Sullivan made a vague allusion to the mystery of mathematics, but Godel's achievement was anything but mysterious. It was a thorough debunking of positivism, the early 20th century philosophical movement that took empiricism to a radical and wholly absurd level by stipulating that nothing that isn't tangible exists. His incompleteness theorem was a confirmation of a priori truth — the kind of Nature Spinoza spoke of — not of religion. And even though Godel's elegant proof specialized in paradox and sinuous self-referentiality, it was perfectly traceable according to the known laws of logic. By definition, a theorem is only as good as the next genius who comes along to demonstrate how bogus it really is. Would that religion said, "this may all be nonsense, wait until we learn more."
So Sullivan is still grasping at straws to place his faith in the same august company as neo-Platonic philosophy. When Einstein spoke of the great "out-yonder," he meant a cosmological order that had yet to be sussed out. There are no laws of heaven except those we invent to make peaceable our time on earth, which is of course our only time, anywhere.
Lucky us, my esteemed co-blogger. Just as I was thinking about how consciousness could be unmoored from matter, I happened upon Steven Pinker's illuminating essay in Time magazine addressing that very subject. He defines the so-called "Hard Problem" of cognitive science like this:
The Hard Problem… is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head–why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.
Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"–the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
Harris is in the extreme minority, then, by denying the "meat chauvinism" that drives most of his field. Maybe as a post-doc he'll locate the totality of cognitive experience in gray matter.
Though just because Sam expresses doubt about the mind-body problem doesn't mean Andrew's any closer to justifying religion as one way of reconciling it (by adding a soul into the mix) that's as good as any other.
P.S. Last August I had a fun little email dialogue with Rebecca Goldstein about her Spinoza book. It should be up at Jewcy in the coming weeks.
dress up is always a great and exciting one, or strip poker. Perhaps get some dice from a game board and decide if you land on certain numbers what those actions are. Spice it up is always a great thing!!