Science and Knowing
Lately there has been some hubbub over Thomas Nagel's book, Mind and Cosmos. In the book and elsewhere Nagel contends that science does not explain consciousness, does not explain subjective experience. Science can point to some factors involved in the mind but these identified parts do not sum back together to fully explain the mind. When science seeks to break the Humpty Dumpty of consciousness apart, Nagel says that science does not find enough pieces to put the egg man back together again.
In a blog post, Alva Noe notes some distinctions about Nagel's position. To Noe, Nagel is not merely saying that we have not found full explanations for consciousness yet. Rather, Nagel is taking the more categorical stance that we cannot explain our minds through an identification of component parts. The mechanisms of our consciousness are in sum and whole unknowable. Noe's other important distinction is that, perhaps, science cannot explain consciousness because consciousness is a cognitive illusion and therefore defies explanation. Noe thinks that perhaps the fault rests with the concept of consciousness, not science, as an understanding of human engagement with the world.
Nagel would agree with Noe's first distinction. He thinks that we simply have no idea how purely physical explanations of the mind would work. This does not make them wrong so much as extremely rudimentary. Nagel writes that "nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true" (Nagel 1974, 446). Physicalism is not so much an explanation as "a schema for explanation, supported by some examples" (Nagel 2012, 6). It is so fundamentally incomplete that we cannot say whether it is right or wrong.
Nagel's next step is to then claim that because science is incomplete we therefore should not reject what he calls the "incredulity of common sense" (Nagel 2012, 7). We should be open to the ideas that that some things cannot be reduced to component parts, that some things in the natural world are non-accidental, and that the mind is a thing in itself which should be incorporated into theoretical models of the universe. This last point would be Nagel's response to Noe's second distinction: the mind is not a false concept. Rather, it is real and must somehow be taken into account.
Nagel's position is explicitly not religious but it also explicitly draws inspiration from present day religious positions that try to wed science and religion. For example, Nagel references creationists who claim that some elements of life, such as the human eye, are irreducibly complex. They think that the human eye has to have been created because there is no other way of explaining how something as complex as the eye could appear in nature. Evolutionary biologists, of course, disagree and offer detailed explanations of how "our kind of eye—the type common across vertebrates—took shape in less than 100 million years, evolving from a simple light sensor for circadian (daily) and seasonal rhythms around 600 million years ago to an optically and neurologically sophisticated organ by 500 million years ago" (Lamb 2011).
Scientists, I am sure, would also disagree directly with Nagel. They would not characterize the scientific enterprise as a vague potential understanding supported only by unsystematic anecdotes. Rather, they would argue that the logic of scientific inference allows us enormous and preponderant confidence that the universe (and the human beings within it) can be explained by physical mechanisms without resort to metaphysics or antireductionism.
Further, scientists would accuse Nagel of confusing what the gaps in the present scientific picture of the universe actually are. They would argue that the gaps are like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They would contend that you can have enormous confidence in the content of the puzzle's picture owing to all of the pieces that they already have connected and in place. They would say that the missing pieces are very unlikely to somehow change the nature of the overall puzzle. They would argue that there being as yet missing pieces does not mean that the missing pieces will never be found or that the jigsaw puzzle is somehow not actually a jigsaw puzzle.
In offering this metaphor for the scientific position, I am referring to the ongoing tradition of Enlightenment thought which holds that the universe is knowable and that science is the proper means for understanding it. Nagel recognizes the contributions of Enlightenment thought and the worth of its insistence on looking for physical explanations for the universe. But he also thinks that this approach has reached its high water mark, that it has come to a point where it cannot explain some things like the mind. Nagel thinks that we should accept these things as unexplainable and move on from that acceptance, formalizing "the mind" into a prominent role int the history of the cosmos.
I would argue that there is little value in this position at this time. Scientists have achieved the progress that Nagel values precisely through the refusal to take previous opportunities for antireductionism. We have modern physics because bright minds insisted on, say, examining light's properties rather than accepting it as ineffable. We have modern medicine because physicians insisted on investigating the interior of the human body rather than regarding only its outward appearance. Nagel, to me, seems like another of a long line of thinkers who have in some way thought that we cannot know more than we already do. I suspect that like Lord Kelvin who said in 1900 that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics," Nagel too will be proven wrong in the decades that follow him regarding our ability to understand the mind.
Why do I suspect this? I do not think that we currently understand the brain or the mind well enough to flat-out contradict Nagel. Rather, I argue that the the pace and depth of neurological research is such that it is far, far too soon to resort to antireductionism. For example, take a recent piece in Science entitled "A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain." Their work is a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain using the NEF algorithm. This cell count is far short of the billions of neurons in actual brains, and the construction of the model is based on inferences about brain function rather than mirroring real brains. However, it is nevertheless a remarkable accomplishment in modeling how a brain's parts can result in the sorts of outcomes that we know brains produce. It is increasingly less of a mystery how neurons working in concert result in a mind.
Eliasmith, Chris, Terrence C. Stewart, Xuan Choo, Trevor Bekolay, Travis DeWorld, Yichuan Tang, and Daniel Rasmussen. 2012. "A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain." Science. 338(6111): 1202-1205.
Lamb, Trevor D. 2011. "Evolution of the Eye." Scientific American. 305(1): 64-69
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review. 83(4):435-450
Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press.
















