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It would appear that the natural mysterian position is becoming increasingly popular as a means of confronting the gap which persists between our observations of the brain and its activity on the one hand, and what we experience as consciousness on the other. This position is well-articulated by one of its most distinguished philosophical champions, Colin McGinn, who characterises a mysterian as one who believes that the mind-brain relationship is strictly “natural” (i.e. not supernatural or spiritual), but that it must remain mysterious because we have no means to apprehend it. We can experience the mind-brain from one side or the other only; we can never look at the connection because we lack the proper faculty. As John Horgan points out in The Undiscovered Mind, mysterianism “is becoming a mainstream position.”[1] The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker subscribes to it, as do science writers Martin Gardner and John Horgan himself. The reasons for their adopting this position are made clear in Horgan’s book; no connection has been established between the activity of the brain and what we experience as thoughts and perceptions apart from the observations that the two phenomena occur simultaneously and that damage to or chemical interference with the brain results in modifications of experienced mental life.
It has long been recognised that any “explanation” of consciousness will be unsatisfactory if it merely describes the activity of the neurons in the brain. How can the firing of x number of neurons equal my experience of seeing a yellow pencil, or feeling a damp cloth, or hearing someone saying my name? With the assistance of some apparatus, I may be perceive a graphic representation of my neural activity at the same time as that activity is happening; yet even this perception is not the same thing as the activity itself. Leibniz, writing in the 17th century, already recognised the impossibility of equating two such discrete phenomena:
Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine that machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit it inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception. (Quoted by Dennett in Consciousness Explained)
Most mysterious in this disjuncture between the “machinery” and our experience is the sense we have that our perceptions are unmediated. When I look at a blue sky, I have no sense whatsoever that my perception is facilitated by the activity of, say, 1,000 neurons relaying stimulation from receptors in my eye to another 1,000 neurons somewhere else, and so on. In fact, if it were not for my knowledge of modern science, I would not even suspect the presence of all this mediation. I would see the sky and naively suppose that my mind was directly perceiving a wide expanse of colour that I call “blue.” I would, of course, be aware that I rely, to some extent, upon my physical body and its organs to make this perception possible; but I would likely conceive of them as a set of windows that permit me to direct my mind’s attention in particular directions and, thereby, enable me to focus on particular things in my environment. This may be called the naive realist view of perception. It corresponds to the notion that “what you see is what you get”; that is, one can gain secure knowledge about the world because one’s perceptions of the world are unmediated.
This position is, of course, untenable if we recognise the apparent mediation between ourselves and the world presented by the sense organs and brain. The historical recognition of the correspondence between neural activity and various mental experiences has, of course, given rise to claims that one “is” the other; that mind can be reduced to matter; or as Francis Crick has put it, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more that the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”[2] Once again, we are being told that two completely different things are actually the same thing. Such claims fail as explanations and have, I believe, prompted many otherwise materialist thinkers to adopt a mysterian position.
Crick’s claim also fails to take an obvious fact into account. It can be demonstrated that our knowledge of nerve cells and their associated molecules derives entirely from human perceptions. (A Berkelian may go so far as to say that these physical objects do not even exist independently of our minds or the mind of God; matter, in this case, is reducible to mind.) Unless we are absolutely certain that a particular kind of reality exists apart from our (mediated) perceptions of it, we are left with Crick and his camp saying that all perceptions are reducible to this small subclass of perceptions, where we are looking at the brain or graphic representations of its activity. Where the mind-brain relationship is considered, a strong materialist stance is easily shown to be philosophically untenable.[3]
Materialism may be characterised as a form of philosophical monism because it attributes all causation to the interaction of matter; it implies one form of causal logic. A number of dualist options are available to us in our explanation of the relationship between mind and brain/body. However, it is usually precisely where such explanations are attempted that the weakness of dualist philosophies are forced to reveal their inherent contradictions. When mind and body are conceived of as belonging to different worlds, each with their own causal logics, it becomes impossible to explain how the two of them affect each other. This is why philosophers such as Descartes, for example, ultimately has to suggest that mind and body are connected through some miracle of God which must remain a mystery to human beings. Descartes, too was a kind of mysterian, only his faith was in the agency of God rather than Nature.
