An eloquent argument against (literally!) mindless pop culture

At Big Questions Online (July 9, 2010) David Bentley Hart reviewed Marilynne Robinson's new book Absence of Mind, a blockbuster slam at reductionism:

Robinson

The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets are all the major schools of reductionism (Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism), but also all the currently popular champions of the reductionist cause (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and so on). It is, in simple terms, a robust defense of the dignity and irreducible mystery of human conscience, personal identity, and self-awareness; and, as such, it is a stirring success.

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Robinson’s central argument is, I think it fair to say, more or less indisputable — or, at least, it should be. It may be fashionable in certain circles, and very desirable for ideological reasons, to insist that our normal experience of consciousness is in some sense an illusion, begotten by one or another set of pre-conscious, purely material forces, which have merely dissembled themselves as personal motives, transcendental aspirations, moral principles, altruism, and so on. And it may well be the case that the “discourses of suspicion” that make these claims have spread wide enough through popular culture to have become a kind of tacit cultural orthodoxy. But, as Robinson acutely observes, there is one great problem that bedevils all the magisterial reductionist approaches to the mind, whether they be sociobiological, neurobiological, psychological, economic, or what have you: simply enough, all of them consistently prove extravagantly inadequate to what any scrupulous, unprejudiced examination of the complexity of consciousness actually reveals.

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In the end, perhaps the most penetrating question Robinson asks in regard to all the modern schools of suspicion is, simply enough: why? That is, if purely material, purely selfish impulses underlie all those behaviors we mistake for selfless altruism or spiritual longing or magnanimity or self-outpouring love, why do they so utterly invert themselves in our conscious minds? Why do they dissimulate themselves as the very opposite of what they are? Let us assume that the conscious mind, with all of its ambiguities and mysteries and abyssal sense of identity, is nothing but the illusory and superficial epiphenomenon of some hidden, unitary, primordial, and amoral material impulse towards survival. Very well, then, but why would it have to hide this fact? Surely it would have no need to deceive itself so elaborately, or to conceal its own genetic interests from itself, unless it already possessed some kind of moral sensitivity to the shame of selfishness. What, then, is that moral self that is there “before” the Darwinian self, whose conscience must be appeased, needing to believe that it is moved by altruism or disinterested love?

There are any number of forced answers that can be and have been made to this question, but none of them is particularly compelling.

Neuroscience: Reducing minds to brains a deep dark rabbit hole?

At Medical Humanities blog, we read of a new paper in Neuroethics critiquing reductionism in neuroscience: Abstract:

Abstract:
Arguments for the importance of neuroscience reach across many disciplines. Advocates of neuroscience have made wide-ranging claims for neuroscience in the realms of ethics, value, and law. In law, for example, many scholars have argued for an increased role for neuroscientific evidence in the assessment of criminal responsibility. In this article, we take up claims for the explanatory role of neuroscience in matters of morals and law. Drawing on our previous work together, we assess the cogency of neuroscientific explanations of three issues that arise in these domains: rule following, interpretation, and knowledge. We critique these explanations and in general challenge claims as to the efficacy of the neuroscientific accounts.

Keywords: rule following, interpretation, knowledge, ethics, morals, mens rea, insanity, lie detection, deception

Accepted Paper Series

Here's a Medical Humanities discussion:

If in fact the mind is not the brain -- with which I absolutely agree -- then a very large portion of neuroscientific practice is immediately headed down a long, dark rabbit hole. But note again my insistence that the proposition that the mind is not (merely) the brain hardly means neuroscience itself is infirm or weak. Quite the contrary; as Pardo and Patterson emphasize, there is still a great deal of important work to be done on the brain that can best be demonstrated through neuroscientific methods. But the work is just that -- on the brain, and the constant leap from brain to mind cannot be sustained, if Pardo and Patterson are correct. The consequence is not that neuroscience is unimportant or not worth doing, but simply that neuroscientific modalities are not totalizing; they cannot explain or account for all of what it means to be conscious, to have mind, and ultimately, to be a person.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose