Non-science is non-sense, not nonsense

I continue to work through my extensive backlog of write-ups, turning this time back to philosophy.

I like Ian Wardell's blog very much. He offers a different perspective to mine, is exceptionally clear in stating his reasoning and conclusions, and best of all, we agree and disagree on a sufficient number of issues to ensure that it's always worth reading. This post is one I tend to strongly agree with, and it's phrased so well that I want to respond to it here for my own sake. It's a rebuttal of a book I haven't read (though the blog post stands just fine on its own), concerning the nature of the soul and the possibility of an afterlife - both notions which Wardell believes in, whereas I reserve judgement.

There is one section where I disagree. Wardell says that the book's description of the soul as a mysterious, non-physical consciousness, giving us free will and immortality, is flawed. He prefers a definition of the mental substance of the soul as "that which thinks". I disagree that this is a useful definition, we could say a table is "that which holds the tablecloth" but this would tell us nothing at all about what a table is, only what it does. In contrast the book's description, despite its extreme vagueness, tells us far more about the nature of the soul : it is non-corporeal, immortal, and essential for consciousness. These seem like important beginnings to me.

However, this is a minor point, and has no bearing on the rest of the post. The definitions aren't mutually exclusive anyway. His next section, on whether the soul is a scientific notion, is what I find much more interesting.

Wardell first considers the idea that the soul is a scientific hypothesis, that it could be subject to verification by measurement :

The phrase that the “physical world is closed”, sometimes referred to as physical causal closure, refers to the idea that all change in the world is purely and exclusively a result of the interactions of the four physical forces existing in nature (namely, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force). Believing in a causally potent soul/self contradicts such physical causal closure.

I agree that, at least in principle, this contravening of physical causal closure will be detectable. However, I suspect that the initial impact on consciousness will likely be minute, perhaps on the quantum scale. It is only then, via physical chains of causes and effects, that this initial impact cascades into larger and larger effects. Importantly, since neuroscientists are virtually all materialists*, they won't be looking for any such influence, least of all any minute influence. Furthermore, and crucially, our functional MRIs lack the resolution to make any assertions in this regard in any case.

* I am not at all sure that's true, but this is by-the-by. 

In other words, as I've speculated before, free will means a non-physical process causing a measurable, physical change. If the mind, a.k.a. (arguably) the soul, has an effect on physical reality, if there is something non-physical at work, the effects should still be in principle visible with ordinary scientific instruments. This needn't be anything dramatic - as in CCD multipliers, a single photon can be amplified to give measurable results (though perhaps we've got the whole notion of brain waves causing conscious choices completely backwards). Various readings lately* about how difficult analysing the brain actually is in practise leave me to think that detecting something on this scale would be monumentally difficult, so I leave that possibility open.

* Especially Jackie Higgins Sentient, to be blogged soon. This does a commendable job of explaining how most science is not a series of Eureka-moment revelations but a gradual, grinding slog, where even relatively minor, incremental findings can take years or even decades to be solidly established - simply because science is frickin' hard. This is something I can attest to from direct personal experience.

Note that this is not at all the same as the "god of the gaps" fallacy. A working, materialist description of the brain in no way precludes a non-physical aspect to consciousness, as we shall see momentarily.

Wardell elaborates :

Science also has its limitations since it can only describe that which is measurable, or in other words, that which is material. This means that our experience of colours, sounds, and odours reside beyond the ambit of science. So too do our emotions, our thoughts, the pains we experience, and indeed, the entirety of our conscious lives. Hence, consciousness as a whole, and a fortiori, the self or soul that has all these conscious experiences, resides outside the ambit of science. 

I'll just interrupt here to interject this post about qualia, if it's unclear as to the difference between our experience of a thing and the thing itself.

