Mind over matter
Professor ponders the nature of consciousness
Archived article from Oct 22, 1999
By Alice Roche Cody
Eleven years ago in Oxford, England, philosopher Colin McGinn woke in the middle of the night with a sudden brainstorm. Quickly, he jotted down his thoughts on the mystery of consciousness. Before going back to sleep, he felt that he finally understood the workings of the mind and the brain in relation to consciousness.
The next morning, he expected to find that his insight was nothing more than pages of meaningless scribble. "But the next day my notes still made more sense to me than anything else I had ever written or read on the mind-body problem," says McGinn, a professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick.
He had, he was convinced, stumbled upon a new approach to understanding the relationship between consciousness and the brain. Over the next few years, he further developed his midnight revelations into two books, "The Problem of Consciousness" and "Problems in Philosophy."
His latest work, "The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World" (Basic Books), crystallizes his ideas in a popular, easy-to-read format. Geared to the lay reader, the book asks one of the most fundamental questions of science and philosophy: Are humans able to explain what it means to be conscious?
By consciousness, McGinn refers to that part of the mind that has experiences, sensations, emotions, feelings, dreams and thoughts. In an effort to explore the relationship between the mind and the brain, he contrasts it to that of a queen and her throne.
"The brain is the seat of consciousness," he writes. "But it is not merely that the mind sits on the brain, like a monarch on her throne. It is more that the brain is what enables the mind to exist at all; it is more of a womb than a seat. The machinery of the brain allows the mind to work as it does and to have the character it does." A queen can leave her throne to stroll in her palace gardens, yet the mind cannot detach itself from the brain. "Consciousness is locked to the brain, rooted in its tissues," he adds.
What makes the relationship mysterious, says McGinn, is that the "squishy gray matter in our heads -- our brain meat -- can be the basis and cause of a rich mental life." While our "meaty" brains can be classified with other "meaty" body parts, such as muscles, kidneys and hearts, he says, it is only the brain that produces consciousness.
"The problem is how any collection of cells, no matter how large and intricately related, could generate consciousness," says McGinn. "The trouble is that neural complexity is the wrong kind of thing to explain consciousness; it is merely a matter of how many cells a given cell can causally interact with. If our kidneys had as many cells as our brains, that would not make them conscious."
McGinn's musings are by no means new; the mystery of consciousness is an ancient philosophical question debated by both Plato and Aristotle. Considered the first dualist, Plato believed that the soul is distinct from the body and is capable of maintaining a separate existence from it. Aristotle, who some call the first materialist, contended that the body and soul are two aspects of the same underlying substance.
Since the 17th century, however, dualism has been the driving force behind the mind-body problem, thanks to French philosopher Rene Descartes. Descartes, who coined the phrase, "I think, therefore I am," viewed the mind and brain as separate entities that were influenced by the pineal gland, which he called the seat of the soul.
McGinn carefully explores both the materialist and the dualist positions. Materialism, the scientific view of the mind, holds that the mind is composed solely of neurons and their electrochemical processes. "Once nature (or God) put neurons in our head, there was no more work to do to give us consciousness," he writes. "This is not because neural processes merely cause conscious processes; it's because neural processes are conscious processes."
Yet McGinn finds this explanation unsatisfactory. "Suppose I know everything about your brain of a neural kind: I know its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments," he writes. "I know everything that the materialist says your mind is. Do I thereby know everything about your mind? On the contrary, I know nothing about your mind. I know nothing about which conscious states you are in -- whether you are morose or manic, for example -- and what these states feel like to you." Therefore, he concludes, knowledge of the brain does not lead to knowledge of the mind.
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