The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World [Paperback]

Colin Mcginn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2000

In recent years the nature of consciousness—our immediately known experiences—has taken its place as the most profound problem that science faces. Now in this brilliant and thoroughly accessible new book Colin McGinn takes a provocative position on this perplexing problem. Arguing that we can never truly "know" consciousness—that the human intellect is simply not equipped to unravel this mystery—he demonstrates that accepting this limitation in fact opens up a whole new field of investigation. In elegant prose, McGinn explores the implications of this Mysterian position—such as the new value it gives to the power of dreams and introspection—and challenges the reader with intriguing questions about the very nature of our minds and brains.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You have a piece of meat in your head called a brain. You also have perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and ideas, which scientists assert are related in some fashion to that piece of meat. How can this be? Philosopher Colin McGinn looks at this question in depth in The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, a slim, accessible book that presents a novel answer: we'll never know. We can look at the brain from outside, and look at our consciousness from within, but never the twain shall meet.

Not at all defeatist in tone, The Mysterious Flame rejects strict materialism and dualism, which seek to solve the mind-body problem in fairly unsatisfactory ways, and claims instead that our intelligence is not an appropriate tool to use for understanding the interface between subjective experience and material reality. (And, unfortunately, we don't have anything better.) Instead of bemoaning our fate, McGinn turns the traditional questions around and asks "What can we know about ourselves?" This is just as interesting as any question being asked by philosophers of the mind, and in fact seems to merit a higher priority. Whether McGinn's arguments will succeed in the marketplace of ideas is an open question, but they certainly deserve the attention of anyone interested in the nature of human thought. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Although its roots reach back to ancient Greece, the mind-body problem has bedeviled Western philosophers particularly since the time of the rationalist suppositions of Descartes in the 17th century. As knowledge of neurophysiology and brain function increase, questions about the nature of human consciousness also multiply. McGinn (Ethics, Evil and Fiction), a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, explores the relationship between the brain and the mind in a witty style. The authors analysis of the classical philosophical answers and conundrums emanating from this problem (dualism, epiphenomenalism, materialism, supernaturalism) are made easy to understand for the lay reader. Pushing reason, logic and experience to their limits, McGinn concludes that, ultimately, the essence of mind and the meaning of consciousness lie beyond the capability of the minds trying to define and comprehend them. Yet, he says, in accepting the limitations of thought about thought, we may find unlikely intellectual solace in inexplicable mystery. This is no pessimistic tract. McGinn asserts that acknowledging the frustrating boundaries of reason about reason frees the thinker to explore those areas of human intelligence that are open to our understanding. Except for his distracting habit of defaulting the third-person personal pronoun to the feminine, McGinn makes his case eloquently, with literary examples drawn from areas as diverse as biology, astrophysics and science fiction. Susan Rabiner Literary Agency.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 26, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465014232
• ISBN-13: 978-0465014231
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #668,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Do we have souls?, January 12, 2004

By 

David H Miller "rothbardianphysicist" (Sacramento, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World (Paperback)

Colin McGinn's central claim in this brilliant and fascinating book is that the "question of the relationship of mind and body is perfectly genuine, but our minds are not equipped to solve it, rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory..." On that central claim, McGinn fails to make his case.

The fundamental problem is that McGinn's concept of an adequate solution is simply too demanding: "The solution would also, I think, have to take the form of a statement of what consciousness is, and that statement would have to be conceptually necessary...It would have to be as obvious that consciousness could arise from the brain as it is obvious that bachelors are unmarried males."

That is too high a demand to place on scientific theories: even our best theories in physics (relativity, quantum field theory, etc.) come nowhere near reaching such an elevated bar.

And yet, in explaining lucidly and in detail why it is so hard to come up with any sort of reasonable speculation as to how the mind and brain are related, McGinn does shed a great deal of light on the basic issue.

McGinn explains the fundamental problem: "Suppose I know everything about your brain of a neural kind: I know its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments. I even know the position of every atom and its subatomic structure. I know everything that the materialist says your mind is. Do I thereby know everything about your mind? It certainly seems not. On the contrary I know nothing about your mind. I know nothing about which conscious states you are in -- whether you are morose or manic, for example -- and what these states feel like to you. So knowledge of your brain does not give me knowledge of your mind."

As a Ph.D. in theoretical physics myself, I will attest that McGinn is absolutely right. It is not just that physics has not yet succeeded in elucidating the nature of consciousness; rather, it is that, in constructing all of our theories in physics to date, we physicists have intentionally chosen to eschew any whiff of the "interior" perspective provided by consciousness and have only allowed the exterior perspective of materialism to enter into the structure of our theories. We've done this for very good reasons, of course -- it has worked wonderfully in explaining the physical world, and we've figured that the issue of consciousness and its interior perspective is someone else's problem.