In order to make this notion that science has its limitations more clear, it might be illuminating here to introduce an analogy. Metal detectors have a great deal of success in detecting metal. But they cannot detect wood, plastic, rubber, or anything else non-metallic. And, so long as metal detectors are merely metal detectors, they will only ever be able to detect metal, and never anything else. In a similar manner, the physical sciences can only detect the material or that which is measurable. It cannot detect that which is non-measurable, so it cannot directly detect consciousness, or selves, or souls should they exist. At best, we could only measure the effect on bodies initiated by the causal power of consciousness. But, as I have already mentioned, such an initial mental influence is unlikely to be currently detectable.

I conclude, contra Musolino, that we cannot claim that the soul is a scientific hypothesis. It is a philosophical one and, more specifically, a metaphysical one.

For more on the necessity for science to restrict itself to measurable reality, and how sometimes non-physical concepts come crashing headlong into mainstream science, see this (rather lengthy) post.

I like this very much. I am a scientist, not a scientismist : I see no reason to presume the entire of reality can be described by measurable observation. That is an assumption necessary for science but irrelevant to philosophy. Hence the title. Things which are inherently non-scientific, e.g. poetry, are nothing to do with what we can sense and measure directly : we cannot objectively measure colour as experienced, still less guilt or ennui or the delight engendered by a host of golden daffodils. These things cannot be "sensed", but they are hardly nonsense.

What does it mean here to say that the soul is a philosophical concept ? I view this to mean the soul is an interpretative concept for understanding how processes work. The cause of a thing is not the same as the thing itself, as in Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum :

“Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,” said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter-of-fact. “But actually that’s caused by magic particles hitting the–”

“Dunno what it’s caused by,” said Granny sharply, “but what it is, is the phoenix dancin’.”

I don't know if anyone has done an analysis of the philosophy of Discworld, but they bloody well should.

In this case, we could potentially never find the soul through scientific analysis - and it could still exist. This completely avoids any sort of fallacious gaps, much as viewing God as the underlying cause of all things does not mean an idiotic notion of a big beardy invisible man moving every particle about with tweezers. The soul instead could be conceptual, a way of understanding, not predicting, observational reality.

I should point out that Wardell has elsewhere advocated a much more scientific view of the soul, arguing that there is indeed evidence for ghosts and suchlike (which I completely disagree with). But I must also point out that I called this blog Decoherency precisely to give myself a license to contradict myself, so I can hardly critique him on that score.

I need only cover the remaining points in brief. Wardell uses the analogy of a pixelated image appearing more clearly at a greater distance as an analogy to the materialist view of consciousness : that it is somehow emergent from its constituent parts, which, when viewed correctly, can indeed be shown to be one and the same as consciousness itself even though when viewed differently nothing such is evident (i.e. neurons might be each individually physically explicable, but it's the collective whole which is conscious).

Wardell rejects this, and so do I. It seems to me that the nature of mind is simply too different to ever reconcile with materialism; qualia cannot be physical by definition. But I plan to tackle this in more detail when I eventually blog up Metazoa (I know, I've been threatening to do this for some time, but I'm on a blogging binge right now so fingers crossed). I am not sure I agree that physical objects cannot somehow create consciousness, however, but I would add that by having access to non-physical qualia, we can make choices based on non-physical reality - which seems like an excellent way to allow for free will, even if we don't have to go the whole way and accept the notion of a soul or an afterlife per se.

Finally, the notion that brain damage causes a change of consciousness meaning that it must be somehow physical. Here too I agree with Wardell that this is not so. The brain could create and mediate a conscious "field" without part of the brain itself literally being consciousness. Alternatively, a receiver need not affect whatever it receives - a broken radio doesn't stop the signal itself. And that's before we even begin to consider more fundamental aspects of the nature of reality : idealism, monism, that sort of thing.

In short, it might be possible to build a consciousness detector - or even a soul detector. But this would not at all be like the hunt for Bigfoot. In principle, you could fell the entire of North America's forests and disprove that Bigfoot was real. A soul detector that failed, however, would arguably not be the same at all. It would be as meaningless as declaring that William Blake's The Tyger was wrong or made of custard : applying things which could certainly be said about mathematics or trifles, but have no business whatever in literary analysis.