It was my kitty, aptly named Descartes, who first made clear to me the difficulty of the
mind-body problem. The problem, I realized, has to do with explanation, and the fundamental
limitations of science to explain the first person experience.
The modern age and its scientific glory often threatens to reduce all matters of the universe to simple physical laws. Such is the case for even the most complex interactions, such as that between me, a human being, and Descartes, my cat. As we cuddled one evening, I pondered using a naturalist perspective what exactly was happening in that instance – how could it be that the universe created two forms of life, and that although we are different species, we still cooperate, interact and have what I would call is friendship. I wondered how the feelings I was having in that moment could have arisen from natural causes. The answer to that question, however complex it may be, is, I believe, accessible through scientific analysis. But, in feeling the moment myself, I also realized that any explanation of ultimate causation, no matter how complete, would never fully explain the experience.
Today, science can provide a reasonable (although sometimes incomplete, but incomplete in the sense that we don’t have enough data, not incomplete in any seriously lacking way) answer to many questions about life. The theory of evolution provides a framework from which ultimate cause can be explained. By ultimate cause, I mean explanations to “why questions”, such as “why is it the case that I care for my cat, another species, whose survival means nothing to my own?”
The answer is complicated, and it involves explaining first why we care for other humans, and then why such care should extend to animals as well. Evolution explains that we care for other humans due to a phenomenon called the extension of kinship – it is clear from an evolutionary perspective why we care for our offspring, and from the fact that we care for our immediate offspring, we can postulate group evolution, which describes how we move from caring just about our immediate kin, to other humans around us (in tight knit communities, caring for non-immediate kin will lead to greater success for the community, thereby promoting greater success for oneself and immediate family). So with a couple leaps of evolutionary faith, we can see how compassion emerges in a natural way – we care for those who look like us, because they are like us, and doing so will be beneficial for everyone in the long run. This tendency becomes ingrained in our genetics.
So we are programmed to care for those that look like us. An evolutionary byproduct of this tendency is that we care for non-humans that have features similar to us. As a result, we feel more desire to cuddle with a cat (close to humans on the evolutionary tree) than we do to cuddle with a cockroach (farther from humans on the evolutionary tree).
The modern age and its scientific glory often threatens to reduce all matters of the universe to simple physical laws. Such is the case for even the most complex interactions, such as that between me, a human being, and Descartes, my cat. As we cuddled one evening, I pondered using a naturalist perspective what exactly was happening in that instance – how could it be that the universe created two forms of life, and that although we are different species, we still cooperate, interact and have what I would call is friendship. I wondered how the feelings I was having in that moment could have arisen from natural causes. The answer to that question, however complex it may be, is, I believe, accessible through scientific analysis. But, in feeling the moment myself, I also realized that any explanation of ultimate causation, no matter how complete, would never fully explain the experience.
Today, science can provide a reasonable (although sometimes incomplete, but incomplete in the sense that we don’t have enough data, not incomplete in any seriously lacking way) answer to many questions about life. The theory of evolution provides a framework from which ultimate cause can be explained. By ultimate cause, I mean explanations to “why questions”, such as “why is it the case that I care for my cat, another species, whose survival means nothing to my own?”
The answer is complicated, and it involves explaining first why we care for other humans, and then why such care should extend to animals as well. Evolution explains that we care for other humans due to a phenomenon called the extension of kinship – it is clear from an evolutionary perspective why we care for our offspring, and from the fact that we care for our immediate offspring, we can postulate group evolution, which describes how we move from caring just about our immediate kin, to other humans around us (in tight knit communities, caring for non-immediate kin will lead to greater success for the community, thereby promoting greater success for oneself and immediate family). So with a couple leaps of evolutionary faith, we can see how compassion emerges in a natural way – we care for those who look like us, because they are like us, and doing so will be beneficial for everyone in the long run. This tendency becomes ingrained in our genetics.
So we are programmed to care for those that look like us. An evolutionary byproduct of this tendency is that we care for non-humans that have features similar to us. As a result, we feel more desire to cuddle with a cat (close to humans on the evolutionary tree) than we do to cuddle with a cockroach (farther from humans on the evolutionary tree).
These thoughts slowly formed in my head as I was petting my kitty, and I realized that I was still unsatisfied with the explanation I had come up with. Sure, I had explained why I have the feelings that I do when I interact with my cat, as well as the history of how such feelings could emerge from a universe with just physical laws. But this explanation does nothing to reveal what those feelings are like. The experience is fundamentally inaccessible to explanation. I can describe to you what it was like, using terms of friendship and love, and you, drawing upon your own similar experiences can reasonably understand what I was experiencing, but only because you have empathy and may have had similar experiences yourself.
Biology and evolution do not (yet) have the power to explain to me why I experience and feel consciousness. It is not clear to me why we are not conscious-lacking chunks of organic matter acting in the way we do due to selective forces of evolution, and without any feeling of experience at all. This, I believe, is the heart of the mind-body problem. To me it seems very likely that we are entirely physical beings, created from entirely physical forces; yet the first person perspective we experience in our minds is still a mystery. Something happened sometime in the last 4 billion years on earth, when stuff went from non-experiencing to experiencing, without any changes in the fundamental laws of the universe. This I believe this is one of the great mysteries of our time, one of the few questions that still leave us completely baffled.
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