The absurdity of mind as machine

I've just read this article:

The absurdity of mind as machine

 

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The author David Bentley Hart I personally don't always find easy to follow, he needs to make his ideas easier to understand. But what he says in this essay is excellent. He says:

[C]onsciousness, uniquely, is not a third-person phenomenon available to objective description; it is first-person all the way down. And yet it is an indispensable prejudice of the modern method that a verifiable scientific description must be an entirely third-person narrative of structural and causal connections and correspondences. On principle, it is precisely the first-person perspective that must be subdued, and even ideally banished from our investigations, in order for a properly “scientific” account to emerge from observation and experiment and theory. Any remainder of the pure subjective constitutes only an area of unintelligibility. And this, needless to say, becomes a fairly intractable difficulty when the phenomenon under investigation happens to be subjectivity as such. The problem is one not merely of appropriate scientific technique, but one of logic.

He’s saying we only know consciousness from within. But science can only ever deal with what we can observe, measure and quantify. So any attempt to make our consciousness fit in with science cannot in principle be achieved. And I agree.

For a truly scientific view of reality, it came to be believed, everything—even mind—must be reducible to one and the same mechanics of motion.

Hence, we have an impasse. Many people believe that due to the astonishing success of science and the technology it has spawned, that it must provide a complete description of reality, including consciousness. But, it cannot in principle explain consciousness, at least not while science deals only with the measurable quantifiable aspects of reality.

But nevertheless, this impossibility is ignored by academics, they are convinced we are machines. But as Bentley points out:

Yet machines do not think; neither do they experience anything; they are composites of inert parts extrinsically organized to perform functions imposed upon them from without by beings who do think and experience things, and nothing more.

We create machines to carry out a purpose that we impose. So, unlike us, such a purpose is not intrinsic to it.

Bentley adds:

This is the special absurdity of allowing an artificial method appropriate to certain isolated questions to hypertrophy into a universal judgment on all of reality, including those of its aspects to which such a method cannot possibly apply. I have known even trained physicists, who should know better, who speak as if Laplace was correct, and that a superlatively intelligent demon who knew all the present dispositions of the atoms composing the universe could infallibly predict—from the bottom up—all future events, including my actions at this moment. But this is nonsense. To whatever degree I am a physical system, I am also an intentional “system” whose mental events take the forms of semeiotic (symbolic, interpretive) determinations, and whose actions are usually the consequences of intentions that are irreducibly teleological. As such, these intentions could appear nowhere within a reductive account of the discrete processes composing me as a physical event; final causes or intentional are not visible within any inventory of the impersonal antecedent physical events composing me. Simply said, I have reasons for acting, and act according to reasons. The obvious physicalist riposte to this, of course, is to claim that all intentionality is in some sense illusory, or reducible to complex electrochemical brain events, which are in turn reducible to molecular description, and then to atomic description, and so on. But that too is obviously false (though that argument must be deferred for now).

When I decide to get up out of bed in the morning, physical forces do not suffice. I have to intend to move my body, to make a conscious effort. Our behaviour, including everything we say, is directed towards an end. Quite unlike the impersonal alleged forces within chemistry and physics.

This is why, among devout philosophical physicalists, such wild extremes as eliminativist reductionism and the materialist version of panpsychism are ever more in vogue.

Yes, the only way to square consciousness with a complete scientific description of reality is to deny the very existence of consciousness.