Neuropath
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But even if it were a matter of terminology, why bother with the old nomenclature at all? Why, outside of the tendentious desire to eat one's conceptual cake and to have it too, not just say, 'Well, you're not FREE, it's true, but you sure are VERSATILE'?
But of course, the real difficulty is that despite their business-as-usual appeal, 'reconciliations' of our popular and intuitive understanding of human nature with recent discoveries in the sciences assume that we actually know what these discoveries mean, when it is painfully obvious that we do not. All we have are trends, which seem to point to a continued undermining of apparent experiential verities, and the knowledge that we are not what we thought we were. We really have no reason whatsoever to think that science will offer us anything remotely recognizable, let alone, as Owen Flanagan argues in The Problem of the Soul, 'preserve much of what it means to be a person'. The fact that we can cook up his kind of reassurances should come as no surprise; we're hard-wired to rationalize, after all.
Personally, given our all-too-human ability to pluck conviction out of abject ambiguity, I think philosophers should strive to be gadflies, not apologists. If you take your arguments beyond the pale of empirical testability, you're pretty much bound to arrive at the conclusions you want, especially if you're as brilliant as Dennett or Flanagan.
The 'Blind Brain Hypothesis' that I give to Thomas is actually a creation of my own from several years back, when I was still actively pursuing my PhD in philosophy. It's little more than a hunch that the basic structure of conscious experience would be far better understood by reference to what the brain lacks than to what the brain has. Since this is one of the most crucial and contentious 'future facts' presented in the book, I thought it might merit some more explanation.
Take one of Thomas's favorite examples: the Now. It is the lens through which we experience time, yet it somehow remains outside of time. Each Now is in some mysterious manner both different and the same—a paradox that has exercised intellects as far back as Aristotle. Given the Blind Brain Hypothesis, however, the Now might be seen as a temporal version of our visual field, the boundaries of which somehow just 'run out'. We receive no visual information beyond the scope of our retinas, so we see nothing beyond that point, nothing at all, not even the absence of seeing. We literally see, in other words, against an undifferentiated frame of sightlessness, which is why the edges of your visual field just… end. We rarely register this because of all the other systems that stitch our keyhole glimpses into an entire world. But from the standpoint of sight, our visual field literally hangs in oblivion.
The same might be said of our 'temporal field', what William James famously called the 'specious present'. In the same way we can't see the limits of seeing, the idea runs, we can't time the limits of timing, so we literally experience earlier and later against a frame of timelessness. This would be what generates the illusion of before and after, the strange bundling of the past and future within the Now. Time passes in consciousness, but in a strange sense it can't pass for consciousness. The bulk of the brain, after all, lies outside the information horizon of the thalamo-cortical system, churning away in timeless invisibility.
For structural and developmental reasons too numerous to elaborate here, the brain can only 'see itself in blinkered terms.
According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, this not only determines what is conscious and what is unconscious, but the very structure of consciousness. The Now is no small feature of lived experience. It also means that for many features of consciousness, it makes no more sense looking for 'neural correlates' than it does looking for 'visual drop-off circuits' to explain the strange limits of our visual field.
According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, conscious systems like humans should have an exceptionally difficult time understanding themselves—as indeed happens to be the case. Since the brain only glimpses slivers of its own processes, small fragments that it can only see as wholes, we should expect it not only to be baffled by the findings of neuroscience, but to insist those slivers really are wholes, and as such require some mechanism in the brain to explain them. If the Blind Brain Hypothesis is true, then much of cognitive science could very well be a wild goose chase, a search for 'magic coin circuits'.
The upshot seems to be that consciousness is illusory through and through, as opposed to just here and there, which is why I find myself in the strange position of wanting my own theory to be wrong. We now know that much of what we take for granted, experience-wise, is simply not what it seems, more than enough to ask all the hard questions covered in this book. But if consciousness is fundamentally, structurally deceptive, then the reason we have so much difficulty trying to figure it out could be that we have no way of knowing just what it is we're trying to figure out. And perhaps we never will.
Personally, I am neither an eliminativist nor a nihilist; I genuinely believe that what we experience should trump what we know. But like Thomas, I just can't figure out how to argue this honestly, let alone convincingly. We, as a species, have an exceedingly difficult time with claims we don't like, and we typically muster all the power bias and ignorance have to offer to confirm our preexisting intuitions. (For a sobering tour of just how bad things are, check out David Dunning's Self-Insight, or Cordelia Fine's splendid A Mind of its Own.) Humans are believing machines, credulous to the point of comedy, be they priests, philosophers, or assembly-line workers. Once you come to appreciate this fact, it becomes very hard to credit anything in the world of competing claims, and very easy to understand why, despite thousands of years, so few of our innumerable theoretical disagreements have ever found conclusive resolution—outside of science,
that is.
This is not to say that science is the end-all be-all, only that if you believe, as I do, that not all claims are equal, and you appreciate just how inclined we are to dupe ourselves, then science, which is institutionally and procedurally structured to combat (as opposed to exploit) our shortcomings as believers, quickly starts to seem like the only remotely reliable game in town. And as the book suggests, science doesn't give a damn about what we want to be true. In a sense, this is the key to its power.
The world of Neuropath is a world where these 'unwanted truths' have reached critical mass, both socially and spiritually. It's a world where the pace of technologically driven social change has outstripped culture's ability to cope, where the black box of the soul has been laid bare to the appetite of irresistible institutional forces. And it very well could be our world.
Whatever the case, knowledge and experience have come to a crossroads, and things don't look so good for experience. What used to be the abstract worries of philosophers have been covered with skin and hair. Neil, I'm afraid, is alive and well—at least in embryo.
We should be prepared.