Mysterianism.

Mysterianism (or: the new mysterianism) is an idea that has been kicking around philosophy of mind circles at least since 1989, the year Colin McGinn published an article entitled, “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”[1] He argued not. He didn’t think the brain was put together in such a way as to enable its users to understand how it could generate our familiar world of “subjective” conscious awareness.   

Another way of saying this: the solution to the problem of human consciousness is cognitively closed to human beings. We are not equipped — for biological reasons — to understand how physical/organic processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. The situation is analogous to why cats can’t understand calculus.

Owen Flanigan coined the phrase the new mysterians for the handful of philosophers who had reached this conclusion — cf. his Science of the Mind 1991.[2] While Flanigan was paying amusing homage to a 1960s rock group called Question Mark and the Mysterians (who in turn got the name from a 1957 Japanese science fiction film entitled in English The Mysterians) the term has an obvious family resemblance to mystery (or mysterious).

If we had access to a hypothetical universal perspective, a “God’s eye point of view,” perchance we could see it. But we don’t have that perspective. And even a more “highly evolved” sentient being wouldn’t have access to our unique species-specific conscious awareness. Any more than we can experience the world a cat experiences through its senses (especially given the cat’s sense of smell which is far more powerful than ours).

Noam Chomsky had reached the conclusion back in 1980 that our cognitive capacities have the purpose of solving problems that keep us alive, not achieving universal understanding.[3] We might call these species-local problems. Chomsky argued that many questions may lie outside our cognitive competence, just as understanding calculus is outside the cognitive competence of cats. Why? Evolution. In this view, evolution equipped us for tool use, language, social interactions, as problem-solving activity in the Pleistocene environment. It did not equip us for understanding the metaphysics of mind-body.

Jerry Fodor wrote of modularity and cognitive architecture, and inferred limits to scientific explanation.[4] His argument: first, human cognition is domain-specific: confined to problem areas. Second, some of these — the nature of consciousness and how the brain “somehow” generates it — may fall outside its modularities. Thus third and finally: science itself probably faces structural limitations on what it can explain. The “ultimate” explanation of consciousness, and perhaps free will, are inaccessible to us for biological reasons: our brains just aren’t put together that way!   

This was all before David Chalmers coined the phrase the hard problem of consciousness.[5] His was just the latest formulation of the difficulties naturalist (or materialist, if one prefers) philosophers have had making sense of how a putatively physical object, the human brain, could generate human consciousness including our subjective self-awareness, including all that makes us important to ourselves. Why should this latter exist at all? What does it add to the “furniture of the universe”? Surely we can imagine a possible world with the same physical principles as our world in which it does not exist.

Flanigan clarified, in his follow-up work Consciousness Reconsidered (1992)[6]: “The ‘old mysterians’ were [Cartesian] dualists who thought that consciousness cannot be understood scientifically because it operates according to nonnatural principles and possesses nonnatural properties.” The “old mysterians,” in that case, looked at the mind-body problem in terms of religion.  

He follows up: “But the new mysterianism is a postmodern position designed to drive a railroad spike through the heart of scientism.” And it does this without sacrificing naturalism. The new mysterians’ stance is a transcendental naturalism (contrasted with Kant’s transcendental idealism).

The New Mysterians’ Kierkegaardian “Leap” and the Paradox of Evolutionary Naturalism.

In that case, in Lost Generation Philosopher terminology, we’ve just left the Third Stage thinking of post Auguste Comte positivists and objectivists, and entered the Fourth Stage thinking of those who (with a sly or mischievous smile, one may note) throw cold water on earlier modernist opinions. It is interesting that although many such writers jettison the universal applicability of “scientific method,” they remain committed naturalists.

McGinn and other new mysterians maintain the dual idea that human consciousness, conscious self-awareness, is “a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel” — but that the explanation if it were accessible to us would remain naturalistic. The problem is the limits of our cognitive architecture, not the nature of the universe.

Which sounds, to this writer’s ears, like he and other new mysterians have made their own Kierkegaardian “leap” (Kierkegaard never called it a leap of faith). The melancholy Dane was trying to save Christianity as he understood it from both the burgeoning Enlightenment philosophy of his time and what he saw as the hypocrisy of established churches such as the Church of Denmark.

