The Battle Over the Human Mind That Split Two Great Thinkers

Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association notes the key role neuroscience has played in undermining a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role for neuroscience, perhaps, but that’s what happened:

”Neuroscientist Donald Hoffman, who once worked with DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick in attempting to crack the problem of human consciousness, recently conceded that the nature and origins of consciousness remain “completely unsolved” and may best be termed an eternal mystery.”

The brusque and decidedly no-nonsense Crick was in the event fated to meet his Waterloo when it came to the subject of consciousness, explains Hoffman. Crick had at first attempted to explain it somewhat airily as nothing but an “emergent” property which “naturally” arose when matter reaches a certain level of complexity. However, he was at length obliged to withdraw that vacuous contention, conceding that there is nothing about conscious experience that is relatable to the physical stuff or material of the brain. Consciousness simply lies beyond our empirical perception and cognitive reach.

Hoffman develops the point further: “At the most microcosmic level the brain consists of subatomic particles which have qualities like mass, spin and charge. There is nothing about these qualities that relates to the qualities associated with consciousness such as thought, taste, pain or anxiety.” To suggest otherwise, continues Hoffman, would be like asserting that numbers might emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.

Both Hoffman and Crick were finally forced to conclude that all purely physicalist theories of consciousness had failed to provide illumination and that the state of consciousness could not be explained in neurological terms, a conclusion powerfully endorsed for more than three decades by distinguished British neuroscientist Raymond Tallis in his long opposition to what he terms “Darwinitis.”

Any physicalist theory of consciousness must reckon with the fact that consciousness deals with information, which is not a material thing and follows different principles from matter and energy.

One outcome in science today is the rise of panpsychism, the view that all life forms participate in consciousness to at least some minimal. Panpsychism attracts many because it allows consciousness to be real rather than illusory (as per physicalism) but it remains in the same general thought world as, say, Hoffman — though not that of Richard Dawkins. Wallace himself, as Hoffman notes, came to embrace a sort of natural theology. He contributed to a number of streams of early twentieth-century thought, as Michael Flannery’s book Nature’s Prophet details.

The bottom line seems to be that we are not only ignorant but, alas, prostrate in our ignorance of the brain’s arcana. Theoretically, of course, there may yet emerge an as yet undiscovered materialist explanation for the brain and human consciousness. But to date we must conclude that today’s science cannot with integrity support such a claim on the evidence presently available.

In any event, neuroscience today could marshall as many arguments in support of Wallace’s view of the human mind than of Darwin’s.