Pinker's Fallacious Case Against the Self and Soul

On the Time magazine web site there is a long essay by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker that seems to be dedicated to proving ideas such as the idea that your self doesn't really exist, that you have no soul, and that what you mistake for a mind with control over your muscles is really just an illusion. Unfortunately, the professor's case involves some serious warping of facts and logic. 

Below the title of the essay we see these words: “You exist, right? Prove it. How 100 billion jabbering neurons create the knowledge--or illusion--that you're here.” This is a completely bogus challenge. The existence of a self and human consciousness is an intuitive truth you can directly perceive. There is not the slightest need for anyone to prove such a fact of experience, any more than you need to prove that black is really black or that you can see something or that you can feel something. The burden of proof – in this case, an absolutely impossible task – is on anyone challenging the reality of such a fact of direct observation and experience. Similarly, if I see a mountain with my own eyes, the burden of proof isn't on me to prove that I have had a sensation – the burden of proof is on you if you make the weird claim that I have not had a sensation.

After wasting several paragraphs on some study involving a coma patient who had certain brain areas light up (a case that has no relevance to what he is arguing for), Pinker asserts, “Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.” To support this reductionist thesis, Pinker says, “Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.”

This latter claim is misleading and inaccurate. The people who have had such an operation are called split-brain patients. The wikipedia article on this type of operation says the following:

In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults.

Similarly, an article in Psychology Today says, “Split personality is a rare consequence of a split brain.” So clearly Pinker has his facts scrambled when he claims that splitting the brain with a corpus callosum surgery “creates two consciousnesses within the same skull.” In fact, it does nothing at all like that in the vast majority of cases. Even in the rare case when a split personality results, that is not at all “two consciousnesses within the same skull,” which is actually something that has never been observed. Split personality is a very rare case when someone alternates between one set of personality tendencies and another, not a case where two consciousnesses exist at the same time in the same brain. We might have a case of two simultaneous consciousnesses if someone's left hand wrote one essay and his right hand wrote a different essay, at exactly the same time (or if someone reported two simultaneous and unrelated trains of thought at exactly the same instant). Nothing like that has ever been observed or reported.

Speaking of anomalous brain conditions, there are some of those that seem inconsistent with Pinker's claim that the brain is the sole cause of the human mind. As discussed here, Lorber found astonishing cases of people who functioned very well with very little brain tissue, after they had a disease that converted most of their brain tissue to fluid. The same link discusses how children with chronic brain seizures are sometimes given an operation in which half of their brains are removed. Astonishingly, they are typically able to function very well after such an operation. How are such things compatible with Pinker's thesis?

Pinker makes no mention of such anomalies, but does take a quick stab at debunking observations that suggest that there may be such a thing as a human soul or life after death. Speaking of mediums, Pinker assures us that “attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks.” This is not an accurate description of the experiences which scientists had investigating mediums a century ago. Although some fraud was exposed, some leading scientists got involved in the investigation of mediums, and ended up concluding that in some cases something much more than magic and fraud was going on. For example, Sir Oliver Lodge (an eminent physicist who made key developments in wireless telegraphy) spent a long time investigating mediums such as Leonora Piper, and repeatedly stated that he encountered something unexplained and authentic, and that fraud was not involved. Another eminent scientist was William James, known as the founder of American psychology. He investigated Piper and declared she displayed some type of paranormal knowledge acquisition. Piper endured more than a decade of rigorous investigation, was never exposed as a fraud, and was eventually declared to be authentic by an arch-skeptic (Richard Hodgson) who started investigating her with the hope of debunking her, but ended up saying he had “no doubt” Piper had provided evidence of an afterlife. Another top-tier scientist Sir William Crookes (the inventor of the Crookes tube that was the forerunner of the X-ray machine) investigated at length a medium named Florence Cook, and reported that she had produced authentic paranormal phenomena suggestive of an afterlife, had submitted to every test, and had never shown the slightest intention to deceive. Crookes also gave a favorable report on the medium D.D. Home after testing him. These scientists never retracted such opinions.

Pinker also claims that “near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain.” This claim does not hold water. Those who have had near-death experiences report experiences such as having a life review, coming into contact with some Being of light, traveling through a tunnel, seeing dead relatives, and seeing some heavenly realm. To explain that naturally, you would need something that produces hallucinations, with the hallucinations all being similar. Oxygen starvation (cerebral hypoxia) is a condition well-understood, as it is sometimes produced in pilots and mountain climbers. Medical references on hypoxia do not typically list hallucinations as a symptom.

