Rene McGinn and Colin Descartes

 

Leaving Descartes is hard.  If you pose the body/mind problem according to a consequence of his view then you will arrive at an analogous position.  The connection between the brain (material) and the immaterial (consciousness) is like that between the extended and the unextended. The property P of the brain that is expected to account for consciousness was taken by the pineal gland. The part taken by god in guaranteeing that we are not ensorcelled  by a demon is taken by a refusal to offer any sort of reason for the reality of the ‘external’ world. Mystery and God are convertible as any theologian will tell you.

When you pose the problem according to the Cartesian rubric your excogitation will have that shape.

McGinn and the Presence of a Sage

 When I use the expression ‘pervade’ of the inert body/mind that is pervaded by consciousness I do not wish to imply that consciousness is an external force that lights up the inert.  The being of things is consciousness.  To be is to be conscious.

This is counter to the idea of consciousness as an emerging power.  What is of its nature conscious has nothing but complexity of structure added to it to gain in awareness.  The self luminous awareness of man is the pinnacle of this evolution.  

Going back to McGinn it must be admitted that this is also a mystery overcast by the cloud of unknowing.  All that the seeker can do is put themselves in that luminous darkness which he realises by his being but which he cannot know in an objective sense.  The comprehension is rather transformative and not apodeictic.  Put yourself in the presence of a sage.  That helps. 

Can we solve the Mind-Body problem? with Colin McGinn (1983)

If you want to feel the force of the body/mind problem as classically posed Colin McGinn is your only man. He’s the mystery man and though he elaborates his central insight into many pages of very clear and distinct prose it may be expressed as the insuperable difficulty of discovering the property that turns the cerebral events into concomitant consciousness. Unless that property is available as data then all the clever hypotheses such as identity, consciousness as epiphenomenal, as divinely tuned, etc cannot be tested. We are beached on this island of consciousness and we cannot discover how the extended and the unextended interact. This is a brute fact and there is no getting away from it. What he presents (Can we solve the Body/Mind problem ‘1983) is a problem that arises out of a classic Cartesian presentation i.e. Causal closure between the extended and the unextended). Other non-dualistic ways of cutting this knot are dismissed. In a typical footnote:

“I would also classify panpsychism as a constructive solution, since it attempts to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the brain that are as natural as consciousness itself. Attributing specks of proto-consciousness to the constituents of matter is not supernatural in the way postulating immaterial substances or divine interventions is; it is merely extravagant. I shall here be assuming that panpsychism, like all other extant constructive solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body problem-as (of course) are the supernatural 'solutions'. “

The mystery slays all solutions. Yes fine but there are data points from which to throw out the putlocks to support a transcendental hypothesis. First: we all come from rocks and gas. Second: increase is complexity and diverse capacity of the brain is linked to the evolution of the human mind. Let me just state my point in a nutshell: The human being can talk into his own ear. That is what allows one to raise the problem of the self, the mind and the body. The advaitins cut through what they call the chit jada granthi or the knot between the conscious and the inert by suggesting that the mind is itself inert and that instead of a yoked mind and body we have a bodymind that is pervaded by consciousness. The effect of this pervasion is to give us awareness that is reflective of the level of complexity of the bodymind. The interaction conundrum is obviated and awareness is somatically distributed. Vestigial centres of awareness are the relics of evolutionary development. We are aware in our guts etc because in our passage to our present refined state it was the chief organ connecting us to the world. Find this classic paper here

mystery

Sankara and Colin McGinn on Existence and Possibility

 It’s analogous to the long cycle on the dishwasher, the one I never use.  Philosophy has its long cycles which never get things quite clear.

"If seven maids with seven mops

     Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

      That they could get it clear?'

I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

      And shed a bitter tear.

Ex nihilo nihil fit as the panpsychist motto, the impossibility of change of Parmenides, sat and asatkaryavada (non-difference of cause and effect and v.v.) and now from Colin McGinn:

is existence possible

The vanes of my brain are spinning.

McGinn’s tourbillon comes from the chilling quarter of paradox.  Existence is not possible because ..... Here I must recommend reading it for it is certain that my understanding of it is flawed.  He pauses on the brink of radical contingency, looks into that abyss and spies William Blake having tea with Nobodaddy.

To Nobodaddy

Why art thou silent & invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye?

Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy works & laws,
That none dare eat the fruit but from
Thy wily serpent's jaws?
Or is it because Secrecy
Gains females' loud applause?

  He questions the endless series of entities that spawn each other:

"The first is that these entities come from nothing at all: they simply spring into existence de novo. Not even God plays a role, since he is an existent being (allegedly) for whom the same question arises: what explains God’s existence?

Introduce the Ontological argument into the cycle and we will never have a clean plate.  Just:

“O good looking one, in the beginning this was Existence alone, One only without a second.  With regard to that some say, “In the beginning this was non-existence alone, one only, without a second.  From that non-existence issued existence." ‘

He said, ‘O good looking one, by what logic can existence verily come out of non-existence?  But surely, O good looking one, in the beginning all this was Existence, One only, without a second.’ Chandogya Upanisad VI.2.1/2

McGinn writes:

“The first is that the same question will arise for the antecedent realm of existence: where do these possibilities come from? If possible worlds really exist, where do they come from—do they pop into existence from nothing? But second, and more decisive, possibilities have no tendency to turn into actualities; so they cannot play the role of existence generators.”

The word ‘pop’, if I’m not being captious, is an indication of the missing factor: time.  The acorn does not pop into an oak.   A possibility is not an actuality it is part of the process or a power.  The acorn falls on the ground.  Add time and the cosmos.  Voila!

Sankara’s commentary on the Chandogya text cited is suggestive:

“As in the world someone, who in the forenoon had seen a lump of earth spread by a potter desirous of making pot, plate etc., he, on perceiving in that very place different products like pot, plate, etc. while returning in the afternoon after visiting a village would say, ‘those pots, plates, etc. were but earth in the forenoon’, so also it is said even here, ' In the beginning this was Existence alone.’

That existence is existence now dense with duration a la Bergson.  McGinn discusses eternal elementary particles:

“Let’s assume they exist eternally: we still need to know why they exist at all, given that they don’t have to. Is their existence simply a brute fact with no explanation? But why these entities and not others—why the particular types of particles that populate our universe?”

That doesn’t quite work for him.  Interesting discussions on this and other topics on his blog.