McGinn and others are making a similar leap trying to salvage naturalism from the paradox it encounters if we peer deep enough at the position’s own inner logic: if evolutionary naturalism is true, then our brains evolved to give us advantages in an environment such as those enumerated above, not grasp universal truths or even discern with finality whatever regularities of nature might be operating outside that environment. This includes the truth of evolutionary naturalism itself, which would be such a regularity. By itself, the idea confers no species-specific survival value or solves any species-local problems, unlike, say, our senses’ capacity to recognize a dangerous predator or identify edible food or pick up the language and customs of our elders as children.

Still another way of looking at this: naturalism (materialism) is the presupposition, even if new mysterianism is the conclusion of one’s philosophical reasoning.

Cognitive Closure in Nature.

Regardless of one’s position on evolutionary naturalism or whether the above line of reasoning is cogent, it should be clear from recent philosophical (and scientific) investigations that our cognition does have limits in what it can visualize, and that we can know (in the sense of having reasoned our way to repeated and reliable conclusions) that they exist.

This is not uncommon in the natural world. Social insects cannot form any concept of democracy. And we humans cannot visualize a tesseract, the equivalent of a cube with four spatial dimensions. We can describe some of its properties mathematically. With whatever concept might serve as the key to unlocking the mystery of conscious self-awareness, we don’t have mathematics to help us as it isn’t that kind of a problem.

Thomas Nagel argued, in my humble opinion successfully in “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”[7], that (1) there is a fundamental and irreducible something, a distinct sensorium or quality space, that it is “like” to be a normal adult bat with bat-brain and bat-senses working properly; but that (2) we humans can not envision this irreducible something because what a bat’s senses, brain, and central nervous system display to it is incommensurably different from what ours display. Hence the answer to the question Nagel asks in his title is also a mystery.

To be sure we are clear: grasping from inside its awareness what a bat’s sensorium or quality space is like, just like unraveling “how the human brain ‘generates’ the human sensorium or quality space,” are beyond the reach of our science and our philosophy in principle. This is not to be confused with the idea that we’re talking about something merely beyond the reach of present-day science. The latter position has been termed pseudo-mysterianism. It assumes the problem is lack of empirical data, not the presence of incommensurable biological structures.

Again: we do not have a “God’s eye” perspective on this complex universe. Assuming for the sake of argument that God exists, perchance He knows what it is like to be one of us, or what it is like to be a bat. If distinctively human cognition and its limits shape distinctively human language, though, it would be very unlikely that He would be able to communicate this to us in a way we could understand. We would be, in Wittgenstein’s sense, up against impassable limits of our language.  

Broadening Mysterianism: Instead of Transcendental Naturalism, Transcendental Pyrrhonism.

Thus not only are we fallible, but our reasonings are finite. This shouldn’t be controversial. But the epistemological implications are greater than scientists and so-called scientific philosophers have ever cared to admit. It is time to face this honestly, that in a phrase, “we don’t know the half of it!”

Hence I would like to see mysterianism broadened.

Drawing on the ancient Pyrrhonians, I would like to see it broadened considerably!

Pyrrhonism was a form of skepticism that (to use a modern term) “bracketed” truth claims, refusing to affirm them as “proven” but not denying them absolutely either. Thus Pyrrhonian skepticism avoided the self-refutation of, “If skepticism denies truth-claims and if it is itself a truth-claim, then it must be skeptical towards itself and hence is self-refuted.”

Sextus Empiricus, the best-known Pyrrhonist, contended that arguments of equal validity or cogency could be amassed on either side of any interesting truth-claim, with no agreed-upon criteria to break the tie. This resulted in an epistemic balance and rational undecidability. The intellectually responsible thing to do, in this case, is “bracket” one’s belief: suspend judgement (epoché). One can act today as if a given claim is true and be successful, but one’s belief should remain tentative nevertheless; circumstances could change, and the action fail tomorrow.  

The predicament the new mysterianism has highlighted relies on biology rather than methodology, but reaches the same result: because of cognitive closure knowledge of certain states of affairs is barred to us. Their example: we can’t solve the mind-body problem because we can’t, for reasons of limits on our cognitive architecture, form the concepts and explanations that would yield the solution.

