We've talked a little bit about materialism. Why psychologists believe and then some of the evidence for it, and then we've taken a quick tour of the brain, but the broader gist of things is what I want to return to and this is that the current view by psychologists, and neuroscientists, and other scientists bolstered by a lot of evidence is that dualism is wrong. The mind is the brain. There's not two substances, there is one, and I want to remind you how radical this is because I want people to worry about it. I worry about it and I want people to worry along with me. So, for instance, you might believe in spiritual beings and supernatural beings with consciousness but no bodies, like gods. If materialism is right, not only don't we have souls but maybe there's no such thing as souls, or to put it differently there's no such thing as mental life separate from the body. More to the point, maybe you were hoping that when your body dies, when you get very older, or you get hit by a bus, or whatever, you'll live on. You'll go to heaven. You'll go to a spirit world, or get reincarnated, or whatever, and psychologists and neuroscientists that they speak honestly would say, "That's crazy." You, your memories, your will, whatever makes you you is your physical brain and when your physical brain goes away so do you. So, people have to figure out what to make of it. What I want to close with though, since this all sounds not only disturbing but extremely arrogant, the idea that scientists are dictating the answer to the most deep questions of all, is I want to end with two notes of humility: the first is, the conception of the mind that fits very well with the materialist view I presented is that the mind is an information processor, it's a computer, and we treat the brain as the physical aspect of the hardware and our mental lives, the ideas, our processes, our heuristics, our algorithms as the software, as the programs that this hardware runs. This way of looking at things, I think works extremely well when it comes to activities like face recognition, language, motor control, logic and so on, but there still remains what the philosopher David Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. The feeling of what it is to slamming your hand in a car door, or eat scrambled eggs with hot sauce, or have an orgasm, or grieve for the death of your friend, or et cetera., et cetera., et cetera. These feelings, the feeling of what it's like, the qualia that many people believe can't be simulated on a computer, and many people wonder whether this could be truly the activity of the brain. If it's true, as I think it is true, that even these most qualitative experiences are the product of brain activities, I think we should admit that we don't exactly know how this happens. There's a quote by Thomas Huxley: "How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue. That question is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Huxley is saying it seems like magic. How a physical structure irritated by neurotransmitters swooshing back and forth and electrical signals running across neurons, how that gives rise to feelings is a mystery, it seems like magic, and I think he's right. I think we know that as the product of the brain, but to be honest we don't know how. The second bit of humility involves the fact that materialism poses a mechanistic conception of mental life, but a lot of us, both as scholars but also as people, are concerned with what you could call humanist values. Values like the notion of moral responsibility: the idea we have free will, that the idea that we're responsible for our actions, the idea that there's such a thing in the world has intrinsic value, the idea that there's such a thing in the world perhaps as spiritual value. For some people it's very hard to reconcile this with the idea that we're merely brains, and there's two ways to react: one can simply reject humanist values, and I know philosophers and psychologists who confidently assert there's no such thing as free will, there's no such thing as morality, there's no such thing as anything higher or spiritual. I know many more people who reject the science, who say that, "Look, if neuroscience is going to tell me that my decisions, my activities are nothing more than neural firings, then to hell with neuroscience." My own view is that these two things can be reconciled. I don't think it's easy, but I think that is possible to reconcile a mechanistic conception of human life with humanist values, and I'll return to this issue over and over again in the course, and in my final lecture I want to go back to it and try to present a little bit more detail what I mean and how this reconciliation can be defended.