The symptoms of hypoxia listed here in a Federal Aviation Administration publication are “increased breathing rate, headache, lightheadedness, dizziness, tingling or warm sensations, sweating, poor coordination, impaired judgment, tunnel vision, and euphoria.” Tunnel vision is a phenomenon where you can only see what's in the center of your field of view, and is something entirely different from seeing yourself pulled through a tunnel, often reported in near-death experiences. So the only item on this list of symptoms matching what is reported in near-death experiences is euphoria. In short, oxygen deprivation is not a plausible explanation for near-death experiences. An RAF pilot named Allan Pring experienced oxygen deprivation while flying, and also much later experienced a near-death experience. He reported there was “no similarity” between the two.

Misleading government graphic -- the brain is not digital

 
Pinker tells us, “Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive 'I' that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion.” If Pinker is claiming here that there is no self that makes decisions based on sensory inputs, he is advancing a nonsensical thesis; and he does nothing to substantiate such a claim. There is not even currently such a thing as a real “science of consciousness.” You can get a PhD or master's degree in neuroscience (the study of the brain and nervous system) or in psychology (the soft and fuzzy study of the human mind), but as far as I can determine you cannot get a scientific degree in consciousness from any large college or university (the closest thing I can find to such a thing is an online master's degree in “Consciousness Studies” offered by a virtually unknown University of Philosophical Research). There is no scientific consensus involving “conclusions from the science of consciousness,” because such a science doesn't yet exist in any substantial and distinct form. 

Pinker discusses the “hard problem of consciousness,” the problem of explaining how a material brain can produce Mind, something totally different from matter. But he says nothing to give the reader any confidence that science is close to solving that problem, or even making much progress at solving it. Can we hope that such a day is coming, that perhaps when scientists scan brain tissue with a little higher magnification they will suddenly say, “Aha, there is a thought being produced”? Such a hope is not very plausible. What could you possibly see in a microscope or scanner that would be “the fingerprint of thought production” or “the smoking gun of matter producing consciousness”? We can't even imagine what we could possibly see that would be such a thing.

Perhaps we should instead consider some other paradigm of explanation involving more transcendent principles.

Scientists Ponder: What Scientific Idea Should be Retired?

Edge.org is a web site that every year posts a thought-provoking question to a group of scientists and other thinkers. Each set of answers usually ends up getting published in book form, and this series of books has made some very interesting reading. This year's question is: what scientific idea is ready for retirement?

There are some big thinkers who respond to this question, but some of the answers involve some lame reasoning.

The first answer given is by cosmologist Andrei Linde, who gives “Uniformity and uniqueness of the universe” as the scientific idea he thinks should be retired. Linde cites cases in which our universe seems to be tailor-made for life, and notes that if the mass of the electron were slightly different, or protons were not almost the same mass as neutrons, or the energy of empty space were not just right, we wouldn't be here. Linde then suggests that we should therefore adopt the concept of a multiverse, a vast ensemble of universes:

If the universe were given to us in one copy..we would need to speculate about the divine cause making the universe custom built for humans. Meanwhile, in the multiverse consisting of many different parts with different properties, the correlation between our properties and the properties of the part of the world where we can live makes perfect sense.

But this reasoning by Linde is not correct. If there are a million billion trillion quadrillion universes, then the match or correlation between our universe and a habitable universe would not make any more sense (and would not be even .0000000001 percent more likely) than it would be if there is only one universe. This in because in both cases the chance of our universe being a habitable universe is exactly the same. Multiplying the number of universes does not change the probability of any one of those universes being successful. It may change the likelihood of at least one of those universes being successful, but it would have no effect at all on the likelihood of any one of those universes being successful. Similarly, selling a million lottery tickets with 7 random digits may increase the chance that some ticket buyer may win, but it does nothing to increase the chance that any one of those tickets will be a winner. To put it in terms of probability mathematics, increasing the number of trials does not increase the chance of any one trial being successful. So if our universe requires an almost miraculous conspiracy of lucky breaks to be habitable, you do nothing to make that seem less miraculous by supposing a vast number of universes. The habitability of our universe (not to be confused with some universe) is a zillion to one shot before the multiverse assumption, and it's just as much of a zillion to one shot after the multiverse assumption.

