“There are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, Hamlet retorts when Horatio expresses astonishment at the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet the king. We are not told explicitly what is Horatio’s philosophy, but from his later remarks we might glean that he is some kind of Stoic. If he were alive today he would be a positivistic Materialist. We know even less about Hamlet’s philosophy, or even that he is a philosopher, though as a student at Wittenberg University he would certainly have been taught Aristotelian philosophy. In a recent book on the play, the literary critic Rhodri Lewis devotes a whole chapter to Hamlet as philosopher, even though he is highly critical of him in that capacity.1 But perhaps there is less justification for that than Lewis supposes.
We know that Hamlet is referring to ghosts or the supernatural element in his philosophy, which Lady Macbeth in the later play calls “metaphysical”.2 In our philosophy both the supernatural and the metaphysical have been banished for what there is in heaven and earth is determined by science. Science forbids us to believe in ghosts, for if we allowed for the ghost in the cellarage we would also be bound to admit the ghost in the machine and that would cause immense difficulties for our view of mind, as well as for our science. In that respect we must side with Horatio’s philosophy.
But Hamlet is right in that there is more to our minds than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Hamlet stands for all that which our present philosophy and science neglect and repress, especially in dealing with the mind. He stands for Homo Ludens, that side of our mind that concerns art and mimesis, imagination and creation, or, in other words, the whole play aspect of our being. The term is the title of the well-known book by Johan Huizinga and it can stand as the watchword of our approach to the science and philosophy of mind.3
According to Huizinga, Homo Ludens together with Homo Faber and Homo Sapiens are the essential characteristics of human mind and culture. As he puts it, “in culture we find play as a given magnitude existing before culture itself existed, accompanying and pervading it from the earliest beginnings right up to the present phase of civilization we are now living in”.4 As we shall see,
What has this to do with Hamlet? Once more Huizinga provides the answer: “It is more than a rhetorical comparison to view culture sub specie ludi. The thought is not at all new. There was a time when it was generally accepted, though in a limited sense quite different from the one intended here: in the 17th century, the age of the world theatre… It was the fashion to liken the world to a stage.”5 Hamlet, the connoisseur of Elizabethan theatre, plays his tragic part on the world stage. He has much to teach us about our own theatrum mundi on which we play our parts. Certainly, our world is very different historically from Hamlet’s world: we play on a global stage with instruments that command far greater powers than he could have conceived. Our capacity to do ourselves harm is also beyond his imagination. And yet, the human drama has not changed in its basic essentials, and the philosophical issues at play are not all that different despite our boastful claims of progress.
This is the reason that Hamlet figures so markedly in our text and that words drawn from his play are quoted repeatedly throughout; or putting it in modish literary parlance, Hamlet acts as the subtext to our main text. It is also meant to act as a reminder that philosophy and science do not just proceed in a world of abstract ideas divorced from realities, but in the real world of pain and suffering and death – the tragedy of human life. Hamlet provides the tragic human touch to our abstruse theorizing, the sense that we live in a historical world where the time is out of joint and that we must try to set it right or suffer tragic consequences such as could not have been even dreamt of in Hamlet’s time.
The reasons why our time is out of joint are, of course, very different from those in Hamlet’s time. Then it was the surreptitious murder of a king that wrought something rotten in the state of Denmark and brought corruption into the body politic. Now there are different kinds of corruptions in the present state of the world, for we are still traumatized by the mass murders that occurred within the living memory of the oldest, and the youngest live in dread of the even far greater possible catastrophes that hang over our heads like the sword of Damocles.
Our time is also out of joint because our eyes are out of focus, for we no longer have a clear vision of ourselves as human beings. The sciences and technologies of our time have distorted our view of ourselves and seem to mandate a conception of our minds as machines. We are the machines from which the ghost has been exorcized through the ministrations of our philosophies and sciences. The instrument these have employed to carry out this exorcism is the computer, an invention that arose during the dark days of the last Great War when so many of our current technologies were first developed. These technologies now enmesh our lives, none more so that computer networks. So that even if we have still not fully accepted the idea of being machines, we are in thrall to the machines that control what we do and determine how we live.
