Author: Bill Vallicella

 Christof Koch:

I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.

Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.

No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.

It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.

Koch is telling us that there is no body-mind dualism, no dualism of substances, but also, presumably, no dualism of properties either. There is no problem about how brain activity gives rise to consciousness. There is no problem because there is no gap that need to be bridged.  "It's just how you look at it."  We can view consciousness from the inside and from the outside.  From the inside  consciousness is experience; from the outside it is synapses, sodium ions, voltage differentials, neurons: the objective items studied by physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, biology and all cognate disciplines.

So one 'thing' — consciousness — can be viewed in two very different ways. Hence a monism of subject-matter, but a dualism of perspectives upon that one subject-matter.  The dualism is epistemic, not ontic.  It may seem that what Koch is urging is a neutral monism according to which consciousness is neither mental nor physical but some third thing or stuff.  But I don't think that that is what Koch is saying. He says,"consciousness is really physics from the inside." That's a sloppy way of saying that consciousness is just physical reality as known from the first-person point of view.  What he is saying, then,  is that consciousness is material in nature, and exhaustively understandable in terms of physics, chemistry, etc.  Thus the view from the inside and the view from the outside access the same reality, and that reality is physical, not mental.  There are no mental substances or properties in reality; mental talk is merely a subjective way of talking about what alone is objectively real, namely matter. 

But here is the problem:  the subjective side of experience is entirely unlike the objective, physical side, and it too is real.  If I kick you in the testicles, the pain you feel is undeniably real; it is no illusion, and it is impossible to be mistaken about it.  What's more, the sensation has phenomenological features it would make no sense to ascribe to brain processes and states, and vice versa: the latter have electro-chemical features that it would make no sense to ascribe to pain sensations.  

If at this point you insist that the felt pain is identical to the brain state/process, then you have said something unintelligible that violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. You have said something 'theological.' Compare: "this man, born in Bethlehem, who died on Calvary, is identical to the immortal creator of the universe.'  You have said something that beggars understanding.

At this point one could take a mysterian line: "Look, it is just true that the felt pain is a brain state; it is true whether we find it intelligible or not."  Alternatively, one could go eliminativist and deny that there is any felt pain.  Of these two approaches, the eliminativist one is surely absurd in that it denies the very datum that gave rise to the problem in the first place. 

But I rather doubt that a scientist would want to go mysterian. The point of science is to eliminate mysteries, not confess them.  The point of science is to demystify the world, to render it intelligible to us, not to pronounce the ignorabimus.

If we are neither eliminativist nor mysterian, then I think intellectual honesty requires us to admit that the so-called 'hard problem' is both a genuine problem and that it is indeed hard, even if we are unwilling to pronounce it insoluble.

So it is not "just how you look at it."  The subjective side of experience is undeniably real and not identifiable with anything  the objectifying sciences study.  Koch is blind to the depth of the problem, and his 'solution' is bogus.

More later on the interaction business.  

Article here.