Science and the Enigma of Consciousness–Part 3 on John Polkinghorne

John Polkinghorne has a higher view of science than most scientists. He sees science not merely as a technique for understanding the physical world, but as the preeminent example of our human capacity for understanding.

Polkinghorne perceives a remarkable interplay between the human race and the rest of the created order—a dance in which humans seek ever-deeper knowledge, and the universe proves accessible to our seeking. It is not a given that humans would indulge themselves in this search, or that they would experience any degree of success.  We might, like all the other creatures, be without notable curiosity beyond what we need for survival; we might be curious and yet lack the capacity to go beneath the surface; and the universe might be mute, random, and impenetrable. The success of science is thus a reason for wonder, and (to those who believe in God) for praise. So this is who we are, and this is the world we live in!

For all his love of science, Polkinghorne does not see it as the last word (or heaven help us, the only word) in our search for understanding. In my previous post I pointed out that science has little or nothing to say about beauty, art, ethical behavior, or the practice of science. These are fundamental to our nature (and, as Polkinghorne notes, fundamental to the practice of science) but science knows almost nothing about them.

There is a habit of mind that treats such matters as froth. The Real Stuff, by this way of thinking, is matter and energy. What cannot be measured, tested, and replicated is like bubbles on champagne—appealing, ephemeral and non-essential. I suspect every one of us has been infected by this habit of thinking. Even we English majors are tempted by the thought that Shakespeare was a pretty writer but Einstein probed the depths of reality.

Polkinghorne sees that this is bunk. And nowhere does he point it out more clearly than when he writes about consciousness.

“It is a remarkable fact that our minds have proved capable not just of coping with everyday experience but also of penetrating the secrets of the subatomic world…. Yet where in that world described by science can we locate the mind itself? ….  There is an ugly big ditch yawning between scientific accounts of the firings of neural networks, however sophisticated such talk may be, and the simplest mental experience of perceiving a patch of pink.” [Beyond Science, p. 53]

Our awareness of pink—our consciousness of ourselves and our environment—is the most obvious and fundamental fact of our existence, says Polkinghorne. So are our awareness of making choices, our knowledge of our own beliefs, our experience of pain or pleasure, our perception of color or form or music. These are mental events that every child knows intimately. Yet they remain beyond the realm of science, simply because they are inherently wrapped in the individual’s experience. We may agree that cutting ourselves is painful, but we really have no way to share pain or to know whether the pain we feel is the same as the pain others feel. There is no object called pain, only my pain. Consciousness cannot be objectified.

Polkinghorne’s point is that science simply does not have the tools to explore a vast domain of obvious and fundamental reality. It is as though we were explorers who had traveled to the most remote parts of the world but lived next door to an off-limits park—familiar because we see into it every day, but nonetheless impenetrable and unmapped. The self-conscious scientist, meditating, deciding, experimenting, daring, loving his subject, makes sense of the physical universe—but he cannot by the same techniques make sense of what he himself is doing, feeling and thinking.

Much to his credit, Polkinghorne is not willing to throw consciousness in a bin labeled “impenetrable” and forget about it. He insists that any comprehensive account of the universe must put these obvious and essential aspects of daily life in a prominent place—especially so because they are so closely tied to our capacity to know anything.

“An account of reality without a proper account of mind would be pitifully inadequate.” [Beyond Science, 72] That is what concerns Polkinghorne—an account of reality. Science, more than any other field, has contributed to it. But the larger project takes us beyond science. “We have to be realistic enough, and humble enough, to recognize that much of what is needed for eventual understanding is beyond our present grasp.” [73] “It would have been impossible to understand superconductivity without the revolutionary discoveries of quantum theory, which so substantially modified the Newtonian account of what matter is like. Consciousness is surely a much more profound phenomenon than superconductivity and its understanding may be expected to call for correspondingly much more radical revision of contemporary thought.” [65]

Polkinghorne is thoughtfully dismissive of attempts to account for consciousness through materialist explanations. He thinks using computer processing as an analogy is hopeless. (Where, in these accounts, is the programmer?) He doubts that evolution fully accounts for the mind, since it is not clear that consciousness has any survival value, and at any rate it is very hard to account for the survival value of, say, music, or quantum mechanics. “Our scientific, aesthetic, moral and spiritual powers greatly exceed what can convincingly be claimed to be needed in the struggle for survival, and to regard them as merely a fortunate but fortuitous by-product of that struggle is not to treat the mystery of their existence with adequate seriousness.” [Beyond Science, 64]

