consciousness

Here's a fantastic profile of neuroscientist David Eagleman, a materialist who struggles with his mystical intuitions. Eagleman is not conventionally religious, but won't call himself an atheist, either. He prefers his own neologism "possibilian," which means he believes that while we have the potential to solve all problems, answer all questions, and explain everything. Yet, he admits, we are nowhere close to doing so. It's the artistic side of his consciousness that helps him keep an open mind. Excerpt:

Though Eagleman’s scientific and literary lives seem radically different on the surface, they are part of the same creative endeavor: to deepen our understanding of a complex world we can never fully grasp. Since scientists mostly talk about what they know, Eagleman’s emphasis on our ignorance may seem out of character. Eagleman offers an analogy: The work of science is like building a pier out into the ocean. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, “Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier, but there’s a lot more out there.” The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know, he says. “During our lifetimes, we will get further on that pier. We’ll understand more at the end of our lives than we do now, but it ain’t going to cover the ocean.” 

He is not a religious man, but he says he's made nervous by the assumption by many neuroscientists that we are nothing but our brains.

 “Almost certainly, we’re missing giant pieces,” Eagleman says, just as previous generations were missing a big piece of the puzzle when they attempted to understand the world without the concept of gravity. “We’re in that situation now, and the reason we know we’re in that situation is because for the most fundamental questions we have, like consciousness, we not only don’t know the answer but we don’t even know what the answer could look like.”

What does Eagleman mean by the question of consciousness? “How do you put together a bunch of physical pieces and parts, and get private subjective experience out of that? How do you get the taste of feta cheese or the redness of red or the feeling of pain?”

Neuroscience labs are busy mapping neural circuits—the signals within the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the body. But “that’s just mechanical stuff, Eagleman says, “and every single discovery in every neuroscience lab is just mechanical stuff.”

“We’re stuck with this very deep problem, this 800-pound gorilla: If it’s all just mechanical stuff everywhere we look, and if every part of the brain is connected to, and driven by, other parts of the brain, then where’s consciousness?” For most folks, the answer might be, “Well, it’s in my mind.” But that begs the question of what we mean by the mind, beyond the physical brain. What is a mind? (Your brain weighs about three pounds. How much does your mind weigh?) Eagleman has no clear way to frame the question of consciousness, much less a way to describe subjective experience: “There’s no equation that can give us the taste of feta cheese.” 

There's a wonderful passage later in the essay in which Eagleman talks about how frightening it is to start digging down into neurocircuitry, and see organic, materialist explanations for the things he loves most in the world. Is it all a matter of electricity and chemistry? The thought that it might just be that, he says, makes "you feel so alien to everything you’ve ever known and loved." Like the poet said, "We murder to dissect."

It is possible that the terror the neuroscientist experiences when confronted by the idea that all that is good and noble and beautiful in the world is only an illusion is the function of a cowardly mind that cannot stand too much reality. But it is also possible that his intuitive skepticism of the notion that we can reduce all things human to chemicals and electricity coursing through flesh is the proper philosophical response to the idea that all things can be reduced to the sum of its parts, and that Man is capable of dispelling all mysteries, that the finite is capable of enclosing the infinite. Maybe Eagleman is hearing from an irreducible, immeasurable part of him telling him that what we can see in a laboratory is not all there is -- and that that part of him is what we call his immortal soul.

This wonderful profile is in part a cautionary tale about why nothing human -- not science, not art, not religion -- can give us a complete account of the world, and our place in it. To reduce epistemology to science, or religion, or art, or any one thing exclusive of all others is to close ourselves to a relationship to the world as it really is. Eagleman says he thinks science gives the best account of reality we have ... but that it is not enough, and he doubts it ever will be enough. That humility is admirable. Anyway, judging by today's column, it sounds like David Brooks is having an Eaglemanesque crise.