Joseph Butler and Alien Minds

    

                I read in a very good book by a very learned author that at a certain frequency in the brain consciousness occurs and that very likely that is the end of the matter. Consciousness is a product of the brain so that no brain equals no consciousness. For various reasons I will not go into here I have never actually believed this, even intuitively as a child, and all I have read on the subject since has only reinforced my original skepticism. This is my hobbyhorse though and most philosophers and scientists are probably quite reasonable to hold that consciousness is a ‘brain thing’ and nothing else. Thus they continue the project of trying to base the philosophy of mind on neuro-science confident that the ‘hard problem’ or mystery of consciousness will be dispelled by science and that mind will be reduced, or at least be shown to completely depend on, the material substrate of nature (specifically the ‘brain’ part of it!). At the same time as science pursues this project it also engages in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence without noticing in the least that the first project seems to contradict the second. If there are intelligent aliens what is the likelihood that they will have brains that vibrate at the required frequency? As far as I can tell almost none. The brain/ mind theory dictates that anything intelligent on other planets must be roughly humanoid or at least roughly animal (as we understand it) with a brain and spinal cord and nervous system to produce the required frequency and if such aliens exist nearly everything we currently think about the world must be false (it implies a universe rigorously teleological for example). This means all the accidents and contingencies of evolution that occurred on our planet would have to recur on theirs. This means aliens can’t be fogs, or clouds or energy fields or any of the strange beings encountered, say, in the Star Trek universe. Unless there is some intrinsic bias in the universe towards the development of humanoid forms (and heck maybe there is though that would be spooky as hell) the identification of consciousness with the brain makes intelligent aliens astronomically less likely. If consciousness can only instantiate itself in a brain then aliens will need brains as we understand them and the forms in which intelligent aliens can instantiate themselves will be drastically reduced thus reducing their overall likelihood. The more closely consciousness is tied to the human brain the LESS likely it is to exist on other worlds UNLESS there is some universal evolutionary bias towards humanoid  or at least terrestrial brains which, I am sure, would be uncomfortably teleological for the mind/brain crowd.  

Fortunately, a clever 18^th  English Bishop named Joseph Butler can ride to our rescue. Butler mastered what I like to call reasoning in a fog. Reasoning in a fog is an important skill. We rarely have pure certainty on anything outside of math or logic and usually we must proceed on what seems more or less likely to arrive at a decision on what may be the most important issues we face as human beings. We have to take what glimmers of sense we can find and proceed on what Butler calls analogy. Of interest to us is the first chapter of Butler’s Analogy of Religion in which the he tackles the question of the immortality of the soul. This is our very question for it is the question of whether consciousness requires a highly specified physical basis such as the human or mammalian brain or something more vague and indefinite that might have a variety of instantiations from alternate physical structures to no physical structure at all. His goal is not at all to PROVE that the mind can exist apart from the body; only that our constant association of the mind with the (human) body is adventitious and not grounded on any necessary or inherent reason or relation. As such it can form no barrier to our hope of immortality (as a practical postulate) or, in this case, to our hope that we are not alone in the universe. In this Butler seems poised between Hume and Kant. The mind/brain relation is a pure association (in Hume’s sense) and as such is no obstacle to rational, even critical faith in a moral universe (of which immortality and final judgment are part in the good Bishop’s opinion). In our case it is no bar to the principle of plentitude, the intuition we have that a universe so vast as ours should be teeming not only with life but intelligent life.

We shall begin examining Butler’s odd but compelling ‘argument’ by laying down its first principle: experience. What we find most likely to be true is what has analogies or is comparable to the steady course of nature and experience. This creates an immediate problem for the empiricist for death is the one thing of which we have NO experience and NO ready analogies from nature: as Wittgenstein memorably put it death is not an event in life Consequently, we have no basis to surmise that consciousness which inhabits a brain may not after death inhabit some other physical form or none at all. Death is not available for experience and if the empiricist insists on making experience the measure of knowledge he can say nothing about what it entails, what state may follow it, or what may befall a post mortem personal identity. We DO see the dissolution of the body of course but our minutest observation can only detect the correlation of mental and physical activity and while we can see physical dissolution we have no way of detecting if a corresponding mental dissolution goes with it; a mind leaves no skin and bones as marks of its cessation. True, it seems to cease its observed activity with death but alas this is no help for it does the same thing in sleep or in a coma. To cease visible or observed activity is not necessarily to cease existence as any sound sleeper can attest.

Of course we are free to INFER what we can never observe; the dissolution of the mind. Butler’s real interest is not the fairly simple point that we never see death but only its observed results. He does think we can reason on the subject based on analogy or comparison of known experiences with unknown ones. These inferences may have no apodictic necessity but they do not require it as they are practical postulates not metaphysical ones. They concern not what we know but what we may reasonably hope. If consciousness is in our experience radically dependent on the body the analogy of nature may well suggest that we do not survive death though of course we could not draw a certain conclusion. Really though, experience only reveals a partial or relative dependence of the mind on the brain. A man may need a leg to walk but he is not ABSOLUTELY dependent on a leg for he can replace it with a wooden peg. He may not walk as well on a peg-leg but he can walk to some extent. So a man may see through an eye or an artificial ocular implant. Nor are we quite sure how many prosthetics we can apply before the body ceases to be the body of a person. The mind depends primarily on the body for information about the sensory world (though in dreams it can create its own sensory information) yet if we replace that body part by part it may still have means to gather and process such information. The body may die altogether but if the process is gradual enough the consciousness may continue as before in a cyborg body with an artificial brain. Butler claims we literally don’t know how much of a body we may chop away and replace before we affect consciousness one iota.

Actually I misspeak. We DO know how much of the body we can cut away: all of it for this is just what happens to us every three years or so. This is just what nature tells us. There is a curious duality in human beings: there is sensation and physical life and there is mental agency (a power of comparison and reflection) centered around a ‘personality’. The physical life can be divided in a way in which the conscious agency cannot. I can chop my hand in half and mail a piece to China but I cannot remove a piece of my mind and leave it at work except metaphorically. The ‘personality’ has a strong tendency to resist dissolution or perhaps has no relation to dissolution whatsoever. In the course of life we see this unit of personal identity maintain itself amidst radical changes in the underlying corporeal organism no particular atom of which it needs to operate. True, we see the state of the body sometimes dampen the activity of thought and reflection (which by the way can operate independently of sense- as in mathematics) as when we are drowsy or drunk but we also see some examples of people retaining their full strength of intellect even in the midst of severe illness and right up to the moment of death. This suggests that for all we know death may be just another iteration of the transitions we suffer in life like birth and growth. At any rate, all these are observable activities of the ‘personality’ and we know that this power of reflection can lie dormant so that ceasing to observe its act tells us nothing about whether it exists or not.

The neat part of all this is that it removes any bias towards the assumption that consciousness is a specifically brain related thing that can only operate in one set physical structure. This allows us to think of consciousness not in our simple earthbound forms but as inhabiting all kinds of other environments as well. Will the oceans of Titan contain brains or conscious beings employing radically different physical structures and, presumably, thinking radically different thoughts? What of environments so radically unlike our own that we would not even think to find life there? Could a planet or star have a sort of consciousness? I don’t know and you don’t know and it may be that brains that vibrate at a certain frequency are the only game in town. Still, for the purpose of looking or even hoping we may not be bound to think so and Bishop Butler, who had none of this in mind as far as I know, might suggest a way to articulate this hope for the 21^st Century.