The Irreducible

Eros, Hermes, and Hephaistos are reclining, each upon a separate garden bench fashioned from ethereal “marble”; having for the moment desisted from the casual conversation in which they have been engaged for the last hour or so, they are listening to the breeze stirring the leaves about them and to the birds singing overhead. Enter Psyche. In her hand is a refulgently red rose blossom at which she is gazing with unusual intensity. Finding an unoccupied bench, she seats herself and turns to Eros.

PSYCHE: Do you see this flower, my love?

EROS: Of course, my soul, very clearly.

PSYCHE: I plucked it just now from the rose tree at the center of our courtyard.

EROS: So I guessed.

PSYCHE: [Addressing all three:] And yet I didn’t do so impulsively. I was detained for some time by my own indecision. I happened to note this one blossom among all the others, and was drawn to its singular perfection and beauty, but I deliberated for some time before breaking it from its branch. On the one hand, I found its loveliness too delicious to resist; on the other, I wasn’t entirely sure that I cared to remove it from its natural place, where it shone out to such exquisite effect amid that inordinate, gorgeous pattern of blossoms and leaves.

EROS: Evidently you made your choice in the end.

HEPHAISTOS: I can’t honestly say that this is the most enthralling tale you’ve ever told.

PSYCHE: Indeed. It’s very ordinary. And yet—and this was what was occupying my thoughts just now when I came upon the three of you here—I find myself fascinated by the conclusions one might draw from it.

HERMES: Such as that you take your time to make up your mind?

PSYCHE: No. Or, rather, yes, that’s true, and that’s significant in itself. For, in taking my time, I was considering a course of action prospectively, weighing one desire and one rationale against another until I arrived at a decision. Then, in keeping with the purpose I’d elected, I acted and, having acted, I began to reflect on what I’d done, out of a further desire to understand the implications of my actions. And all of this required a certain period of time because I wasn’t merely storing information in my mind in a disordered aggregate, but instead was arranging my reflections in a particular intelligible order according to a grammar of logical continuities, reasoning upon my actions, employing concepts that I had to communicate to myself by way of signs—words, that is, indicating ideas in relation to one another—the whole process guided by my longing to understand as much as I could.

HEPHAISTOS: Again, my dear Psyche, as enchanting a raconteuse as you usually are, I can’t pretend to find any of this nearly as absorbing as you evidently do.

PSYCHE: And yet you ought to. For what I concluded from this admittedly humble episode is that mental acts are irreducible to material causes; that consciousness, intentionality, and mental unity aren’t physical phenomena or emergent products of material forces, but instead belong to a reality more basic than the physical order; that the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for roughly four centuries is incoherent and inadequate to all the available empirical evidence; that in fact the foundation of all reality is spiritual rather than material, and that the material order, to the degree that it exists at all (on which we may reserve judgement), originates in the spiritual; that all rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God.

HEPHAISTOS: [Sighing:] Ah, that again.

PSYCHE: Yes, that again. My further conclusions, dear Phaesty, are that the brain doesn’t produce the mind, even if the mind operates within the world through or as the brain; that none of the sciences as they exist at present—no neuroscience, however advanced, no form of biochemistry, and not even the most revolutionary forms of modern physics—will ever produce a coherent causal narrative of the relation between the physical and the mental; that no machine ever has been, or ever will be, conscious, capable of thought, or possessed of functions even remotely analogous to the operations of the mind; that the hope for a day when men and women will be able to download their conscious minds into computers is destined to be bitterly disappointed; and that, once again—simply to reiterate the point—there’s an infinite, metaphysically simple God in Whom all things live, move, and exist.

HEPHAISTOS: [With a sardonic lilt in his voice:] My goodness me. [Slowly sitting up upon his bench:] Assuming that you’re not trifling with us, I can say only that your conclusions are rather, ah . . . extravagant, given the evidence you’ve offered.

EROS: [Also sitting up:] They seem eminently reasonable to me.

HEPHAISTOS: [Smirking:] As truly shocking as I find that, I suspect you’re guided more by love than by reason.

