“Is There A Place for The Mind in Physics” Response

My sister recently tweeted a link to an article entitled Is There A Place For The Mind In Physics

I largely agree with the reviewer, but am quite incredulous towards some of the reviewed author’s notions. Thanks for the read, sis!

Nagel brings both intellectual heft and clarity to this question. Nagel’s famous 1974 article What is it like to be a bat? is a masterpiece of argument against the reductionist view that Mind is nothing more than an [epiphenomena] (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/epiphenomena) (word of the day!) of neural activity. Instead, Nagel argued that there is vividness to the internal experience of consciousness that cannot be reduced to an external account of matter and motion (i.e., neurons and electrical currents).

In this paper, Nagel says that it is not worth developing a physical theory of mind until we determine whether it is even possible to describe the activity of the mind in objective terms. Is it meaningful to describe what it’s really like to be human? He uses this as an argument against reducing consciousness to an objective level. Nagel seems to be saying that there is something simply indescribable about consciousness. Maybe it’s the forty years that have passed since the publication of this paper, but this seems like the lazy man’s approach. Arguing that consciousness is indescribable seems like a cop out that does not try to address the question at hand. Additionally, I would say that Nagel is asking the wrong question. He seems to be saying that an objective view of consciousness has to be viewing consciousness as how it “really feels” to be human in objective terms. I’d argue that one cannot describe how it “really feels” to be a computer adding numbers ad infinitum, but this in itself doesn’t prevent computers from becoming sentient (I’m not immediately dismissing other arguments against cybersentience, just this one). Similarly one can’t describe how it really feels to “be the brain” shooting current and chemicals around, but this doesn’t prevent us from being sentient. Maybe I’m misunderstanding Nagel’s point in the article, but I was entirely unconvinced.

Let’s get back to the NPRticle. It sounds like Nagel’s Easy/Hard problem distinction falls into the same trap. Nagel is saying that the neurons firing and sensory experiences are essentially different things, and this prevents studying the former from revealing the true nature of the latter. Nagel is once again falling back on the “indescribability” factor of consciousness, which is a crutch. To go back to the computer analogy of the mind… the physical bit arithmatic in a computer and the high level functionality of its software are essentially different beasts, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t directly related. Indeed, although they’re completely different in nature, they are deeply causally related.

The article then summarizes Nagel as follows:

Now, given that I’m a physicist, you might expect me to slam Nagel for being hopelessly lost in the weeds. The truth is, while I deeply suspect he is wrong, I do find his perspective bracing. Given his atheism, the question Nagel is really asking is stunning: Is there a fundamental place for the Mind in the fabric of reality? In its crudest form the question could be phrased: Might there be some “thing” we need to add to our picture of reality that we don’t have now in order to embrace mind?

I’m a little incredulous towards this position (a little more so than the article’s author, even). Do you really think that there’s some unknown substance in the universe which is needed to understand how the mind works? Just because we haven’t yet discovered how all behavior in the mind is produced by the activation patterns in the brain doesn’t mean that we need to give up, as Nagel suggests, and wait until we discover some wonder tissue that ties everything together.