Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

I do not myself believe that such an account of the brain will ever be made. Present research methods show the relatively greater activity of specific regions of the brain in response to certain stimuli or in the course of certain mental or physical behaviors. But in fact it hardly seems possible that in practice the region of the brain that yields speech would not be deeply integrated with the regions that govern social behavior as well as memory and imagination, to degrees varying with circumstances. Nor does it seem possible that each of these would not under all circumstances profoundly modify the others, in keeping with learning and with inherited and other qualities specific to any particular brain. What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires? What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? To say it is the brain is insufficient, overgeneral, implying nothing about nuance and individuation. Much better to call it the mind.

If the brain at the level of complex and nuanced interaction with itself does indeed become mind, then the reductionist approach insisted upon by writers on the subject is not capable of yielding evidence of mind’s existence, let alone an account of its functioning. One who has inquired into the properties of hydrogen and oxygen might reasonably conclude that water is a highly combustible gas — if there were not his own experience to discourage this conclusion. As proof of the existence of mind we have only history and civilization, art, science, and philosophy. And at the same time, of course, that extraordinary individuation. If it is true that the mind can know and seek to know itself in ways analogous to its experience of the world, then there are more, richer data to be gleaned from every age and every culture, and from every moment of introspection, of deep awareness of the self.

To return briefly to the notion of multiverses. There is no reason I am aware of to doubt that our known reality is one of an endless number of realities, most of them ephemeral and unhaunted, presumably, though that is speculation. This hypothesis is so convenient to those who wish to minimize the significance of the apparent fine-tuning of our universe to allow for the existence of life, and so inaccessible to disproof, that there is something a little comical about it. Still, lifted out of the polemical context in which it is often to be found, the notion seems plausible enough. Why should there be, or have been, only one great singularity, one great surge of cosmos? Our universe is sufficient to prepare our imaginations for plenitude on an even grander scale.

So, granting the plausibility of the idea, what does it imply? Its power, when it is used polemically, is based on the fact that, in a multiverse, absolutely anything is possible. Take that, Reverend Paley. Still, it does draw attention to the givenness, the arbitrariness, one might even say the narrowness, of the protocols that govern our reality. Everything we take to be essential could be the accident of a peculiar history, a warp or an asymmetry in this one emergence that eventuated as time, or as gravity. To say that everything could be utterly different from universe to universe itself suggests infinite variants on a substructure of reality whose existence it is surely an error to assume. If it would still be meaningful to say, There are an infinite number of universes — if their profound otherness did not embarrass even the language of Being itself — then our own experience of Being is obviously far too minor and partial to support generalization. If something we could discern and recognize as intelligent life were to occur in certain of these other realities, might we not learn that our notions of intelligence were, so to speak, parochial? Might we not reconsider our ideas of intelligence as it occurs here on earth? If the question seems fanciful, the use if not the point of the multiverse hypothesis is precisely to enlarge or even to explode conventional and restrictive notions of the possible. My point is simply that the ancient assumption of parascience, that we are playing with a full deck, that we can proceed from an understanding of reality that is in every important sense sufficient, is a feature of the literature carried forward from a primitive notion of what sufficiency would be.

On one hand we have the most ancient and universal theological intuition, that the order we see exists by divine fiat, that the heavens proclaim the glory of God. And on the other hand we have this late development in cosmological speculation, the notion that the reality we experience is arbitrary, being one manifestation of an infinitely greater potentiality. I run the risk here of seeming to theologize science or to use scientific speculation to vindicate theology. This is true only in that, in both cases, the sense of the arbitrariness of given reality allows the human mind to see around its edges, so to speak — to acknowledge the potential in the interstices of the actual. To clarify this point I will quote a sharply contrasting view, expressed by E. O. Wilson in the last chapter of his book On Human Nature , published in 1979. “The core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic. Let me repeat its minimum claims: that the laws of the physical sciences are consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient to the same laws; and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject to these materialist explanations.” 5

I confess to finding this language unclear. I think I am fair to Wilson in taking him to mean that the physical and social sciences are coextensive, and that the laws of the first can therefore be presumed to govern the second, at least in principle or by extension, a notion already asserted in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte. What this would mean in practice is still difficult to imagine, however, even putting to one side the question of whether the social sciences are in fact sciences, or are methodical and testable enough to identify in themselves the workings of the kinds of apparently universal constants it is customary to call “laws.” I take it to mean that this world has passed through states of evolution, each of which would have been comprehensible in the terms of our understanding of, in Wilson’s phrase, “the visible universe.” A fair amount has happened in science since the publication of this book in 1979. We now know that only a small fraction of the universe is in any sense visible, that the adjective “dark” is now applied to most of it, meaning that the presence of unanticipated forms of matter and energy can be discerned or inferred though not “explained.”

Of course these must be assumed to be in principle “subject to materialist explanations,” though I would rephrase this as “available to tentative description in terms science finds meaningful.” But these phenomena demonstrate, as physics and cosmology tend to do, that the strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and that the assumptions of science, however tried and rational, are very inclined to encourage false expectations. As a notable example, no one expected to find that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that the rate of its acceleration is accelerating. It is a tribute to the brilliance of science that we can know such things. And it is also an illustration of the fact that science does not foreclose possibility, including discoveries that overturn very fundamental assumptions, and that it is not a final statement about reality but a highly fruitful mode of inquiry into it.