Another scientist who offers a flawed answer to the Edge.org question is physicist Alan Guth, who answers the question of “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” by saying: “The Universe Began in a State of Extraordinarily Low Entropy.” In fact, there are still absolutely compelling reasons for believing that the universe did begin in a state of extraordinarily low entropy. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is always increasing. So if we just rewind things back to the time of the Big Bang, we are left with a state of incredibly little entropy. The diagram below illustrates the point:

Why would Guth want to propose that the universe did not begin in an incredibly low entropy state? Because the low entropy of the early universe is a major reason for doubting the cosmic inflation theory that Guth originated (a point that cosmologist Roger Penrose has made). It turns out that the cosmic inflation makes the “incredibly low early entropy” problem much worse, and requires that the universe must begin in an even more special state (entropy-wise) than it would have begun in without cosmic inflation. As physicist Sean Carroll says, "To get inflation to start requires even lower-entropy initial conditions than those implied by the conventional Big Bang model." So naturally Guth wants to bolster his pet theory by getting rid of ultra-low entropy at the Big Bang, somewhat in the same way that a believer in Earth's uniqueness might want to get rid of evidence for extrasolar planets.

But what does Guth propose as a way to get rid of this ultra-low entropy at the universe's beginning? He suggests some theoretical work he describes like this: “This work, by Sean Carroll, Chien-Yao Tseng, and me, is still in the realm of speculation, and has not yet been vetted by the scientific community."

That candid statement shows on what very weak speculative ground Guth is standing on in this matter. Let's stick with the facts, and continue believing that the universe did begin in an astonishingly low entropy state.

Another flawed answer to the Edge.org question is given by Bruce Hood, who answers the question of “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” by giving this answer: “The self.” Hood gives us some materialist reductionist nonsense that is designed to make you think that you don't have a you. Sorry Bruce, but having read my Descartes long ago, I can paraphrase him by simply saying: “I think, therefore you're wrong.” To anyone who has a self, there is nothing less necessary than disproving an argument against the self (only a computer might need to make such an argument).

Similar comments can be made about the strange, strained reasoning of physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, who suggests “Individuality” as the scientific idea that should be retired, and who assures us that “you can't attribute an event in time to a single earlier cause.”

Another weak answer to the Edge.org question is given by physicist Steve Giddings, who suggests “spacetime” as the scientific idea that should be retired. Giddings points out that general relativity and quantum mechanics need to be reconciled, and that the idea of spacetime may not survive once that happens. Yes, but that may take centuries; and meanwhile we need the notion of spacetime.

Worse than Giddings' answer is the answer given by W. Daniel Hillis, a physicist who suggests “Cause and effect” as the scientific idea that should be retired. He says, “We will come to appreciate that causes and effects do not exist in nature, that they are just convenient creations of our own minds.” Nonsense. If I jump off a high cliff, my jumping will be the cause, and my death will be the effect.

Don't come near this if you're a Hillis fan

Another silly answer is given by Jerry Coyne, who suggests “Free Will” as the scientific idea that should be retired. He claims there is “no evidence for a mind separate from the physical brain,” something that would be doubted by many people studying near-death experiences. Coyne then claims “recent experiments support the idea that our 'decisions' often precede our consciousness of having made them.” These experiments (involving a difference of only an instant) have been well-debunked by detractors (anyone interested can read this article). The supposed evidence for a “decision before the decision” is very dubious, since we don't have the technology to read a mind, and can't tell exactly when a person has made a decision by reading his brain activity. 

Another dubious answer is given by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who answers "the hard problem of consciousness" as his scientific idea that should be retired. This is the problem of how matter (something so different from consciousness) could give rise to consciousness. I suspect that Dennett wants to get rid of the problem because he has no answer to it, and it is troubling to his worldview. He gives no real reason why the problem should be retired. Dennett's imperfect judgement may be shown by his very misleading statement elsewhere: "We have pretty much figured out how life got started, the big bang, black holes, gravity, and electricity."  At least two of these (the big bang and the origin of life) are still very major mysteries, the big bang in particular being completely unexplained.

The home page of Edge.org currently trumpets itself as “a forum for the world's most brilliant minds,” although you would never know it from some of these answers to this year's Edge.org question.

But there were some good answers to the question of what scientific idea should be retired. Among the more intelligent answers (provided by various thinkers) were the following:

There Is No Reality in the Quantum World
M Theory/String Theory is the Only Game in Town
Only “Scientists” Can Do Science
Natural Selection is the Only Engine of Evolution
String Theory
Unlimited and Eternal Growth
Unbridled Scientific and Technological Optimism
Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete
The Atheism Prerequisite
The Mind Is Just the Brain

I agree that these ideas are ripe for retirement.