HERMES: To the contrary, my friend. I agree with both of them.

PSYCHE: Oh, yes, that reminds me. Another of my conclusions is that love and reason are inseparable aspects of mental life, and that both alike are always already present in all of organic life. Yet another is that life itself is more than the quantitative effect of material forces; it is instead a kind of intentional intelligence pervading all things.

HEPHAISTOS: I see. The mind of God again, no doubt. [With a laugh:] Curiouser and curiouser. Well, I know that I’m in a distinct minority here, but I trust you’ll all pardon me if I remain true to my materialist convictions and continue to reject talk of God as anything more than a fantastical rhetorical resort to an explanatory cipher. And I hope you’ll also not think less of me if, despite the staggering evidence of a rose blossom plucked after deliberation from a tree, I continue to believe that the most rational and logically parsimonious explanation for the existence of all things—including mental phenomena—is that they’re the physical results of wholly material causes, operating in strict obedience to purely physical laws of causation.

EROS: I don’t always believe you’re quite as insensible to the mysteriousness of life and mind as you affect to be.

HEPHAISTOS: I assure you, there’s no affectation involved. I certainly see no need to explain life as the force of the divine mind in all things, or some spark of divine fire animating material organisms. We have no need of that hypothesis, to coin a phrase, or of any other form of “vitalism.” Organic life is the fortuitous product of unguided chemical interactions. Each species is the product of a phylogeny stretching back through time to a sea of rudimentary and barely active chemical elements, and any given individual organism is merely a kind of machine, a functioning combination of intrinsically purposeless parts, all constructed from an ensemble of largely inert chemical ingredients.

HERMES: [At last joining the others in an upright posture:] Do you truly believe that?

HEPHAISTOS: Indeed I do. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the demarcation we habitually draw between organic life and simple chemical reactions is more a convention of semantics than anything else, or at the very least no more than a relative judgement made along a continuum; ultimately, there’s no essential distinction between the simple volatility of elementary chemistry and the vitality of organisms, no point of inflection—not even that of organic matter’s accidental acquisition of the properties of homeostasis and replication—at which the one is miraculously transformed into the other.

EROS: None whatsoever?

HEPHAISTOS: None. Even the distinction between life and death, to be pitilessly honest, is really just a convention, a mere division between differing kinds of chemical processes; what we arbitrarily single out as meriting the name “life” is merely a functional arrangement of elements that in themselves aren’t alive. The whole evolutionary history of living things is that of the gradual, relentless concrescence of ever more layers of complexity upon a simple chemical basis. Any given organism is an item of chemical technology, albeit one that evolved by way of natural selection and modular accumulations rather than by being designed by an intending intelligence; hence, life can always be reduced to its chemical components again without leaving behind any mystical residue or supernatural tertium quid that we might call the “life force” or the divine spark or anything of that sort. Similarly, we gods—like our parents the titans and their parents Ouranos and Gea, as well as whatever other celestial and supercelestial beings there may be—arose originally from, and can be analytically reduced again to, the aethers and their natural fluctuations and native energies. So too, mind is merely a mechanical function or emergent property of the neural machinery by which organisms interact with their environments. Or rather, perhaps, mind is simply identical to that neural machinery and its interactions. Don’t scowl like that, Eros. This isn’t to deny the marvel and beauty of either life or mind; it’s merely to deny that any but a natural explanation is required to account for them.

EROS: Do you deny that you yourself are a living being, then, rather than a machine?

HEPHAISTOS: Why make that distinction? Of course I’m a living being, but I reject the notion that my “life” is anything other than an accumulation and integration of countless, minute, essentially lifeless, essentially mechanical parts. I deny that life is anything but the complex operation of innumerable little machines organized into a larger machine, just as I deny that mind is anything other than the cumulative integrated result of numberless, minute, essentially mindless ingredients and processes—an axon here, a flicker of electricity there, a neurological filter for discriminating between lateral and vertical intensities, a cerebral module that’s developed a capacity for retaining mnemonic traces—and so on. I, like every living and conscious thing, am a mereological illusion . . . or an apparition . . . a composite totality that seems whole and entire in itself, though really I’m just the emergent result of a vast collection of discrete parts and forces and tiny molecular mechanisms acting, if not in perfect concert, at least in close synchrony so long as . . . well, so long as their physiological momentum keeps them flowing together in a common structure.

