Under pressure, of course, a soul—a set of principles—may partly fold. What might have seemed “incompressible” may in fact yield to greed, fame, vanity, corruption, fear, torture, or whatever. In this way, “soul” can be broken. Orwell’s novel 1984 gives a vivid description of the mechanics of soul breaking. People who are brainwashed by cults or terrorist groups that hold them captive for long periods of time can lose the global coherence of drives so carefully compressed over years into their neurons. And yet there is a kind of resilience, a tendency to return to some sort of “resting position”—the central soul, the innermost core—even after horrendous, grueling episodes. This could be called “homeostasis of the spirit.”
Let us move to a jollier note. Imagine a soul-free universe, a mechanistic universe with nary a speck of free will or consciousness to be found not a perceiver anywhere. This universe might be deterministic or might be filled with arbitrary, random, capricious, and causeless events. It is law-governed enough, though, that stable structures can emerge and evolve. In this universe, then, are swarming many distinct, tightly knit, self-sufficient little objects, each one with an internal representation system of enough complexity as to engender a deep, rich self-image. In each one of them this will give rise to (and here we onlookers must be pardoned for smiling with wry amusement) the illusion of free will—when in fact, of course, this is just a cold universe and these objects that populate it are just robotlike, rule-bound machines, moving around in deterministic (or capricio-deterministic) trajectories, and kidding themselves that they’re exchanging meaningful ideas when in reality they’re just mechanically chattering back and forth by emitting and absorbing long trains of empty, hollow, meaningless electromagnetic or perhaps acoustical waves.
Having imagined this strange universe filled with illusions, one can now take a look out at this universe and see all of humanity in thin disorienting light. One can de-soul-ify everyone in the world, so that they’re all like Smullyan’s zombie or Searle’s Chinese-speaking robot, seeming to have an inner life but in fact as devoid of soul as is a clacking typewriter driven by a cold, feelingless computer. Life then seems a cruel hoax on all those soul-free shells, erroneously “convinced” (although how can a heap of dead atoms be convinced?) that they are conscious.
And this would be the best possible way to look at people, were not for one tiny fact that seems to mess it up: I, the observer, am one of them, yet am undeniably conscious! The rest of them are, for all I know just bundles of empty reflexes that feign consciousness—but not this one! After I’ve died—well, then this vision will be an accurate accounting of the way things are. But until that moment, one of the objects will remain special and different, because it is not being fooled! Or … might there be something just a little wrong with dualism?
Dualists maintain, as Smullyan puts it, that mind and matter are separate substances. That is, there are (at least) two kinds of stuff: physical stuff and mental stuff. The stuff our minds are made of has no mass, no physical energy—perhaps not even a location in space. This view is so mysterious, so systematically immune to clarification, that one may well wonder what attracts anyone to it. One broad highway leading to dualism goes through the following (bad) argument:
Some facts are not about the properties, circumstances, and relations of physic objects.
Therefore some facts are about the properties, circumstances, and relations nonphysical objects.
What’s wrong with this argument? Try to think of examples of facts that are not about physical objects. The fact that the narrator in Moby Dick called Ishmael is a fact in good standing, but what is it about? One might want to insist (implausibly) that it is really about certain ink shapes certain bound stacks of printed pages; or one might say (somewhat mysteriously) that it is a fact all right, but it is not about anything at all; or, waving one’s hands a bit, one might say that it is a fact about an abstract object—in much the way the fact that 641 is a prime number is a fact about an abstract object. But almost no one (we suppose) is attracted the view that it is a fact about a perfectly real but nonphysical person named Ishmael. This last view takes novel writing to be a method of ghost-manufacture; it takes too literally the familiar hyperbole about an author’s characters coming to life, having wills of their own, rebelling against the creator. It is literary dualism. (Anybody might seriously wonder if Jack the Ripper was really the Prince of Wales, for they were both real people—or maybe a single real person. A literary dualist might seriously wonder if Professor Moriarty were really Dr. Watson.) Dualists believe that over and above the physical things and events there are other, nonphysical things and events that have some sort of independent existence.
When asked to say more, dualists divide into two schools: those who hold that the occurrence or existence of a mental event has no effect whatsoever on subsequent physical events in the brain, and those who deny this and hold that mental events do have effects on physical events in the brain. The former are called epiphenomenalists and the latter are called interactionists. Smullyan’s fable nicely disposes of epiphenomenalism (doesn’t it?), but what of interactionism?
Ever since Descartes first struggled with it, interactionists have had the apparently insuperable problem of explaining how an event with no physical properties—no mass, no charge, no location, no velocity—could make a physical difference in the brain (or anywhere else). For a nonphysical event to make a difference, it must make some physical event happen that wouldn’t have happened if the nonphysical event hadn’t happened. But if we found a sort of event whose occurrence had this sort of effect, why wouldn’t we decide for that very reason that we had discovered a new sort of physical event? When antimatter was first postulated by physicists, dualists didn’t react with glee and taunts of “I told you so!” Why not? Hadn’t physicists just supported their claim that the universe had two radically different sorts of stuff in it? The main trouble with antimatter, from the dualists’ point of view, was that however exotic it was, it was still amenable to investigation by the methods of the physical sciences. Mind-stuff, on the other hand, was supposed to be off limits to science. But if it is, then we have a guarantee that the mystery will never go away. Some people like that idea.
D.R.H.
D.C.D.
VI
The Inner Eye
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.[37] But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H20 problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.
36
“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel appeared in