Does Neuroscience Show that Mind is an Illusion?

Eliminativism and Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory

There’s a fraternity of devotees to science that looks forward to the day when science and technology will make religion obsolete not just academically but practically. The posthuman systems will rain down progress on the intellectual elites who will think of theology as archaic, while Everyman will be swept up in technology’s re-enchantment of nature.

The new prophets are science fiction authors who dramatize the consequences of the falsehood not just of religious creeds but of folk psychology, of the naïve but eminently useful self-image we have of ourselves as conscious, free, rational minds with meaningful beliefs and desires. Doom will fall not by the judgment of any jealous sky spirit, but as a result of the assiduous labours of cognitive scientists who will decode the brain’s functions and demonstrate once and for all what we are and have always been.

But some of these devotees, known as “eliminativists,” jump the gun. They argue that we can know even now — when the all-powerful technologies (such as that of downloading the mind into a computer to live forever) haven’t yet trickled down to the average folk and made a mockery of their ancient religious conceits — that we’re not what commonsense tells us we are.

Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory

Scott Bakker, for example, developed what he calls the “blind brain theory,” according to which the commonsense, folk-psychological conception of the mind can be explained away as an illusion fostered by the brain’s outward-directedness and thus by the brain’s blindness to its nature. Using only its onboard instruments, as it were, the brain’s heuristics (best guesses) model the brain as “the mind,” but that model is so informatically thin compared to scientific knowledge, as to be an “illusion,” a trick that’s seen through and dispensed with as soon as the reality comes to light.

And we already know the basic reality, says Bakker: we aren’t minds, as we naively think of them, but brains. The brain is exceedingly complicated and we mean to simplify by presuming that the brain is a thinking and feeling self or person. We presume we have mental representations that carry meaning, since we intend for these vehicles of thought and of consciousness to bear an object. We have values, too, ideals that guide us as representations of the good. We can think logically, we assume, and we have some self-control so that we’re not just animals or robots, slaves to evolutionary programming or circumstance. We’re aware of the world from our subjective viewpoint, and conscious states seem both real and immaterial.

But again, that entire self-image is belied by what we already know about the brain. The brain is our essence, if anything is, and the brain is very far from the naïve conception of the self, person, mind, or soul. Therefore, none of those latter things is real, implies Bakker. The brain tricks itself into “thinking” of itself as a person, because for hundreds of thousands of years, until the Scientific Revolution and evolutionary biology, the brain has been deprived of a suitable vantage point on its real identity.

After all, the brain’s chief senses are directed outward to fathom the nature of environmental opportunities and threats. The brain can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or touch itself, because the brain is locked inside the skull, behind the blood-brain barrier. What meaning, value, consciousness, reason, and freewill really are is a story told by neurobiologists, not by the average person’s folk psychology.

Those so-called features of the mind are how the brain seems to itself before it knows any better, when it hasn’t yet benefited from science’s third-personal, objective perspective or from the study of other people’s brains.

In Bakker’s words, the “‘inexplicables’ of consciousness like presence, unity, and personal identity, are best understood as ‘magic tricks,’ artifacts of the way” the magician, namely the brain, plays this trick on itself. “All magic tricks turn on what might be called information horizons: the magician literally leverages his illusions by manipulating what information you can and cannot access. The spectator is encapsulated, which is to say, stranded with information that appears sufficient.”

But once you understand how the magic trick is performed, the magic fades. Likewise, cognitive scientists already know enough to realize that the magic of consciousness and of intentionality is stilted and charmless. The more we know about the brain, the harder it is to take seriously the folk’s low-informational model of neural processes. If the analogy with magic tricks holds, says Bakker, “intentional phenomena, like magic, are something the brain can only cognize as such in the absence of the actual causal histories belonging to each. They require, in other words, the absence of certain kinds of information to make sense.”