But let us leave the tragic side of things and turn more to the comic which is also there in Hamlet. Hamlet reminds us that “the play is the thing to catch the conscience of the king”. Play, as we shall show, catches more than just conscience, it grasps hold of consciousness itself. It does so more decisively even than thought. According to Descartes, who came shortly on the heels of Hamlet, it is thought that defines us primarily as conscious beings. Hence he pronounced his famous dictum “Cogito, ergo sum”. But perhaps it is even more appropriate to declare “Ludo, ego sum”, for playing in the general sense of miming, imitating and representing is more characteristic of being human than is thinking. “I play, therefore I am” might be the more profound truth since, like Hamlet, we are all players before we are thinkers; and too much thinking can make cowards of us all, as Hamlet rues. However, “nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so”, that is, without thought there could be no judgement.
After Hamlet, Descartes is the next most crucial figure in our story. It is to Descartes that we owe the initial exposition of the scientific method of mathematical quantification and of experimentation that is at the heart of our science and philosophy. Descartes together with Galileo and Kepler initiated the Scientific Revolution out of which our world of science and technology developed. Consequently, Descartes is the hero of the standard histories of the modern world; but in our account he serves more as the anti-hero, for out of his philosophy have sprung the contemporary forms of Cartesianism with which we now have to battle and attempt to overcome. In declaring the body to be a machine, Descartes prepared the ground for the later progression to the view that the mind, too, is a machine.
Hamlet had as yet no inkling of any such Cartesian mechanistic philosophies; even though he did sign his letter to Ophelia with the words “thine, evermore, dear lady whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet.” But this is obviously only a fortuitous reference to the machine, rather than an anticipation of the
The real hero in Damasio’s account is neither Hamlet nor Descartes, but Spinoza. He notes, however, that all three are linked when he remarks that “Spinoza was born into an age of questioning, an era that might well be known as Hamlet’s age”. But there is a difference in their questioning. For Hamlet “to be or not to be, that is the question”; for Spinoza being and non-being are no longer the main question, rather it is that of the being with contradictory attributes, human being. On this key issue of reconciling thought and extension or mind and body Damasio sides with Spinoza as against Descartes. This also means that he is against the contemporary forms of mechanistic Cartesianism based on the computer model of mind. Since what he has to say about that fits so well the overall thesis of this work, we will allow ourselves to quote him at some length right at the very start:
…we can be certain Spinoza was changing the perspective he inherited from Descartes when he said, in The Ethics, Part 1, that thought and extension, while distinguishable, are nonetheless attributes of the same substance, God or Nature. The reference to a single substance serves the purpose of claiming mind as inseparable from body, both created, somehow, from the same cloth. The reference to the two attributes, mind and body, acknowledged the distinction of two kinds of phenomena, a formulation that preserved an entirely sensible “aspect” dualism, but rejected substance dualism. By placing thought and extension on equal footing, and by tying both to a single substance, Spinoza wished to overcome a problem that Descartes faced and failed to solve: the presence of two substances and the need to integrate them. On the face of it, Spinoza’s solution no
longer required mind and body to integrate or interact; mind and body would spring in parallel from the same substance, fully and mutually mimicking each other in their different manifestations. In a strict sense, the mind did not cause the body and body did not cause the mind.7
The last sentence, as we shall show, is particularly noteworthy.
Spinoza – as seen through the eyes of Damasio and interpreted with Damasio’s knowledge of science – is as good an introduction to the mind-body problem as that to be found in any philosopher. But it is only an introduction and much needs to be added to it and amended in it before it will begin to provide answers to our main questions. Damasio’s own sciences, neurology and psychology, need to be consulted and the contribution that both of them have to make to the issue spelled out. How they relate to each other forms the nub of our account of mind. The difficulty is one of determining how these two kinds of science come together. Neurology is at the “hard” sciences end of the interface where mind meets body; psychology is at the “soft” sciences end – it is where mind reaches out outside its own body to the external social environment of language and culture. Tying up these loose ends is the knot intrinsicate of our problem.
