By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
“In Brain Map, Gears of Mind Get Rare Look” is the headline given to a front-page report in The New York Times. “Gears” of the mind? Yes. We are told, “In what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular neuro map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions in an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind.” “Machinery” of the human mind? Yes.
Yawn! It was known in antiquity that the brain is an organ of thought, much as the eye is the organ of sight. What was not known is that some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, and still others when we raise our hands.
To generalize, specific areas of the brain are active when people are engaged in specific activity.
The identification of regions of the brain associated with speech, memory, and sight is interesting, and one willingly gives assent to such reports, relying on the authority of the investigator. What is left unexplained is the abstract character of human thought.
For example, we may experience one or more instance of an element, say, copper, and from that experience learn that copper conducts electricity. From that one experience we are convinced that copper conducts electricity wherever it is found and that that proposition is true even if copper would disappear from the face of the earth.
Though derived from sense experience, that knowledge is held in an abstract, universal way. The intellect has grasped something intelligible in the sensory encounter that transcends the singular report.
Aristotle, in accounting for the phenomena, reasoned to the abstractive power of an agent intellect, itself immaterial. He reasoned that from one or more experience of a sensible entity we can grasp something of the nature of that entity, for there is more in the sense report than the senses themselves are able to appreciate. We form an idea of what the thing is and communicate that idea appropriately.
Ancient notions of abstraction and causality came to be challenged in the 18th century by the British empiricists.
David Hume, by limiting knowledge to sense experience, made it impossible to reason to an unseen cause, in the case of knowledge to an abstracting intellect, immaterial in character. A cause, he explained, is simply the name we give to what comes before when we constantly experience two things in a sequential relationship.
Immanuel Kant, convinced by Hume’s analysis of causality, endorsed Hume’s skepticism and similarly denied reason’s demonstrative power, not only with respect to an unseen abstracting intellect, but also to the existence of God.
Hume denied that we have evidence for the existence of God, but nevertheless gave an insightful analysis of the nature of religion as a social construct, one that Emile Durkheim was to expand upon a century later.
Kant, while denying that reason can demonstrate the existence of God, postulated the existence of God as a necessary component of his moral philosophy. A moral life would make no sense were not God its term as a judge of good and evil, and a rewarder of the life well lived.
Absent evidence of an immaterial order, coupled with an unwillingness to postulate one, what is a modern academic to do? Every thought, aspiration, or pious act has to be explained, like all natural phenomena, in purely materialistic terms. History records many such attempts.
The currently favored one resorts to neuroscience. Some start by debunking Descartes’ distinction between mind and matter or matter and spirit. We are told by Michael Graziano that “[o]f all the branches of science, neuroscience is the only one that has seriously challenged the dualistic view that the universe is divisible into matter and spirit.”
It takes a lot of faith to be an atheist. No philosopher of note claims to have evidence that God does not exist. Agnostics are plentiful. Agnosticism is the preferred position of academics and practical atheists who address the subject. In common they place the burden of affirmation on the other. The issue then becomes one of causal explanation, that is, explanation of something that does not explain itself.
For a neurobiologist like Graziano, we await, by his own admission, satisfactory explanations of phenomena like awareness, consciousness, and self-identification. Graziano is convinced that “[e]xplaining self-knowledge is in principle easy. A computer ‘knows’ what it is. It has information on file on its own specifications. I have a memory of prior states. Self-knowledge is merely a category of knowledge.” That suggestive tactic may explain the periodic dementia of my computer.
Whatever the starting point, all materialistic explanations of human nature end up more or less the same way, namely, with a confession. We do not yet have the answer but we are sure we are on the right path.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America.)
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