Bottoms Up! (a break from the basic science)

One thing about which scientists, skeptics, philosophers and mystics can agree, is that science cannot explain the existence of a consciousness without anatomy.

Those abstract thinkers on the right (the philosophers and mystics) believe this demonstrates a limitation of science. After all, they have defined the attributes of a disembodied mind and science doesn’t explain it to their satisfaction. The roll their eyes in condescension and accuse skeptics and scientists of that dreaded paragon of concrete thinking, reductionism. After all, it’s intuitively obvious that human minds are very special in a way that cannot be defined by the observed anatomy.

It’s time for skeptics and scientists to stop granting the machinations of philosophers and mystics, preferred status.

The issue is not skeptical reductionism. It is, as it has always been, a problem of philosophical overreach and imagined assumptions, matched with an a priori respect afforded such. Science cannot demonstrate the mystical properties of mind for the simple reason, that these are made up constructs to begin with. Philosophers and mystics must demonstrate a sound basis for these claims (other than word games or intuition) or we should just ignore them. Science is not reductionism it is coherent modeling. Starting from basic reproducible observations of reality, science helps to build models of reality that fit the observable universe with greater and greater precision and accuracy. That these models cannot provide any support for the existence of a soul for example is less a problem with the model and more a problem with the philosophy. Philosophers can debate nonexistent realms until the end of time since they seem more concerned with sounding convincing or defending their intuition than with being right about the true nature of existence.

Coherent modeling is superior to philosophy in this regard for a simple reason; modeling builds a ground up view of existence while philosophy starts from the top down and as such is largely based upon a foundation of intuition. A ground up model is always superior because this method is most easily consistent with Occam’s Razor. When building from the ground up you reach a point when observed reality is well approximated by the model. This end point may not be intuitive but it will be the simplest explanation of the observed facts. (Often it isn’t intuitive, but intuition is highly over rated in science.) At this point, a scientist can be fairly comfortable that the model reflects objective reality. The simplest explanation is reached in this manner. Based upon details of observed reality, a coherent model is essentially complete once these details have been accounted for. There is no need to account for any missing parts based upon intuition or baseless assumptions.

The top down philosopher however has the added burden of accounting for their initial suppositions. Starting from a series of assumptions that may well have no basis in reality, the philosopher has to account for the disparity between coherent models of reality and their hypothesis. The result? The philosopher declares victory since science has revealed a gap between their assumptions and demonstrable reality. They announce that this proves the existence of something beyond science! No it doesn't. It's far, far more likely to prove that the assumptions of the philosopher were groundless in the first place. That such gaps are the arbitrary creations of the philosopher seems to be of little consequence. Rare seems to be the philosopher who concedes that their intuition is faulty. No, it must be a problem with the scientific method which is not good enough to detect the transcendent parts of reality that only they can intuit. Despite the abysmal track record of intuitive thinking to successfully describe objective reality, philosophers cling to it as a badge of honor. Which, I suppose is why they continue to debate Aquinas while the rest of the word has moved forward 7 centuries.

If science supports a view that the evolutionary development of our senses as a means to successfully navigate objective reality in concert with the growth in our brain’s complexity led to the perceptions we now embody with mystical powers, rather than the other way around (a view which depends upon the existence of abstract consciousness, a thing never seen to exist), then that’s just the way it is. It may be fun to imagine that this were not so, but it’s high time we stopped treating this as anything beyond speculative fiction.

Any philosophy that depends upon the existence of a mind without an underlying structure, is guilty of such a top down bias. No objective evidence exists in support of such minds. This is the mother of all gods of the gaps. It’s based upon the error of assigning far too much credence to our intuition about such things instead of what we actually observe in nature. The bottom up approach to neuroscience is resulting in coherent models of the human mind that fit real observations. If philosophers of the mind want to be taken seriously, then let them first prove that a disembodied mind can in fact exist outside of their intuition. If not, science needs to stop apologizing for the fact that the special nature of humans that we all love so much exists now, where it always has, only in philosophy texts.