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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.
