ARE YOU AN ILLUSION?

Are You an Illusion? Mary Midgley poses the question both whimsically and seriously. Given that a vast corpus of contemporary neuroscience and psychology denies the existence of "free-will", and asserts that consciousness is no more than a by-product of neurons firing off in the brain or other unspecified bio-chemical processes, most psychologists conclude that the sense of a self is an illusion. Mary Midgley argues that the conclusion is not only nonsensical but that the scientists who propose it probably don't believe what they're saying either. At least with regard to themselves. Mary Midgley is no anti-science crusader. A respected philosopher who has produced a large corpus of books on moral philosophy and the philosophy of science, she is grounded solidly in Darwinian Evolution. She deserves a serious hearing, even if her views challenge prevailing scientific views. How did we come to accept as scientific facts concepts that don't make sense: that we don't have free-will, that our self doesn't exist, that animals have no emotions, that nature and evolution have no purpose. Such ideas go against our daily experience. We feel that we are much more than automatons, that our lives have meaning and purpose. Are we fooling ourselves? She concedes that many scientific findings are "counter-intuitive"; the Earth moves at 30km/second through space though we are not aware of it. However, the findings of science have to make sense. Our subjective experience of a self, of free-will and of consciousness cannot be swept under the carpet because our materialistic prejudice makes them inconvenient. The conflict, she perceives, is between empirical science and scientism about which she says,

Scientism exalts the idea of science on its own, causing people to become fixated on the assumptions that seemed scientific to them during their formative years. This prevents them from seeing contrary facts however glaring they may be…

How did scientism's assumptions come to be accepted as dogma? "At the start of the 20th century, while Freud was exploring the content of consciousness, behaviouristic psychologists were busy denying the existence of the inner self. Behaviour was seen as measurable, a scientific quantity, while the psyche was denounced as an unscientific construct even though it might feel real. Midgley suggests that the prejudice was rooted in 19th century attitudes to thought. The exploration of inner states was seen as an obscene activity that proper people didn't do. The idea that one's thoughts and feelings might be real, and so could influence the outer world felt scary. Scholars including T. H. Huxley went to all lengths to avoid referencing the influence of thought on human action. When we add to our conscious psyche a subconscious, whose nature is irrational possibly beyond our control, the psyche starts looking really scary. Best to pretend that it doesn't exist, or at least that it isn't worthy of study. A materialistic view of the Earth (The Gaia Theory excluded) is of a lifeless object; of animals that have neither emotions nor consciousness. Is that view more "useful" to us than a religious view? She suggests that it is, in allowing us to exploit the Earth's resources with few constraints, and to use animals without any regard to how they feel. Thus we have built our technological world and driven plant and animal species to extinction with few pangs of conscience. Social Darwinism as described in Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" emphasises the evolution of species through natural selection that lacks any purpose. Its resemblance to the mechanism of free-market capitalism is no coincidence. Midgley notes how the popularity of "The Selfish Gene" paralleled the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both champions no holds barred economic competition. Midgley asks us to examine our materialistic assumptions. She rejects the Cartesian duality of a body and spirit, but points out that ditching the soul, which modern science has done, has left us with a picture of inanimate nature that does not explain consciousness, our sense of self or our sense of purpose. At the age of 94 Mary Midgley has put forward a well-articulated challenge to established science. Would that we all have the mental clarity and verve to argue as clearly when we're in our nineties.