Make Up Your Mind

Do you know your own mind?  More interestingly, does anyone else know your mind?  Now add the subgroup: do scientists know your mind?  Does modern science provide an adequate understanding of the human mind?  Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind is a reflection on that topic. 

First, though, it is worth noting the curiosity of this book and author combination.  Robinson is best known as a novelist.  (Gilead is a very good novel.  Perhaps, fifty years from now, it will even be a Great Book.  Serious praise, there.  (The sequel Home is good, not very good.  But there are a slew of future papers to be written by undergrads and graduate students comparing those two novels.))  So, here we have a novelist giving a set of lectures which are published as a book on a subject other than Literature.  There are not many people who can write adeptly in both the fiction and non-fiction worlds.  Never has been if you think about it.  (Indeed, the more you think about it, the more you realize how shockingly rare the ability is.  That list must exist somewhere:  people who wrote both fiction and non-fiction books which are well worth reading.  (To be on the list, both the fiction and the non-fiction have to be really good.)  Could I make a list of 100 such people?  I am not so sure.  In fact, as I ponder it, I begin to doubt I could come up with 100 names.)  But, Robinson has pulled it off—this book is quite good.

The argument:  modern science has completely obliterated the mind.  We all know we have a mind, we all know our minds think things, but Science (with a capital S) has completely discounted the evidence of our mind.  Freud did this quite famously in Civilization and Its Discontents. Someone tells Freud about the Oceanic Feeling, the sense of eternity he has, which is a subjective fact for the person explaining the feeling.  Freud notes that such a feeling is not confined to this one person, but is widespread.  Freud does not have this sense.  Thus, it does not exist.  QED.  Thus Spake Freud, setting the pattern of proof for much of 20^th Century Science.

But, as Robinson notes, 20^th century science has an underling problem when it comes to the human mind.  Freud taught us how to think about the mind scientifically; no need for your introspection, just read Freud.  Darwinist also taught us the science of the Mind.  So did the Skinnerians.  (So did the Marxists.  So did the Nietzscheans.)  Yet, and this is the point which is rarely noticed, while we have at least 5 (and really even more) strains of 20^th century scientific thought which completely describe the Mind, these scientific theories are mutually contradictory.  Robinson is right: there is simply no way to reconcile Freud and Darwin in the theory of the Mind.  More generally, the mind described in modern scientific treatises (of any school) does not bear a lot of resemblance to what I actually perceive as going on in my own head.  Maybe I am deceived about my own mind.  But, whence comes the confidence that it is me who is deceived; whence comes the confidence that Others, the Scientists, are not deceived when they posit theories about my Mind?

To take the example from Freud.  If my mind can sense eternity, that oceanic feeling which convinces me of the existence of eternity, but modern science cannot detect eternity in my mind, which is right?  Is there any reason to believe that Science can uncover the totality of what goes on in my mind?  Is there any reason to distrust that portion of my thoughts which are not susceptible to scientific refutation? 

Indeed, if we take Science seriously, there is little reason to Trust that our minds are capable of reasoning correctly.  Consider, for example, a Darwinian multiverse in which there are infinitely many universes—a theory which is trotted out to explain why we don’t need a God to explain the Universe in which we find ourselves.  Now if there are infinitely many universes, then there is necessarily one like ours in every respect except for the fact that the human mind does not reason correctly, that what the human mind thinks is logically proven to be true is, in fact wrong.  There is a universe out there somewhere with lots of people thinking they are really intelligent because they have figured out some neat things about the universe, but everything they know to be true is, in fact, false.  With infinitely many universes, that universe must exist somewhere.  Right?  How do we know it isn’t our universe? 

We trust our minds to reason correctly.  We trust them to develop science.  Yet, there is a suicidal impulse in the modern mind—as we trusted it to come up with explanation about itself, the explanations have all tended to obliterate the mind, to destroy any reason to suspect that the theory being used is True.  If all our thoughts are driven by X, then it necessarily follows that the minds of those who accept that theory are also driven by X, at which point it is useful to wonder why anyone would believe X to be true in that case.  Modern science requires the idea of a trustworthy mind, immune from simplistic, deterministic processes, able to sort through and evaluate the world in which it finds itself.  Modern science requires a mind like the one most of us actually experience.  But why then reduce that mind to something incapable of feeling and thinking all the things I feel and think?

All of this is much like the denigration of the idea that Faith is a means of having Knowledge.  Yes, Reason is important and teaches us much.  But at the end of the day, Faith also teaches us much.  That statement annoys many people to no end, and yet those same people get out of bed every morning with complete Faith that the world of today will function like the world of yesterday—a belief, as Hume pointed out centuries ago, for which there is not a shred of evidence.  It is literally impossible to test the hypothesis that the future will be like the past.  Yet, we all know it to be true.  I have never met anyone who doubted it.  And how do we know it?  The Mind is a curious place, isn’t it?

Robinson’s book is well worth reading.  It is the sort of book which sets the mind wandering into all sorts of avenues and alleys.  A thoughtful book puncturing some of the Pieties of the Age.  It would be nice if there were more books like that.