The key implication of materialism is that the mind is the brain. As E.O. Wilson puts it in Consilience, "the mind is the brain at work." What's actually there, in reality, is the brain, while the mind is just an outmoded way of conceptualizing the brain. It's not we who think, but our brains. Unbeknownst to Wilson, the silliness of this proposal is repeatedly revealed during his discussion of mentality. Reality exists outside our heads, while inside our heads we find "a reconstitution of reality." So, if I have a headache, and I take an aspirin, it's real when it's on my tongue but transmutes into a representation of aspirin once it's in my brain. When we go to bed at night, "Sleep descends upon the brain." What does that mean? Neurotransmission is unaffected by sleep. Those neurons don't miss a beat. The brainstem triggers sleep, but it's the person, not the brain, who actually sleeps and wakes. He asserts, in passing, that the brain produces images. Yet images, unlike material objects, can refer to things outside themselves. My image of "New York," for instance, refers to something real, something other than the image itself. Can atoms and molecules and neurons do that? Can they refer to things outside themselves? Matter is itself-- period. How do you square this implacable reality with the referential nature of thought?
As a scientist Wilson need not bother with the musings of philsophers, like Dennett, who at least has the decency to admit that materialism requires that all aspects of mentality be viewed as mere hallucinations. There's no such thing as imagery, stupid! It's imaginary! No unity of "self", no thoughts, no feelings, no autonomy or self-determination. A human being is just a randomly formed pocket of auto-hallucination. That is the logical outcome of materialism, and if it's true, then what is the fucking point of all this? What's to stop us from breeding a perfect race? As molecularly-driven virtual machines, we are in competition for scarce resources from our supercomputer brothers. If we're going to compete-- if we're going to justify our existence-- we better get that genetic "program" in optimal running order. Then we can enter into the family of perfect creation, somewhere on the ladder between programmable VCRs and self-cleaning ovens.
We need a way out of materialist reductionism without getting caught up in dualism. Mind is not the brain, and brain is not the mind. They share no common ground whatsoever. Yet each cannot exist without the other. They're like up and down or same and different. There's obviously no mind without brain, and the reverse is also true, for without special life support, the brain won't live in a vegetative state for long.
The answer to the mind-brain dilemma is that a single thing can manifest in apparently opposite ways. Every wall has two sides, and they face in opposite directions. Philosophically, the issue is simple. Language tricks us into thinking that opposites are separate, whereas, in reality, a singular thing can express in opposite ways, like temperature being expressed as hot and cold. Bergson cleared this up long ago. It's just a matter of understanding how language distorts thought. Big deal.
But can a biology be created that treats mentality and materiality as equally self-existent? Can there be a falsifiable hypothesis of life that embraces mentality, that lends objectivity to subjectiveness? If so, we would have a scientific basis for a politics that treats being human, no matter how imperfect we are, as intrinsically good. The intrinsic worth of human life-- and nature in general-- is what Marray fails to understand, despite his outward disapproval of eugenics.
I think such a biology came into existence in the 20th century, but it's been flying under the radar for years. It's as much hidden from public perception as leftist political analysis. It originated with the concept of "morphogenetic fields," put forth independently by three biologists in the early 20s. C.H. Waddington was a big proponent of "form-giving" fields. Indeed they are totally accepted by mainstream biology, but only heuristically. Fields are just a particularly effective way of conceptualizing organic activity. They're metaphors. But in the 70s a biochemist at Cambridge, Rupert Sheldrake, began discussing with his colleagues the possibility that fields are real and that they both reflect and maintain the form of organic structures at all levels of complexity within and beyond the individual body. This view is not universally dismissed by biologists, who know better than anyone else the grave problems of demonstrating that the body could even conceivably function on a strictly mechanistic basis. Sheldrake proposed his "hypothesis of formative causation" in his 1981 book, A New Science of Life.
Sheldrake concludes that the field model makes sense only if morphogenetic fields are able to resonate with similar fields from the past. In other words, memory does not require material conveyance. So, for instance, our own personal memories do not have to be conveyed from the past into the present through a kind of neural recording. Sheldrake asserts that the brain does not contain memories. Indeed the idea that the brain is a recording device has never got beyond the level of pure speculation. The same goes for species memory. So far as we know, DNA does not record the hereditary information of the species. There's never been a scrap of evidence for the existence of a material blueprint of the body within the body. DNA determines individuating characteristics, things like eye color and the quality of your eyesight, but does that mean it contains a blueprint of the eye itself? Not at all. This is just an assumption. That the body is matter and matter alone is simply an article of faith. To the true-believers, there cannot be self existing fields of information (minds) which resonate with the past (memory).
E.O. Wilson is so confident in his faith that he quotes Whitehead in support of his theory of consilience. He assumes that since Whitehead believed in the unity of nature, he must have reduced life to physics. In fact, Whitehead's consilience was exactly the opposite of Wilson's. As he wrote in Science and the Modern World (1925), "Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms." Not long ago this kind of thinking was perfectly acceptable. There was a much greater sense that we don't know for sure what's going on, and radical views should be taken as seriously as common ones. The unreflective and even pathological fixation on matter (mommy) and its submission to strict mechanistic control (daddy) didn't really become ingrained until the mid to late 20th century. We forget how much more open the intellectual atmosphere was in the early years of this century. It wasn't always so bleak that people like Wilson and Murray could count on total agreement among respectable people regarding their toxic, underlying assumptions.
--Ted