Now comes the bold question: why should the philosophy of mind be unique in that its central query has hit an epistemic brick wall? For once we try to infer decisive conclusions outside the range of what our senses, brains, and central nervous systems seem designed to solve in our proximate, species-local environment, there isn’t a whole lot we can say in general that doesn’t come down to educated guesses of varying degrees of reliability.

I would like to see more skepticism toward any number of claims to be found in the various sciences that have reached, and now assume, conclusions that can be shown to be “bracketable.” The guiding query here, which departs from new mysterianism as given to us: why be a naturalist, transcendental or otherwise? Given cognitive closure, why take the “leap,” other than maintaining a “scientific” performance (to maintain respectability in a still mostly Third Stage intellectual world?). I’m not arguing here in some sneaky fashion for theism. I’m arguing for what I’ll call transcendental Pyrrhonism: a Fourth Stage philosophical postmodernism that goes further than the new mysterianism in knocking scientism off its modernist pedestal.

I won’t develop these examples in detail here (a few are dealt with in my book [10]). I might develop one or two of them in subsequent essays should this one provoke a response — doubtful, but who knows?  

Some Chancy Examples, and a Call for Epistemic Humility.

We do not know how the universe originated, or how old it is.

That may seem like a startling claim. Haven’t we figured out that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old, and began with a Big Bang?

For starters, not every qualified physical cosmologist has been sold on this: even if “Big Bang skeptics” are an extreme minority.

If science is an empirical discipline (however dubious this is but let’s let that pass for now), then since we are far outside what experience can tell us, the best ideas we have, even by the best leading physical cosmologists, come down to educated guesses. We have Big Bang cosmology, of course. We also have Halton Arp’s observations, collected over decades, interpreted by him as showing that the conventional view of the red-shift of stellar and other bodies as a measure of the velocity with which they are moving away from us observers is untenable, and to the extent the Big Bang Theory depends on this, it is thrown into doubt. (Arp, who had been a student of the late, great Fred Hoyle, was a steady-stater, thinking that postulating a Big Bang at the beginning implied a Creator in which he did not believe. Interesting, that….)[8]  

That a Big Bang really happened is an inference at best: no more empirical than any religion-based cosmology such as Christianity or any other well-developed mythos that posits a creation event. It couldn’t be otherwise; no observers were there. It is true, we have the math, but like all formal reasoning, the truth of the conclusions depends on the truth of the premises, and the reasoning is only as strong as its weakest step! Roger Penrose has suggested that our mathematics may be too limited to capture the universe’s deepest secrets. Yes, again, many cosmologists will cite the existence of background radiation as a kind of “echo” of the Big Bang. On the other side of a different aisle, intelligent design (ID) theorists will cite the immense complexity of living cells, of RNA/DNA, and the intricacy of how all must work together so that systems can function: if any parts fail, the system as a whole fails. ID asks: are we supposed to believe that living systems of the intricacy we see in, e.g., the human brain, came about exclusively through the natural selection of random mutations?

To the transcendental Pyrrhonist, this is a fair question. He doesn’t have to postulate God as the Intelligent Designer (unless he just wants to). He doesn’t have to postulate anything!

What we know, from actual empirical research, is that the human brain is the most complex entity in existence, vastly exceeding the complexity of any supercomputer, and that the complexity of what we are seeking to explain naturalistically only gets greater when we incorporate into it the necessity of detailed interactions with the senses and central nervous system of which it is an integral part of our living systems.

We do not know how life originated, because in the light of the physics and chemistry on which we can rely, we have no credible explanation for how their laws could operate on chemicals in a “primordial soup” or some equivalent and generate something with a complex metabolism, including especially the capacity to interact with its surroundings in such a way as to replicate itself and yield viable offspring.

Creating an entity able to do this under laboratory conditions would not solve the problem. It would only show that intelligent designers can create life. It would not show that it happened, or could happen, under natural conditions absent ID. Nearly all authors I’ve read miss this crucial point.

Again: we have educated guesses, some of which are not merely nonempirical but have grown increasingly outlandish over time.[9]   

Transcendental naturalism, or any other form of materialism, requires one of these guessing games to be the right one, as I’ve argued at length.[10]

We do not know how we originated, or how our first civilizations came about, or how long ago. Physical anthropologists posit an apelike ancestor from which we, as primates, and all other higher apes are descended. There is no consensus on who this apelike ancestor was, what he looked like, or when he lived — though he is thought to have evolved and lived on the African continent. We’ve seen myriad evidence of possible candidates. None have ultimately passed muster.