Even now, muses Bakker, before the hammer of transhumanism has fallen, we should bet on science and realize that even if the illusion of the mental self persists, at the metalevel we know that that self is unreal; we know now that we’ll eventually be able to explain away the subjective self as something else entirely, as a wrongheaded interpretation of a neural process.

Causality and the Reality of Illusions

Let’s return to the magic trick analogy. Suppose you’re part of an audience in a theater, with a magician on the stage performing the simple trick of holding a coin between his left thumb and index finger, and lowering his right hand over the coin to make it seem as though he’s taking the coin with his right hand even though he’s secretly dropping it deeper into his left hand. So if the audience had to guess where the coin is, they’d say it’s in the right hand, but they’d be wrong.

Bakker emphasizes how this kind of error is due to the audience’s limited access to pertinent information. If an audience member were standing on the stage behind the magician, she’d see how the trick works and wouldn’t be misled by the tricky hand movements.

But there’s a point of disanalogy here. The theater and the trick are designed to fool the audience. It’s no accident that the audience isn’t allowed to occupy the stage or to peak behind the curtain. Using folk-psychological terms, we’d say the magician intends to mislead the audience, and the audience wants to be tricked for entertainment value.

Specifically, the magician has a goal in mind about what he wants the audience to see and what steps he has to perform to generate that appearance. The illusion of the magic trick isn’t just a disconnection between what the audience sees and what really happens on stage; instead, the reality of hiding the coin is a means of generating the intended appearance. The illusion isn’t accidental but is the whole point of everyone’s being where they are in the theater.

Now, that folk-psychological talk of mental representations, of designing a trick, or of choosing to mislead or to be misled is precisely what Bakker means to eliminate as obsolete, by appealing to the promise of cognitive science. Science can show only how the causal order of a modeled system probably unfolds, depending on the background conditions. Thus, to recover the point of his analogy, Bakker would have to replace the ordinary references to the magician’s and to the audience’s beliefs and motives as conscious, subjective, mental states, with an objective, causal, highly technical account of what’s going on in the theater.

Suppose we have some such scientific explanation. Notice that that explanation can issue no negative judgment at all on what the audience sees. The “illusion” of the magician’s appearing to take the coin with his right hand isn’t unreal but is an objective effect at the end of a carefully arranged causal chain. In short, the trick is that the magician is able to do two things at once, one of which is hidden while the other is in view of the audience. So his crafty hand motions make it seem as though his right hand takes the coin, but that appearance for the audience’s benefit is real, since that’s how the magician’s actions really look from the audience’s limited vantage point.

Bakker wants to say the audience’s perception is lower in “informational content,” but that’s only an illegitimate way of sneaking in semantic distinctions through the backdoor. The audience’s perception of the trick isn’t noise compared to the signal of what actually happens to the coin. Instead, the magician transmits two signals, one he wants the audience to receive and the other sent by the coin itself to the rest of the world, because the magician can’t actually perform a miracle.

So anyone standing behind the magician would detect what really happens to the coin, but the magician arranges things to produce the exhilarating appearance that he performs a supernatural act onstage. The two signals are equal in informational content. The difference is that the signal received by the audience reflects not the real position of the coin, but the staging and whatever neural equivalents there are for the magician’s skills at deception and for the audience’s willingness to be deceived.

Again, the scientific story is just that that system unfolds according to modeled probabilities: the brains involved, their skills and “intentions,” and the arrangement of the theater (the stage separated from the audience’s chairs) generate from a certain angle the appearance of a miraculous transportation of the coin from the right to the left hand. In the larger natural system, the coin never leaves the left hand, as explained by the rest of science.

There is, then, no purely scientific basis for distinguishing between illusion and reality. There are only objective causes and effects. The “illusion” of the magic trick is a real effect that occurs in a carefully-arranged system. That effect is the appearance that something miraculous happens to the coin. In the system that’s hidden from most people in the theater, there’s another effect: the coin acts like a regular physical object and the magician uses sleight of hand to deceive an audience that’s willing to suspend its disbelief.

