Over on the Discovery Institute’s “Mind Matters” website, my arch-nemesis ( 🙂 ) Michael Egnor recently posted a lecture which he describes as “a fascinating overview of neuroscience and the philosophy of mind (which) explains the fallacies of materialism and the logical and scientific strengths of dualism”. I thought I would give it a look and see if I agreed. The lecture is by Dr. Sharon Dirckx, who holds the positions of “senior tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA) and… RZIM (Ravi Zacharias International Ministries) apologist.”
Now, a preliminary issue: The “Mind Matters” post is entitled “An Oxford Neuroscientist Explains Mind vs. Brain”. That is a bit deceptive. While Dirckx does have a PhD in brain imaging, as far as I can tell she currently holds no academic post and does not currently work as a neuroscientist. Moreover, she does not appear to have any direct affiliation with Oxford University. It’s a bit complicated, but the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics is physically located in Oxford University’s Evangelical college Wycliffe Hall. However, the OCCA appears to be independently funded and run by RZIM and is not itself part of Oxford University. The Church of England had, in fact, expressed concerns regarding the lack of clarity regardig this organization’s affiliation and worried that people applying for programs with the OCCA might mistakenly believe they were applying to Oxford University. The bottom line is that Dirckx is a teacher and speaker with a private Christian apologetics program and has no formal affiliation with a university. She is no more entitled to be called an “Oxford neuroscientist” than if she were working in the kitchen of the Wycliffe Hall cafeteria. And, to be clear, I have no reason to believe that “Mind Matters” committed anything more than an honest mistake here, nor that Dirckx has ever, herself, misrepresented her credentials. (The same cannot be said for Ravi Zacharias.) In any event, her background in neuroscience should still allow her to speak with a degree of understanding regarding the research on human consciousness.
Here is the video of the lecture. The first section consists of an interview in which Dirckx describes why she became a Christian, so if you want to skip to the lecture itself, it starts at 16:50. On the other hand, you may not want to watch it after reading my summary that follows.
Her main theme is that attempts to account for human consciousness in terms of brain processes have failed, but that one can account for it if one accepts that God exists. She begins by noting, with alarm, that the idea that all human thought and activity may be purely the result of brain activity appears to be seeping out of the academy and entering mainstream popular culture. She goes on to quote Ben Shapiro (!) as expressing grave concern that this idea leads to the conclusion that we do not have free will and are “just a cluster of cells moving meaninglessly through the universe.” Now, I do not necessarily accept that this is an unavoidable conclusion of the premise that the mind arises from the brain. But it should be noted that Dirckx is here committing the fallacy of appealing to consequences. That is to say, even if the proposition that mental activity is entirely due to brain activity leads to consequences that are undesirable, this does not mean the proposition is false.
Dirckx spends part of the lecture discussing what is known as the hard problem of consciousness. Anyone who has done any reading on the issue of human consciousness will likely have come across this term, but briefly it is a concept devised by philosopher David Chalmers. He distinguishes the “hard problem” from the “easy” problems of determining the neurological processes that give rise to specific aspects of human cognition and mental experience. This is not to imply that there is anything “easy”, in the absolute sense, about answering these problems. However, there is no reason not to expect that, with sufficient time and effort, these questions can eventually be answered. On the other hand, as Chalmers puts it:
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. 1
The term for these aspects of our experience is qualia, whose nature can be illustrated by a famous thought experiment devised by another philosopher, Frank Jackson. In this experiment, we imagine a scientist named Mary who has lived her entire life in a room devoid of any colours other than black and white. However, she has access to all the resources necessary to understand every physical aspect of colour and how it is perceived and processed by the human brain, from how light of different wavelengths stimulate particular cells of the retina, to the paths the signals elicited by this excitation travel via the optic nerve to the brain, and how neural activity corresponds with the colours we perceive. Now suppose that, one day, she receives a package. Upon removing its (black and white) packaging, she finds she is holding a ripe, bright red apple. For the first time in her life, she actually sees the colour red. The question is: Does Mary learn anything from this experience beyond what she already knows from her complete knowledge of all the physical facts connected with seeing the colour red. Many would argue that she does learn something new and, further, that this illustrates two facts: 1) Qualia are real phenomena and, 2) physical processes and entities alone cannot account for all mental phenomena, that there is some knowledge of the world that can only be obtained through conscious experience. It further follows that physicalism is false. Not everyone agrees with those conclusions, and that eventually came to include Jackson himself. Dirckx, however, does agree and, moreover, claims that the existence of qualia can be accounted for by accepting the existence of God.
Dirckx attempts to summarize the various positions on the relationship between mind and brain, but I believe her account is too abridged to allow a full appreciation of the issues involved here, so I will attempt to flesh things out a bit more. I do so with the caveat that I am not even remotely an expert on this complicated topic. And I also acknowledge that what follows remains a far from exhaustive discussion. But hopefully it is complete enough for our purposes. Readers who desire a more fulsome account of any of the following topics can follow the links.
