The Mind Is Not the Brain?

Recommended: a couple of good online reflections on Marilynne Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self, from D.G. Myers and Amelia Atlas.

While both these reviews are positive, I don't think I'll be picking up a copy anytime soon. Robinson is writing against what she calls "parascientific writing," a handy term that leaves respect for science intact while disparaging the recent trend of popular, scientifically-informed books that tend to argue against a spiritual realm, or that tend to denigrate individual experiences of consciousness.

Agreed: a lot of modern empiricism (and so-called empiricism) tends to denigrate individual accounts of what life or experience consists of. It wants to tell people what they're "really" doing, "really" thinking, and what the world is "really" like, and refuses to listen to what they themselves have to say. Robinson identifies the problem wonderfully. But the solution to this problem doesn't have to be a retrenchment in spirituality, or jaw-dropping wonder at the imponderable nature of existence/the human mind, or a dismissal of neuroscience's materialistic findings about the brain.

In fact, a number of thinkers in a variety of fields have been troubled by the same problem that disturbs Robinson, and have, I think, solved it better. For instance, Robinson's concern about the way "parascientific" writing downplays human experience has also been expressed by the sociologist Bruno Latour. Latour encourages researchers to take people seriously when they describe their sense that superhuman forces, for instance, are compelling them to do things. For someone like Latour, this information is a valuable clue to how the human mind, and how social activity, functions--it isn't some kind of charade to be exposed. (Latour makes this argument in Reassembling the Social.)

Easily my favorite book in this vein--and one of my favorite books of all time--is Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson was a polymath who dabbled in anthropology, sociology, animal communication, and a number of other fields. Steps is an anthology of his writing from the 1940s through about 1970, showing the way he worked through questions of information and communication to form a new picture of what "mind" might mean--a picture that respects human experience and tries to place it appropriately in the framework of a larger system. His view manages to include both the mystical awe that comes with true appreciation for mental processes, and an empirical view that respects and deploys scientific understanding.

Later systems theorists and posthumanists have followed up on this work in various ways that--while equally fascinating--are more academic. (I'm thinking of people like Niklas Luhmann, or Cary Wolfe, whose What is Posthumanism? I'm currently devouring.) If you're interested in this problem--the poverty of popular scientific explanation, the difficulty of reconciling certain scientific claims with felt human experience--I strongly, strongly recommend Bateson's work. But my broader point is that we're at a kind of explanatory impasse, and Robinson has done a fine job identifying it--but the impasse doesn't mean we need to retreat to one camp or another. It means it's time to scout for new paths, and I think systems theory, in its various forms, offers them.