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.
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.
There are meditation techniques that bring one fully into one’s body, eliminating the perceived duality that Lightman describes.
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.