Alan Lightman a physicist best known for his writing about science, most famously his 1992 novel Einstein’s Dreams. At present he’s a “professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT.”
Lightman’s recent article in The Atlantic (click headline below or find article archived for frere here), while seeming to buy into the magazine’s recent penchant for osculating religion, really is not. It seems to mostly express a kind of spiritual wonder. But it’s confusing for two reasons.
First, he denies materialism, but latter accepts it (see below).
Second he deals with two forms of dualism: the mind/body dualism dealt with by Descartes, but also a dualism caused by recent advances in medical technology, in which part of your body is not made of tissue (examples are artificial hearts and mind/electrode interfaces) making people part human, part machine.
After reading the piece, I wasn’t sure what the point was except to mirror Lightman’s wonder at the world and his unanswered questions.
It began when Lightman had a colonoscopy, which got him wondering what was going on inside himself; as he said, “I felt like a trespasser in my own body.” And that gets him into the first form of dualism. All bolding henceforth is mine:
Modern neuroscience has largely overthrown the classical view that the mind and the body are fundamentally different substances, and it has shown that all of our thoughts and mental experiences are rooted in the material brain. But even granting that scientific view, there remains a profound disconnect between our conscious self-awareness—rooted in the three pounds of gooey stuff in our skulls—and the rest of our body.
And here’s the confusing bit, where he denies materialism: he simply has to be more than just the substance of his body. Bolding is mine:
After that unsettling medical adventure, I began mulling over why I was so disturbed to see the insides of my body. A number of issues come to mind. For starters, the experience struck me as a vivid demonstration of my materiality. Even though I am a scientist and have a materialist view of the world, I still harbor the belief that I am more than just a jumble of tissues and nerves. The experience of consciousness and life is so sublime that it is hard to imagine it all arising from mere atoms and molecules.
This seems like a case of cognitive dissonance, but it’s not clear whether he really believes what’s in bold as opposed to “harboring” that belief. Yes, we don’t know how consciousness works, but what else is there to create it except the stuff of our bodies and brains? For other people, like Ross Douthat, a failure to understand is by default evidence for god, but nobody who knows the history of science would think that.
Lightman then muses for a while about our failure to fully understand our own bodies, but what is a source of puzzlement to him is a challenge to scientists. We have never made progress in understanding nature by assuming that naturalism is wrong, and so the program to understand consciousness must begin with a naturalistic program—until we find an exception to naturalism!
But later on, Lightman says that he’s really a materialist:
I must again confess that I am a materialist. I respect the belief in an immortal soul. I respect the belief in a nonphysical mind. But, despite my predilection for some transcendent element, I do not share those beliefs. Still, I am baffled by the disconnect I feel between body and mind. I look down at my bare feet and command my toes to wiggle. And they wiggle. But “I” am looking down at them from above. My toes are things that I gaze at from some distance. But what distance? The distance from the camera of my eyes? The distance from my conscious mind, which has these thoughts? And my toes are visible. The inside of my body is even more distant.
Once again his source of wonder is his victimization by an illusion, one described so clearly by Dan Dennett, that there is an “Alan Lightman” sitting somewhere in his brain, a little homunculus that looks down on his toes. Again, he’s baffled, while a biologist would see a challenge. My own view, and I’m no expert, is that the “hard problem of consciousness” will simply devolve to a problem of what brain connections are necessary for the sensation consciousness, and then we’ll have to say, “And that is all we know.”
Finally, having confessed his bafflement, Lightman goes on to describe some medical advances that truly are amazing, but, like the one below, must surely have a naturalistic explanation:
In 2013, scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California implanted two computer chips in the brain of Erik Sorto, then 32, who was paralyzed from the neck down from a gunshot wound. The output from the chips is connected to a computer, which interprets the patterns of their electrical activity; the computer, in turn, is connected to a robot arm. When Sorto is thirsty and merely thinks about reaching for a cup of water, the computer chips in his brain sense his desire and relay that thought to the computer, and the robot arm grabs a cup of water and brings it to his lips. When I interviewed Sorto in November 2021 and asked him what it felt like to have this machine in his body, he said that he felt mostly human but also part cyborg.
Now that is amazing, especially because, as far as I know, the way it works was not designed from first principles, although some knowledge of neuroscience was surely required (where do you put the chips?). But this surely has a naturalistic explanation, unless you think that god did it or some fundamental principles of how neurons and muscles work has eluded us.
And that’s pretty much it. I may have failed to be impressed simply because I’m jaded, and as a scientist I’m used to unsolved problems that to other conjure up spiritual or even non-naturalistic explanations. But still, I wonder why The Atlantic published this.