Still more educated guesses, directed by a presupposition and an organizing conceptual system, not just actual physical evidence (fossil remains, genetic comparisons, etc.).  

Rather like efforts to amass evidence for an abiogenetic theory of the origin of life, these efforts are now well over a century old. The scientific community is not going to relinquish them, because modern materialism, which Third Stage thinking embedded in scientific/academic culture, requires that they be true. The requirement is logical, not empirical. It makes hash of the idea that the sciences are really fully empirical, or ever were.  

The mainstream consensus seems to be based essentially on the prevalence of Third Stage thinking that requires continuous (although not necessarily without a lot of “bumps” along the way) progress from a primitive state to our present industrial economism.

This consensus rejects out of hand not just the appearance of humanity in some kind of higher state, such as Genesis and other sacred texts stipulate, but the idea that civilization might have moved in vast cycles and that there might have been advanced civilizations in what we call prehistory. The problem here: intrepid explorers and renegade archeologists have found ruins and artifacts on every continent that cannot be identified as the product of any known culture. They do not fit what the Third Stage consensus tells us were human technological capabilities at the time.

“Ooparts,” some of these entities are colorfully called.[11] A few, for example, are eerily similar in design to modern aircraft, accurately depicting wings and other parts of an aircraft as they would have to fit together to achieve flight. This is just one example. Another, often-cited, is the Piri Reis map, possessed by 15^th century Turkish sea captain Piri Reis, depicts coastlines of South America and Antarctica with surprising accuracy. The map was clearly a compilation from earlier maps that have been lost, and the knowledge used to construct those earlier maps lost in the meantime. The implication, though: someone, probably based in the Mediterranean region or in what is now the Middle East knew about continents on the other side of the world. And that the history of civilization very likely has had “days” of advance and “nights” during which previous progress was lost.[12]

Be all these as they may, there are reasons for doubting the consensus and suggesting that there were civilizations predating Sumeria, usually cited in textbooks as located in the “cradle” of civilization (Tigris and Euphrates river valleys). Again, we have educated guesses based on scattered evidence, remnants of a presumably larger body of remains of such nearly all of which have disappeared over the ravages of time. Again, naturalistic accounts are pitted against those of Christianity and other nonnaturalist worldviews.

Let me note again (lest it was missed the first go round): although obviously I’m not a materialist, my purpose here is not to champion anyone else’s presuppositions. I’m not sneaking in or postulating anyone’s supernatural creation account of the universe, life, or human beings, or civilization. I’m not claiming that any particular civilization postulated in anyone’s religion, mythology, or other lore (e.g., the legendary city of Atlantis described in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias) actually existed. Or that there were really Anunnaki or some such who predated the Sumerians. Any more than that Adam and Eve actually existed!

A mysterian would not do that! A transcendental Pyrrhonist would not do that! He has grown comfortable with the likelihood that the solution to origins problems is simply inaccessible to us. While there probably are “facts of the matter” regarding all of the above, we can no more see them than we can see what is behind an opaque curtain.

What, then, is the next step? Epistemic humility, before the complex, vast, and largely unknown universe in which we subsist in a tiny corner, with brains that do very well solving certain kinds of problems but are totally incompetent when it comes to others.  

Even evolutionary biologists with a taste for matters philosophical seem to be gravitating towards the idea that we never really “know reality” as it is in itself (are we back to Kant’s Ding-an-Sich?!). Their postulated process “designed” brains to keep us alive by solving the problems of an immediate environment, not uncover truths about the origin and nature of the universe, or even about ourselves and how our minds work at the deepest level.[13]

I would offer a somewhat different skeptical idea, entirely compatible with all that we have seen here, that we do not know that consciousness — our own or that of any other species — is generated by any brain process. On the other hand: perchance brain processes serve as a conduit for something that passes through them from the outside, so that what results from properly functioning cognitive system — senses, brain, central nervous system — is the species-specific consciousness of a living system able to solve species-local problems: a very different claim, and while perhaps startling because of its newness, is no less empirical than anything naturalists have come up with. For all we know, consciousness is a feature of the universe itself, its origin and operations inaccessible to us, but enabling survival, systemic interaction, and problem solving at all levels of the hierarchy of living systems. And perhaps not just on Earth, but on any number of the potentially billions of habitable worlds out there.