This is not a problem with one solution that might be formulated once and for all as the true answer. It is much more like a historical work in progress, an ongoing scientific and philosophical exploration that humanity engages in age by age. But there is real progress in this work for ever newer discoveries are being made and better theories are advanced; and we can judge this by how far we have come since Hamlet. The next few centuries will undoubtedly bring as much if not more progress again. But that does not mean it will bring us closer to an ultimate truth or final solution. It could turn out to be an endless endeavour, humanity’s ceaseless preoccupation with understanding itself. Or it might turn out that there will be some way of bringing this quest to an end or ending it due to the sheer impossibility of going on any further.
All such speculations about what the future might or might not bring are nothing more than that – speculations. They are unsubstantiated and unverifiable since there is no way of peering over the horizon of historical time to see what it will reveal on the other side, as it were. However, that does not prevent us surveying all that which is within range of our temporal vision at present and even a little beyond into the future. We can study the sciences as they now exist and as they might develop in the near future, and so ascertain what they might disclose about the mind. We can interrogate them philosophically and
What do the “hard” sciences and the soft “sciences” have to contribute to our knowledge of ourselves as minds and bodies? Why are their contributions so very different? What is it that makes neurology a “hard” science and psychology a “soft” science, what distinguishes them in their methods and procedures? Why do we even need two such different types of sciences? How do these two sciences fit in with all the others: how does neurology relate to biology and the sciences of evolution and how does psychology relate to anthropology and sociology? How can the humanities, such as literary criticism of plays like Hamlet, contribute or have any bearing on the sciences at all? At present the vast majority of scientists and philosophers would hold that the humanities have no relevance to any such scientific issues. Most would argue that the “soft” sciences are not all that relevant to the mind-body problem either, and would look solely to the “hard” sciences for answers. This is one of the reasons why the humanities and “soft” sciences have fallen on such hard times at present, so much so that many scientists and philosophers believe that they do not really count at all. Here again, our reference to Hamlet serves a purpose in reminding us that literature does matter and that it cannot be simply dispensed with for it has so much to teach us about ourselves.
The trend to relying on the “hard” sciences alone in unlocking the mystery of the mind has become ever more pronounced since the end of the Second World War. The spectacular advances in technology that then began and have continued ever since have given rise to developments on two broad fronts: on the one hand, we now have instruments and recording devices that enable us to peer into and see what is going on in the brain in ever greater detail; on the other hand, we can build machines that seem to have some of the same capacities as the brain, the computer being the foremost among these. The coming together of these two developments has led to a great variety of new scientific approaches and whole new sciences. Neuroscience, cybernetics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, connectionism, robotics and many more have been new departures in the “hard” sciences. What has ensued has been a veritable mechanization of the mind. The history of this whole trend in the sciences of mind has been masterfully summarized in a two volume book by Margaret Boden.8 This work represents both a triumphalist vindication and validation of the evident success of this movement; but also a testament to its ultimate
It is this whole post-war technologically conditioned trend that we are setting ourselves against. But instead of tackling it head on right from the very start, we shall adopt the indirect approach and by indirection find direction out. Only at the very end will it be possible to openly confront the “mind as machine” advocates and other “hard” sciences exponents of mind as brain. For prior to any such confrontation we must first arrive at an alternative view of the nature and origin of the mind. This acts as the positive foil of the negative critique; the one cannot exist without the other, like the two sides of a coin; which comes first is a matter of tactics, and the presentation we have adopted could just as easily have been reversed. But to have done so and begun with a direct frontal attack would have forfeited the advantages of the indirect approach.
Right at the very start we begin our indirections by asking a few childishly simple questions: what are the origins of matter, life and mind, the three most fundamental modes of being? But we soon discover that as with all such naïve questions about origins they are all but unanswerable, not because we have no answers, rather because we have too many, a veritable embarrass de richesse. Unfortunately, we have no way of decisively choosing between them. Determining how matter, life and mind arise is all but undecidable since we are unable to prove or disprove empirically the various explanations on offer. All the answers are plausible and there are no experimental tests or other decision procedures for falsifying or ruling out any of them. This means that we have no commonly accepted theoretical explanations of the fundamental issues in physics, biology or psychology. Our initial task will be to explain how such an anomalous situation has arisen in the sciences and what it tells us about the course of science as a whole. Does it mean, as some claim, that science is coming to an end?