Part of the problem is that people characterize materialism as implying that one is ” just a jumble of tissues and nerves.” Just? JUST?!?! It’s not “just” anything. It’s the most complicated (kind of) structure of which we are aware in the universe. It’s too intricate to know itself fully, in all details. It’s not just a jumble. If people would stop characterizing materialism so dismissively, then they might find it less troubling that there is such a panoply of experiences and thoughts available to it, including “qualia”.
Agree whole heartedly … “just” is a rhetorical device. I’d go further, it is not only a jumble of tissues and nerves. It is billions of years of evolution, stardust unfolding, physics and chemistry doing their thing. It is bloody amazing!
Extending your comment, it’s not a “jumble” at all, since that word implies an unstructured assortment (shake up the items in a draw, and you have a “jumble”). Instead, it’s a very particular and specific arrangement of matter, where most of the interest is in that arrangement.
I found my self wanting to explain to the sweating professor that the experience of mind and self does not “just” come from a jumble of xxxx. Mind and self is an emergent property of those nervous tissues that are interacting. The whole is indeed greater than the mere sum of the parts (a point that will appeal to fans of the numinous), since the whole includes the new emergent properties that come out of interactions between parts.
How can a puff of mere water molecules self-assemble into an intricate and symmetrical snowflake? How can a mere ball of dividing cells self-assemble into a tadpole with instincts to swim and feed? Emergent properties are always surprising, but there is no evidence for anything other than the parts and interactions.
Why is it a problem? The fact that our bodies are extremely complex doesn’t negate the fact that materialism reduces our humanity and dignity. To be reduced to a meaningless machine with no free will is spiritually debilitating, stultifying, and is diametrically at odds with our innate understand of ourselves as creatures with an ultimate end or goal existing in a Universe suffused with meaning and purpose.
Moreover, modern reductive materialism is simple incompatible with the very existence of consciousness. The physical or material world is wholly cashed out by its physical properties — mas, charge, velocity, location and what have you. But consciousness wholly lacks any such physical properties.
And even if, contrary to the facts, that were not the case, there simply are no compelling reasons or evidence to suppose we are merely an assemblage of bones and flesh.
Sorry, but “our understanding of ourselves” is our feelings, not scientific understanding, which does point to reductive materialism. If we are more than an asssemblage of bones and flesh, do tell us what more is there that the stuff of our bodies.
I think there are two important kinds of evidence against your view. One is that our “innate understand of ourselves as creatures with an ultimate end or goal existing in a Universe suffused with meaning and purpose” changes as our brains develop. No one reports conscious experience in the womb because our brains aren’t sufficiently developed for that experience to occur.
The second is that the “innate understanding of ourselves” can be temporarily altered by physical damage, drugs, toxins, and pathogens. My wife didn’t suddenly acquire the consciousness of an Irish poet when she hallucinated leprechauns sitting on her bed – she had viral encephalitis. And her own consciousness didn’t return from somewhere else a few weeks later – she got acyclovir.
Re our innate understand of ourselves as creatures with an ultimate end or goal — I am not part of your our, and you seem to be assuming everyone is. Atheism is only one factor; not only do I not understand myself as a creature with some ultimate end (other than non-existence), but I understand your and your our‘s understanding of such a goal as being a fictional story, an illusion in Dennett’s terms. Similarly for free will, meaning, purpose, and (the hard one) conscious experience.
Re the distress of being reduced to mere physics — well, in general nobody likes being reduced to anything. I’d phrase it instead as the joy and wonder of having been expanded from mere physics into an aware self in a universe with with other aware selves.
Yes, consciousness lacks inherent physical properties. So does the tooth fairy, the number 42, and all other fictional characters and objects.
Exactly. Every biochemical synthetic reaction proceeds with negative free energy change or, put another way, such that the entropy of the universe increases. Nothing happens in life that can’t happen. What we see in ourselves is simply the most probable arrangement of matter that could result from the starting conditions (which includes of course catabolic reactions ultimately powered by sunshine that produce high-energy phosphate bonds, which will be broken during synthesis of “us-stuff”. There’s no free lunch.)
Not only is the arrangement of interest to us, it is the most thermodynamically favourable and therefore most probable result. Because many reactions proceed with large free-energy decreases, the result we see is overwhelming more likely than any other possible result. Yes, we as we are are more likely than “just” a jumble of protoplasm, or life-stuff that never even made it to protoplasm.
