MIND MATTERS.

The Mysterious Flame
Conscious Minds in a
Material World
Colin McGinn
Basic Books, $24, 242 pp.

The nineties were to consciousness what the sixties were to sex, according to philosopher Colin McGinn. If sex was on the brain then, more recently the hot topic has been "mind"--or, more precisely, how the brain gives rise to the mind.

Written in a style lightened by wit and not burdened by jargon, The Mysterious Flame is a fascinating read from beginning to end. McGinn does what the best philosophy has always done: make us wonder at how strange the world is. McGinn's question is what sense we are to make of "the fact of consciousness," "the having of sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts." He has written several technical treatments of this topic but here presents both the problems and his positions in a popular idiom. This book may not tell you everything you wanted to know about consciousness but were afraid to ask; but it is difficult to imagine a more pleasurable way of being initiated into the current debate about the mind.

To begin with, the philosophy of mind, as it is called, is on the whole resolutely naturalistic, which may be why it is little represented at Catholic universities but thrives at institutions like M.I.T. Consciousness studies takes its bearings from what McGinn calls the "secular scientific view of the universe," and has been given much of its excitement and urgency from the advancement in brain sciences over the past twenty years. In that context, the brain has often been referred to as "meat." The problem, as McGinn puts it, is "How does mere meat turn itself into conscious awareness?" Going on and on about the brain's complexity only begs this question, which fundamentally is how sentience comes from matter, however complex. The fact is that consciousness--this pulsing throbbing with which all creation groans--is strange, strange stuff, and it is not at all evident how to square it with a strictly materialistic scientific world-picture.

McGinn discusses, and rather quickly rejects, both materialism and dualism. Materialists argue that "there is nothing more to the mind than the brain as currently conceived"; dualists that "there is no possibility of reducing the mind to the brain, because they are separate realms." The problem with materialism is that "there is a deep logical gap between neurons and experiences." Knowing everything there is to know about how the brain works--how its raw materials ignite the flame of consciousness--teaches us nothing about what we actually sense or suffer or feel or think. "Even hi-tech instruments like PET scans," McGinn observes, "only give us the physical basis of consciousness, not consciousness as it exists for the person whose consciousness it is." Correlatively, the problem with dualism is that "it cuts the mind off too radically from the brain," resulting in both phenomenological embarrassment and conceptual incoherence. To put this another way, mind-body dualism is contradicted by the everyday facts of experience. Knock your head against a wall if you wish to ascertain the unity of brain and mind.

Most of The Mysterious Flame presents McGinn's own solution to these problems, what he calls "naturalized mysterianism." This is the thesis, to put it baldly, that we are "constitutionally unequipped" to solve the mind-body problem, "rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory or evolution by natural selection." McGinn insists that there does exist a fact of the matter, a truth out there somewhere, and all the evidence we have suggests that this is consistent with a secular, naturalistic worldview, even if necessarily beyond its ken. In short, "the mechanism of consciousness is a mystery" to us because of the way our minds have evolved, but the successes of science in other fields give us reason to feel secure that there is a mechanism, and so we "can avoid being drawn into religious mysticism about consciousness."

The way McGinn argues for this thesis further reveals his presuppositions. He thinks of what he is doing as "providing a map of human knowledge and its limitations," and bringing us to recognize "our cognitive limits." Philosophers have knocked their heads against the mind-body problem for the past several hundred years, so it stands to reason that there is either something about it that resists our advances, or something about us that prevents us from thinking clearly about it. McGinn wants us to acknowledge that the problem is with us--that "the enemy is within." Philosophy, in this light, is about coming to terms with our finitude.

This is a noble conception of philosophy; but whether McGinn's view reveals the limits of human intelligence as it has evolved or the limitations of his own philosophical biases is an open question. He gives the latter possibility very little thought. And sometimes he made this reader wonder whether he had somehow blocked out the past hundred years of debates over epistemology, logic, and language. He writes, for example, that "thought is clearly not the same as reality." That is true enough, but it is not saying much. It also becomes questionable when used to pretend that "there, on the one hand, is the world with all its objects and properties, existing independently of us; here, on the other hand, is thought about the world"--as if consciousness and the world could be cleanly separated and studied apart from one another. Similarly questionable is McGinn's claim that "I form my concepts of consciousness through examining my own inner states, that is, through acts of self-awareness." This, too, seems to make perfect sense at first blush; but the important question in philosophy is what is done with such claims--what further claims they are used to support.

This notion leads McGinn to speculate, at the end of his book, that genetic engineering may offer us a way to overcome the mind-body problem: that, if we could only produce a human being with enough introspective power, we could dispel the mystery of our nature and see that "deep down we are quite ordinary, difficult as that may be to believe." We could, that is, become conscious of the material genesis of consciousness.

McGinn presents this genetically engineered consciousness as only "a theoretical possibility," and qualifies it with ethical qualms; but it is not clear what he has in mind. Here several questions might be asked. First, what does McGinn mean by introspective power? What would his super-introspect be introspecting? Further and deeper, why would the upshot of knowing how mind arises from matter be able to convince us that we are "quite ordinary"? This is itself difficult to believe. Why not conclude, instead, that matter (whatever matter finally "is," composed as it is of particles, waves, and force fields) is quite extraordinary, and we pulsing, throbbing beings--ashes from ashes--not a bad piece of work ourselves?

Bernard G. Prusak is a graduate student in philosophy at Boston University.