The Primacy of Method

Abstract

The argument of this book turns on the idea that the doctrine that consciousness lies outside the reach of science is an inherently unstable doctrine for any materialist to hold. Mysterians profess that the science of consciousness is impossible, while at the same time maintaining that they are materialists. That is, they argue that consciousness lies outside of the domain of physical science, while nevertheless insisting that it lies entirely inside the domain of the physical. An ingenious and subtle hypothesis, to be sure, but one cannot help but be reminded of Tycho Brahe’s model of the universe. Beleaguered on one hand by the many failures of accuracy in the Earth-centered view of Ptolemy, and threatened on the other by the challenges to the accepted principles of physics posed by Copernicus’s sun-centered view of the universe, Tycho devised an ingenious and subtle compromise: a model of the world in which most of the planets orbit around the sun, while the sun itself, along with the moon, orbit around the splendidly stationary Earth. Likewise, the mysterians attempt to strike a compromise. Impressed by the many triumphs of physical science they admit on one hand that consciousness is physical, while still maintaining on the other that consciousness is perfectly stationary, splendidly unmoved by the explanatory trajectory of science. The goal of this chapter is to show that the instability of this compromise will eventually be revealed by practical progress in the science of consciousness. The notion you can be a materialist and a mysterian at the same time is supportable for the nonce only because of the rather elementary state of our modeling of the brain, a circumstance that clearly can be remedied.