocates of ether and phlogiston—not to mention the four humours—and think about the over-soul. Those folks knew how to party!
This overflow of certainty, these failures—if you will—I accept as travails of the soul. But here I give the term ‘soul’ a special usage—as a name for programmatic uncertainty about what is left over from all our attempts to squeeze mind into brain.
Soul, in this usage, need not retain a religious sense—although it may. I offer it as a way of marking the distance between what bedevils our present aspirations to become complete in our theories, and the conundrums that in time diffuse our every success.
Can we still be optimistic Hegelians without accepting Hegel’s final stages for the achievement of spirit? There were terrible wars fought over that issue. Theories that pretend to such powers of explanation, have a way of insisting that you heed and do what they say they are right about. Everything that does not fit is irrelevant, unknowable, or unaskable—good grounds for dismissing criticism or denying citizenship.
But contrasting theories—those that attack the desire for certainty have had their own shot at being duly considered, and were also found wanting. To resolve this impasse is not a matter of theoretic equalization—but of contextual autonomy—agreement that accepting a theory requires understanding the language through which it is expressed. Realizing such latitude in present theorizing is a chimera, to be sure—but even chimeras have power.
To exercise this power, they need to probe the different logics of square and crooked dancing, and demonstrate the competing correspondences between the still of painted images and the rhythms of the moving world; they must empower the architecture of music heard from out a neighbors’s window, and appreciate the scribblings on bathroom walls and subway cars that celebrate repressed or repressive longings. And, with non-sequential gloom or glee (depending on the place they’re at) must undertake the task of writing both prose and poetry about all that.
HARD AND SOFT PHILOSOPHY
“Hard Philosophy” and “Soft Philosophy” is not a division between truth and error—nor between rigorous and sloppy thinking.
It would not suit the ambi-valent nature of my thesis to divide its principals as neatly as is offered in the academic distinction between Rationalists and Empiricists—endemic to curricular clarity from which few students emerge without puzzlement. There are, of course, the ideological prejudices—philosophical camps with which to ally one’s self in the ongoing search for (warranted) “true belief.” Clear oppositions also make it easier to teach undergraduates the subject. But which belief actually satisfies the wanted distinction, and which does not? What historical figures (without waffling) fully occupy the competing sides? To what purposes does one put this distinction now?
I have the same difficulties with “Rationalism and Empiricism” that I have with “Mind and Brain:” Each evokes a polemical procrustian bed upon which no event or observation
