The author, Edward Wilson, has written several Pulitzer Prize winning books this being the latest to receive that very prestigious award.

As the sub-title would suggest Edward Wilson is unhappy with the Postmodernism of our day which believes there is no universal truth but only a relativistic `truth for you’ and `truth for me’.

With this at least this reviewer is at one with Wilson. Postmodernism places great store on style and surface appearance rather than an argument for a claim of universal truth. But here is the irony. Wilson’s book is written in style. It is engaging, non-polemical, full of impressive knowledge of many and varied kinds. Is this why it has won the prize? It can't be because he has made his case for he hasn't!

What is the case he seeks to make?

In contrast the post-modern outlook Wilson believes in universal truth. However the burden of this book is to take this conviction further than many would want. He believes that all truth can in principle be attained by the reductionist methods of natural science. That is to say that he believes that our conscious awareness of our surroundings, our apparent free-will, the personal knowledge we have of one another, our appreciation of beauty, our perception of right and wrong etc can all be reduced to the laws of physics. In other words he believes that all ways of knowing can in the end be reduced to reductionist science. He is then what some would call a `hard materialist’ or `hard naturalist’. He pleads guilty to `ontological reductionism’ and `scientism’. (page 9). However unlike Dawkins and Leakey and others, he is not, an anti-religious polemicist. He even concedes that transcendentalism may finally win the argument. However the purpose of his book it to put the case against transcendentalism and for materialist reductionism. He believes there may possibly be a God but this God has no continuing relationship with creation and therefore He is not relevant to anything we do or know. Wilson is then, as he describes himself, a Deist. (The belief that God has no continuing interest in His creation has always struck me as a very odd belief.)

By referring to Kant and other well known philosophers he gives the impression that he is well read in philosophy. This for the case he is making, of course, would be essential. However it is only an impression - though an impression that must have impressed those who award the Pulitzer Prize. His arguments show he has not really got to grips with the age-old discussions. With reference to 20^th century philosophy he devotes several pages in chapter 4 to Logical Positivism. It was a form of atheist materialist philosophy that came to prominence in the first half of the 20^th century. It failed and Wilson knows that it fails. However he claims that it failed only because it was not known how the brain works. This he tells us is the `whole story' of its failure. What is extraordinary about Wilson's claim is that the state of scientific knowledge had nothing whatsoever to do with the failure of Logical Positivism. It failed because, at its heart, was the so-called Verification Principle. This stated that any statement that cannot in principle be tested by experiment is meaningless. (So, it claimed that moral and aesthetic judgements are meaningless). It was later realised (by Wittgenstein and others) that the Verification Principle itself cannot be tested by experiment and therefore, on its own terms, is meaningless. The failure of Logical Positivism had nothing to do with the then lack of knowledge of the brain and everything to do with it being a self-refuting philosophy. 

Over and over again his main thesis boils down to the argument that since scientific reductionism has answered many of our questions about the natural world it will, one day, be able to answer all questions. However that simply does not follow! It could conceivably be argued that science's great success makes it possible that one day it will answer all questions. Even this argument for a possible outcome could only be valid if it could be shown that the advance of science is reducing the sense of mystery about the nature of reality. Many would argue that the very reverse is the case. For example with the advent of the very successful quantum physics the mystery of what lies at the foundation of the natural world deepens greatly. The discovery of DNA may well have greatly advanced our understanding of what life is but it exposes new mysteries that previous generations could never have thought of. More of that below.

A serious gap in his thesis is his failure even to refer to the great physical chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi. Since Polanyi's main contribution to epistemology runs directly counter to Wilson's views, he, at least, should have tackled Polanyi's arguments. 

Polanyi believed that it is only living conscious beings that know things. (Books and computers may contain information but do not themselves know anything). Polanyi’s conviction was that any theory of knowledge, which reduces the conscious person to mere lifeless atoms in motion, undermines not only the concept of person but also undermines knowledge itself because it is only living conscious beings that know things. 

His conviction was that all knowledge is personal knowledge but that we persons know things in a different way than we know other persons. We know other persons when we talk to one another living and working in their presence. We could never reach that knowledge by dissecting people – however far our science had advanced. Thus personal knowledge of one another is not reached by reductionist science but is nevertheless real knowledge. Good science in the widest sense uses methods of knowing that are appropriate to the object we seek to know. It is now, and always will be, inappropriate to use reductionist science to know other people. It would not only be inhumane but in the fullest sense of the word unscientific.