HERMES: All of that raises questions regarding the meanings of quite a few words—“natural,” for instance, or “cause,” or “emergent” . . .

HEPHAISTOS: Perhaps. But you don’t deny, do you, that life evolves from simpler into more complex forms?

HERMES: Of course not. We know it does. Our grandparents watched it happening on the earth and in the seas over vast ages. At least, the grandparents of three of us did. [To Psyche:] I realize you arrived among us a little later. [To Hephaistos again:] What I most certainly do deny, however, is that biological evolution was a purely mechanical process, or that the Neo-Darwinian model of evolution is exhaustively explanatory—or even largely explanatory. At most, it’s only a partial, local, restricted truth within the embrace of a far larger, more vastly encompassing truth about the origin of life.

HEPHAISTOS: It may or may not be; but, even if it’s insufficient, whatever theory may come to supplement it will still be situated within the realm of natural forces and causes.

PSYCHE: Again, what’s “natural”?

HEPHAISTOS: I tend to take it to mean “physical.”

PSYCHE: That we can debate. But I must commend you, Phaesty, for having so quickly recognized that the issue of the origin and structure of mind is inseparable from that of the origin and structure of life. That’s very astute of you indeed, because inevitably both issues center upon one and the same question: whether, that is, a purely mechanistic understanding of nature—or its many descendants or sequels or variants, such as philosophical naturalism or physicalism—can be made to account for the very things that had to be subtracted from the picture of nature in early modernity in order to produce the mechanical philosophy to begin with. That is, can mechanism explain what mechanism originally abstained from trying to explain on principle? For certain reasons, incidentally, I would add language to the list of intrinsically irreducible realities.

HEPHAISTOS: Add as many items as you please, but my response will remain unchanged. Any complex phenomenon may seem to resist reduction to simpler, more elementary causes; but, as a rule, that proves nothing, since what seems to be the case is often nothing more than the current status quaestionis, which will be revised in time by deeper scientific investigation. When you say no scientific method or discipline could possibly provide a causal narrative of mind—as you so often have said—what you mean is that there’s no way of bridging the divide between third-person data about physical events and first-person conscious experience. And I assume that’s because the former consists in purely objective inventories of material objects and electrochemical episodes, united by physical connections, while the latter is composed of subjective phenomenal awareness and private thoughts, connected by consecutive rational associations and subsisting in private intuitions and private interpretations.

PSYCHE: Very good. You put it very succinctly. That’s indeed my view. Simply said, a strictly quantitative method can’t illuminate a strictly qualitative phenomenon like consciousness, and a strictly third-person method can’t illuminate a strictly first-person experience. And so, my dear friend, to imagine that the absolute difference between objective physical states and subjective mental states can be overcome in terms of physical causality is a category error, if only because modern scientific method is applicable only to the former while offering no avenue of access to the latter. The sciences don’t even have a means of asking the correct questions here. For another thing, no matter how many correlations we isolate between neurological states and mental events, it’s a fairly venerable axiom that correlation isn’t causation. Granting all due respect to the cognitive sciences, and to all their inventories of the correspondences between mental and brain states, none of that will ever yield the explanation we seek. We’re talking about merely apparent quantitative associations between totally qualitatively dissimilar phenomena. The nature of the relation is so obscure that we can’t even presume to know which side, if either, might enjoy causal priority; we have no better reason for speaking of the mind as what the brain does than for speaking of the brain as an instrument the mind employs. All that the sciences of our day can do with regard to this issue is remind us—as if we needed reminding—that minds and bodies aren’t functionally severable in our normal experience.

HEPHAISTOS: It’s always perilous to presume to know what the sciences of the future may or may not achieve.