McGinn argues that to understand consciousness this perspective of physics simply must be widened (and he doubts we humans have the mental power to do the widening): in his words, "My thesis is that consciousness depends upon an unknowable natural property of the brain...It follows that physics, construed as the general science of matter, is incomplete, because the general properties of matter that the brain exploits to produce consciousness are currently unknown." He even speculates that there is some humanly unfathomable dimensional structure to space-time and matter that leads to consciousness.

Maybe.

But I think McGinn underestimates how well we physicists understand the structure of molecules, atoms, and the electrons, protons, and neutrons of which they are comprised. We know how these things work to an almost unbelievable level of accuracy in a wide variety of situations. Physically, the brain is just a straightforward aqueous solution, no more complex at the level of elementary particles than a can of chicken soup.

It's hard to believe there is important missing physics there.

Indeed, we physicists have for several decades actually been following McGinn's advice to explore extra trans-dimensional space-time structures of all sorts (e.g., the currently popular ten and eleven-dimensional superstring and super-p-brane theories). We still see no hint of the "interior" perspective provided by consciousness.

McGinn is right that physics does not explain consciousness; there is no sign that his own ideas or any other ideas can expand physics so as to encompass consciousness. What is missing must therefore be something non-physical: to put it provocatively, we must have souls (not necessarily immortal ones, sad to say).

The conclusion seems obvious from McGinn's argument, but McGinn rejects it, mainly by pointing out that it raises some questions to which he has no good answers. And yet, the best defense of this "dualist" thesis I have seen is by...Colin McGinn! In a brilliant essay, "Consciousness and Cosmology," published in 1993 in Davies" and Humphreys' "Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays," McGinn offers a breathtakingly convincing case for a mental realm distinct from the realm of matter. In that essay, he explains that he is simply offering a picture of what a mind-body dualism would be like if it were really true, but that he himself does not really accept that it is in fact correct.

Yet, the speculative dualism of his 1993 essay seems more solid, more akin to normal scientific theories, that the airy trans-dimensional pseudo-physical speculations offered in "The Mysterious Flame." I am tempted to believe that McGinn himself knows this but found it more professionally prudent to present the obvious conclusions of his arguments as mere speculations in the 1993 essay.

Space prevents discussion of the other brilliant and provocative ideas McGinn tosses out in this book. Although I think his central thesis that humans can never understand the nature of consciousness is mistaken, any scientist who wishes to prove McGinn wrong by actually producing such an explanation of consciousness would do well to familiarize himself with McGinn's work.

"The Mysterious Flame" should surely be read together with McGinn's 1993 essay, "Consciousness and Cosmology." The two together comprise the most readable, insightful discussion of the mind-body problem which I have yet had the pleasure to read.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Milestone Achievement in the Philosophy of Consciousness!, October 20, 1999

By 

B. Bronczyk (Harleysville, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World (Hardcover)

Nearly all of the texts I've read concerning the subject of consciousness are marred by their overtones of scientific hubris; they invoke symbol manipulation and algorithmic, multi-track neurochemical processes as the ultimate explanations for the hidden substrate of our introspective awareness. Now, along comes Colin McGinn with a carefully reasoned, head-clearing breath of philosophic fresh air. His analyses of "cognitive closure" (namely, that evolution has not furnished our minds with the faculties necessary to solve the mind-body problem) and the non-spatial character of spatial awareness are both incisive and humbling. McGinn takes a firm stand in declaring consciousness to be grounded in the material world. Yet, as can be seen in his discussions of free will and death, he refuses to interpret this fact in a reductionistic or fatalistic fashion: we simply do not - and never will - have the capacity to understand how "meat" can be conscious. In reading "The Mysterious Flame," I was struck particularly by McGinn's brevity, clarity, and persuasiveness in presenting his arguments as well as his sparing use of jargon (although his text does tend to be repetitive at times). The reader also comes away with a sense of McGinn's intriguing personality and foibles (he's obviously a fan of science fiction). Of all the books I've read on this subject, and I have read many - including one with the rather pompous title "Consciousness Explained", this one was easily the best.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The mystery of the flame, July 3, 2009

By 

Ashtar Command "Seeker" (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World (Paperback)

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher who specializes in the question of consciousness. He is also a great fan of science fiction, which occasionally shines through even in his philosophical writings. In "The Mysterious Flame", he mentions space aliens on every other page, and turns out to have a bad crush on the Star Trek character Seven of Nine (Colin, really!). In another text, he is kidnapped by aliens who turn out to be Platonists!