Our preoccupation in this work is, of course, with the third of these issues, that of the origin or emergence of mind. The other two, the origins of matter and of life, are only there as prolegomena to the main text. Matter – which concerns physical reality – is a highly technical issue that spans the whole gamut from elementary particle physics to solid state physics, including chemistry. Life, which concerns biological reality, is also the province of numerous sciences from biochemistry and molecular genetics through to animal ethology. Mind, which concerns animal and human cognitive capacities, has even more scientific specialities both in what we have called the “hard” and the
If understanding the mind means understanding ourselves as human beings, then it seems as if we have both more knowledge of ourselves than of anything else, and yet we are further from knowing ourselves than of knowing anything else, short of the universe as a whole. We know that our brain is the most complex single object in the universe; but we do not know whether we will ever be able to fully plumb its workings. There are, indeed, philosophers who argue that the human brain does not have the capacity to know itself, that only a superior brain can do that; for as we can understand animals, so only superior beings are able to understand us. On the face of it, such an argument seems specious for the problem is not that of an individual brain knowing itself and so being defeated by its own self-limitation, but that of the joint activities of a multitude of brains engaged in a collective undertaking to analyse and decipher piece by piece the operations of this single system. There is nothing to prohibit that in principle, though it might take a long time in practice; how long we do not know.
However, in practice there might be limitations in how far we might go in unravelling the inner tangles of our brains if, for example, its workings prove to be too complex or chaotic. So it is possible that at some point in the distant future there will be diminishing returns on the scientific effort expended on understanding the brain. It is possible that in respect of mind as well, truly novel and significant knowledge will eventually peter out. These are conceivable possibilities, but we have no reason at present to believe that we have as yet or will soon encounter any such barriers. Productive returns are still being achieved in both the “hard” and “soft” sciences of brain and mind, and this might continue for some time still.
However, there are thinkers who disagree and argue that not only the brain and mind sciences but the sciences in general have now reached the stage of ever diminishing returns. This argument was first launched by the molecular geneticist and neuroscientists Gunther Stent and was later restated by the science journalist John Horgan. Stent tries to show that all the crucial fundamental discoveries in all sciences have already been made and that there is nothing left to do except fill in the details to the last decimal point. He relies on Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions according to which the crucial discovery is the initial paradigm and all the rest is merely working out and branching out or what Kuhn calls normal science. It seems, according to Stent and Horgan, that all the paradigms have already been discovered, only their application to the infinite variety of concrete particulars remains to be laboriously elaborated. Stent takes geography as an analogy for all other sciences:
Geography, for instance, is bounded because its goal of describing the features of the Earth is clearly limited. Even if the totality of the vast number of extant topographic and demographic details can never be described, it seems evident nevertheless that only a limited number of significant relations can ultimately be abstracted from these details. And, as I tried to show in The Coming of the Golden Age, genetics is not only bounded, but its goal of understanding the mechanism of transmission of hereditary information has, in fact been all but reached. Indeed, and here I will probably part company with some who might have granted me the preceding example, even such more broadly concerned scientific taxa as chemistry and biology are also bounded.9
Stent believes that all the major problems in biology have fundamentally been solved or about to be so; and he explicitly refers to three key issues not solved which he confidently believes will be soon overcome: the origin of life, the mechanism of cellular differentiation and the functional basis of the higher nervous system. He places his confidence in “the central dogma of molecular genetics” as elaborated by Crick and Watson, and on “the host of biologists now standing ready to do battle and vast armoury of experimental hardware at their disposal”. Hence he expects that “origin of life, differentiation, and the nervous system cannot help but soon suffer the fate that was accorded to heredity in these last twenty years.”10 It is now over forty years since that sanguine prediction was made and though undeniably there have been advances, these problems are still very far from solved.
