Chapter 34 - A new Dualism

 Chapter 34

Spiritology

We began by noting the centrality of certain philosophical questions to the nature of our existence; such questions that humans have asked, as far as we can know, everywhere and since forever. So important were these matters that those rare individuals among us who at least *seemed* to have the best answers were feted and held in high regard. We noted that, for most of history up until the Baroque period and the scientific revolution society’s philosopher was often also the theologian and the scientist, and oft-times the physician.

And what is the problem?

Our first question was “who am I?”

I experience my life very much as a passenger in this body. Happily, so far, the various bits all seem to work satisfactorily. I experience, or generate, thoughts and moods .. the extent to which I feel *in control* of these thoughts and moods is variable and debateable, but my sense is that I control them. On the flip side, I am stuck in this body. I have found no way to live in another (I admit I haven’t looked very hard to do so, and I wouldn’t know where to start looking!).

So what am I?

The 1982 film “Blade Runner” introduced us to characters identified as “replicants”: Roy and Rachel are identical in every measurable way to biological humans. Aside from some extreme strength, they behave in every respect indistinguishably from biological humans, manifesting all the stigmata of human emotions.

The question arises: aside from being made of biological stuff instead of mechanical, aside from being carbon-based over silicone based, what would a physicalist scientist identify as the essential difference between a biological human and a replicant?

The answer is: not much.

“Emergent property of complexity” is the standard answer. The whole has properties that cannot be predicted from a sum of the parts. Good to know.

Yet perhaps, above all, it was to *this* conclusion that the philosophers and humanities academics protested. Clumsily and maladroitly perhaps, but perhaps what they were protesting as they *chose* to doubt all science was the apparent challenge of the emerging science to their very existence as … spirits.

I wish there was a less polluted and contaminated word to use but, forgive me, it’s going to be “spirits”, because no matter how ignorant and medieval has been the use of this word over recent decades it remains that “spirits” is also, in English, a recognition of this eternal sense I presume we each share in *being*.

For “I” am in here. Whether I am thinking or not, I come back to Descartes and go farther: I am. That’s it.

….

Surely Cartesian dualism was disposed of long ago. Surely *any* dualism was disposed of long ago.

Perhaps. But it is not exactly a fair fight pitting 17th century Descartes, dead and alone, unarmed, against entire faculties and armies of 21st century opponents. So what might Descartes do to argue his case today?

Descartes would have to recognise that much of what he thought mind *does* is neurologically explicable. Likely *all* explicable. He would have to surrender any hope of proving his spiritual existence in any verifiable manner. In terms of the mechanics of existence, modem monism does fine, thanks.

But that is because there is no plausible way to distinguish between a biologically-constructed replicant, and a biological human. By definition, the two are the same. But similarly, it follows that there is no way if *disproving* the presence of the “spirit” either, even if one were able to follow each neurone’s connections, map all the synapses, because even with such a map there is no way of detecting the sense of self *within* the cerebral network (as far as we know).

Like “i”, the square root of minus one, the spirit is non-falsifiable in itself, non-verifiable in itself, but *useful*.

So here is the analogy and the template, drawn straight from the very same mathematics Descartes laughed at. 

In the same way that the quantity i exists *perpendicular* to the number line, so too can a spirit concept be posited *perpendicular* to the realities we know. Claiming nothing for it aside from our sense of existence, no measurable action for the spirit can be proven or disproven.

I sit here and have a choice: a choice between two options, neither of which is verifiable nor falsifiable. Neither of which need impact of any physicalist argument about the mechanics of life.

The choice is: either my essential being is spirit, or an emerging property of complexity.

Personally, I choose spirit.

Personally, I choose to believe the people around me are spirit as well.

And I treat them as such.

*And I know, nor need know, anything more about it*.

Choose spirit, and study of Humanities makes sense *even though* all the humanities are hopelessly non-falsifiable, hopelessly pre-paradigmatic, and their practitioners hopelessly driven by the base natures and biological drives that drive us all.

Choose spirit, even when the mechanics of our thoughts and decisions and words and deeds can be mapped out in functional MR scans and precisely manipulated via neurotransmitter engineering and CRISPr gene editing.

To choose spirit may be the last and defining act of defiance.

…..

As mentioned above, the vast majority of humanities academics readily accept the certainty of science in their daily lives even though in a polemical debate they may deny thinking so, and even though their more rabid leaders may take a Bolshie view against science.

Similarly, the vast majority of scientists daily behave as if they, and their peers, and their families, and all of us, are entities beyond our neurophysiologies, though in a polemical debate they may deny thinking so, and even though their more rabid leaders may take a Bolshie view against any metaphysicalist ontologies.

…..

Once reduced forensically, stripped of jargon that adds nothing material to its arguments,  and critiqued by scientists who *have* actually studied and researched in science far more than Kuhn ever did, SSR becomes a very ordinary book.

It says little to actual scientists, while having manifestly misled generations of non-scientists, yet it appears the misled were willing and eager to be led astray. The most generous motive to ascribe to these willingly misled is that they perceived the expansion of science into the humanities as a threat to the innate human ontological sense of being, of spirit.

If we all ignore the radical whisperers motivated only to keep us apart, we can instead walk together in a march to Truth.   

This then is the meta-am hypothesis

Because the vast majority of humans believe implicitly or explicitly in a metaphysical or transcendent self, perhaps science ought to consider that the null hypothesis so to speak and seek to disprove it. They cannot. Yet they instead assume a non-metaphysical starting point then expect proof of a metaphysics. This cannot happen either. So we choose. 

All hypotheses are contingent. So can be the meta-I hypothesis. But an experiment pertaining to it is barely conceivable. 

Beyond the existence nothing is claimed. Let the believers fight it out!!