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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Do we have souls?, January 12, 2004
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.
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