Stent’s thesis has been taken up by Horgan, first in a book, The End of Science, and subsequently in other publications.11 Horgan reviews the state of the sciences in a much more sceptical spirit even that Stent. He holds that in many fields science has reached a dead end where no further progress can be expected. This he holds to be the case in relation to the three fundamental issues we previously raised, the origins of matter, life and mind. He sees many of the theories on offer in these fields to be as much philosophical as scientific, consequently not subject to empirical testing, and therefore outside the ambit of science as he understands it.
Both Horgan and Stent before him make many insightful comments on where the sciences stand at present, but the conclusions they draw from them must be rejected. Science is not coming to an end; this only appears to be so
This is the reductive quest in science that began with Descartes and was first articulated in his Discourse on Method. Subsequently it was carried much further by Newton who declared “hypothesis non fingo”, namely, he was not concerned with metaphysical issues of the fundamental nature and ground of things, merely to explain them empirically by reference to the laws governing them. All other subsequent scientists continued this quest to reductively explain the whole of nature. Physics came close to completion with Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory and subsequently with the Standard Model of elementary particle physics; and the other physical sciences followed suit. Chemistry was successfully reduced to physics starting with Bohr’s work. Biology proved a harder nut to crack but a good start was made in genetics by Crick and Watson’s reduction of the principles of Mendelian heredity to the atomic structure of dna, and it was believed, as Stent said, that the rest would follow. Even psychology seemed finally to be susceptible to reductive treatment through the Cognitivist Revolution based on information processing.
Reductive science aims to explain entities on a higher and more complex level by reference to theories couched in terms of entities on a lower and more basic level. It is pre-eminently an analytic and atomistic mode of explanation, breaking things down to their lowest constituents and then reconstituting them again. The first analytic move is relatively easy, but the second synthetic one rarely succeeds. It is not possible to derive chemistry from physics or biology from chemistry. The successful reduction of biology leaves unanswered most key questions, such as the ones Stent confidently expected to be soon settled. The reason for this is that reduction in principle tells us nothing about what is actually possible in practice. When Dirac discovered the positron, he believed he had solved the fundamental problems of physics, and he famously declared “all the rest is chemistry”, namely, a matter of laboriously solving the equations. But the equations could not be solved.
Einstein expressed himself in a similar vein in a statement which we will quote in full because it is so indicative of how a great reductivist master thinks about science:
In regard to his subject matter … the physicist has to limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and the logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness. But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe? In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist’s renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.13
The telling phase in that declaration is “if that process of deduction were not beyond the capacity of the human intellect”, for almost always deducing a natural phenomenon from already known laws and initial conditions is beyond the scope of the human intellect. Even if we have the relevant equations at hand, they are usually too difficult to solve; in such cases they stare back at us mutely and uncomprehendingly. Hence, being able to reductively explain something in principle tells us almost nothing about what is actually the case in practice. Einstein was certainly wrong to hold that life can be arrived at by “pure deduction”.
We can reductively explain life in terms of chemistry and molecular genetics; Crick and Watson demonstrated that conclusively. But we cannot start from the laws of chemistry and molecular structure and deduce from these the origin of life. Despite the fact that we know all about the molecular and chemical constitution of the living organism, we still do not know how life originated though there are many plausible, unfortunately mutually contradictory, accounts about it. In brief, as we showed in The Ends of Science, reduction cannot be reversed and transformed into deduction; from the fact that X can be reduced to Y, it rarely follows that X can be deduced from Y.
In seeking to reverse reduction, as it were going backwards from Y to X, we come upon a concept that is playing an increasingly more important role in contemporary science, that of emergence. We can say that X emerges from Y, and we can also proceed to explain how and why this takes place. To scientists brought up in the reductivist philosophy of Classical science this seems to be either an illegitimate move, an illusionist sleight-of-hand trick of getting something out of nothing, or something utterly mysterious and incomprehensible. The re-emergence of emergence in science and philosophy has consequently been an uphill struggle and bitter battles have ensued in many fields. But there is no way of dealing with the issues of origin, above all that of the mind, which we previously raised except through invoking the notion of emergence.