PSYCHE: Not when it’s a matter of logic. As you say, consciousness, uniquely, is first-person in its phenomenal structure, all the way down. In fact, it’s the very phenomenon of the “first person” as such, the sole act whereby someone is anyone at all, with a private inner life, and it’s wholly inaccessible to any scrutiny from outside. Of course, we can observe behaviors in others that resemble our own and that we know in our own cases to be associated with consciousness, but that doesn’t provide us any immediate intuition of the subjectivity behind them when we observe them in others. Even the most exhaustive surveillance of all those electrical events in the neurons of the brain that we can reasonably assume to be the physical concomitants of mental states can never admit us into the singular, continuous, wholly interior reality of another’s personal experience—that inward, conscious self that’s pure perspective as such, never to be captured as an object within the field of some other perspective.

HEPHAISTOS: Goodness
gracious me.

PSYCHE: Mock if you like, my dear, but I’m only acknowledging modern scientific method’s understanding of itself. That method absolutely insists that a verifiable scientific description must be a rigorously third-person narrative of structural and causal connections and consequences. It’s precisely the first-person perspective that must ideally be subdued within—and even banished from—our view of any phenomenon if observation, experiment, and theory are to yield a properly “scientific” account of that phenomenon; any remainder of the purely subjective, however meager, constitutes only an area of unintelligibility. This rule is fair enough, perhaps—perhaps—when we’re talking about, say, cell division as viewed through a microscope; but it becomes an insurmountable obstacle when applied to the phenomenon of subjectivity. Now the object of investigation is the very thing that our prevailing method, on principle, refuses from the first to take into consideration. So yes, we can say with utter certainty that consciousness can’t be described solely in terms of, say, sensory stimulus and neurological response, simply because neither stimulus nor response is in itself a mental phenomenon; neither one, considered as a purely physical reality, entails conceptual content, intentional meaning, volition, desire, beliefs, or personal awareness. So the notion that there’s a purely physical basis for subjective experience remains at best a conjecture regarding a kind of connection for which there’s no analogy anywhere else in nature. An electrical pulse as such is not a thought or a private impression; or at least, if it is, we have no language for describing—no conceptual grammar for understanding—that arcane identity.

Once again, my dear friend, yes: we can in fact confidently assume that no purely empirical explanation of the relation of physical to mental events will ever be found. We’ll never devise any causal model adequate to explain the relation between the two, or even isolate any aspect of that relation as an object of scientific scrutiny. The problem has nothing to do with the limitations of our current scientific techniques or knowledge; it’s entirely one of logic. No matter how sophisticated the cognitive sciences may become, mere quantitative advances in physical data will never be able to span the qualitative abyss between the objective and subjective dimensions of reality.

HEPHAISTOS: Abyss? Really?

PSYCHE: It is an abyss. We need only consider the real features of mental life—the intricate interweaving of recognition, judgement, desire, will, deliberation, evaluation, and internal language that I described in regard to the rose I plucked from my tree, for instance—to see that they’re irreconcilable with any mechanical picture of things. It’s the very reality of correlations between objective brain events and subjective mental states that forms the central mystery confronting us; so even the most exhaustive catalog possible of all the neurological concomitants of mental actions would still amount only to a series of reiterations of that mystery. If what we are seeking is a causal model in purely physicalist terms of the convertibility between the physical and the mental, then all that our repeated expeditions into the jungles of neurology can achieve is to show us we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Frankly, to my mind the notion that first-person experience could be reduced to third-person functions is utterly devoid of rational content. It’s like claiming that one’s height is reducible to one’s charisma.

HEPHAISTOS: [Smiling and then sighing:] So you say. But that may itself be merely a matter of our current state of knowledge. What if that absolute qualitative distinction between the third- and first-person perspectives is itself only apparent rather than real? And what if this seemingly singular, purely subjective reality of consciousness and thought you speak of with such certainty could be disassembled into an immense collection of very tiny, purely objective parts? What if intrinsic consciousness is a kind of holographic illusion, so to speak, generated by a plurality of partial representations, all of which can be dissolved again back into the purely extrinsic relations of unconscious things? Or, if that should prove impossible, what if instead there are occult properties invested in matter at its most elementary levels—and by “occult” I mean merely “hidden from view”—that are already what you might call “subjective” in nature? What if the seemingly absolute qualitative abyss you describe between subjective and objective phenomena is actually a distinction between two sides of a single physical continuum that we simply haven’t as yet properly descried and described?

