As humans, who are we?
What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
Express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god!
Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons”.
— Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, 1994
Two very different visions of what humans are. Which is the more plausible?
As children grow up they see that the world contains other people and it contains things, such as machines. Young children are, as Paul Bloom describes, instinctive dualists. They know instinctively that there is something essentially different between people and machines.
Unlike machines, it is widely believed that people have what is variously called a spirit or a soul, to have freedom of choice (albeit limited) and to have goals and aspirations and seek to reach a high potential.
And yet, in today’s physicalist culture, it is asserted that people are nothing but complicated machines, “nothing but a pack of neurons”.
Yuval Noah Harari in his book “Homo Deus” wrote that “humans are algorithms”.
In 2014, Dick Swaab wrote a book called “We are our brains” which has been acclaimed as a No. 1 international best seller.
The title expresses a widely believed and apparently popular assertion but, if it is true, then the implications are devastating. It is also arguable whether those who make such a bold assertion actually live by it or even if it is possible to live by it.
The physicalist belief may have the advantage of simplicity and expects everything, including our minds, to be explicable by the laws of physics but it does so at the cost of ignoring many manifest observations and of denying what is most important about being human. It is, simply, not adequate.
The physicalist viewpoint only recognises things which can be measured and which are open to public observation. Subjective phenomenal experiences can neither be measured nor observed by anyone other than the one experiencing them. Therefore any attempt to explain the mind purely in terms of the physical is doomed to failure.
Moreover, if the physicalist viewpoint is taken as true, we are presented with a very bleak scenario.
Consequences of the physicalist viewpoint are:
- We have no explanation for the fact that we are conscious.
- Free will has no place in a deterministic Universe and therefore it must be an illusion.
- If we have no freedom then concepts such as “justice”, “morality”, “aspiration” and “value” are meaningless.
- Our strongly held instinct that human life has special value and that things such as slavery, racism, human trafficking etc. are wrong has no foundation if we are just packs of neurons.
- Anything which we do, anything which we achieve or aspire to in life is destined to be lost totally and absolutely.
As C. S. Lewis said:
They keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on Earth, that each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.
C. S. Lewis, “The weight of Glory” in “Screwtape proposes a toast”, Fount paperbacks 1998.
The “gospel” of physicalism is that we will all be lost forever and there is nothing we can do about it.
Fortunately, physicalism is not an observation or a prediction of science, rather it is a dogma into which the results of science are sometimes required to fit. As Keith Ward wrote:
There is no way, apart from dogmatic unbelief, to exclude both Divine and human purposive action and direction from influencing the way the real world goes.
Keith Ward, “In defence of the soul”
More details and references to various physicalist theories of mind which have been proposed can be seen here. They all share the same difficulties.
Fortunately, there are other ways of looking at reality which, although less fashionable, fit what we observe at least as well and are much more optimistic and give reason for hope.
Some Refutations of physicalism can be found, for instance here or here.
1 Ian Ravenscroft,”Philosophy of mind, a beginner's guide”, Oxford University Press, 2005,ISBN 978 0-19-925254-1
2 N. Block, “Consciousness”, in Gutenplan 1994
3. Christoffer Skogholt, “AN EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST PHYSICALISM”
4. Peter Meyer, “Physicalism: A False View of the World”
5. Peter Meyer, “Physicalism: A Pernicious Cosmology”