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Seeking God in Science Part 10.5: The Mind-Body Problem (Take 2)
Preaching the gospel of evidence, experiment and reason since 2003.
I made a big mistake in my previous entry in this series. Actually, I probably made a few dozen, not least of which was deciding to tackle this topic at all without first laying a lot more foundation. But before I give up and go back to talking about boring topics like relativity and quantum mechanics, I want to try to fix one mistake that really stands out: I set out to write about the "mind-body" problem, and then casually switched to talking about "consciousness". The irony is that I did not do this consciously. I did not deliberately decide to conflate consciousness and the mind, at least not that I can recall. I just started writing, and at some point the sentence "The Big Question I'm going to tackle here is the problem of consciousness" somehow popped onto my screen, and then mental inertia took over. It never even crossed my mind (!) that I had tacitly changed topics until I found myself arguing with Don about whether or not thermostats are conscious, and it has taken me many, many hours of post-mortem to realize — to become consciously aware of the fact — that that entire discussion can be traced back to that one sentence. Of course, "mind" and "consciousness" are not completely unrelated, but the fact that that very sentence was, in retrospect, a product of my mind but not my consciousness is ironic testimony to the fact that they are not the same thing. I feel more than a little chagrined not just for tacitly conflating them, but for taking so long to figure out that this is what I had done. The second installment in this series was an entire blog post warning about exactly this pitfall, and then I just went and stepped in it.In my defense I will say that I didn't originally intend to write about either the mind-body problem nor consciousness until much later in this series. My original plan was to lay a lot more foundation first. I was going to take at least half a dozen entries to cover classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and relativity. Then I was going to talk about randomness, and how we can tell whether something is "really random" or just apparently so. Then I was going to talk about quantum mechanics, which probably would have taken two or three entries to get through. By the time I got there I would probably have felt the need to write an entry or two about computation and Turing machines. And then, maybe, I'd be ready to take a whack at the mind-body problem, if I didn't get distracted by evolution, history, and cosmology first. (Does the past exist? Can we have reliable knowledge of the past? Yada yada yada.)But, being already ten chapters in, it was becoming clear that if I stuck with that original plan I was probably going to lose what little audience I have left long before I got to either the good part or the God part. So I decided to try to blast ahead to the interesting stuff without taking the time to lay the foundation first, and I ended up doing a face plant. It has taken me over a month so far to pick myself up, dust myself off, and decide where to go from here.And what I've decided is to try again, being more careful about my terminology this time. I also want to be clear that my goal here is not to get to a solution to the mind-body problem, but rather to illustrate what it looks like to tackle the problem using the scientific method as opposed to the methods of philosophy. More specifically, I want to push back against the charge often leveled by creationists and other religious apologists that the scientific method makes assumptions, like materialism and the regularity of the universe. It doesn't. Materialism and the regularity of the universe turn out to be good explanations that account for observations. They are not assumptions.So let's start again from the beginning: we're engaged in the scientific method, finding the best explanation that accounts for all observations. But the only observat