Tying My Boot Laces, And Moving On

Academic philosophers wrestle over questions like What is beauty? What is truth? What is good? What is being? I must admit that as a student I enjoyed reading, thinking, and writing about these things.

In fact, I once firmly argued that there would never be a solid answer to any such philosophical questions.

And thanks to modern science, one philosophical question seems a lot closer to being put to rest: are mind and body separate things?

Scientists can pretty much show a link between a specific thought and a specific circuit in the brain. They can even evoke that thought by engaging that circuit. They can even look inside someone else’s brain and correctly indicate whether that person is having that thought.

Yup, they’re pretty much able to say it: the mind is not separate from the body. Subjective experience derives from physicality; it is nothing, in any tangible way, other than physiology.

However, the funny thing is that for serious philosophers of mind, the problem hasn’t gone away at all. They still say, “But my experience of me is still be separate; you can’t show me my experience of me”. And even if we could cut open their brain and hold a mirror just like in a dentist’s office so they could see what we’re looking at and say to them “look, there it is; that’s you right there," they would still say, “but that’s just the physical correlate, what about my sense of me!”

Ah. That’s the spirit.

And they would go on and on.

A mathematician and otherwise pretty all 'round smart guy named Godel came up with a mathematical proof that no mathematical system can prove itself. That, I think, is, at the least, a metaphor for why this particular wrestling match will never end.

“You can’t pick yourself up by your own bootstraps”, as others have said. The problem is built right into the limitations of our three-dimensions-plus-time consciousness. We can’t get out of the box, to see the box. Ever.

I love the notion put forth by Harvard Psychologist J.P. Mitchell, that mind is a set of “algorithms by which one set of physical actions is mapped onto a different set of physical actions by the brain.” I interpret this as a response to those philosophers, “you are a projection, just like the stuff on a movie screen is a projection.”

There is nobody up there. Let's just move on.