ABSENCE OF MIND

These Yale University Terry Lectures on religion in the light of science and philosophy are subtitled 'the dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self.' Robinson shows how modern thought forms a closed circle with its positivist assumptions that, at least in terms of its methods and presuppositions, science is fundamentally complete and that certain past patterns of thought can be dismissed as naive and untenable superstitions; we have passed a threshold and have dispelled a number of major illusions, including religion, as Freud suggested. This represents what Robinson calls a hermeneutics of condescension, based on the assumed authority of science. The central point is that 'mind as felt experience has been excluded from important fields of modern thought.' In other words, there is such a focus on objectivity and impersonality that people have lost sight of the fact that any system of thought has to presuppose consciousness. The first-person perspective is prior to the third-person view and corresponds necessarily to our own immediate sense of felt experience. Positivism sought to exclude the language of metaphysics as meaningless, but we cannot in fact do without a metaphysic and should always remain aware of our own assumptions in this respect.

As Robinson points out in her second lecture, 'the elusiveness of mind is a consequence of its centrality, which is both its potency and its limitation.' However, this depends on which way we are facing – inwards or outwards. Buddhist contemplative traditions, for instance, tell us a great deal about the way that consciousness operates, but Western thinking looks out and ironically becomes naive about the nature of what it is that is looking. A further consequence of this way of thinking is that our minds are not in fact our own but can be explained in terms of other factors, whether biological, social or cultural. This corresponds to various forms of reductionism and determinism and is associated with a 'curtailment of the assumed capacities of the mind', in contrast to Descartes who was confident of his mind as a clear and certain point of departure. The cultural consequences of this way of thinking are serious, since, as Robinson observes, whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind; and the dominant scientific discourse is one of chance, necessity and ultimate meaninglessness. Interestingly, Comte intended a selfless devotion to the welfare of others to fill the place left by no longer believing in God. More recent thinking on this topic, particularly in Dawkins, has found it hard to reconcile altruism with the survival principle of Darwinian evolution. Nor does the predominance of a mechanistic understanding make this any easier, since machines cannot be moral. E O Wilson, in his quest for an overarching framework, characterises altruism as ultimately selfish. This reminds one of rather crude undergraduate philosophising.

The last lecture considers the nature of consciousness, showing how the soul as a category has been collapsed into the mind and the mind into the brain. Functionally (Steven Pinker) the mind is what the brain does, which, for a left-hemisphere dominated person like him, is equated with computation. And yet there is still, for Robinson, a soul that appraises what the mind integrates. We can all recognise these higher order functions involving the mind's own self-awareness, 'the self that stands apart from itself'; in Hindu terms the Witness, but I think that many Western thinkers would try to formulate this into a non-reductive physicalism involving emergent properties.

In the final analysis we are left with certain perennial imponderables, as Pinker calls them, involving subjective experience, free will, conceptual meaning, epistemology and values. These cannot be adequately appraised objectively, still less 'solved' by science, but are matters for philosophy and religion that will remain open in every generation. Thus 'so long as the human mind exists to impose itself on reality...what it is and what we are must remain an open question.' Indeed, and it is good to see this expressed in this eloquent series of lectures – that we are and will remain more than an 'optimised ape.'