Last week I finished reading Colin McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy, and while I found it both entertaining and interesting, I don't really know what to make of his "mysterian" take on human consciousness. Granted, this is just a pop-version of his argument, but it's a pop version that he himself wrote in order to explain the position, so if it leaves out something essential he has nobody to blame but himself. The argument, as I understand it, is basically this: there are certain kinds of phenomena that the human brain just isn't equipped to understand; their features and organization just don't have a good enough match to the kinds of features and organization that evolutionary pressures have honed our brains to cope with (e.g. they are necessarily holistic and can't be reduced into simpler component parts that can be understood in isolation). Because of the inadequacy of all theories of mind up to this point, plus some intuitions about what a theory of mind would have to look like, we have good reason to suppose that mind is one of those things that our minds are just too primitive to understand. Naturally this view really cheeses off some people who were hoping to explain the mind, and perhaps even convinced that they were making progress, but McGinn observes that there are other fundamental limits of knowledge that have been discovered (Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, Godel Incompleteness Theorem) so is it really that surprising if this was one more?
The problem with this is that absent proof (which both Godel and Heisenberg had) of the particular limit to knowledge, this is just the argument ad ignorantiam. Pointing out similar features to other hard problems is not the same as proving equivalence (as, e.g. proving a problem NP-complete), and really boils down to nothing more than saying "Gee, that looks hard to me. Doesn't that look hard to you? Guess we ought to give up." (Patricia Churchland has a good discussion of this in Brainwise: Studies in Neurophilosophy) So the question is why does anyone take the Mysterian position at all seriously?
Oh, so you've discovered Colin McGinn? I was never impressed by Mysterians. I even find them mystifying, ironically enough. The analogy between brain operations and Heisenberg uncertainty/Godel Incompletenes Theorem is terrible. In the latter two cases, there are fundamental limits on the nature of reality that prevent any more detailed knowledge. It's not a question of being unable to comprehend in these cases, but rather a limit on the kinds of knowledge that even exist. That's a far stretch from saying that the mind is not understandable.
Unless you are willing to posit that minds don't obey laws of physics (i.e. reject materialism), there's little scope for assuming that there's anything fundamentally mysterious about minds.
If you want a fun read, look for a physics paper by Max Tegmark debunking Roger Penrose and anyone else who thinks that consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. Try Max's web site---I bet it's there.
Posted by: Scott at August 1, 2003 08:16 PM Well, he has a slightly better example that he offers of sentences that are grammatically well-formed English, but are too complex for any human to successfully parse; at least better in the sense that they don't represent fundamental limits on knowledge but only limits on what we can directly apprehend. Unfortunately, without proof that understanding minds would require such apprehension, the example cuts both ways--we do in fact know whether such sentences are well-formed because we have tools that we can use to analyze them.
In the end it seems to be one of those notions (like brain-in-a-vat) which even if it were true there's not the slightest point in acting as if it were true.