Nevertheless, like shining a light in a furnished room containing an infinitely deep well at its centre, all we have simultaneously done is to resolve the even greater darkness of the hard problem, consciousness itself. Its edges are illuminated, this leading the neuroscientist to think they are closer to the solution when they are further away than ever. And so what have we gained from saying, for example, that vision is dependent on the unexplored whole brain to now say it depends on this particular part of the brain into which we have journeyed? Neither tells us what seeing is, let alone what it is when “I see”. And have we answered the question if mind drives brain as a necessary instrument, or brain drives mind, the latter as its secretion?
An answer in favour of materialism might be in the fact of just how profound the changes to mind can be in disease or in states of drug intoxication. A congenitally blind person is likely never to describe a visually vivid dream and never say “I see with my mind’s eye, yet lack the apparatus to see in the world”. Helen Keller "saw" and held memory in her fingers. A demure introvert might experiment with phencyclidine and become a raving homicidal lunatic. The older person with dementia might not simply lose their memory, but their memory of having lost memory, and indeed their whole connectedness with themselves and the world goes with it. These are prima facie devastating blows to a non-materialist account of mind or accounts which place mind on a pedestal as anything more than epi-phenomenon, though their claim to being fatal blow is more a neuro-scientistic mode de jure, than a fact beyond other interpretations.
One such non materialistic objection, and one which has been played out in religion and popular culture (cross culturally) from antiquity, is the notion that the person is primarily a non-physical substance that becomes attached to a material structure into which it grows and comes to identify. To a behaviourist the phenomena is actually a supernatural Pavlovian experiment without extinction being easily achieved. Just imagine it to be possible that there is something which is better described as spirit that comes to be shackled to a brain and grows with it. With time it would forget what it is in the greater sense, and contra Plato might never have known to begin with what it was then to forget. It might only know itself in the phenomena of its conscious awareness and in its intentionality, particularly its intentionality of moral faculties and the like. But this is the bitter joke, for the mind never achieves an emancipation from the attachment to the material brain, and neither ignorance of neuroscience nor a knowledge of its limitations is to any avail. When the brain bleeds the mind reflexively bleeds in its own way, even unto the end of the person as they knew themselves and were known to others. I am not proposing this ontology to be true, much less expecting it to convince the diehard materialist. Yet it is a fair opening gambit to an ontology that could be developed and indeed has been developed by better minds than mine. In its accommodation of both the facts of neuroscience and the miracle of consciousness as per outlined above, it is far from being the least parsimonious formulation either. The fact that it lay partly outside the bounds of what is ordinarily considered science provides no a priori’s to abandon it as a possible (nay plausible) way to see self in world.
The glimpses we have into this supra-material self may be within aesthetics, morality, peak experiences and the givenness of consciousness, along with certain aspects thereof. One of many places to which I was taken to marvel when I was younger was the spatial location and extension of consciousness. And this was a sense of marvel only to be amplified by a knowledge of neuroscience, as its answer to the mystery was as unfulfilling as an answer could possibly be. Take something sharp and jab it into your finger tip. The pain you feel is of course in your finger, not somewhere behind the eyes. Now I could tell you that there is a sensory representation of that same finger in the brain, this homunculus having been resolved with clarity by Wilder Penfield and others nigh on a century ago. Stimulate that finger part of the brain and you may have the very same sensation in your finger as if you dug into the fingertip itself. Ablate that same area in the brain and you might prick your finger a thousand times and feel nothing. We could also do, as nature sometimes does, cross wiring experiments where one physical stimulus leads to a different physical sensation, or where removing a limb results in the sensation that your limb still exists out there where it was and yet now only empty air has come to fill the space (see in the use of the word “wiring” the ease with which the technological metaphor creeps in). Now I, as well as anyone else cognizant of neuroscience, can dismiss the mystery here. I can say that the feeling of the finger as being spatially outside the brain and in the finger is simply the brain performing some strange ventriloquy, like the performer who projects the voice as if coming from the doll in their lap. But this neuro-ventriloquy, if true, is much more profound and cannot be simply believed without pause. For neuroscience would say, and say rightly, that the only the brain itself has the requisite complexity to effect the emergence of the finger consciousness. Certainly the “wiring” in the finger is just the ramifications of a simple nerve. There is no little brain in one’s fingertip sufficient for the complexity argument to hold, and so I am not in my finger they will say. And yet I do not experience things within the head as if to say “I the one behind the eyes feel a pain and know that it is associated with a noxious stimulus to the finger”. If I take upon myself the cap of the materialist neuroscientist I cannot liberate myself from the experience as being in a place (and time) which, so says the dogma, lacks the neurological complexity to be experienced. That is to say I cannot convert the beingness of the finger from spatially within the finger to within the head and somewhere behind the eyes simply in virtue of knowing about the sensory homunculus. Even an assiduous change in language to prohibit “in finger” consciousness cannot alter the basic fact of being out there. And so back we are to dismissing things as a trick of our ventriloquist brain, and the case is closed. The mystery does not go away however, nor does an evolutionary explanation which might pretend to answer the “why” or “how”. How am I, qua nothing but an emergent product of the brains complexity, consciously existing res extensa in the finger, a place of neurological austerity? I would suggest to the materialist that if they admit to the possibility of any ventriloquist act as they apparently must, then why not countenance one of a different kind, i.e. not one where matter automatically in the act of emergence thinks that it is mind (for lack of a better turn of phrase), and not one where the brain qua mind thinks it is spatially located “out there”. If the concept of ventriloquism exists in the world at all and it admitted into argument, then why not allow for the hypothesis that an immaterial mind confuses itself with the walls of its jail and automatically thinks that it is matter?
Another possibility, terribly unpopular nowadays more for falling out of fashion than plausibility and more a result of the sycophantic want for philosophers to cling on as scientistic appendages as opposed to the philosopher telling the neuroscientist how to think and where they have failed to think, is another kind of mind brain monism. Only in this case the monism is not material but mental and usually, though not necessarily, religiously informed. In such a world view what we think of as brains and rocks and the orbits of planets are thoughts within a greater mind. In their regularity and radical separation from our own little minds, certain of these thoughts are experienced as something solid, separate and “objective”. Our perceptions of this solid world out there are internally valid of course. Yet the solidity of the external world is a category error. For in the greater mind all in creation is weakly consubstantial, with thoughts merely crystalized in various forms in time and over time. Our own mind is a thought made free from the greater mind, with some limited agency to change itself and effect change. And what we cannot easily change is the brute facts of the material world. To disavow the existence of this greater mind is a projection of our own narcissism in defending the limits of what our own can know and do. We might think that if we cannot be more of ourselves, then this greater mind cannot be at all.
As Ronald Knox wrote, when thinking of the immaterial monist Berkley
There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."
Reply:
"Dear