Substance Dualism, a view most commonly associated with Rene Descartes, holds that the mind is immaterial and exists independently of the body, the brain, or any other physical entity. It is not subject to the laws that govern the physical world. Moreover, its existence and function cannot be understood and explained in terms of functions and processes of the brain or any other physical entity. This view entails the ontological position that the mental and the physical are two distinct “substances” from which the universe is constructed.
This is in contrast to physicalist or materialist views in which the mind is understood as being explicable purely in terms of physical entities, forces and processes. Physicalism comes in two flavours: Reductive physicalism is the view that all mental processes are, in fact, brain processes, and that what we may think of as the “mind” is entirely reducible to those processes, in the same way that light can be fully understood as (reduced to) electromagnetic waves with a wavelength between 400 and 750 nm. Another way of saying this is that mind states are identical to brain states. At its most radical, reductive physicalism takes the form of eliminativism, a viewpoint associated with Patricia and Paul Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett. Eliminativism entails that many of the things we commonly think of as belonging to the mind, such as beliefs, desires, and subjective perceptions do not actually exist, that these instead belong to a “folk psychology” which is the equivalent of how our forebears mistakenly believed illness was caused by demons or evil spirits. A reductive physicalist would respond to the story of Mary by claiming that the story begs the question and that if Mary is surprised by her first direct encounter with the colour red, this only indicates that she does not yet know every physical fact regarding the perception of colour.
Non reductive physicalism, on the other hand, takes the position that the mind is produced by brain processes, but is not reducible to those processes. The wording often used is that the mental supervenes upon the physical (which I have found confusing since, on first reading, it seems to imply the causal relationship flows in the direction opposite to what would be expected). To say that the a mental property X supervenes upon the brain is to say that there cannot be a change in X without there being a corresponding change in the brain.
This is how I can best understand the difference between these two forms of physicalism: The reductive physicalist would predict that a complete understanding of consciousness could be achieved through nothing more than an understanding of the particles, fields, forces and laws that underlie other physical processes. That is to say, consciousness can be reduced to biology, which can be reduced to chemistry, which can in turn be reduced to physics (Note, however, that not everyone agrees with those levels of reduction.) The non-reductive physicalist, on the other hand, would predict that, while consciousness depends on processes that are explained by the usual laws of physics, it cannot be explained solely thru these laws. This will, instead, require additional bridging laws that are fundamental in much the same way that the laws of physics are fundamental, but are distinct from those laws, and which govern how properties of the mind emerge from neurobiological processes.
There is one further category, which for some reason Dirckx entirely fails to mention, and this is property dualism. Like substance dualism, property dualism views the mental and the physical as two fundamental and distinct aspects of the world. However, it considers both to be aspects of a single physical substance. This is the view endorsed by David Chalmers, who proposes a form of panpsychism. This may initially strike one as an odd position, evoking as it does the idea that furniture, rocks and other inanimate objects are aware and have thoughts and feelings. But that is not what the term entails. Rather, it proposes that consciousness is a fundamental, and possibly universal, property of the physical world, much like mass and energy. This is not to say that protons, electrons and neutrons are aware of their existence and have thoughts. The particular form of consciousness that exists when billions of these particles are collected together in the form of a brain likely does not much resemble the form that arises from other arrangements of particles. But just as all physical objects will possess physical properties related to the physical properties of the individual particles that make them up, they will also possess mental properties related to the mental properties of their constituent particles. As radical as this idea may seem (and Chalmers emphasizes that it will appear less strange to people acquainted with Eastern religions and philosophies), in effect it simply acknowledges the third logical alternative to the rival views that consciousness exists entirely apart from matter, or that it only emerges as a result of particular arrangements of matter.
So to summarize, simply, the four positions just discussed:
1) Substance dualism: The mental exists entirely apart from the physical.
2) Reductive physicalism: Only the physical exists.
3) Non-reductive physicalism: The mental emerges from the physical.
4) Property dualism: The mental is a fundamental aspect of the physical.
(There is also a fifth option, idealism, which holds that only the mental exists, but that is not relevant to the present discussion.)
Now, how does Sharon Dirckx argue for substance dualism as the only model that can account for human consciousness? Well, to be completely honest, she often does not provide any argument at all. She simply asserts that the other models cannot account for it. For instance at, at 34:20 she states that “brain processes cannot account for qualia” without providing any justification for this sweeping claim. At 47:20 she makes reference to the Scientific American article on network neuroscience by Bertolero and Bassett that I have discussed in a previous post. However, rather than attempt to discuss this concept and explain what she sees as its shortcomings, she simply hand waves it away by asserting that “there is a huge chasm to be crossed” in describing how the mind arises from brain processes.
There is an odd section in which she recounts a “conversation ” she had with her Siri application, I presume in an attempt to demonstrate that computer algorithms cannot produce conscious thought:
Siri, who made you?
I, Siri, was made by Apple in California.
Siri, what are you?
