Book Review: De La Mettrie’s Ghost
Excellent book. I’m glad I didn’t get turned away by the materialist reductionism at the beginning. Here is a summary:
Materialist Views
Chris Nunn is Associate Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and researcher and practitioner in the field. He begins his book by giving a survey of what is known about consciousness. He covers biology, chemistry, physics; then into psychology. If you read just this first section, you’ll come away thinking that the author is a brain-dead reductionist who doesn’t understand free will. But this is really the only honest way to treat the subject matter at the materialistic level.
Philosophy
He then moves into philosophy, and despite a wide-ranging treatment, he says nothing I object strongly to. I love his rebuttals of Cartesian dualism. He moves quickly to the point — memory is the critical faculty which enables us to say that, for all practical purposes, we have a form of free will. He adequately elucidates this point, and basically demolishes the strict reductionists.
False Perceptions and False Memory
From here, he does due diligence in exploring things like false memories, hypnosis, and the delicate balance in the seeming paradox of free will. I was already rather familiar with these issues, but it’s gratifying to see them covered honestly in a book by an avowed materialist. His treatment of Libet is exactly what Bandler and Grinder were saying in the mid ’70s, and what hypnotists have known all along. His treatment of “free won’t” is reminiscent of Augustine’s balance between concuscible and irascible.
Somewhere along the way he presents two “axioms” of consciousness, which he takes great pains to point out are designed for refutability to make Popper happy. The axioms are believable enough.
Stories and Cultural Determinism
After settling upon the idea that free will is predicated on stories embedded in memory (which I strongly believe), he then explores the logical question — how do the stories that our society and culture tell, shape our free will? He veers into literature and history here, and presents some delightful and even hilarious stories about the way stories impact people’s free will.
In this section, he leans heavily on the idea of “mental objects”, which are similar to “platonizations”, “memes”, or “demons”. This concept of “mental objects” is a platonization in itself, and he seems to lean too heavily on it sometimes, but to no apparent damage. This section is far from being reductionist, and the author takes to the new freedom with much aplomb. Many times you get the nagging feeling that he is presenting facts out of context in order to support his narrative. But the narrative is fun, he is full of wonderful insights, and as long as you don’t treat it as religion you will totally get his point.
One minor pet peeve. In this section, he frequently uses the idea of “attractors” to explain order in chaotic systems. I get annoyed when people who don’t fully understand chaos theory appropriate its terms; like people who say “fractal” every time they mean “pattern”. At least Nunn uses “scale free” roughly correctly. And since I am fairly well-versed in the subject matter of this book, I was able to understand “attractor” as the author meant it; but it’s a bit of a stretched metaphor here.
Science Fiction
To wrap up the book, he concludes with a highly speculative chapter on quantum physics, black holes, and so on. It’s fun and kind of “science fiction”, and not at all necessary for the narrative of the book.
He gives a fairly good treatment of near-death experience research, and suggests that maybe Ayahuasca (the hallucinogenic) will point to a scientifically verifiable context for consciousness that is bigger than individual or culture, and independent of shared experiential memory. I was shocked that he did not mention Ketamine at all in this section.
Epilogue: Tell Good Stories
Finally, the book has an “Epilogue” tacked on, which is the primary spot in the book where the author feels free to share his opinions and call to action. He launches into a complaint about the unredeeming quality of stories available today (he seems to have forgotten that Tromalchio was roughly contemporary with Cicero, so it’s not as if the ancients didn’t have worthless tripe). He thinks it’s import for kids to grow up on a diet of the best quality stories possible.
He rather indefensibly lurches into the thesis that you can attack the “sex and violence in media” problem by generating as much “other” media as possible. But he can be forgiven for this, since it’s just an opinion tacked to the book as afterthought.
Quotes
He is rather quotable. Here are some interesting quotes:
“But, as we shall see, some surprising research findings have led to serious suggestions that free won’t may exist while free will does not.”
“The problem is that, if one appeals to biology to explain the power of each cognitive object, of which there are many thousands, one may end up having to propose implausibly large numhers of distinct biological mechanisms, as well as a range of more general ones such as ‘herd instinct’.”
“Nevertheless, experience can appear to cause physiology as well as the other way round; though the latter view is the one often favoured by reductionists. In fact the two, experience and physiology, are best regarded as aspects of a single process. Supposing otherwise is really only a hangover from Cartesian dualism, and can lead to all sorts of futile ‘chicken and egg’ arguments.”
“He left the castle, clothed as a pilgrim, intending to go to Jerusalem. His half unregenerate status showed itself when he fell in with a Muslim travelling in the same direction. The Muslim allowed that the Virgin Mary was a virgin immediately before Jesus’ birth but would not agree that the same applied after delivery. He rode on fast vhen Ignatius’ temper began to fray. Ignatius was in two minds about whether to pursue and knife him ‘in defence of Our Lady’s honour’.”
“If one believes Marshal McCluhan’s dictum that the medium is the message, it appears that the ‘medium’ for the Saint story is not the literature in which it is told but, rather, the people in whom it is embodied.” — this the money quote, and probably why a reader recommended I pick up this book. The parallel to Barfield’s “Philology and the Incarnation” is delightful. Nunn even foreshadows this “incarnation” story at the very start of the book.
“Both points of view are equally valid. What remains constant in a Necker cube are the lines on the paper.”
“There is a big ‘but’. It is that this view of a partially autonomous consciousness has been reached through picturing it as a part of the physical world – as simply an aspect of brain function.” — wow, intellectual honesty! bravo!
“Some conclusions deriving from good science are indeed conclusive, but they are quite rare.”
“It’s worth remembering that Claude Shannon’s definition of information, the one that scientists mostly use, proved so enormously useful precisely because he excluded any notion of meaning from his idea of what constitutes a ‘bit’. If information is itself to a degree mysterious, then meaning is even more so.”
“But the boundary between efficient and formal causes is a lot fuzzier than is often supposed.”
“I have assumed, throughout this book, that consciousness (the expression of and contributor to the story) and some memory-related aspect of brain function (the relevant matter) can be identified with one another for all practical purposes. In other words, I have assumed in effect that the poem is its print on the piece of paper. Put so baldly, any such assumption seems dubious at best.”
“Why, in the case of NDEs, should an immaterial soul be able to impress such remarkably clear and vivid memories on a damaged body that has a hard enough time hanging on to even confused memories of its own? … The most straightforward explanation for this specialness is that the stories themselves can act like attractors in a chaotic system, and formally cause the appropriate neural states to crystallize out. At times of crisis, this argument goes, the stories most deeply ingrained in a person are likely to provide the most powerful attraction for all the neural chaos going on and so, perhaps, may be the ones experienced.”
“People absorbing impoverished and plain nasty stories will increasingly as time passes tend to embody these qualities.”