Emergence is not a new idea. It had first arisen in the work of J.S. Mill in the mid-nineteenth century and a little later it flourished in connection with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was particularly prominent in British philosophy and science till just before the onset of the Second World War. But after the war it lapsed due to the reductivist triumphs that then ensued. So much so that it was made unmentionable for a long time. It went into a kind of conceptual hibernation which lasted till almost the end of the twentieth century. Only a few daring thinkers had raised it during this period, such as the neurologist Roger Sperry and the philosopher Donald Campbell in the 1970s. But around the turn of the millennium it aroused considerable attention from many scientists and philosophers. By now it is back with a vengeance as if to make up for lost time.
We shall attempt to make sense of emergence and show that it is neither a mystery nor a trick but the logical consequence of reversing reduction. It has a clear logic of its own which is that of indissoluble non-identity, such that to assert that X emerges from Y entails both that X cannot be detached from Y and that X cannot be identified with Y. We shall also show that it is in some broad sense an empirical matter whether or not emergence does or does not apply in a given case, namely, whether the concept of emergence can be invoked as part of an explanation in a given scientific context. It is undoubtedly the case that there are very many phenomena and systems where the concept of emergence has been invoked with considerable justification and explanatory plausibility. This has occurred in all scientific fields, which raises the further question of whether an overarching theory of emergence can be formulated to cover all of them. There have been many attempts to do so, frequently presenting themselves as unified theories of systems or complexity or adaptive matter and many others. We shall study a number of these and seek to ascertain whether they have succeeded in presenting an all-embracing theory of the many diverse phenomena of emergence. To forestall any doubts about this matter and
What emergence represents for the history of science depends on how all these issues will work themselves out in the future. At present we cannot tell whether it stands for another kind of science, perhaps even another era in science after the Classical age; or, on the contrary, whether it is a trivial pastime of speculative minded scientists and philosophers at the end of science, as Horgan maintains. Horgan is particularly critical of theories of complexity and chaos and other such modish fashions in science which promised a great deal but delivered very little. But one must not take such disappointments – frequently the result of excessive expectations raised by journalistic hype – to prejudge the issue of where science stands at present. It is most likely that we are in an in-between time waiting for something decisive to happen; like Hamlet’s ghost, we are wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.
In a historical period when the time is out of joint, there are even more serious problems besetting philosophy. The end of philosophy is also a frequently mooted topos which we tried to set right in a book that complements the one on science, entitled The Ends of Philosophy.14 Once again, the point of that title is to stress ends and not the end, telos and not finis. The book sought to propose other ends for philosophy than those that had been dominant during the long era of Positivism.
During the period of Positivism two variants of this extensive movement became prominent: Logical Positivism and Linguistic Positivism. Wittgenstein played a central role in both. Logical Positivism, a name which it acquired much later, began prior to Wittgenstein with the technical triumphs in formalizing logic and mathematics first initiated by Gottlob Frege and subsequently completed by Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead in their masterwork Principia Mathematica. This formal “language” became the basis for Wittgenstein’s initial quasi-metaphysical sketch the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that combined Frege with Schopenhauer, the two opposed poles, conceptual Realist and Idealist, of German philosophy.15
However, as is well known, Wittgenstein changed his mind later in his career when he turned away from formalized “language” to common language and
Both these types of Positivism were brought over to America where they were amalgamated as two sides of Analytic philosophy which has dominated philosophy departments since the Second World War. Logical Positivism arrived in America through the agency of leading exponents of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap and Herbert Feigl, who came as refugees. Linguistic philosophy was introduced by Wittgenstein’s pupils, such as Norman Malcolm, and through lecture courses given by Oxford philosophers, such as J.L. Austin. Both gained many distinguished American adherents, such as Willard Quine on the one side and Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell on the other.
It is our contention that the ends of philosophy practiced and preached by both the “turning to logic” and the “turning to language” movements, though perhaps salutary in their time, have by now clearly turned into dead ends. Analytic philosophy in general has more than outlived its time and is now moribund if not yet altogether dead. The time has surely come to seek for new ends of philosophy, new ways in which philosophizing can still be carried on, for otherwise it will indeed come to an end. This is by no means an idiosyncratic opinion but one shared by a number of outstanding philosophers in America whose views will be discussed in this book. The two who will be extensively dealt with are Evan Thompson and Mark Johnson and there are others who might be considered as well.
