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?
(The following was posted to John & Belle Have A Blog's entry on Just Not So Stories)
I don't think that either the Just So or Just Not So stories work, and in general the explanatory power of Just So stories is weak unless you're sure that there is a genetic predisposition to be explained. For instance, if male mammals or hominids in general preferred younger mates, it would be much less of a stretch to suppose that a similar male human preference has a genetic component.
The problem with your Just Not So is that it assumes that just because you have an explanation of why behavior A would be arguably more beneficial than behavior B, selection pressure couldn't have produced B, but evolution is more complicated than that. There are any number of reasons that sub-optimal behaviors could have been selected for, even assuming that your analysis of the merits demonstrates greater optimality (it might not, e.g. better ability to run while carrying offspring--proxied by a more youthful, fit appearance-- might trump ability to bear them, particularly since sperm is cheap). For instance, preference B could be the result of an "arms race" (much as female peacocks's preference for longer tails); starting from a preference for obviously childbearing women, a slight pressure to select the younger appearing could snowball until it was the appearance of youth itself that was preferred, despite the preference being sub-optimal or even maladaptive.
The same sort of objection can be raised against the original Just So story: in the absence of evidence for the genetic predisposition being explained, it's overreaching to attempt to account for behavior this way. Even if it were true that the indicators were proxies for fertility, that's not enough to establish that fertility (and not, say, ability to raise offspring to reproductive age) is obviously the winning genetic strategy. Humans, after all, are K-reproductive strategists, not R-reproductive (lots of care into few offspring, not little care into many).
That's all a pretty long-winded way of saying that while the Just So story to explain male attraction to young women is underwhelming, it's not so easy to demonstrate that it can't be in part a genetic predisposition just by reasoning about what's likely to succeed as an evolutionary strategy.
Brian supposes the following scenario: Bob bets the barman that Frank is too drunk to know where his car is. Frank heads out to where he usually parked his car, forgetting that today he parked it in a different place. Unbeknownst to anyone, some joyriders stole Frank's car from where he parked it, and left it where he usually parked it. Frank takes them to the place he usually parks, and there is the car; therefor, according to Brian, the barman ought to win the bet. I.e. although Frank's belief about where his car was was completely unjustified, it turned out to have been true, so we ought to say that Frank knew where his car was.
Suppose, instead, that although Frank usually parks on Elm Street, today he is so drunk that he heads in the opposite direction, towards Main Street, thinking that he's heading towards Elm. When they get to Main Street, the joyriders have left the car there. "Here it is, right on Elm where I left it, " announces Frank. So, it would seem that according to Brian's argument, Frank knew where his car was...although even after finding the car, Frank still doesn't know where he is. Ought Bob still pay the barman?
I think all this shows is that while under the ordinary course of things when we say "know" we don't particularly care whether somebody's belief is justified, that's because most of the time we expect that it is. Whenever we have reason to suspect that's not the case, however, we become more circumspect about what it means to know something. Whether it's the case of someone who is drunk, or a hypochondriac, or a pathological liar, we are rightly hesitant to ascribe knowledge to the fool who always cries that it's noon, just because at the moment it does happen to be noon.
...there's been a fair bit of resistance to the term "Bright" already, some from people who might otherwise be sympathetic (e.g. some of the folks on Crooked Timber), some from creationists and their apologists (like this guy, Michael Rea) with whom there can be no accomodation anyway. Like Dennett, I agree with Dawkins when he says "it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked). . .", although I might take care to point out that otherwise smart people can have stupid beliefs, or keep themselves wilfully ignorant of facts supporting positions that they don't agree with. (To argue, as Rea does, that a position must be respectable if a lot of people, including "well-educated and otherwise reasonable, honest, and sound-minded individuals", hold it is, well, ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked. Not only is that fallacious reasoning, but counter-examples are obvious--so obvious that it's clear that Rea doesn't count as reasonable, honest, and sound-minded on the topic.)
Still, judging by the reaction I've seen so far, "Bright" does seem to be overreaching.
The Brights are a movement of people "whose worldview is naturalistic (free of supernatural and mystical elements)" and are trying to change the nature of public discourse and perception of such worldviews, by coopting the word "bright" as a noun much as "gay" was coopted to present a more positive, friendly term for homosexual. E.g. not "Are you bright", but "Are you a bright?" They claim Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and James Randi as Brights, which is certainly true; it may even be true that they self-identify with the Brights (Dawkins and Randi evidentally do). Nevertheless, I'm a bit sceptical of the linguistic theory that seems to underpin this cooption; hasn't anyone noticed that while Gay Pride doesn't cause most people to bat an eye, "that is so gay" is now not a compliment, where once it was? And despite the careful drawing of the noun/adjective distinction, trying to seize bright this way seems a quite a bit more aggressive and likely to raise hackles even among the sympathetic.
On the other hand, my world-view is naturalistic, free of the supernatural and mystical, and I wouldn't mind having a short-hand description that didn't characterize it totally in terms of what it's not (atheist, agnostic, unbeliever), and nowadays Epicurean requires just as much explication as would saying "I'm a Bright"--and if the meme takes off A Bright might end up requiring a whole lot less. It still makes me flash on those old Dr Pepper commercials, though....