Uncategorized – Mind-Body Problems

Chapter Nine The mind-body problem lurks at the heart of every life. You face it when you swill a glass of vodka moments after vowing never to drink again, when you squelch the urge to watch gay porn on the Internet, when you yearn to quit your soul-crushing Wall Street job and abandon your thankless family and write novels in a cabin in the woods, when you scream at that vicious voice in your head to shut up, when you see a shrink, swallow an antidepressant or pray to quell your despair, when you fear death but don’t see the […]

Chapter Seven Before I met Rebecca Goldstein, I worried she might be snooty. She looks glamorous and brainy in author photos, with long blond hair and an austere expression. She’s an adept in physics and mathematics with a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton. She has won acclaim for her highbrow fiction and quasi-fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex and biographies of Spinoza and Gödel, two of history’s knottiest thinkers. She’s spoken at Davos, given a TED talk, won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In 2015, […]

Chapter Six In 2016 I joined a philosophy salon in New York City. Most of the participants have academic training in philosophy, and some are actual, full-time, professional philosophers. Roughly once a month, seven or eight of us meet in the salon-runner’s apartment to munch chocolate biscuits, sip wine and argue about a paper. Whatever the topic—the vagueness of knowledge, Wittgenstein’s mysticism, the dubiousness of moral rules—we often end up bickering about what philosophy is, or should be. What is its purpose? Its point? In one session we considered “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?” by David Chalmers. Chalmers […]

Chapter Eight In June 2017 I traveled to Jamaica to interview Robert Trivers, who owns a house on six wooded acres on a hilltop near the island’s southern coast. Unwisely, perhaps, I talked my girlfriend, whom I’ll call Emily, into coming with me. She rolled her eyes when I called Trivers one of the greatest living scientists. You say that about everyone you interview, she said. What sold her on the trip was the prospect of relaxing on a Caribbean beach. We arrived at Trivers’s home early one evening and departed the next afternoon for a resort in Negril. During […]

Chapter Two By the time I flew to Indiana to meet Douglas Hofstadter, I was so steeped in his writings that I found myself thinking like him, or like I like to think he thinks. I thought, I’m looking out the plane at a plain, which is also a plane. In my notebook I jotted, Indiana, the Blank State. But the landscape wasn’t blank. It was an Escher print, a recursive geometric puzzle receding to a blurred horizon, a metaphor for infinity. My feeble punning efforts made me appreciate punny-man Hofstadter all the more. For him, the world is a […]

Chapter Five The easiest way to get students to think about the mind-body problem is to bring up mental illness. Many find debates over consciousness, free will and the self too abstract, but they all care about depression, anxiety and substance abuse. These disorders force us to ask, in an especially urgent way, who we really are. Modern psychiatry, I inform my classes, has embraced the physiological paradigm of mental illness. It stems from flawed genes or neurochemistry and is best treated with physiological remedies, such as antidepressants. This emphasis is good in some ways, because it reduces the stigma […]

Chapter Four When I was six or seven, I was still a devout Catholic, and I believed in the power of prayer. At a class bowling party, when my turn came I silently said a Hail Mary, hoping the mother of God would help me throw strikes. She didn’t come through. Nor did Jesus, to whom I appealed in a snowball fight with older boys, keep me from being smacked in the face so hard by an iceball that I started bawling. These disappointments contributed to my loss of faith, but I continued paranormal experiments in a secular vein well […]

Chapter Three By the third day of the conference, the Kiva Ballroom felt like Plato’s cave. We prisoners sat in darkness as spotlighted figures on a stage projected arcane patterns on two enormous screens and jabbered about free will, neural networks, Bayes theorem, machine intelligence, panpsychism, psychedelics and telekinesis. What’s real, I wondered, what’s illusion? Does our desire to escape the cave just drive us deeper into darkness? It was April 2016, and I was in Tucson, Arizona, at “The Science of Consciousness,” the same meeting I attended back in 1994. Hundreds of scholars pitched theories to a thousand listeners. […]