I have already mentioned Berkeley’s radical immaterialism, the obverse of materialism, in which matter is supposed to have no existence apart from its representation in the mind. Matter is then a mere abstraction from our many perceptions of what we take to be material things (perceptions of pictures made by electron microscopes or particle accelerator apparatus are to be included in this class of perceptions). A less radical immaterialism is presented by Rudolf Steiner, who suggests that matter is precipitated out of spirit. Mind, being uncondensed spirit, is therefore able to apprehend what is really just a condensed form of the same substance. Steiner’s monistic approach is thus already preferable to the materialist monism, which is unable to propose that mind is merely rarefied matter.
Steiner is, like Berkeley, still incomplete insofar as he offers no clear explanation of the demonstrable correlation between neural activity and mental states.[4] According to McGinn, the “universal mentalist” position (as he labels radical immaterialism) remains plagued by a problem to which any monist approach is susceptible, only now the problem is framed in different terms: how does the activity of the “condensed spirit” that is a neuron become part of the spiritual activity that is perception? And why is the mediating role of the body scarcely experienced in the act of perception? If minds and neuron are ultimately composed of the same (spiritual) substance, how is it that the neurons are never experienced as such under conditions of normal consciousness?
Unmediated Perception
I will now suggest a radical idea that, to my knowledge, has never really been explored before: perception is not mediated. The way we experience perception constitutes a direct connection between two parts of what is ultimately a whole spiritual reality. In other words, my experience of blue when beholding the sky is the result of a real/ideal world-element (blueness as experienced, not a particular wavelength of light) coming into direct contact with another real/ideal world element (my mind, not my brain). This is, of course, the position of a naive realist. Rather than balk at the many difficulties such a standpoint presents, let us see what follows from it if we accept it as a postulate from the beginning and try to work out the conditions under which it is possible without ignoring the empirical evidence of brain science or the rigour of philosophical thinking. It may be possible to come up with several accounts of how perception is unmediated; what follows is presented as one attempt to reconcile this radical position with science and philosophy.
How?
The first question that presents itself might go as follows: if perception is direct and unmediated, then what are the roles of the sense organs and neurons? What are they doing, if not conveying information from the world to the mind? Rather than conveying information in a positive manner, we might think of them as conveying it in a negative manner; that is, they act as gates through which the mind has contact with parts (I hesitate to say quanta) of a spiritual reality to which the mind, too, belongs. A conscious mind with no sensory input, then, is like an eye enclosed by a dark, opaque screen. Each bit of sensory input, rather than being a signal between the external world and the mind, is actually an opening in the “screen” of the brain. Of course, conscious experience is ultimately comprised of countless such openings (corresponding to the countless receptors in the eye, for example, or the thousands of nerve endings that give us a sense of temperature), thus creating the possibility of a rich, global experience of the world. In this way, perception is unmediated by the body; whether it is mediated at the source of the percept, and what the role of the mind is in uniting these percepts to concepts, are questions to which we will return later.
How can a neuron be a gate, rather than a signal conduit? And how does the mind perceive (i.e., become aware of) only a part of what the senses are capable of bringing to awareness, at any given moment? Here we must exercise the imagination to envisage what is probably beyond the limits of visual analogy. Let us suppose that the normal (non-firing) state of a nerve cell, in which it engages in mere metabolic activity, presents to the mind an opacity, a blockage. Let us say we are in a perfectly quiet room, listening attentively, and this nerve cell is inactive. The mind is, therefore, present to this nerve cell; it exerts a kind of mental pressure against it through the desire to listen. (Since unmediated perception presupposes matter’s status as crystallised mind-substance, we may entertain such a relationship between disincarnate and incarnate mind without contradicting ourselves; but more on this anon.) A sound occurs, and the neuron fires (possibly as the last in a sequence of firings). This discharge constitutes a suspension of the cell’s normal metabolic activity, a fleeting death, which to the mind makes it like an opening. However, this opening does not occur unless force is applied to the neural gate from both sides:
Figure 1. Role of the Neuron and the Mind during Perception
Hence, if the mind does not press up against neural gate, perception will not occur. In the case of sounds, we might expect that scarcely any pressure is required for us to hear; usually, we hear things whether we want to or not, although low, constant hums or the sound of our own breathing may fade in and out of awareness. We may think that the sound of a fan is entirely beneath our awareness, but when it is shut off and we notice the silence, it becomes apparent that we were aware of it all along. And so it may be incorrect to think of a perception as mere open and closed gates, convenient though this representation may be. We may need to posit openings with varying degrees of opacity, or multiple gates for each percept, one at the physical level and one or more filters at an immaterial but still pre-mental level.
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