Two systems, two causal chains, two effects as outputs. That’s the end of the scientific account of the matter.

Pragmatism and the Incoherence of Eliminativism

To speak of an illusion as compared to a deeper reality is to presuppose the semantic notion of truth, of a symbol’s representation or misrepresentation of some fact. If folk psychology is all wrong and there’s no such thing as subjectivity, consciousness, or semantic meaning, then there’s equally no such thing as an illusion as such. Illusions could only be real outcomes of a particular system.

If you submerge a stick in the shallow end of a lake and the stick appears to bend because of how light interacts with the ripples in the water, and if we’re going to discard folk psychology in favour of science, then there’s no illusion or error here, because there’s no mental representation of the stick that can be right or wrong. Once again, there would be two systems: first, the stick in the water, in which case the water isn’t normally strong enough to bend the stick; and second, the stick plus the water plus the brain of the perceiver which receives light rays bouncing off the stick, through the water into the eyes that generate the appearance of a wavy object underwater.

That appearance isn’t wrong or illusory or low-informational. It’s what naturally happens under such and such conditions, and that’s all a scientist can say about it. There is no deeper and deeper knowledge unless we’re going to presuppose the part of folk psychology that posits the difference between truth and error.

What we can add is the pragmatic point that some models are more empowering than others, but this doesn’t help the eliminativist’s appeal to magic tricks. The two systems at work in the theater empower both the magician and the audience. The magician hones his craft and is paid for his clever work. The audience entertains itself by suspending its disbelief and surrendering to the magician’s tricks, and is rewarded with the experience of awe and wonder, since from its vantage point, as far as the audience can tell, the magician performs miracles.

The eliminativist wants to add, though, that the miracle is unreal and that one account of the events is better than the other. Only the magician knows what really happens there and the audience is merely fooled. But there’s no way to formulate those evaluations when resorting purely to scientific explanations of what objectively unfolds in the theater.

The Social Function of “Obsolete” Concepts

Notice also that eliminativism fails if neuroscience will end up only re-describing folk concepts of subjectivity, consciousness, meaning, truth, and the like. If the neurologist’s models can be translated into the language of folk psychology, there’s no obvious reason to discard the latter, since both would be different ways of talking about the same thing. One or the other language or model might be more useful in different contexts, but that would be far from saying folk psychology is useless and is explained away by neuroscience.

This would be different from concepts that are indeed made obsolete by science, such as the Christian theological concept of a witch. That concept isn’t just a simplification of certain natural sociobiological phenomena, but is a theocratic tool for controlling populations by persecuting nonbelievers. Witches in the Christian sense may be unreal, but that’s irrelevant to the concept’s social role. The concept is real as a tool to strengthen people’s faith and to train them to obey the authorities, by scaring them. Monsters may not be what we naively think they are, but the concept of monsters performs certain social functions.

What really happened to the Christian concept of witches isn’t that science refuted the theology. Instead, liberalism and capitalism overthrew European theocracy and feudalism. Instead of being so concerned with obedience to an ancient creed, modern folks became preoccupied with being free enough to make money on the basis of scientific and technological advances. Why burn people at the stake when you can sell them something and make a profit?

The eliminativist wants to say the concept of minds or of persons is as vacuous as that of witches or goblins. But in so far as “witch” was a simplified way of referring to a wayward, epileptic, or hapless foreign woman, that concept isn’t vacuous — obnoxious and oppressive, yes, but not wholly empty. Similarly, if the naïve self-conception is a simplified way of speaking mainly about the brain, about the most complex thing we know of in the universe, the notion of a conscious subject is hardly empty.

There would be different tools that are more or less useful for different projects. That pragmatism defeats eliminativism unless cognitive science supplies us not just with an alternative or more precise model of what a person is, but with a new kind of society, one in which folk psychology can no longer perform any useful function.