It is in personal knowledge of one another that we can begin to learn those things that are in principle unknowable by reductionist science – namely what it is like to be that other person. My experience of me as `I’ cannot be publicly examined but can nevertheless be revealed to other people with whom I have a personal relationship. My subjective experience of me as `I’ in my relation to the outside world is what I call my self-awareness and consciousness. These inherently subjective experiences are what philosophers call `qualia’.

However if we presuppose materialism before we begin to examine reality, ultimately there will be no alternative to Edward Wilson’s view. But why should we presuppose it? As noted above the farther reductionist science advances into knowledge of the material world the more not less mystery it uncovers.

To argue against transcendentalism one must surely tackle such ancient questions as to where the universe came from. This is not a question about a gap in our knowledge of how the universe works but a question that in principle lies at the boundary of science and any transcendent world. I am surprised that Wilson does not tackle it, especially as he seems to claim that one day there will be no questions at all that science cannot answer. (Page 10)

He skirts the related question: Why is the universe ordered?’ with the words: "fortunate comprehensibility of the universe", and with a description of the world as "surprisingly well ordered". (Page 50) The adjective `fortunate’ and the adverb `surprisingly’ immensely underrate the issue. Surely we must agree with Einstein that the origin of the comprehensibility of the universe is itself incomprehensible. In other words science’s presupposition of order is right but it cannot say where that order came from. If Einstein is correct then there is no way that Wilson’s thesis can be correct. It fails at nature’s foundation.

It is in his treatment of mind and consciousness that he tackles another fundamental issue. If he can explain these in materialistic terms he has gone along way to showing that one day beauty, culture, morality and religion will all be explicable from physics.

Before I get to his treatment of mind and consciousness there is something to be said about the nature of life and evolution. Wilson gives us a very impressive description of the cells of life. He tells us that cells use very modern technology involving digital logic, analogue-digital conversion and signal integration. He tells us that this complexity exceeds that of super-computers and space vehicles. (Pages 101-103) However his marvellous descriptions seem to make the assumption that our ability to describe something is the same as explaining where it came from. But does he really believe that unguided random mutations in the DNA can explain all that even given survival of the fittest for millions of years. Random mutations almost always produce harmful effects. Natural selection itself cannot bring about improvements. Natural selection is not, as is commonly thought, an ordering principle. It can only preserve improvements that have already taken place purely by accident. 

It would be a different story if these improvements had as their source not random mutations but an ordering principle pervading nature. But that is what Wilson’s presuppositions cannot allow, for then we would be faced with the question as to the origin of that ordering principle which has produced conscious beings. Would it not have to be conscious itself and therefore not be an `it’ after all?

One of those who on the book's cover commends it to the potential reader is Douglas Hofstadter. In his own book he says Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden says (p.54):

But now to his treatment of mind and consciousness. This is the subject of chapter 6.

He refers (page 341) to Roger Penrose’s thesis in his Shadows of The Mind. Penrose believes that conventional science and AI will never be able to explain consciousness. Wilson rejects this because he believes that brain science is advancing very fast. However Wilson has missed Penrose’s point which does not depend on the state of brain science. Penrose claims to prove from Godel’s theorem that thinking and knowledge will never be reduced to mechanistic computation and cannot have a merely physicalist explanation.
 
 

He likes Daniel Dennett’s book `Consciousness Explained’. Dennett dismisses the problem of consciousness by saying that it is a mere epiphenomenon and `no big deal’. However all the independent reviews I have read of this book, even from a materialistic view point, do not think Dennett has explained consciousness at all. They seem agreed that the book should be renamed `Consciousness Denied’. However Wilson accepts Dennett’s thesis without question. He tells us that "all contemporary scientists and philosophers agree that the mind is the brain at work". That simply is not true. There are many that have seen the enormous problems with this view. (See for example the 1997 special issue of `Scientific American' entitled: `Mysteries of the Mind')

When my wife tastes dates and likes them I wonder why I can't bear the taste. Is she experiencing the same sensation as I am? Perhaps neuroscientists will one day be able to follow the process of tasting from the taste buds in our mouths to the parts of the brain but that is not the same as knowing what I experience in the tasting. Senses need an owner.

A computer could be programmed to say `Ouch' if I hit it. A computer expert could examine all the physical processes that arise from the blow to the response `Ouch', but that does not mean that the computer has actually experienced suffering! The computer does not own that to which the word `Ouch' refers to. Qualia are characteristics of the `inside -out-world' that cannot be seen from - outside-looking-in. 