Mysterianism as Philosophical Therapy: Some Concluding Observations.

Science worshippers won’t like any of this, of course. Mysterianism, whether in the form McGinn, Flanigan and others put forth or in my broadened from, rejects important Enlightenment (Third Stage) assumptions that empirical science can solve every genuine intellectual problem, that human reason is unlimited, and so could explain everything given sufficient time. Purveyors of scientism will reject my call for epistemic humility, because they dislike mysteries. At best, they’ll find depressing the idea that there are intellectual problems the solutions to which are simply beyond the reach of our species-specific cognition, and they’ll dismiss my speculation about the place of consciousness in the universe as vague and mystical (not merely mysterian). I don’t even want to ask what they’ll say of my brief foray into “ooparts” and other challenges to the mainstream consensus on the history of civilizations.

I can’t do anything about this, so my exposition and defense of broadened mysterianism ends here. I should note that broadened mysterians, like the Pyrrhonians before them (assuming their population increases beyond one!) might gravitate toward a philosophy that sidelines pursuit of general truths. Sextus Empiricus was among those who spoke of ataraxia—transquility. He was not trying to discover general truths. He was trying to achieve a life of freedom from disturbance, then showing others how to do it.

To this mindset, “bracketing” an unprovable truth claim is therapeutic. Don’t “bracket” the claim, and you end up in endless irresolvable disputations — the opposite of ataraxia. What is going on here that provokes the purveyor of scientism’s anxiety? It is wise to accept what one cannot change, after all, and as philosophers, surely we want to embrace whatever small bits of wisdom we can find in this world. If one’s goal is living well — being in harmony with, at peace with, oneself, one’s fellows, and one’s surroundings — one does not need truth claims about the origins of the universe, life, humanity, or civilization; one does not need dense speculations on “how the brain generates conscious self-awareness” with premises one might not be willing to grant without even more disputation. These may make parlor games for the reasonably well off, but the rest of us have problems to solve, lives to live. The truths that serve us best are truths about particulars: this food offering is nutritious; that one is best avoided. This relationship is bringing me happiness; that one isn’t. These words help others; those don’t. This action gets a desirable result; that one fails. Living intentionally, learning as needed, in harmony with one’s surroundings: that’s ataraxia.

I can only ask the science worshippers, or purveyors of scientism, if they really believe they’ve offered, or are in a position to offer and justify (in whatever sense of this term they want) anything superior that will stand up to solid critical examination.  

Endnotes

[1] Colin McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind–Body Problem?,” Mind 98 (1989): 349–366.

[2] Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

[3] Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

[4] Jerry A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).

[5] David J. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 200–219.

[6] Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

[7] Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435–450.

[8] Halton C. Arp, Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science (Montreal: Apeiron, 1998). There are many works expounding the mainstream cosmological framework Arp is criticizing; one of the clearest is Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

[9] A tract I’ve found useful for its historical focus is Charles B. Thaxton, Roger L. Olsen, and Walter L. Bradley, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984). A much updated version is available: The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2020). Again, one can find useful guides to mainstream views and speculations which can serve as useful background. Cf., e.g., Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000) and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[10] Steven Yates, What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2021); cf. esp. chs. 4 and 5.

[11] Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (San Diego: Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1993); William R. Corliss, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts (Glen Arm, MD: The Sourcebook Project, 1978); William R. Corliss, Strange Artifacts: A Sourcebook on Ancient Man (2 vols) (Glen Arm, MD: The Sourcebook Project, 1974, 1976). For an on-the-barricades skeptical treatment of “out-of-place artifact” claims cf. e.g., Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, 10th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[12] Cf. Charles Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (New York: Chilton, 1966). Although again Graham Hancock isn’t exactly beloved within the circles of archeological consensus thinking, I’ve found him to have some interesting ideas once his fixation on supposed extraterrestrial influences is removed: cf. Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995); and America Before: The Key To Earth’s Lost Civilization (New York: Yellow Kite, 2019); among others.

[13] Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Donald D. Hoffman, Manish Singh, and Chetan Prakash, “The Interface Theory of Perception,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22, no. 6 (2015): 1480–1506.