The Self is Not an Illusion in Any Meaningful, Useful Sense
“Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains to help us track the impact that the world makes on us.”
by
Keith Frankish
September 26, 2019
The above is a worthless, self-contradictory essay from Aeon, an otherwise good source of information and ideas.
The essay’s argument is an example of thinking that continues to undermine the social sciences and mislead the public, and gives an off ramp and free pass to those who wish to absolve individuals and society of moral responsibility for individual behavior and group action.
This line of thinking goes something like this: “We really can’t help ourselves. What we think and do is determined primarily and at bottom by our genes and physiology, over which we have little to no conscious, volitional control. We need an evolutionary biology of human behavior because religion, secular moral philosophy, and the social sciences have failed to deliver an exact, predictive science of human behavior as physics and chemistry have for matter. As we continue to tease out and get to the real roots of the biological bases of our behavior, that is, in our nerves and brains, and metaphorically in the so-called ‘moral foundations’ of our deep prehistory, let’s turn to medication to fix or ameliorate these material substrates that are the causes of our moral and behavioral failings.”
The British author of the essay in question, Keith Frankish, repeatedly uses the pronouns ‘we, us, I, you’ in his essay, yet blows right by and never directly addresses arguments for the reality of an embodied self as described by the following thinkers, to list only a few:
Antonio Damasio
(2010)
Thomas Nagel
(2010)
Mary Midgley
(2015)
Raymond Tallis
(2018)
In fact, ironically, toward the end of his essay Frankish as much as agrees that what he calls an illusion and Damasio calls a real, embodied self is similar if not the same, and that it is sufficient and necessary for adaptive living.
Why Frankish chooses to focus on the notion of ‘illusion’ and not focus on the holistic conception of real, self-possessing persons is never made clear. Nor is his argument as to why thinking in terms of an illusion and not a real self is a good thing to do. I think I know why.
I think his preference for illusion is nothing more than a perverse desire. A quest to uphold what he and many others think is the preeminent role of neuroscience to single-handedly lead the way, ultimately discover, and provide the beat-all clincher that will finally explain the long-standing yet ill-formulated “hard problem of consciousness.”
The thinking in this essay exemplifies the current iteration of the scientistic notion that self, person, and being human can be deterministically reduced, like what is done in physics and chemistry, to laws and formulas of brain meat tissue, molecules, atoms, and physiology.
God (your pick) only knows what cockamamie direction Frankish would have taken if he had woven in the now emerging notions of quantum biology - quarky, spooky brain meat action at long distances?
The futility of this writer’s willful ignoring of the totally different characteristics and theoretical and methodological requirements of levels of biological complexity above the atomic, molecular, tissue levels should be obvious. It is obvious to those who are not under the spell of an illusion, make that, a delusion that strong reductionist materialism is a necessary and sufficient way of understanding everything.
Shame on you ant expert E.O. Wilson and the sociobiology Trojan horse you rode in on! Sociobiology, and the similarly subversive and debilitating French-hatched notions of postmodernism, have both all but ruined vast swaths of now three generations of the public’s ability to think anthropologically; that is scientifically, and holistically, comprehensively, and humanistically.
Postmodernism, in fact, almost destroyed the social sciences in the 1990s. Also, see here. Sociobiology and its offspring neuroscience have been no different in their assault on the social sciences.
Materialism, though necessary, is not sufficient to explain consciousness, not is it sufficient for the realization of an anthropology.
A world populated by sane embodied selves, human and nonhuman, living individually and socially as thinking, contextual decision-making, volitional agents who are ‘personally’ responsible for the higher level of complexity decisions they as embodied selves make and the actions they take, is real. Very real. It is not illusionary in any meaningful, useful sense.
_______________
Keith Frankish: Philosopher, writer, honorary reader in philosophy at the University of Sheffield; visiting research fellow with the Open University; adjunct professor with the Brain and Mind programme at the University of Crete.
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