Can my experience of looking at the colour red (say) be scientifically examined? At some future date scientists may be able to follow all the electrical and chemical processes between by eyes and my brain that come from me as I look at something red, but will they ever see that redness itself somewhere in my brain? Surely not. That means that they will never be able see what I experience when I see redness!

Michael Degnan (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota) makes a similar point about our conscious experience of colour. He says:

However Wilson is aware of Chalmers view of the problem.

David Chalmers, a philosopher at the University of California Santa Cruz, distinguishes between the easy problems of consciousness and what he calls the hard problem. The so-called easy problems of consciousness are the kinds of questions being tackled in neuroscience laboratories around the world: How does sensory information get integrated in the brain? How do we see and reach out for an object? How are we able to verbalise our internal states and report what we are doing or feeling? Chalmers does not contend that these problems are trivial. He claims that they may take 100 years to solve, but that progress is being made. The hard problems are: What is the nature of subjective experience? Why do we have vividly felt experiences of the world? He believes nothing in physics or chemistry or biology can explain these subjective feelings.

On pages 128ff Wilson responds to Chalmers? He concedes that however far science advances we cannot know how others feel. (Unlike Dennett he seems then to accept that `qualia’ do exist) But he tells us that this is where `art’ comes in to its own. Art, he says, can transmit feelings between one person and another. But now it seems that Wilson has given up consilience because, remember, consilience is the view that all knowledge can in principle be obtained by scientific reductionism. However he has not, after all, given up. He rejects the conventional wisdom (as he calls it) that scientific fact cannot be translated into art. He bids us imagine an experiment where two brains can be connected (even at a distance according to his thought experiment) so that one brain causes its neurone firing to be reproduced in the other brain. Would not then subjective experiences have been transferred from one to another. Well may be. He hasn’t made his point convincingly. However even if we grant that subjective experiences have been transferred from one person to another they are still the private property of those two persons and cannot be publicly examined. The only way we could possibly all share in the experience would be if all our brains were so joined for a while. But after we had been disconnected how could we be sure that we had all experienced the same thing? We could not be sure. Thus Wilson’s thought experiment begs the question of qualia and subjective experience.

He goes on to discuss free will.(page 130ff) Can it exist in a mechanistic brain? He says that our `decisions’ are not predictable (he invokes chaos theory) and therefore we have the illusion of really being free. He sees this as a good thing. It is better to feel free than feel like an automaton. Yet he, elsewhere (page 117), when describing the marvels of the brain says that God would not have created a brain like ours because if He had He would have made us so that we never rebelled and were always selfless. So here Wilson seems to believe that to be a mere puppet of God would have been a good thing! (Also he seems to assume that once we have understood how something works - in this case the brain - we have put and end to the need for transcedental explanation. However the more marvellous our discoveries the more difficult it is to believe that it was all the result of blind mutations with natural selection preserving the beneficial mutations.)

There are many other problems of identifying the mind with the brain (see for example the chapter entitled `Materialism’ in Edward L Miller’s good introduction to philosophy: Questions that Matter) but there is not space in a review like this to cover them all.

Finally I turn to his discussion of ethics. Where does our sense of ought come from? Can physical states be right or wrong? Wilson, as we would expect, denies any transcendent origin of our sense of ought. It is an instinct that he believes is the result of biological evolution combined with culture and social convention which are themselves results of biology and ultimately physics. He rehearses the arguments against his view but returns to his oft made assertion that those who disagree with him are ignorant of modern brain science. But that is mere assertion on his part.

The problem with a purely physicalist explanation of our moral sense is given by C. S. Lewis in many of his writings:

Very briefly here are two examples of his points:

A.

If we hear of someone in danger there will be two contradictory instincts.

• Herd instinct to help him - preserve the species. 
• The instinct to avoid danger - preserve the species.

B.

• Electrons behave as they do - that is neither morally right nor wrong - it is just the way things are - the whole story.
• We behave in certain ways but that is not the whole story for we know we ought to behave in certain other ways.
• Therefore more than one kind of reality
• Our moral awareness must be something above and beyond what we actually do. Something real that is pressing on us though we often try to forget it.
• Science tells us how things are not what they ought to be.
• An ET just observing our behaviour would never realise there was a moral law. He/she/it would only see what we actually do. The moral law is about what we ought to do.
• We, from the inside, know there is a moral law.
• We cannot keep it.

Fantastic? Yes but what about alternatives such as:

• The impersonal laws of physics are eternal and self-existent and can explain the whole of human experience.
• There is a God but although we experience love He does not care enough to do anything for us.

Back to Faith and the Modern World.
 
 

Comment to HowardTaylor always welcome.