Brains and Minds
The conventional wisdom is that minds are the
secretions of brains. It goes something like this…
Our Ultimate Common Ancestor was a single-celled
(can I say creature?).
[No materialist scientist has anything to say about
how great great great great (etc) grandma came into being. She was a mindless blob of protoplasm. She
was blessed with an astonishingly complex blueprint for her very important proteins,
her genome). She was mindless (sorry, grandma) but she contained lots of
information. Information is a phenomenon which (according to our uniform and repeated
experience) proceeds only from minds. Minds, however, proceed only from brains
(according to the theory). Grandma didn’t have a brain. Ergo she didn’t have a
mind. Mindless grandma was suffused with information. She reproduced by
division in the same way that bacteria do today.]
She and her offspring got more complicated. Various
threats in her environment were circumvented by ‘adaptations’ to her genome and
to epigenetic information. Epigenetics is the study of how genes are switched
on and off. I believe that it is a subject which is destined to grow, to
include theories about how a single cell can reproduce itself and become liver
cells and bone cells etc. My granddaughter’s skin, hair and eye colouring are
(at least partly) determined by her genes. The fact that she is the image of
her mother is not genetically determined. That is not to say that she didn’t
inherit this resemblance; but it wasn’t through her genes.
The adaptations
consisted, essentially, of successive modifications to grandma's original blueprint. According to the
theory, billions of adaptations appeared by chance. Some worked; most did not.
Grandma’s offspring contrived (or were contrived) to become multi-celled
creatures. In the blink of an eye, in the Cambrian Explosion, a plethora of
body plans came into being – not one of which have any identifiable ancestors
in the record. Eyes appeared, blinking or not. Sex appeared, requiring not one
but two simultaneous major adaptations in one species.
Sex is a huge problem for neo-darwinists. It
requires the emergence, simultaneously,
of two complementary adaptations in one generation.
The story proceeds: trilobites and their
contemporaries morphed into invertebrates, vertebrates, reptiles, mammals and birds.
As well as kidneys, livers and such, brains came into being. At every stage, in
this account, the creature became better adapted to survive. Survival and
reproducibility drove the process. We can imagine that on an alien world
(according to this account), creatures would appear, very well adapted to their
environments, well adapted to survive and reproduce – but utterly incapable of
thought. Perhaps even in this world. For billions of years, according to the
standard account, thought was not a requisite for survival and reproduction –
thought and the grammar of thought, logic.
And then we get to the ‘hard problem’ –
consciousness. It is a much harder problem for materialists than for theists.
Theists suppose themselves to be conscious, inescapably so. It is a datum, not
easy to describe or explain but if you say that I am not conscious, you are
telling me that I do not exist. This is not a proposition that I can accept.
The materialist ‘solution’ to the hard problem is that consciousness and free
will are illusions: I only think that I am thinking! This is worse than
incoherent.
Animals have brains – sometimes we eat animal
brains. Some animals obviously have memories. Some animal behaviours evince cause
and effect processes: press this lever, get this reward. Some animals have
memories (maybe most vertebrates). Ruthless scientists train rats and jellyfish
to navigate mazes and then remove selective parts of their brains to establish
where these learned behaviours are stored. So far, to the best of my knowledge,
they have not had much success. So, animal experiments have not revealed where
memories are stored. If minds were simply brain activity, this would be very
mysterious. The situation is very different from that of computers; we know
where the bits and bytes are stored.
Some thinkers have suggested that brains may be physical
receivers which allow our minds to interact with the physical world. This idea
raises many serious questions but it may account for the apparent reality,
which is that brains do not produce minds but that minds use brains. Just as
some radios are more sophisticated than others, so some brains enable their
controlling minds to operate more effectively. Thus, the brain you are born
with may determine, to a degree, whether or not you are a musical prodigy or a
mathematical genius.
The hard question is a very interesting question.
Rupert Sheldrake quotes his late friend, Terence
McKenna: Modern Science demands one miracle, the coming into being of all
matter, energy, space and time. It then promises to explain everything else.
Sheldrake lists ten dogmas of modern Science. He finds them all sadly wanting.
The Thomistic scheme makes a lot more sense.
Inanimate matter is simply inanimate and soulless. This may or may not be true.
Plants have vegetable souls, which determine their composition and shape.
Animals have vegetable souls and
animal souls. Humans have both and a spirit.