A Pack of Neurons

I noted in an earlier post that there are two kinds of materialists, those who believe that consciousness can be explained in purely physical terms as a brain function and those who believe that it can't be reduced to a material or brain process and who conclude that conscious experiences must therefore be an illusion.

Biologist Jerry Coyne is an example of the latter sort. Coyne once wrote that “many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” By "us" he meant atheistic materialists (A-Mats, for short).

For Coyne materialism entails that if something cannot be explained in terms of physical matter - atoms and molecules, energy and forces - then it doesn't really exist. Matter is the only substance. Mind is not a substance at all but is rather just a word we use to describe what the brain does, just like we use the word digestion to describe what the stomach does. Since consciousness has resisted all attempts to explain it in terms of material substance, it must, A-Mats of Coyne's stripe conclude, be an illusion.

In this belief Coyne follows in the steps of Nobel Laureate Francis Crick who once wrote that,

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

But if Crick and Coyne are correct and we're just a pack of neurons with their associated chemical reactions why should we believe that what they're telling us is itself anything other than a neuronal illusion? Why should we think that the neuronal illusions they're communicating to us about the human self are true? After all, chemical reactions are not true or false. Electrons whizzing along neurons are neither true nor false. Where does truth come from if all we are experiencing is an illusion generated by our brain.

It has been said that there's no idea so nonsensical that some philosopher somewhere doesn't believe it. The idea that when you experience pain you're really not having an experience at all but are, in fact, having the illusion of pain is an excellent example. The illusion of pain, if that's what it is, is still an experience of pain.

The award for the most amusing and succinct criticism of Coyne's version of materialism, perhaps, should go to a commenter at Uncommon Descent who submitted this ditty:

There once was an A-Mat named Deal,
Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,
When I sit on a pin,
And it goes all the way in,
I dislike what I imagine I feel.”

It seems obvious, at least to many philosophers, that in order to deny that one is having conscious experience one must be having conscious experience. Yet some wish to deny it, largely, I think, because they fear that to acknowledge the existence of a non-material substance in their ontology is to take several steps out onto the slippery slope that leads them to theism. It's astonishing the lengths to which one will go to avoid that conclusion.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga illustrates this sort of adamantine recalcitrance with a story about a man who had become convinced that he was actually dead. He went to the doctor and told the doctor that he was a dead man. Nothing the doctor said could persuade him otherwise.

Finally, the doctor asked him if he knew that when one was dead they no longer bleed. The man agreed that this was so, and the doctor promptly stuck a needle in the man's finger and pointed to the drop of blood that began to ooze from the puncture. "See," the doctor exclaimed, "you're bleeding!" To which the man replied, "Gosh, I guess dead men do bleed after all."