At the same time, he believes that our bodies—our brains, our synapses, our neural networks—are intrinsically involved in thinking. Given what we know about the genetic basis of mental illness, the effect of mind-altering drugs, the bizarre effects of brain damage, we can hardly think of the mind as a substance sitting on top of the brain. The mind must be in the brain, even while the brain does not begin to explain the mind. Polkinghorne speculates, in very general terms, how we might integrate our understanding though what he calls “a dual-aspect monism.” By this he means something like the wave/particle aspects of light—two coexisting modes of a single substance. But Polkinghorne admits that he can offer no more than a glimmer of understanding.

Even when thinking “beyond science,” Polkinghorne remains a scientist—hopeful that by working together we can someday understand what seems impenetrable. Knowledge is not a matter of opinion. We reach it together, as a human community. To do that, however, will require more than science as we know it.

Pantheism and Avatar

Ross Douthat has an excellent column in today’s New York Times. (here) He starts by noticing James Cameron’s apology for pantheism in the movie Avatar, and goes on to note pantheism’s increased attraction. In a low-key way he summarizes some of the issues that confront pantheism, and suggest why theists are better in tune with what we know about the world.

Herod’s Christmas Massacre

I preached Sunday on Herod’s massacre of the children. (Matthew 2: 13-18) I didn’t choose the topic, and for the longest time I wasn’t sure how to preach it. But in the end, I came to believe that Matthew’s way of telling the Christmas story offers an important corrective to our culture’s Christmas. We often experience dissonance between the beautiful, high, lovely vision that Christmas offers, and our real world of difficulty, loneliness, anxiety, violence and hurt. In Matthew, those two come together.

You can listen to the sermon at http://fpcsantarosa.org/mp3_files/121309_TimS.mp3. It begins with a carol, but trust me, the sermon is coming.

What Science Can’t Do: Part 2 on John Polkinghorne

As I noted in Part 1, “Why We Should Admire Scientists,” John Polkinghorne is very positive about science and scientists. He points out that science is the only field of human inquiry that seems to have reached universally accepted conclusions. Scientific knowledge seems real and dependable, and has led to many of the material improvements in our world. The stuff works! And the people who practice it work communally in (generally) quite admirable ways.

Some conclude that science is the only reliable guide, and they try to apply its methodology to all fields of knowledge. Further, some say that if science can’t grasp something, it must not be real. Polkinghorne calls this the hagiographic view of science, and he (politely) considers it nonsense.

He says science cannot be reduced to a methodology. He is greatly influenced by Michael Polanyi’s careful description of science as personal knowledge—that is, knowledge gained by persons, not by machines, in ways that we cannot fully specify. Scientists work in ways they cannot fully explain, pursuing “beautiful equations,” for example, or “elegant solutions.” The doing of science cannot be learned from a textbook but is only gained by participating as an apprentice in a scientific community.

Polkinghorne points out that “science is not radically different from other forms of human rational inquiry. It too requires the act of intellectual daring, of commitment to a potentially corrigible point of view. It too involves reliable but unspecifiable acts of judgment. Science’s superior power to settle questions lies, not in its invincible certainty, but in the openness to testing that results from its concern with aspects of reality sufficiently impersonal in their character to be open to repetitive investigation and consequent experimental checking.” [Beyond Science, 18, 19] In other words, science succeeds because it works on the easy stuff, the stuff that lends itself to the techniques of science. The same techniques on other subject matter may be perfectly useless.

For instance, science sheds little or no light on science itself.  (Measurements and mathematical calculations on scientists as they go about their work would yield very little information about what goes on inside their minds.) Science sheds no light on beauty, very little on music, art and literature, none on the purpose of human existence, none on the difference between right and wrong (even though the performance of science depends on ethical behavior among scientists). Most importantly (and this will be the subject of my next post), science has shed almost no light on the phenomenon Polkinghorne regards as among the most obvious facts of existence: our consciousness.

So Polkinghorne, while obviously loving science, knows that science has its limits. It doesn’t follow that human inquiry is constrained by those same limits. Instead, science’s success should encourage us to hope we can discover truth in other realms. After all, science is a human invention, working from within a human community. Its success says something about human capacities. Humans invented a way to understand the world that uncovered the astonishing and ornate mysteries of quantum mechanics (to use Polkinghorne’s favorite example.) Why not hope we can learn in other ways, as well?

