science:

(By request, since Tumblr doesn’t allow Q&A posts to be reblogged, I have made this answer into a text post that can be reblogged. The previous post has been deleted. Sorry for double-posting.)

Sixpenceee asked:

What’s your opinion on the mind-body problem? Do you think the mind can survive after death and is a separate element?

It’s tempting to suggest that if science can’t explain the way consciousness arises from matter, then there might be something to the old myths about the afterlife and the survival of the soul or reincarnation anyway. But it’s very important to distinguish between these two questions: what is consciousness, and does consciousness continue after death?

There is no reason to suppose that the mind doesn’t die when the body does. Near-death experiences are just that: they’re not experiences of death, otherwise the person who had the experience couldn’t have lived to tell the tale. Furthermore, it isn’t implausible that we might sometimes enter an altered state of consciousness in extreme conditions that bring us to the brink of death—after all, everyone experiences the altered state of consciousness we call dreaming almost every night. That these experiences might resemble myths or narratives prevalent in your society is hardly surprising. If your subconscious is creating a story, surely it must take the raw material from somewhere, and if you live in a traditionally monotheistic society where life after death is a common notion known to everyone, believers or not, then tunnels of white light or talks with dead relatives during a hallucinatory near-death experience is almost to be expected. After all, people who ingest a lot of drugs or become psychotic also have similar experiences.

What other reasons might one have for believing in the continuation of consciousness after the brain is dead? Excluding theoretical future inventions that facilitate “brain uploading,” and excluding religious scripture, what more is there to say? How would we ever know? If the mind is intangible, unobservable, at best we could say that the mind might survive death, but without any good reason to believe so, why would you? The only mind we have direct access to is our own.

The famous philosophical question of other minds asks, how do you know your neighbor is conscious? How do you know your mailman isn’t an automaton, an assemblage of matter that behaves like a human but has no consciousness, for whom there is nothing to be like them? The answer, of course, is that we don’t, but they behave roughly like we do, they respond as if they are conscious, and besides it seems hard to imagine how a robot could accomplish what other people do without having sentience. Whether such automatons—identical molecule by molecule with humans, but lacking conscious experience—can exist is known as the philosophical zombie problem. Most of us who have common sense accept that other minds exist, that other people are conscious, because they appear to be. And we also accept that rocks and bacteria aren’t conscious, because they display no signs of being conscious. Of course, until we can prove definitely that the mind is purely physical, we can’t prove that rocks aren’t conscious, but not even the most hardcore treehugger argues that we shouldn’t tread on rocks for fear of hurting their feelings. The same argument can be applied to life after death: dead people don’t display any of the signs of being conscious. The most parsimonious explanation is that when the body dies, so does the mind. Even if dead people’s minds somehow were separated from the body, and remained in existence after physical death, we would never know.

There is a lot of things we don’t understand about the brain. But one thing we’re pretty sure: it isn’t breaking any of the laws of physics. Clearly mind and brain are intrinsically linked. If the mind were nonphysical but somehow capable of interacting with the physical brain in the way that a dualist account of consciousness requires, we would expect to see energy spontaneously come into existence as the non-physical self pulls the strings. But we don’t. The second law of thermodynamics holds as well for the brain as it does for everything else in the universe.

I believe the mind isn’t nonphysical. Exactly what that entails is a matter of both philosophy and science. The philosophical zombie thought experiment is troubling; not so troubling that I believe it proves the mind can’t be physical, for reasons explained above, but troubling in a more fundamental sense. The fundamental question is: why does a certain configuration of physical, objective matter translate into subjective consciousness? It seems entirely conceivable that it wouldn’t. Biology reduces to chemistry which reduces to physics, and it would be logically contradictory for biological mechanisms to violate the laws of chemistry, or for chemistry to violate the laws of physics. And it works the other way around: physics necessarily gives rise to chemistry, which necessarily gives rise to biology. But with psychology, the same seems not to be true. We have yet to find the piece of the puzzle that guarantees that physics gives rise to consciousness. It seems entirely conceivable that it wouldn’t, in ways it’s inconceivable that physics wouldn’t give rise to chemistry.

I believe the mind-body problem is the hardest one in science, in part because the brain is so complicated, and in part because it is a problem that is both philosophical, linguistic, and scientific all at once, and which discipline which aspect belongs to is hard to determine. Combining quantum mechanics and general relativity? I think we’ll do that long before we solve the mind-body problem. Perhaps, in the end, we must simply accept that there is no explanation. For no good reason, certain configurations of matter give rise to subjective experience, just like there is no reason for the other fundamental constants of physics to be what they are. They just are. But this seems hard to accept because the fundamental forces of nature are so elementary, and the mind so complex, and it seems hard to believe that elementary facts can be true for no good reason, but that they still can’t explain more complicated facts which are entirely supervenient on them. (That, I’m afraid, is philosopher-speak. I have been damaged by reading too many philosophy papers, and this is a very complicated subject, and it’s very hard to write about without using technical language, even though I try and explain technical terms the average reader would not be familiar with as much as possible on this blog.)

Because it is so complicated—perhaps the hardest nut to crack in science—and because it is so essential to our lives—by definition, all our experience is, well, conscious experience—the study of mind and brain is probably my favorite part of science. You may have noticed there’s a lot of pharmacology and psychology on here. But it’s very hard to give a straightforward answer to a question like, “What’s your opinion on the mind-body problem?” Life after death though? Nah, old fairy tale.

sixpenceee:

how many eye contact until we frick frack

YES I frick frack soon