IT’S one of the big questions that no one has yet answered satisfactorily.
What is the relationship between mind and the physical world?

Exploring this relationship can be fascinating, but we still conduct our
investigations in the shadow of René Descartes’s famous proposition that
mind and matter are utterly different, first put forward in the 17th century. So
powerful is the Cartesian notion that reality consists of a duality of mind and
matter, that it has proved the greatest stumbling block in the search for an
adequate theory of mind.

In Unsnarling the World-Knot, David Griffin objects to the fact that
most modern philosophers still consider only two philosophies as useful: dualism
and materialism (everything derives from the physical, including the mind).
Griffin, however, insists that we have a third choice: panexperientialism.
Experience may characterise all the units of matter.

Griffin assumes that if two types of thing are fundamentally different they
cannot interact. This is why he feels that he has to make mind and matter the
same in some respect. They are both made of “atoms of experience”.

Griffin does not fully come to terms with the fact that science has already
abandoned the narrow materialist view of bits of matter pushing each other
around. Even as early as Newton’s law of gravitation, and most obviously with
quantum physics, science has embraced the view that the world consists of
relationships (often described as laws) between different types of processes and
states.

Griffin does agree with the idea that abstract objects, such as logical
relationships, can affect our minds. Sometimes we are convinced by an argument
because it is logically valid, but validity is not a mental state. This is a
view championed by philosopher Karl Popper and Australian physiologist John
Eccles. So not only do we have mind and body, but also abstract objects such as
numbers, theories, logical relationships, plans, works of art and so on.

I fear that Griffin fails to understand Popper and Eccles when they say that
complete knowledge of how the mind affects the body is impossible. They are not
pointing to something that distinguishes the mind-body problem, but to a general
ultimate limit on understanding any causal relationship. So anybody concerned
with the mind-body problem could profit by reading Griffin. He lays out the
arguments clearly for and against considering that the fundamental units of our
world consist of experience.

Searle’s main thesis is that consciousness is a unique feature of brain processes, but not reducible to the goings-on of individual neurons, in the same sense that the transparency of water is an emergent feature of water not reducible to the features of individual water molecules.

He insists that the mind cannot be understood as simply a program running on a computer called the brain. Brains do compute, but they do more. Computers simply manipulate symbols without understanding their meaning.

Yet Searle does not always hit the target. For example, he confuses giving an explanation with giving an ultimate explanation in criticising Edelman’s contention that a brain process called “reentry mapping” gives rise to consciousness. Searle argues that, even if true, this does not tell us how the process gives rise to consciousness. But this is a higher-level question. You may explain why a ball thrown horizontally from a building reaches the ground at the same time as a ball that falls straight down by saying that the vertical acceleration due to gravity is a constant, independent of the horizontal speed. To say that one could say is to offer no criticism but only to ask for deeper, more general explanations.

Slow Reckoning by Tom Athanasiou, Secker & Warburg,
ÂŁ12.99, ISBN 0 436 20282 4

JUST as we take plumbing for granted until a burst pipe floods the house, so
we take our fundamental conceptual “plumbing” for granted until it is stressed
beyond its limit and buckles. Time to reach for the Yellow Pages and call a
philosopher. At its best, philosophy combines the poet’s vision with the
lawyer’s logical doggedness: it helps us to construct alternative conceptual
systems when those on which we rely break down.

One part of our tacit philosophy that is now breaking up is the social
contract, according to Mary Midgley in Utopias, Dolphins and Computers
(Routledge, ÂŁ17.95/$22.95, ISBN 0 415 13377 7). It needs tempering
with a vision of people in relationships bordering on the organic—ideas
with their roots in ecology—rather than as fundamentally isolated atoms in
contractual union. Other problems requiring the construction of alternative
philosophies include environmental pollution and artificial intelligence.

Midgley’s book is a clear and sustained assault on the anti-intellectualism
that proclaims: “It may be right in theory, but not in practice.” Midgley
scotches this: if an idea does not work in practice, something is wrong with the
theory. The most dangerous and self-undermining philosophy is the assumption
that there is no real philosophy, that we can exclude fundamental precepts. But
we must also be careful, Midgley warns, to weave abstract considerations back
into practical concerns.

Midgley’s philosophy will be needed as new technologies open up unforeseeable
opportunities and problems. We share a tacit assumption that few people live to
see 100. The assumptions will have to be rewritten when people live for two
hundred years. A child born when you were 25 will be 175 years old,
seven-eighths of your age, but with perhaps eight-sevenths of your wisdom.
Parents are already challenged by their children catching up with them. Perhaps,
like Boethius, they may cope successfully with adversity through philosophical
reflection.