I thought my colonoscopy was one of the best bits of evidence against dualism. A fraction of a gram of di-isopropylphenol, with a tiny hint of fentanyl, completely eradicated my consciousness whilst the anesthetic was administered.
My colonoscopies are quite prosaic. I was feeling a bit of low srlf-esteem regarding my poetic sensibilities.
There are meditation techniques that bring one fully into one’s body, eliminating the perceived duality that Lightman describes.
Exactly right, meditation is deadly to the idea of dualism. Nothing exposes the insubstantial nature of a separate self like sitting down and looking for it.
An elusive topic.
The real-world super-simple example I’ve come up with to ponder this is gears.
Imagine a stationary gear set. There’s all this specific design to it or they stall or blow apart. All the teeth are very clear and distinct. The locations where they mesh as well.
Now, crank the gears really fast. When we look at the gears in motion and cannot perceive the individual teeth, nor their meshing. Instead, we see a blur. If you try this in real life, strikingly, you can see in the meshing part the circumference of the gears form a cusp shape that is not visible when stationary.
So material in motion is perceived to be different. We know it’s all atomized/molecular, but the body in motion is perceived as a higher order impression of the same base set.
Hard to pinpoint. Maybe you could try this thought experiment with a piano (like today’s Mendelssohn video!) but on the inside and all the individual components become a blur.
Consciousness or experience is the blur, is what I’m arriving at with this.
Nice analogy.
It seems to me that Lightman is defending materialism, but is using his colonoscopy anecdote to mollify dualists by allowing that they are not unreasonable.
“The experience of consciousness and life is so sublime that it is hard to imagine it all arising from mere atoms and molecules.” He’s saying, yes, it seems like there’s more to the mind than atoms and molecules in motion, but it really is just atoms and molecules all the way down.
My interpretation of the piece is that Lightman is a materialist, but he doesn’t want to be too hard on those who can’t bring themselves to see the light.
Thinking of the brain as a mass of cells and molecules is simplistic. Much of this sort of thinking comes from molecular biology, which considers organs as systems of molecular interactions. While this is true, it is not the complete story. The spatiotemporal interactions of neurons and networks in the various brain areas determines the information flow in those circuits. While we have abundant (if incomplete) understanding of these circuits in sensory and motor systems, we have far less knowledge of the patterns of information flow in the circuits responsible for cognitive and emotional processing, which underlie consciousness.
The importance of these spationtemporal organizations (note the plural) is shown by the fact that cell and organ cultures, which allow for use of in vitro approaches to experimentation as well as being the substrate for biological/nonbiological interactive systems for advanced computation differ strongly from in vivo systems: they differ in complexity, plasticity, and computational abilities.
Note that this is an attack on dualism, nor a defense of dualism. It is straight biophysics and cellular neuroscience, and there is a long way to go before it addresses philosophical questions. It does address the fact that the physical brain is far more complex than a simple mass of cells.
Correction: meant to write “this is not an attack on dualism”.
For most people, materialism is atheism plus respect for science. In philosophy, however, atheism is perfectly consistent with dualism. Various statements that “all of our thoughts and mental experiences are rooted in the material brain” or that mind is an emergent property of the brain or the brain produces conscious experience are also consistent with property dualism.
In philosophy, the mind-body question is a real question, having nothing to do with souls or the sublime or wonder, spiritual or otherwise. Most philosophers are materialists of one sort or another, because the arguments against dualism are very strong, but nobody has yet been able to explain how materialism works. The strictest form of materialism holds that conscious experience is the very same thing as brain processes, yet it seems to have properties that no physical object or process can have.
Dan Dennett thought that conscious experience is an illusion.
Dennett’s remark is often interpreted as saying that it’s a mistake to regard ourselves as conscious (which is obviously potty and obviously not what he meant). An “illusion” is a “misinterpreted sensory experience”. Hence we are indeed experiencing consciousness (= we are conscious), but we’re misinterpreting it (which is obviously true, and likely our consciousness involves layer upon layer of misdirection and re-interpretation).
Dan Dennett is the grandfather of illusionism, the successor to the eliminativism of Paul and Pat Churchland. Chat-GPT: “In the philosophy of mind, illusionism is the radical physicalist view that phenomenal consciousness (the subjective “what it is like” of experience, often called qualia) is an illusion. It argues that while we have the powerful impression of possessing private, non-physical mental states, these experiences are actually the result of introspective mechanisms misrepresenting brain processes. The position was popularized and named by Keith Frankish in 2016, though its roots are in the long-standing work of Daniel Dennett. Strong Illusionism denies that phenomenal consciousness exists at all; it is a total introspective error. Weak Illusionism suggests that consciousness exists but is radically different from how it appears to us.”
