|
Mind! Do I have one?
From "Feelings" by Charles Birch
The basic distinction that has to be made is not primarily between mind and matter but between the objective and the subjective.
Things are experienced either internally or externally. When we see, touch, smell, or hear something our primary experience is external. When we think about things the experience is internal. But our senses do not bring us direct knowledge. All sensory signals arrive in the brain as modulated electrical signals that must be integrated and deciphered.
My own consciousness is the only thing in all the universe of which I have direct knowledge. Everything other than consciousness is inferred.
I experience the world as a world of objects through my five senses. I also experience life as inner awareness.
Feelings are the subjective side of life. Outward events are the objective aspect.
Can mind arise from no mind?
The present dominant view claims that mind is something that emerges in the course of the evolution of life. It is given the name emergentism.
A second view is that there is no such thing as mind, all is mere matter (physicalism or materialism).
A third view says that, in some sense, mind is part and parcel of all the entities in the evolution of the cosmos and the evolution of life. Thus mind and matter are two aspects of the one thing (panexperientialism).
The question we are really asking is what is the nature of nature? Is it a machine, or is it something other.
When did mind arise?
When did mind arise in cosmic evolution?
Physicalism says mind is not real-- the only real things are insentient bits of matter.
Panexperientialism asks: How could that which is arise from that which is not? It says mind (in some form) and matter always existed together all the way back to the Big Bang and even beyond. It avows that mind never arises from no mind.
The exponents of mechanism have declared that nature is not 'alive,' that not even taste, color, or odor belong to it. All that is real is the primary qualities of bits of matter to which nature can be reduced. The real world is matter in motion and nothing more. For mechanists, the machine replaces the organism as a model for understanding the nature of matter. Whitehead1 scathingly called this the, 'doctrine of vacuous actuality.'
Emergence
The most common view held by biologists on the origin of consciousness is that it came into existence in mammals, possibly in birds, and even possibly in all animals that have a central nervous system. Some even extend the range of consciousness to protozoa because of the obvious responsiveness of these organisms to physical stimuli.
Emergence is a common doctrine in evolutionary thinking about the origin of organs. For example, the five-toed limb is said to have emerged from fish that had no such limbs but had fins. Analogously, minds are said to have emerged from no minds. This step contains a serious flaw, a category mistake. Mind is in a quite different category from limbs, feathers, scales, etc., which are external properties knowable to sensory experience. Mind is not knowable in this way.
There are two forms of the doctrine of emergence, a dualist and a physicalist form--one holding that once the mind emerges it is as a fully actual entity with power to affect the body, the other holding a physicalist view in which mind is without power to exert causation on the body.
|
|
