Escaping the Mind Machine
In 1714, the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote in The Monadology, “If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, we will never find anything to explain a perception. And so, one should seek perception in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.”
The problem Leibniz poses is very much with us today, as it perfectly describes where scientists find themselves when approaching the brain. They find a vast maze of neural connections but have no real idea how those connections could possibly add up to first-person conscious experience. This problem, known as “the hard problem of consciousness,” affects the debate around such hot topics as artificial intelligence and strikes directly at the core of our own self-conception: are we merely biological “bags for putting food in” (as Orwell once put it) or are we, in our essence, souls, not reducible to a mechanistic account of our biology? By now, people are used to seeing the brain, and therefore the self, as a mechanism, a complex system of neurons, dendrites, and synapses that generates consciousness as a product. But if we get beyond these all-too-casual assumptions, which are well-expressed by the cliché that “love is just chemicals in your brain,” we realize how little these supposedly scientific notions explain.
David Bentley Hart’s new book, All Things Are Full of Gods, is a timely antidote to these common modes of thought, demonstrating the severe logical problems with all materialist explanations of consciousness. An Eastern Orthodox lay theologian, essayist, and fiction writer, who helms the popular “Leaves in the Wind” blog on Substack, Hart is a seasoned veteran of weighty controversies in the realms of religion, philosophy, and science. He was the most intensely intellectual opponent of “New Atheism” during its heyday, producing works like Atheist Delusions and The Experience of God, which served as potent rebuttals to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and the late Daniel Dennett’s Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. It would be an understatement to say that he was “more than a match” in this contest. Hart has further been involved in controversies within Christianity, particularly through his 2019 work, That All Shall Be Saved, which argued against the idea of an eternal hell. He has further irked traditionalists through his willingness to draw on the heritage of Eastern thought, citing the Hindu school of Vedanta philosophy, in particular.
All Things Are Full of Gods takes the form of a debate situated in a realm beyond and between worlds, the Intermundia, where the Greek gods have retired after they ceased to be worshipped on Earth. Four gods, Psyche, Eros, Hermes, and Hephaestus discuss the nature of consciousness. Since Hephaestus is the blacksmith god, the god of the fire and forge, he plays the role of defending the modern, mechanistic description of consciousness, while the other three gods argue against him. Psyche defends the unity and transcendental nature of consciousness, while Hermes and Eros back her up when the discussion veers towards matters of language and love, respectively. Although the gods have passed out of our world, they have kept abreast of developments in science, theology, and analytical philosophy, and don’t hesitate to cite figures at the center of these debates, like David Chalmers and John Searle.
To put the debate into the simplest terms possible: Hephaestus entertains arguments that the physical laws and particles that make up our world give rise to increasingly complex phenomena, of which consciousness is one; the other gods argue that this is impossible, returning to ancient but still vital ideas about how reality is structured, specifically drawing on Aristotle. The basic problem is the same as the one Leibniz outlined three centuries ago: how can a machine made of unconscious parts result in the unified experience of consciousness that we all presumably have? How can first-person experience—unique and personal to each of us—be derived from parts that have no “I,” so to speak, but are just collections of “its”? Another way of putting it would be to ask how first-person experience can arise from a purely third-person reality, which is the only account of reality that science provides.
Analytical philosophers have schemed their way into various materialist explanations for this problem, and Hart deftly dispatches all of them. Hart, through his Greek god surrogates, demonstrates that when such philosophers offer a materialist account of reality, they usually end up secretly smuggling in language for which they have no warrant. For instance, certain philosophers have argued that we do not really intend to do or say or think anything. Our brains generate a response to sensory input, and we merely impute intention to our behavior afterwards. Hart shows that this is ultimately nonsense, demonstrating that the language of intentionality is inescapable, even in arguments that propose to demolish it. They secretly smuggle it in through the back door and then pretend it is not there.
Daniel Dennett was one of the most egregious offenders in this area. Along with Paul Churchland, he endorsed an attitude towards consciousness called “eliminative materialism.” Basically, the eliminative materialists argue that “you’re not really conscious, you just think you are.” They dismiss consciousness as an illusion. But Hart points out that this inevitably drags in the language of consciousness, since an illusion is itself a form of consciousness. Their formulation is non-sensical, a self-negation, essentially saying, “You aren’t conscious, you’re just conscious of being conscious.” Contrary to their position, the fact that we are conscious is the one thing we absolutely do know for sure. The other conclusions we draw come after this primal fact.
Many analytical philosophers and scientists think of consciousness as being little different from the same kind of processing that computers do. Our thoughts and emotions are just the products of a computational process. But Hart argues that our basic awareness of reality cannot be the same as our mere thoughts and feelings: there is a difference between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. To make this point, he cites a thousand-year-old example from the Kashmiri Shaivite tradition (a school of Hindu thought): “Pause to reflect on your mind; for a moment your mental functions come to a halt, and you stop thinking about whatever you were thinking a moment ago; then allow your thinking to resume. All right. Who was it who was aware of that momentary stilling of your thoughts? Who was that silent witness […] who from within your mind observed your mind pause and then begin moving again along its otherwise continuous cogitative path?”
As Hart takes us on this grand tour of modern philosophical delusions, he treats the reader to various interesting asides on topics like quantum physics, animal intelligence, and the nature of language. His thoughts on artificial intelligence are especially timely. He writes, “having first imposed the metaphor of an artificial mind on computers, they now reverse the process and impose the nonsensical notion of a thinking machine on their own minds.” He meditates on the psychology of people who welcome this: “For a certain number of persons, what’s most truly enchanting about that phantom they fancy they see haunting their technology isn’t that it might possibly possess real consciousness, but that it might help them to discover that they do not—that they too are only machines, and their souls only the shadows cast by machines.”
While arguments about the nature of consciousness may seem obscure, they structure many commonly held assumptions in the modern world. Cliches of nihilism like the aforementioned “love is just chemicals in your brain” run rampant in our world and have a deep effect on how we see ourselves. Really, Hart’s book is quite literally an attempt to save the world, in the sense that it strives to save the world’s coherence, and prevent it from being reduced to meaningless particle motion. He desires to return us to a sense of nature as full of consciousness and intelligence, as a place where, in the words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, “All things are full of gods.” His book explores the impoverishment of our existence without such a sense, concluding that we are “obsessed with what things are and how they might be used rather than struck with wonder by the inexplicable truth that things are.”
All Things Are Full of Gods is admittedly addressed to someone who is already somewhat familiar with these arguments and the philosophical terminology used to discuss them. The book is dense yet precise in the way it employs philosophical language. If read straight through, the reader may at times feel like he or she is travelling in circles, since so many of the philosophical arguments for the material basis of consciousness appeal to the same ideas, which Hart dispatches early in the book. Yet, he has to keep pulling them up and knocking them back down in their slightly varying forms, in order to achieve the comprehensive scope his work desires. It is probably best to approach the work more as a vast preserve that you can range through, picking up different points and insights as best suit your own interests and needs.
In the end, Hart leaves us with a smidgen of hope. While he says that he is not optimistic about humanity’s capacity to pull away from the sense that we are just biological machines, he implicitly offers some advice on how we might escape. If William Blake was right when he said that we “become what we behold,” perhaps one way to escape transforming ourselves into machine-like entities would be to spend less time immersed in the world of our devices and more time immersed in nature. In a rather more literal sense, Hart puts us in mind of Voltaire’s famous concluding advice in Candide: “Let us cultivate our garden.”
Sam Buntz writes from Chicago. He is the author of The Great American Cougar Hunt and The God of Smoke and Mirrors, both available on Amazon. You can find him on Twitter @SamBuntz.