"The Mysterious Flame" is a popularized and surprisingly easy read. I say surprisingly easy, since philosophy texts on the question of consciousness are often extremely technical, difficult and down-right boring. This is the only exception I've seen so far. The New York Times probably had a point when they said that McGinn's text is the best introduction to the problem of consciousness. Yet, it should be noted that the book isn't neutral. It's fiercely partisan towards McGinn's own perspective on the matter. In many ways, his views resemble those of John Searle. The major difference is that McGinn doesn't believe the question of consciousness will ever be conclusively solved. He therefore calls his position "mysterian".

What makes consciousness such a vexing issue is obvious: thoughts and feelings aren't material objects. They have no extension in space, and can't be pinpointed to a specific location. Also, they are intensely subjective. You can't probe somebody else's consciousness (or know how it feels to be a bat). Despite its non-material character, consciousness is nevertheless connected to a material object: the brain. How is this even possible? How can a lump of material tissue give rise to non-material thoughts, feelings and meanings? This is the mind-body problem, also known as "the hard problem".

McGinn rejects the two standard answers to the problem: materialism and dualism. "Materialism" as defined by McGinn is a reductionist form of materialism, which attempts to show that consciousness really isn't non-material. The mental is identical to the material. Thoughts and feelings are brain states. That they feel non-material is an illusion. Dualism takes the opposite tack: the mental and the material look so different, because they *are* different. The mental comes from another dimension of reality, and isn't necessarily connected to the brain at all. Dualism is most common in religious forms, and connected to ideas about humans having an immortal soul that leaves the body at death, but one can imagine a purely secular form of dualism as well. McGinn spends several chapters debating dualism and other seemingly outlandish philosophies (panpsychism, "total mentalism"), while his discussion of reductionist materialism is very brief. Somehow, McGinn seems fascinated by the notion that the mental, or consciousness itself, is independent of our physical existence. In the end, however, he rejects it together with reductionism.

McGinn's preferred position is that consciousness is rooted in the brain, and that our thoughts, feelings and desires are caused by material processes in the brain. Consciousness cannot be reduced to brain states in the sense of being identical with them, but it nevertheless emerges from brain states. (I always considered this to be a trivial position, but apparently it's controversial among philosophers!) However, McGinn also believes that we will never know exactly how the brain produces consciousness. Our minds aren't properly equipped to grasp their own inner nature. Consciousness is of necessity first person: we can see other people's brains, but we can't see other people's consciousness. Conversely, we can introspectively probe our own consciousness, but nothing in it tells us what material process gave rise to it. We are, in McGinn's phrase, cognitively closed.

McGinn further argues that we can't even know everything there is to know about our own consciousness. Not even introspection will reveal its deep structure, the essence of our own minds. We can't even explain what it means to have a self! And since we can't do this, we will never be able to guess what biological processes gave rise to consciousness.

The main problem with McGinn's position is, of course, that if we can't know the cause of the mind, the cause might very well be materialist or even dualist! How are we to tell? Dualism in its strong form cannot explain why mind and matter are correlated at all. In its weaker form, however, dualism is more difficult to argue against. A "weak" dualist could argue that a brain is necessary to create consciousness by bringing together material and mental elements. This would explain the correlation between mind and matter in the brain, while still considering them to be fundamentally different properties of the world. The argument against such a dualism would simply be that it doesn't really explain anything, since we still don't know *how* the brain makes consciousness out of mental and material properties. But then, dualism and "mysterianism" are equally mysterian! McGinn's main argument against dualism is that mental and material states in the brain are just too perfectly correlated. Dualism in any form is therefore unlikely. But if we are cognitively closed, how can we know for sure? There is a certain tension in the book between "mysterianism" (which should be strictly agnostic) and the emergent materialism I take is McGinn's "real" position.

McGinn also discusses whether robots can be conscious. He reaches the conclusion that they cannot be. Consciousness isn't simply a computer program. A computational program can only simulate intelligence. Actually, it's unintelligent. A robot who speaks Italian just because its been programmed that way, doesn't really understand Italian. (Think of a parrot that mimics human speech!) It's a mindless zombie, even if it says all the right things. For a robot to be really conscious, it would have to have a brain with the right properties for consciousness, but its precisely these properties we don't know about, and probably never will know about. Besides, whatever property makes us conscious, it's probably organic. Consciousness arising from a metallic brain is, while not intrinsically impossible, at least highly improbable.

"The Mysterious Flame" might strike readers new to the subject as defeatist. Shouldn't scientists and philosophers attempt to find a solution to these and other problems? Shouldn't we, to quote Star Trek, boldly go where no man (or Andorian) has ever gone before? Such people might be surprised to hear that philosophy at least since the time of Hume and Kant, have been as much preoccupied with telling us what we *can't* know. Knowing the limits of our knowledge might, after all, do us some good!

And if Colin McGinn is right, we will never solve the problem of the mysterious flame...