In his 1991 book *The Science of Mind*, the philosopher Owen Flanagan noted that some modern scientists and philosophers have suggested that consciousness might never be completely explained in conventional scientific terms - or in any terms, for that matter. Flanagan dubbed these modern doubters "the new mysterians", after the 1960s rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians. (The term did not originate with the rock band: *The Mysterians*, a low-budget Japanese film about an alien invasion, was released in 1959).
In defending their position, mysterians often borrow a line of reasoning from Noam Chomsky. The MIT linguist has distinguished between *problems*, which seem solvable at least in principle through conventional scientific methods, and *mysteries*, which seem insoluble even in principle. Chomsky noted that all organisms have certain capacities and limitations that result from their particular biology. Thus, a rat might learn how to navigate a maze that reuqires it to turn right at every juncture or to alternate between right and left: but no rat will ever learn to navigate a maze that requires it to turn left at every juncture corresponding to prime numbers. That talent exceeds its cognitive capabilities. In the same way, certain problems addressed by science may lie forever beyond our capacity for understanding. These are mysteries, now and forever.
Chomsky has impled in various writings that he considers consiousness, free will, and other aspects of the mind to be mysteries. Yet in a conversation with me, Chomsky once took issue with a fundamental tenet of the mysterian position. "There is no such thing as the mind-body problem," Chomsky asserted. "For there to be a mind-body problem there has to be some characterisation of body, and Newton eliminated the last conception of body anybody had." Newton, Chomsky explained, is supposedly the progenitor of the mechanistic, materialist worldview that gave rise to the mind-body problem. But Newton's own theory of gravity, which showed that objects can influence each other in non-mechanistic ways, actually *shattered* the materialist worldview.
Materialism, Chomsky elaborated, presupposes that the world consists of objects that interact through direct contact with each other. But Newton, by discovering gravity - action at a distance - showed that materialism doesn't work even for a phenomenon as simple as a ball rolling down a plane. The world consists not of material objects influencing each other through direct contact but of immaterial *properties*. These properties include gravity, electomagnetism, and yes, consciousness. "It's an interesting element of the human irrationality, that people continue to talk about the mind-body problem," Chomsky said. "I should say I haven't convinced a lot of people."
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