PSYCHE: My goodness, so many what-ifs. They’ll take some time to answer, though I’m perfectly willing to try to do so. Mind you, how unified consciousness could be an illusion, when illusion itself would seem to require a unified consciousness in which to appear, we can discuss in time. Again, though, I have to emphasize that the problem here isn’t a matter merely of how much information we possess, or of how much empirical data we’ve failed as yet to discover; it’s that the logical constraints that govern the sciences absolutely prohibit them from any meaningful empirical or theoretical investigation of the mind’s inner states. So on this score we really can’t accept promissory notes for scientific discoveries in some unspecified future that will chase all our perplexities away, since plain logic tells us that they’re worthless. I know that your preferred term for the working premises of modern science is “methodological naturalism”; well, it’s precisely such naturalism that’s incapable of explaining mental acts, no matter how developed its methods may become in time. If, of course, at some future date we should abandon the third-person rigorism of modern science altogether, and find a way of speaking of consciousness and subjective interiority in a language that also yields a satisfactory physical description of reality, it will be only because we’ve so radically revised our every concept of the physical that we’re no longer talking about what the sciences today recognize as their proper field of study. I think that unlikely. Whatever the case, Phaesty dear, I cordially encourage you to try skipping over that qualitative abyss if you doubt it’s there. I assure you, you’ll fall in.

HEPHAISTOS: Do you? Well, even if I were to plummet down into its depths, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that I’m wrong in principle. It might mean merely that I lack the necessary dialectical tools. I’m not a philosopher, after all; I’m merely a god, and a god of limited agility at that. [Looking at Eros and Hermes in turn:] I’m just a poor, lame, lumbering blacksmith slouching my ungainly way among gods as fleet as thought itself.

HERMES: Oh, now, let’s not be coy. False humility doesn’t suit you.

PSYCHE: Quite so. And, anyway, I wouldn’t place the burden of persuasion entirely on your shoulders, Phaesty, broad and brawny though they are. I admit that we can’t conclude just from the qualitative difference between objectivity and subjectivity that there aren’t, as you say, occult propensities in matter that might explain the reality of mental phenomena. I have other reasons for thinking it logically impossible that mental states are merely physical in nature. My view, to be clear, is not only that you can’t in practice produce an account of how the third-person objective facts of electrochemistry are causally connected to mental events, though in fact you can’t; rather, it’s also that it’s logically impossible for physical events—understood mechanistically, at least—to produce mental events by way of purely material causes. I grant, though, that the conclusions I’ve drawn from my confessedly not very thrilling adventure at the rose tree require some exposition. So, let me propose the following: I’ll lay out my arguments against the physicalist reductionism you favor. I encourage you to raise what objections you like; but, if I should prove reasonably successful in convincing you of the solvency of my arguments, you must then allow me to attempt to convince you also that an honest phenomenology of ordinary mental acts demonstrates that it’s at least reasonable—and more reasonable than any alternative—to conclude that mind is the ground of reality and that, moreover, infinite mind—the mind of God—is the source and end and encompassing element of every finite mind.

HEPHAISTOS: That sounds like a very time-consuming exercise.

PSYCHE: Happily, being gods, we have literally all the time in the universe at our disposal. [Turning to Hermes:] What do you say?

HERMES: I’m entirely agreeable to the suggestion.

PSYCHE: [To Eros:] And you, my love?

EROS: I adore you.

PSYCHE: We’ll take that as a yes. [Turning back to Hephaistos:] So, what say you?

HEPHAISTOS: [After a moment of silence:] Very well, then. The floor—or, rather, the greensward—is yours.

This dialogue is extracted from All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale University Press, August 2024). Reproduced by permission.