Time's Sermon
Posted
Sunday, January 28, 2007
by
Charlie Trimm
Categories:
Culture and Theology
The latest issue of Time (January 29, 2007) was devoted to the topic of the mind and body. There were many fascinating articles, but one of them caught my attention: The Mystery of Consciousness, by Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard. This articles surveys the "Easy" problem and the "Hard" problem. The easy problem is "to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computations, identify its correlates in the brain and why it evolved." The hard problem is "why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in ones head - why there is first-person, subjective experience." There were two parts of the article that jumped out at me.
One of them was the claim that despite vast areas of disagreement, the one agreed upon area in the field was "the idea that our thoughts, sesnsations, joys, and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA, consciousness is the activity of the brain." In other words, we are not two parts, but simply one. The main proof of this is that everything can be seen in the brain, whether emotion or thought process or desire. But the question that comes to my mind is whether this actually proves anything. Are these observations cause or effect? Wouldn't we expect an effect on the brain we could see even if it was caused by an immaterial mind? Am I just missing something here?
The other interesting part was how the article ended. Here is final two paragraphs.
And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifiting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that life is short. It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
The reason these were interesting is that the article has become a sermon. He takes his main point and draws out various applications for his audience. While I know this is standard procedure, this one was blatanly yelling "sermon" at me when I read it. Who says that scientists are totally disinterested and objective observers?
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