Dennett often felt the need to deny that he was eliminating consciousness. He starts “Why and How Does Consciousness Seem the Way it Seems?” 2015 https://open-mind.net/DOI?isbn=9783958570245 “People are often baffled by my theory of consciousness, which seems to them to be summed up neatly in the paradoxical claim that consciousness is an illusion. How could that be? Whose illusion? And would it not be a conscious illusion? What a hopeless view!”
Dennett goes on, however, to explain that “there is no double transduction in the brain” during perception. “Therefore there is no second medium, the medium of consciousness or, as I like to call this imaginary phenomenon, the MEdium. Therefore, qualia, conceived of as states of this imaginary medium, do not exist… The arrival of photons on the retina is transduced thanks to rhodopsin in the rods and cones, to yield spike trains in the optic nerve… It is still extremely tempting to imagine that vision is like television, and that those spike trains get transduced “back into subjective color and sound” and so forth, but we know better, don’t we? We don’t have to strike up the little band in the brain to play the music we hear in our minds, and we don’t have to waft molecules through the cortex to be the grounds for our savoring the aroma of bacon or strawberries. There is no second transduction.”
If brain processes are not transduced into subjective color and sound, where do subjective color and sound come from? Don’t they emerge from brain processes? It’s very plausible to believe that “consciousness arises through materialistic processes in the brain”, as Professor Coyne stated here recently. But that’s what Dennett is denying. There is no second transduction. So what happened to subjective color and sound or any other form of consciousness? “So there is no MEdium into which spike trains are transduced. Spike trains are discriminated, elaborated, processed, reverberated, reentered, combined, compared, and contrasted—but not transduced into anything else until some of them activate effectors (neuromuscular junctions, hormone releasers, and the like) which do the physical work of guiding the body through life.” Brain processes and behavior. That’s all there is, according to Dennett’s hard-core physicalism.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Four centuries after the scientific revolution took off, many people still think that the patronising, question-begging assertion of an early seventeenth century, fictitious character, who thinks the ghost he was listening to was real, is an accurate characterisation of reality.
Yes, there are many things, but reliably evidenced only on one side of this duality.
I don’t think Shakespeare meant the line to be read in the context of whether the ghost of Hamlet’s father was real or any other commentary on the supernatural. Since the ghost is depicted as a character seen by Hamlet’s friends first (and reported to Hamlet), and because the ghost gives Hamlet news that he didn’t know, and couldn’t have hallucinated, — for us in the audience this is a major reveal — the ghost is clearly intended to be a real dead guy up from Purgatory on a visitor’s visa with the straight dope. Even Horatio, who sees the ghost but worries for Hamlet’s sake that the ghost is nefarious, “knows” it is real.
The line is delivered late in the scene (I:5) after the ghost has been and gone. Horatio has been trying to get Hamlet to tell him what the (real) ghost said to him in private but Hamlet wants to keep it under his hat and dissembles a threadbare cover story which Horatio doesn’t believe. Horatio calls it “wondrous strange” that Hamlet wants him and Marcellus to swear that they will deny the event ever took place, even as the ghost back in Purgatory is talking to them (from under the stage), which is the prompt for the famous line which goes:
If “your” is stressed as it often is in modern use out of context, it does look like a put-down of Horatio’s less advanced grasp of natural science. But this doesn’t look right in context. Horatio knows the ghost is real. If it’s recited as “y’r philosophy”, as in “Ya got yer religion and then ya got yer science“, it may just mean that keeping secrets by telling lies about them is how we get on in the world. If I told you I’d have to kill you.
The line has been dragooned into supporting mind-body dualism just because it sounds good, like “Lottery in May, good harvest in September.” But why should we expect that William Shakespeare knew anything profound about the subject that we should quote him on it, out of context? As you say, of course we shouldn’t.
Then we must work harder on our imagination.
If I don’t understand it or if I can’t imagine it, then it must be some supernatural woo.
“Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and… Ow! My head hurts!”
“Even though I am a scientist and have a materialist view of the world, I still harbor the belief that I am more than just a jumble of tissues and nerves.” – Alan Lightman
He should know—especially as a scientist—that a biological organism in general and a human one in particular is anything but a mere jumble or heap of things, because it’s a naturally well-organized, well-structured physicochemical system of molecules and atoms.
This makes me think of Tourette syndrome. These People can Say or Do things their “I” explicitly rejects!. No one reaches for a second non-material soul to explain that— it’s just the material brain being messy and distributed.