Consider what might be called the ‘Bottleneck Thesis,’ which might be expressed as: we are natural in such a way that it is impossible to fully conceive of ourselves as natural. In other words, we are our brains in such a way that we can only understand ourselves as something other than our brains. Expressed in this way, the thesis is not overtly contradictory. It possesses an ontological component, that we are fundamentally ‘physical’ (whatever this means), and an epistemological component, that we cannot know ourselves as such. The plank in reason breaks when we probe the significance of the claim–step inside it as it were. If we cannot understand ourselves as natural, then we must understand ourselves as something else. And indeed we do, as we must, understand ourselves as agents, knowers, sinners, and so on. We may define this ‘something else’ in any number of ways, but they all share one thing in common: a commitment to a spooky bottomless ontology, be it social, existential, or otherwise, that is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism. We can disenchant the world, but not ourselves.
Although not contradictory, the Bottleneck Thesis does place us in a powerful cognitive double-bind. Despite the sheen of philosophical respectability, when we speak of the irreducibility of consciousness and norms as a way to secure the priority of life-worlds and language-games as ‘unexplained explainers,’ we are claiming an exemption from the natural. How could this not be tendentious? The only thing that separates our supra-natural posits from supernatural things such as souls, angels, and psychic abilities is the rigour of our philosophical rationale. Not a comforting thought, given philosophy’s track record. Moreover, these supra-natural posits are in fact fundamentally natural. Their apparent irreducibility is merely a subreptive artifact of our natural inability to understand them as such in the first instance. But then, once again, the only way we can assert this is by presupposing the very irreducibility we are attempting to explain away. We simply cannot be fundamentally natural because of the way we are fundamentally natural.
Given the absurdity of this, should we not just dismiss the Bottleneck out of hand? Perhaps, but at least two considerations should give us pause.
First, there is a sense in which the Bottleneck Thesis is justified as an inference to the best explanation for the cognitive disarray that is our bread and butter.
Say sentients belonging to an advanced alien civilization found some dead human astronauts and studied their neurophysiology. Say these sentients were similar to us in every physiological respect save that evolution was far kinder to them, allowing them to neurophysiologically process their own neurophysiology the way they process environmental inputs, such that for them introspection was a viable mode of scientific investigation. Where we simply see trees in the first instance, they see trees as neurophysiological results in the first instance.
Studying the astronauts, these alien researchers discover a whole array of neuro-functional similarities, so that they can reliably conclude that this does that and that does this and so on. The primary difference they find, however, is that our thalamocortical systems have a relatively limited information horizon. After intensive debate they conclude that humans brains likely lack the ability to process themselves as something belonging to the causal order of their environment. Human brains, they realize, probably understand themselves in noncausal terms. They then begin speculating about what it would be like to be human. What, they wonder, would noncausal phenomenal awareness look like? They cannot imagine this, so they shift to less taxing speculations.
On the issue of human self-understanding, the alien researchers suggest that with the early development of their scientific understanding, humans, remarkably, would begin to see themselves as an exception to the natural order of things, as something apart from their brains, and would be unable, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, to divest themselves of the intuition. ‘There would be much controversy’ they suggest, ‘regarding what they are.’
On the issue of social coordination, the alien researchers conclude that humans would be forced to specify their behaviours in noncausal terms, as behaviour somehow exempt from the etiology of behaviour, and as a result would be unable to reconcile this intuitive understanding with their scientific understanding of the world. Given that humans are capable of scientific understanding (the specimens were, after all, astronauts), the aliens assume humans would perhaps attempt to regiment their understanding of their behaviour in a scientific manner, perhaps elaborate a kind of ‘noncausal ethology’ (what we call ‘psychology’), but they would be perpetually perplexed by their inability to reconcile that understanding with their science proper.
Human understanding of their linguistic behavioural outputs, the alien researchers assume, would likewise be characterized by confusion. Once again the human’s intuitive understanding would be noncausal, and given the maturation of their science, they might begin to question the reality of their hardwired default assumptions–their ‘intuitive sense’ of what was happening as far as language was concerned. ‘There might be some noncausal X,’ the aliens conclude, ‘that for them constitutes the heart of their immediate linguistic understanding, but it would seem to vanish every time they searched for it.’ (The X here, of course, would be what we call ‘aboutness’). Some more daring researchers suggest humans might eventually abandon this X, attempt to understand language in thoroughly terms. But this would provide no escape from their dilemma, since such an understanding would seem to elide obvious phenomenal features that not only seem to belong to language, but to be constitutive of it. (And here, of course, I’m talking about normativity).
And so the aliens continue speculating, all the while marvelling at the poor blinkered creatures, and at the capricious whim of evolutionary fate that perpetually prevents them from effectively rationalizing their neurophysiological resources.
Is this story that farfetched? Could aliens, given intact specimens, predict things like the mind/body problem, the problem of moral cognitivism, the problem of meaning, and the like? With enough patience and ingenuity, I suspect they could. The Bottleneck Thesis, I think, provides the framework for a very plausible explanation of the intractable difficulties associated with these and other issues. The theoretical uroboros of the intentional and the physical, the human and the natural, has a long and hoary history, repeated time and again in drastically different forms through a variety of contexts. It is as though we continually find ourselves, in Foucault’s evocative words, at once “bound to the back of a tiger” and “in the place belonging to the king.” This apparent paradox is a fact of our intellectual history, one that requires explanation.
As an adjunct to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the Bottleneck Thesis not only explains why we seem to have so much difficulty with intentional phenomena in general, it explains why those difficulties take the forms they do across an array of different manifestations.
The second thing that should give us pause before rejecting the Bottleneck Thesis is that it constitutes a bet made on a eminently plausible neuro-evolutionary hypothesis: that our neurophysiology did not evolve to process itself the way it processes environmental inputs–that our brains are blind to themselves as brains. Given evolution’s penchant for shortcuts and morphological malapropisms, the possibility of such a neurophysiologically entrenched blind-spot, although grounds for consternation, should not be grounds for surprise. So we have evolved, and so long as we continue to reproduce, our genes simply will not give a damn. It would be pie-eyed optimism to assume otherwise.
There are cogent empirical and conceptual grounds, then, to think the Bottleneck Thesis might be true. And short of actually discovering intentionality in nature, there is no way to rule it out as a possibility. Certainly the absurdity of its consequences cannot tell against it, because such absurdity is precisely what one would expect given the truth of the Bottleneck. If we have in fact evolved in such a way that we cannot understand ourselves as part of nature, then we should expect to be afflicted by cognitive difficulties at crucial junctures in our thought.
Re: The "Blind Brain Theory of Consciousness" and the Consequences of Eliminativism
Originally Posted by rationalrevolution
The concept of "free will" doesn't even make sense, even from a philosophical perspective. It was always a religious concept, embraced by Christianity as a way to explain away the obvious flaws with reality while placing none of the blame on a "perfect god". Within the Christian framework it is impossible for a perfect god to exist and to have created a perfect world if the world that we live in today is clearly imperfect, so "free will" was the scapegoat, to which all flaws in the world can be attributed. It served a similar role in Plato's philosophy.
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