A new start in philosophy must be made because not only has it sunk into a sterile Positivism of the logical or linguistic varieties, but also because it made common cause and modelled itself on the misguided scientific-technological project to mechanize the mind. This is the “mind as machine” movement which flourished in American science in the period after the war, first as Cybernetics and subsequently as the Cognitivist Revolution to which we previously adverted. American philosophers almost en masse fell into step with this scientistic development and propounded theories of mind accordingly. None was more receptive in this respect that Daniel Dennett who started his endeavour at
Due to war-time exigencies which we shall later spell out, Cognitivism began at the Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology (mit) at the hands of its great luminaries, Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky. Both exercised a profound influence on philosophers all over America and eventually in Britain and its academic spheres, as exemplified pre-eminently by Margaret Boden. A precursor to Boden’s book on the history of the Cognitive Revolution, Howard Gardner’s The Mind’s New Science, points to the attraction that Cognitivism held for philosophers and explains why they were so taken with it.17 The mind’s new science quickly spawned the mind’s new philosophy in a number of variants of this approach. One very influential version was produced by a pupil of Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and went under the designation of Functionalism. Another was Dennett’s philosophy of mind based on Minsky’s society of mind theory. And there were many other such developments. Philosophy once more returned to the subservient position to which Locke had once sought to consign it, that of the underlabourer to science.
Philosophy as the handmaiden of science linked its fortunes to the science which it served. It happened to be Cognitivist science which was in the ascendency. Since then the Cognitivist Revolution has shown itself to be far less revolutionary that it was originally thought to be and, like so many others, it has ended up as a failed revolution. The philosophies of mind that based themselves on it are also registering the same symptoms of failure. The whole “mind as machine” movement both in science and philosophy is by now showing all the signs of an exhausted undertaking. It was a mistaken enterprise from the start and the errors inherent in it are by now glaringly obvious, as we shall show in the very last chapter of this book, when finally our indirections find direction out.
A new start must be made in philosophy, one that will once more align it with science but in a different way to that which prevailed during the Positivist era with its reductivist preoccupations. Philosophy must reengage with those scientific issues where there is a need for philosophical mediation and where science alone cannot settle matters. These are the kinds of issues of emergence that we previously touched on and will go on to consider in greater depth, such as the questions regarding the origins of matter, life and mind. It is the last of these, the emergence of mind, which will preoccupy us throughout most of this book. We will address this problem at once on the scientific and philosophical
Thus the book might serve as a demonstration of a new way of bringing science and philosophy together in dealing with fundamental issues that concern both. This kind of partnership might be entered into on many other major topics apart from mind. Part 1 of the book that deals with the science of matter offers some suggestions as to how philosophy might re-enter the discussion of key problems in science from which philosophers have been largely excluded or, better put, they have excluded themselves by adopting the previously outlined blinkered Positivistic approaches. We leave it to others better qualified in the relevant scientific fields to once more take up the interpretative tasks that call for and invite philosophical participation.
On the matter of mind, which Hamlet calls the quintessence of dust, we might once more begin by turning to his play. For it is Hamlet who coins this expression at the conclusion of his peroration on the nature of Man. So we turn to that first, and let Hamlet speak to us in his own words.
Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), Chapter 5.
Macbeth, Act i, scene v.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, trans. anonymous (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).
Ibid, 4.
Ibid, 5.
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (Orlando/Florida: Harcourt, 2003), 225.
Ibid, 209.
Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Gunter, S. Stent, The Paradoxes of Progress (San Francisco: Freeman, 1978) 49.
Ibid, 49.
John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
Harry Redner, The Ends of Science: An Essay in Scientific Authority, (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1987).
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1954), 225.
Harry Redner, The Ends of Philosophy: an Essay in the Sociology of Philosophy and Rationality (London: Croom-Helm, 1986).
See Harry Redner, Malign Masters: Philosophy and Politics in the Twentieth Century, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
See Harry Redner, The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015).
Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution, (New York: Harper Collins, 1985).