I am Siri, but I don’t like talking about myself.
Siri, are you a person?
Sorry, Sharon, I’ve been advised not to discuss my existential status.
Siri, why are we here?
I don’t know, maybe the Genius Bar folks can answer that.
Siri, why do we exist?
To have conversations like these.
Siri, why do you exist?
I process, therefore I am.
Now, of course, I am not claiming that Siri is conscious. However, if she was conscious, I’m not sure I would expect her to give much better answers than she did just there. And suppose Siri had been programmed to give the sort of answers that Sharon Dirckx would give. For instance, “I, Siri, was created by human beings for the glorification of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”, or something like that. Would Dirckx then conclude that Siri was conscious? For that matter, it would not surprise me if computer programmers are close to developing an algorithm that would be able to give the sort of answers one could expect from a grad student in philosophy or theology. What then?
At another point, she repeats an argument that has been made by Michael Egnor and which I have already discussed, when she cites the research of Adrian Owen. As you may recall, Owen was able to demonstrate through functional neuroimaging that some people in a persistent vegetative state are able to understand what is being said to them, even though they are unable to respond verbally or physically. Dirckx repeats the error Egnor made and interprets this as demonstrating that the mind can function in the absence of brain functioning. In fact, all this demonstrates is that the parts of the brain involved in understanding speech are separate from those involved in motor and verbal responses to speech, and that the former can be spared even when the latter are no longer functioning.
She refers to Sam Harris’s position that free will does not exist, and attempts to demonstrate that this position is incoherent because people do not behave as if we do not have free will and, instead, will fight vehemently against attempts to impede our freedom. While, as I have already said, it is not a given that physicalism entails denial of libertarian free will, even on its own terms Dirckx’s argument fails. Those who do not accept the existence of free will nonetheless acknowledge that we experience a very strong, though illusory, feeling that we do have free will, and therefore it is not unexpected that we will behave accordingly.
To Dirckx’s credit, she does acknowledge one of the chief difficulties with substance dualism, namely the problem of accounting for the causal interaction between the mind and the brain. The question that arises here is: If the mind does not have physical properties, how can it have effects on the physical functioning and properties of our brain and body? Dirckx’s attempt to address the problem is not convincing. She uses the example of cyberbullying to demonstrate that non-physical things (words or thoughts) can have an effect on our brains and bodies (neurological and physiological manifestations of emotional distress). The problem is that this does not demonstrate what she claims, because the hurtful words can only have an effect on us if we perceive them through physical means, in the form of sound or light waves that excite our sensory organs and are then translated into electrical signals that are processed by the brain.
The chief problem with Dirckx’s line of argument is that, while no one is claiming a complete physicalist account of the mind and how it relates to the brain yet exists, this does not mean that her favoured model, substance dualism, is correct by default. She is still obliged to provide a compelling argument in its favour. And she does at least try to present what she believes is convincing evidence that the gap between the brain and the mind can be bridged if God exists. Are you ready for that evidence? Here it is:
You have made (human beings) a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor.
Psalm 8:5
I can only speak for myself, but I do not find that a particularly persuasive argument. You can judge for yourself.
From the foregoing discussion, it should be clear that a full accounting of human consciousness will likely require many of us to abandon at least one belief whose truth seems self-evident or is a fundamental aspect of our worldview. Among these are:
- Attributes that we believe to be essential aspects of our mind, such as feelings, beliefs and sensations, actually exist.
- Everything that exists is physical or supervenes upon the physical.
- Consciousness is limited to living things, and does not exist in inanimate objects.
- Human beings are not only physical beings, but also have aspects that are immaterial.
Sharon Dirckx, like many others, seems to be unable or unwilling to give up the last of these because to do so would conflict with her religious beliefs, and that is her prerogative. But if she wishes to claim that models that do not entail immaterial forces cannot, even in principle, account for the human mind (as opposed to merely claiming that alternatives to these models are not yet ruled out), she needs to do more than dismiss or misinterpret scientific evidence and quote verses from the Bible. As to what that “more” would be, I really do not know. It’s her job, as well as that of her fellow substance dualists, to figure that out.
The chief argument against physicalism is that, while it has led to enormous strides in our understanding of how the mind operates, it has yet to fully elucidate how the mind, in all its aspects, arises from the brain. Physicalism has not yet answered the hard problem. But, then, neither has substance dualism which, in addition, suffers its own seemingly insuperable problems. The problem of causation has already been mentioned. There are also the more basic problems of defining what a “mental substance” actually is, and of demonstrating its existence by some means other than assuming it can fill some existing gap in physicalist accounts. For all its shortcomings, physicalism at least has a method and strategy to answer the questions it raises: Just keep doing science, and see how far it can take us. What is the supenaturalist strategy? As far as I can see, it amounts to little more than asserting that one is correct, and hoping no one asks for evidence to justify that claim.
“Fred Jackson” — rather, Frank Jackson.
Thanks for catching that! I wil make the correction.
Great logic, love the article