The success of science also says something about the world: it is the kind of world that is susceptible to truth-seeking. For as Polkinghorne points out repeatedly, it is not a given that the world must be susceptible to our attempts to understand it, nor is it a given that we human beings have the ability to understand. The fact that it is and we do should make us hope that by working in skillful and dedicated communities we really can advance our understanding in realms beyond science. For understanding, impossible for most life on our planet, apparently lies very close to the heart of human nature.

As physicists hope to achieve a unified vision tying all forces together, so Polkinghorne aspires for a comprehensive understanding of life. “I actually believe that the grandest Unified Theory, the true Theory of Everything, is provided by belief in God.” [Beyond Science, 112] But that is a subject I will take up in a later post.

The Soloist

We watched a good movie last night, “The Soloist.” It’s out on DVD. The plot is “based on a true story” about an LA Times columnist who writes about and then befriends a homeless man who plays the violin on the street. Turns out he went to Julliard. The columnist tries to help him, with mixed results. Three reasons you should see it:

First,  it’s an engaging, interesting film. Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. are excellent.

Second, it offers an accurate and interesting portrayal of mental illness. That’s a subject we all love to forget.

Third, the plot turns on the subtle ways in which the columnist, trying to help, begins to play God. I found lots to think about. With those we love, where do we draw the line between helping and insisting? The film offers no glib answers, but some hope.

The Elite 20%

David Brooks and Gail Collins have a very interesting exchange in today’s New York Times. (here) Collins offers a narrative of post-WWII America’s boom times for ordinary Americans followed by (since the 70s) a persistent squeeze. Brooks sets this story within another narrative, the divergence between the highly educated (the elite 20%) who are doing very well and the rest of Americans.

What I found particularly interesting was Brooks’ suggestion that this elite 20% not only do well financially, they also dominate our public culture. Since advertisers are wild to get at them and their wallets, their tastes dominate the media. When the 80% watch those same media, they develop the same elite tastes (for bigger houses, vacations in Cancun, flat screen TVs, and so on). The 80% don’t have incomes to sustain those tastes, though, so they borrow. And then, it all blows up, as it did this year.

Here’s what I’d add: the 20% not only dictate the culture of acquisitiveness, they dictate a culture of unlimited freedom. In particular, they dictate a culture of sexual freedom. Watch TV and ask yourself: what are the ethics of sexuality in this society?

The elite, for whatever reasons, can handle this freedom. They marry and still have a low divorce rate. Even if they do divorce, they have the income and personal stability to manage the consequences. But the 80% do not. Their divorce rates are well over 50%, and so well over half their kids grow up with only one biological parent. This produces a high quotient of personal problems, which reinforces tendencies to quit school early and earn less money.

It’s an ugly cycle that tends to reinforce itself.  I wish I knew what to do about it.

Ode to Joy

Last night I sang in my third and final performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, along with the Santa Rosa Symphony. I have been wanting to sing this ever since I missed singing it with the San Francisco Symphony as a sophomore at Stanford. (I was in France at the time.) It was worth the 39 year wait. Part of the joy was sitting through the first three movements, right in the middle of the first three movements, on three consecutive nights, practically swallowed up by the horns and the timpani. (For the Ninth, singers don’t get any action until the fourth and last movement. But then they get a lot of action.)

Our director, Robert Worth, read a brief passage from a Slate.com essay by Jan Swafford that captures something of the glory:

Famously, the Ninth first emerges from a whispering mist to towering, fateful proclamations. The finale’s Joy theme is almost constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and decomposed. The Ninth is music about music, about its own emerging, about its composer composing. And for what? “This kiss for all the world!” runs the telling line in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of epic scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing.

The Ninth, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, ending with a cry of jubilation, is itself his kiss for all the world, from east to west, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When the bass speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller. It’s the composer talking to everybody, to history. That’s what’s so moving about those words. There Beethoven greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

That says it pretty well, but what it says is that we don’t know what we are talking about. We only know that we are exhilarated and moved as we share Beethoven’s obsessive brilliance. “A kiss for all the world” doesn’t do much for me. It’s the music that enthralls.

