Consciousness and the Mind of God.

Strange as it may seem to most conscious people, many neuroscientists and philosophers, speculating on the results of computer-assisted brain research, have concluded that there is no consciousness, no "self." At the most, the self or conscious identity is a creation of "folk psychology," our common-sense language, with no scientific foundation. Conscious activities are mere appearances or "epiphenomena." Science, which deals with matter, countenances no dualism which would allow for a "soul" or a "self" or a "spirit." Of course, if there is no meaning to these terms, even less is there meaning in other realities of folk psychology, such as "God."

To take one of the most prominent of such iconoclasts, Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained, 1991) maintains that we can describe ourselves in terms of beliefs and desires and personal actions, but these "intentional" activities can only be scientifically explained in terms of more basic accounts in which intentions play less and less a role. Like his mentor, B.F. Skinner, Dennett contends that folk-psychology presumes a homunculus, a little person sitting inside us peering out at the world and controlling the inner levers of our activity. We seemingly cannot avoid using such language. Nevertheless, the "explanation" of the behavior of such homunculi must be in terms of other smaller homunculi who are less intelligent, less bright. Progress is made if we can account for things of high intelligence in terms of "a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi." The final payoff is to get to homunculi so low that they can be replaced by the purely physical, the mere mechanical. As Dennett puts it, "only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all." Any theory that denies such a viewpoint is conveniently labeled a "dualism," and dualism is "not a serious view to contend with but rather a cliff over which to push one's opponents."

It is in order to refute such reductionism that Charles Taliaferro has written Consciousness and the Mind of God. His goal is twofold: First, to catalogue the arguments of the various proponents of such scientific materialism; and second, to advance an alternative view that allows for a classical understanding of the person and God.

I would say that Taliaferro admirably achieves his first goal. I do not know of any similar catalogue of the various contemporary arguments of scientific materialism. It is an encyclopedia of contemporary philosophers of neuroscience: Willard Quine, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Richard Rorty, Steven Stich, etc. With Rorty these writers look forward to a time when scientifically enlightened people will not say things like "I'm in pain," but rather something like "my C-fibers are firing."

What struck me as I read Taliaferro's book is the prevalence of such philosophy. It is "in possession" of many of the philosophical and scientific citadels of our country. Nineteenth-century mechanistic determinism may have disappeared with quantum mechanics, but reductionist views of science are very much with us. So much so that even some theologically inclined Christians maintain that we should rid ourselves of dualistic notions of the person and do our theologizing solely on the basis of scientific materialism. Any dualism, it is felt, denigrates the body and results in an excessively individualistic view of human life.

In opposition, Taliaferro's second goal is to provide a positive alternative to all such views. His is not a Cartesian separation of mind and body, but rather what he calls an "integrative dualism." "The overriding aim of this book may be summed up as a defense of the view that persons are not identical with their bodies and God is not identical with the cosmos, and yet persons and bodies, God and the cosmos, exist in a profoundly integral union." Taliaferro describes his view as the level-headed compromise between materialism and idealism. "Midway between the extremes of radical idealism and the austere materialism just documented lies dualism."

Taliaferro defends the legitimacy of appealing to conscious experience. Of course, the appeal to experience tends to be theory-laden, that is, guided by an hypothesis on the character of experience; but Taliaferro provides us with no clear hypothesis on the relationship of the experiences of scientists to our ordinary conscious experience. He. does not clarify the meaning of his terms: experience, science, consciousness, knowledge, intentionality, etc. He prefers argument. And among such arguments he includes an appeal to a theistic framework within which to understand the interwoven character of physical and mental life. Of course, to a convinced materialist this must seem hopelessly quixotic, supporting the obscure with the seemingly even more obscure.

At times this book evoked for me the image of interminable late-night arguments of college students on "the existence of God." The issue is eminently important, but one has the suspicion that the antagonists are going about it in the wrong way. Framing the issue in terms of the validity of "dualism" can miss the point that both sides of the argument can be carried away by their imaginations: a "picture thinking" not only about "souls" but also about "science."

For as I read this book, I kept asking myself, "Instead of starting from sensations and argumentation, as Taliaferro tends to do, why not start from the central act that is presupposed by Dennett and the others: that is, the act of understanding from which all explanatory scientific theories spring?" On this basis one can formulate what it is that scientific understanding is achieving in the different sciences and also how those sciences are related to each other and to the ultimate aim of understanding. In other words, in a dialogue with scientifically aware people the first appeal must be to the facts of scientific awareness. Clarifying in a rigorous manner the very processes by which Dennett and the Churchlands arrive at their theories can provide a basis for a verifiable theory of conscious experience. The dynamic structure of such consciousness is prior to the results of any computer-assisted brain research and provides the norm by which such research is critiqued and evaluated.

By beginning with an analysis of conscious understanding one is by that very analysis clarifying the distinction between the material and the spiritual. The material is intelligible but not intelligent; the spiritual is intelligible and intelligent. As Bernard Lonergan once cryptically phrased the issue when asked at a public meeting about "the biological basis of thought":

The biological basis of thought, I should say, is like the rubber-tire basis of the motor car. It conditions and sets limits to functioning, but under the conditions and within the limits the driver directs operations.

I found it significant that there is no mention of Lonergan's analysis of consciousness, particularly his Insight: An Essay on Human Understanding, in Taliaferro's book. And yet many of us feel that Lonergan's is the most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of consciousness in this century. (Presently the University of Toronto is publishing the twenty-two volumes of Lonergan's collected works.) I feel Taliaferro's encyclopedic work would have profited from a familiarity with Lonergan's.

Richard M. Liddy, a priest of the archdiocese of Newark, teaches at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.