The Anomalous Reality of the Anthropocene

Here we encounter another problem with eliminativism. Suppose we agree that the naïve notion of the mind is as mistaken as the notion of witches, vampires, and unicorns. There are no such things as such. How, then, will the eliminativist explain the Anthropocene without covertly appealing to folk-psychological concepts?

After all, what seems to have happened is that the brain’s relative ignorance of itself via introspection produced what the eliminativist calls the “illusion” of the conscious mind, which illusion is objectively rather an effect with obvious real-world consequences. Specifically, our species has utterly conquered the planet — not wisely or responsibly, mind you, but hubristically and self-destructively, as you can see for yourself in the documentary “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet,” for example.

The eliminativist is obliged to explain the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, or the objective fact that our species’ activities have been so profound that they’ve impacted geology, by appealing mainly to the brain at the neurological level, without that scientific model’s entailing the folk conception of the mind. But all animals have neural control centers of some kind, and the human brain is similar especially to that of chimpanzees. In any case, while the neural structures of some other species, such as octopuses, crows, and dolphins generate moderate levels of intelligence, these animals haven’t broken through the biological barrier like we evidently have.

Thus, the eliminativist should consider whether the difference in degree between human and animal brains is sufficient to account for the lopsided asymmetry between our respective impacts on the planet.

We know from chaos theory that slight variations of initial conditions can generate large variations of outcomes. But this wouldn’t account for the anomalousness of the human impact, since there are likewise slight differences between the brain types of animals. The question is whether neuroscience alone can explain why we haven’t behaved like all other animal species and been confined to homeostasis within a niche, as opposed to swarming the four corners of the globe and unbalancing the ecosystems to the point of ushering in the sixth mass extinction.

Transhumanism and the Hubristic Potency of Minds

As far as we actually know at present, the best explanation of that asymmetry is that we’ve broken free of our brain and from biological evolution, by developing language and culture which give us psychological and social identities. The folk-psychological concept of the self is evidently integral to that causal chain. Our unsophisticated way of thinking of the self bootstraps us into behaving as people or as lords of the earth rather than as animals. Were we to run with Bakker’s magic trick analogy, we’d have to say that just as the magician sets up the theater to generate the appearance of a supernatural event, the brain tricks itself into evoking the idea of the mind, and does this by design or for the unconscious evolutionary purpose of creating a non-animalistic mode of life.

Either way, the folk concept of the self is hardly dispensable, since that concept has been instrumental to our real-world impact. Likewise, if we wanted to explain the workings of Christian theocracy, we’d need to appeal to the concepts of witches and demons. To be sure, those theological notions have been explained away, if we’re interested in knowing what does and doesn’t exist in nature. But the eliminativist can’t afford any such realistic take on scientific explanation, since realism appeals to those so-called obsolete folk notions of meaning and truth.

If we take up the pragmatist view instead, a model explains away another only in the sense that the latter is irrelevant for the former’s purposes. And one purpose that would be deemed useless by the pragmatist philosophy of science is just the seeking after Reality, the Facts, or the Truth.

Even if we stop short of this pragmatism, the eliminativist faces the awkward question of whether neuroscience is likewise explained away by physics. Is the brain also unreal as an illusion created by chemical interactions, just as the mind is supposed to be an illusion caused by the brain? If so, the eliminativist’s idea of scientific explanation would amount to a type of mysticism, since it would entail the unreality of everything we perceive in the world. Science, rather, is meant to be a useful method of enabling us to understand the world well enough to control it.

Thus, science itself presupposes the egoism and hubris of folk psychology. Perhaps the transhuman mindset will indeed amount to a mystical justification for ignoring everything we currently take for granted as real, including our mental and biological selves, and perhaps this will reform not just consumer society but the instrumental advantages of science. In that case, eliminativism proceeds against folk psychology from no higher ground.