#868 Reading the Mind off the Brain

Dr. craig’s response

It’s so interesting that your reflections on the nature of consciousness should lead you to question your belief in materialism, Richard, and perhaps eventually lead you to embrace the reality of the immaterial soul and the existence of God, the Ultimate Mind.

The mystery of consciousness is an unsolved enigma for materialism. Jerry Fodor remarks, “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.”[1] One thinks as well of Daniel Dennett’s oft-quoted crack, “The trouble with brains, it seems, is it when you look in them, you discover that there’s nobody home.” [2]

Eliminative and reductive materialism are increasingly unpopular views.[3] The assertion of eliminative materialists that we have no conscious states is so contrary to experience as to be absurd. The claim of reductive materialists that states of consciousness are identical to brain states is not much better. For the reduction of conscious states to brain states cannot do justice to the inherent uniqueness of our states of consciousness. My colleague J. P. Moreland, who has spent most of his life studying mind/brain problems, draws our attention to three distinctive features of consciousness:

Physical states are not characterized by this sort of subjectivity but can be described only objectively. There are no qualia associated with being a neuron or a synaptic firing, brain states are publicly available states and are not directly accessible or incorrigibly known, and brain states have no point of view. Considerations like these rightly lead Rutgers University philosopher Dean Zimmerman to confess that he finds property dualism—the thesis that the mental properties of persons are distinct from their physical properties— “utterly compelling,” independently of any reason to accept a dualism of soul and body.[5]

It seems to me, moreover, that even non-reductive materialists ought to be very discomfited by the attribution of such states of consciousness to the brain. Zimmerman explains that non-reductive materialists believe that the mental and physical attributes of persons are independent in the way that color and shape are; despite being distinct properties, they are attributes of a single thing consisting entirely of ordinary matter—in our case, a human body or brain.[6] But it seems like a category mistake to ascribe mental properties to the brain. The brain is not jubilant, the brain is not embarrassed, the brain is not afraid, the brain is not in pain, even though the brain is involved in the neural circuitry that gives us such experiences. Neither does the brain have a subjective perspective or direct access to itself that no one else has. Thus non-reductive materialism no more succeeds in offering a plausible account of the subject of consciousness than eliminativism or reductive materialism.

Which brings us to your question: what about studies able to discern what “subjects were thinking about based on brain scans”? So-called “localization studies” map mental states to various regions or structures of the brain. If a researcher could tell what a person is thinking from such a third-person description of the state of the brain, would that imply that it is the brain itself, not the soul, which is the bearer of these mental states? Not at all, for such experiments would demonstrate at most correlations between states of the soul and states of the brain. This is hardly news! Stephen Evans points out,

Evans’ remarks bring to mind the illustration of dualism-interactionism offered by Sir John Eccles, the Nobel prize-winning neurologist: just as a pianist uses a piano as an instrument to make music, so the mind uses the brain as an instrument for thought. If the piano is damaged or out of tune, the pianist, despite his ability as a musician, will not be able to produce beautiful music; and if the brain is damaged in some way, the mind’s ability to think will be similarly impaired.[8]

Nancey Murphy, herself a non-reductive materialist, admits, “it is important to note that this evidence will never amount to proof: it will always be possible for the dualist to claim that these functions belong to the mind, and that mental events are merely correlated with events and particular regions of the brain.”[9] Even if a scientist could tell what someone is thinking by scanning his brain, the researcher would not have the qualia of the experience or immediate access to those conscious states that the patient does—in fact, in order to know whether his scans were correct, he would have to ask the patient for his first-person report!

If you’re interested in pursuing these questions further, Richard, let me commend to you J. P. Moreland’s Consciousness and the Existence of God (New York: Routledge, 2008), or his chapters on the mind/body dualism in our Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.