How is this? How can sound waves communicate such emotion? For all that science has uncovered about the way our brains work, the power of music suggests that we have barely touched the tip of understanding.

Why We Should Admire Scientists—Part 1 of a Series

One of the disasters of our times is the split between Christians and scientists. Evolution is the issue causing the disharmony, but that only defines the battle lines. Underneath are a deep lack of respect on the part of believers for scientists, and a deep lack of respect on the part of scientists for believers. And underneath that is a narrowness of view—an inability on both sides to see how wonderfully significant the other side is.

In my reading, two people have the kind of breadth of mind to bridge this gap and bring understanding—Michael Polanyi and John Polkinghorne. Unfortunately neither one is an easy read. Polanyi’s epic Personal Knowledge is as long as War and Peace, while Polkinghorne’s many books are very short, but it makes no difference. Most people won’t read them. They are the sorts of books that require concentration on each paragraph, and sometimes on each sentence.

This series of posts intends to bring Polkinghorne’s insights down to a lower shelf, and possibly tempt some of you to actually read him.

I like Polkinghorne because every page betrays a love of science.  Until he was 50 years old he was a working physicist at Cambridge University on a first-name basis with many of the greats of the post-war era—Paul Dirac, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, and Stephen Hawking, among others. He participated in one of science’s most exciting eras, during which Newton’s physics were overturned, quantum mechanics became law and the quark was discovered at the heart of matter. When Polkinghorne writes about this, his pride and pleasure are unmistakable.

We all ought to feel such emotions. Of all the forms of discovery that humans have learned, none has produced such results. Science discovers truth that everyone can agree on, and that has proven itself productive in the world. We fly planes and broadcast football games because of what scientists learn about the world.

But scientists don’t do their work in order to make products. They work in order to understand. Polkinghorne makes this point through a wonderful mental experiment. Suppose, he says, a black box was discovered that could perfectly predict the weather two weeks hence. Into slot A you put information about current conditions; out of slot B came a slip of paper with infallible descriptions of the future.

“Do you think [the meteorologists would all go home?” Polkinghorne asks. “Not a bit of it! They would take that box to pieces to find out how it modeled the great heat engine of the earth’s seas and atmosphere so accurately. As scientists they know that prediction, however perfect, is not enough. They want to understand the nature of weather systems.” [p. 13, Beyond Science.]

Science is arguably the human endeavor of which we can most take pride, as members of the human race. Not only has it been astonishingly effective in advancing genuine, universally acknowledged understanding of an opaque and mute universe, but it has done it (by and large) in an admirable way. Scientists do not generally become rich, they do not gain fame. On the whole they are cooperative and generous with each other. They rarely lie, cheat or steal. Christians of all people should admire people who devote their lives with such care and perseverance to understanding a universe that we believe God made.

Polkinghorne, though, is no scientific chauvinist. While beaming with family pride when he considers science, he also sees its limits. As he points out, science cannot even explain science. There are no experiments to be done on scientists as they do their work that can discover how they do it. When Polkinghorne writes about his own scientific career he often mentions the search for beautiful equations, and the thrill and wonder of discovery. Science has nothing to say about beauty or wonder. They are inextricably part of science, but we need something more than science to explain and explore them. “Science should be part of everyone’s world view,” Polkinghorne writes. [p. 20, Beyond Science.] “Science should monopolize no one’s world view.”

I’ll take up the limits of science, as Polkinghorne sees them, in my next post.

How to Do It

As an example of how a believer can serve in the mass media, I recommend Michael Luo’s NYT piece on African-American college graduates and their struggles with job discrimination. (here) Its depth of research and dispassionate tone made it stand out to me. A less-well-done piece could be dismissed as whining or as liberal-bleeding-heartism. But when you finish reading this piece, you can’t help being convinced of the special difficulties African Americans face. Luo did good by doing his job well.

If the subject interests you, be sure to read the comments. Some very articulate African Americans describe what they have experienced.

Tim Keller

Michael Luo, who writes for the NYT, brought my attention to a new article on Tim Keller in New York Magazine. (here) It’s quite long and reasonably favorable. I’ve become accustomed to Keller’s success in Manhattan, but the article reminds me how amazing it is. Like the fall of communism, it’s something I wasn’t expecting ever to see.

By the way, Luo was the first to write about Keller in the general press.