[For whatever it’s worth, I thought some of you might enjoy seeing excerpts from my letter to Cecil:]
Dear Cecil:
As a proud member of The Teeming Millions, I would like to thank you for your wonderful books and many years of your enjoyable, enlightening columns. I recently learned for myself that few thrills in life compare to having Cecil simultaneously answer your question and make fun of you in his weekly column. My compliments to Mr. Signorino—the resemblance is amazing. 
Yes, Cartesian dualism became excessive, but that fact neither obliterates nor materializes the mind. I am in my third year of research on how the uncritical acceptance of such pseudo-scientific dogma as meme-ism constricts creativity in children. (With any luck, my book will be out early next year.) Anyway, I have some additional questions for you to consider.
Question Number 1: Would the World’s Smartest Human Being find “heavy sledding” in an intellectually honest “scientific” explanation of consciousness? Hold that thought.
Question(s) Number 2: Does a mental event capable of bringing about behavior really violate the law of energy conservation? Really? Should the World’s Smartest Human Being find it persuasive that a non-physical element of our real, knowable world might not comply with the laws of physics? Does the color purple violate the second law of thermodynamics? Does gravity itself have mass? Does inertia itself keep going unless acted upon by another force? Should we find it similarly remarkable that a physical element did not comply with the laws of, oh, say, morality or justice?
Question(s) Number 3: If Question(s) Number 2 is (are) answered affirmatively, would that disprove that mental events are capable of bringing about behavior? In other words, is a fact of experience “undone” by a theory that legislates against it? Really? Or would it be more accurate to say that the relationship between psychological events and physical events is only a metaphorical one?
The most intellectually honest articulation of the monist-materialist view is arguably Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), the book that recast Descartes’ “myth” as “the ghost in the machine.” The “ghost,” according to Ryle, is attributable to the common mistake of assuming that there are as many entities as we have words (for the entities)—he calls this a “category error.” (I use the term hypostatization, as in “Freud hypostatized the id.”) University of Newcastle theoretical physics professor Paul Davies explains the category error as follows: “the relationship between mind and body (brain) is similar to that between an ant colony and ants, or between the plot of a novel and the letters of the alphabet. Mind and body are not two components of a duality, but two entirely different concepts drawn from different levels in a hierarchy of description.”
So far, so good, I suppose. There’s just one problem: this particular “category error” commits its own “category error.” For example, Ryle asserts that dualism would require that the statements “Smith’s chess move is in the motor cortex” and “Smith’s chess move is the one he had in his mind” must be as different as “Smith arrived in a flood of tears” (or “you stomped off in a huff”) and “Smith arrived in a taxi” (or “you stomped off in a new pair of shoes”) (Concept of Mind, page 22). But they are different—right? This is an assertion that no self-respecting monist-materialist could accept. As Georgetown philosophy professor Daniel N. Robinson points out in An Intellectual History of Psychology (1995), “If all talk about mental states and brain states must forever be as different as talk about Smith’s tears and his means of transportation, then dualism—and not just linguistic dualism—can look forward to a long life.”
Enter J.J.C. Smart’s thesis Sensations and Brain Processes (1962) which showed (surprise!) “there are no philosophical arguments which compel us to be dualists.” Fair enough. In Smart’s judgment, “that everything should be explicable in terms of physics except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable.” Allow me to translate: “Monist-materialism must be, therefore monist-materialism is.” Perfectly fair, but hardly scientific. Revealingly, Smart concludes that “there is no conceivable experiment which could decide between materialism and epiphenomenalism” (to that list, I would add transcendentalism, interactionism, and [wink-wink] string theory-ism). In other words, this is a philosophical matter, not a scientifically resolvable one. As Richard Feynman (you science types should recognize that name) wrote in The Character of Physical Law (1965), “One of the amazing characteristics of nature is the variety of interpretational schemes which is possible.”
I am also familiar with the fascinating experiments done by Dr. Libet—unfortunately, the observable timing of what we consider the “impulse to perform” still does not eliminate the possibility of mental events being capable of bringing about behavior. Scientifically speaking, it does not even directly address the matter.
The simple fact is we have minds, we are conscious, and we do reflect upon our own private experiences. These are the most common phenomena in human experience. Should I apologize because an argument is not refuted simply by telling me that I am wrong? Yet that is the only assertion upon which monist-materialism can be “based,” at least right now and for the foreseeable future.
Cecil, a great deal of recent philosophy and psychology is essentially a Ryle/Smart echo chamber. Books derived from this circular pseudo-scientific argument include Blackmore’s Meme Machine (…“We” watch with detachment while our robot selves rattle through the preordained humdrum of experience?.. Who the heck is “we”?) and Dennett’s Explaining Consciousness. Yes, I read it, and, like you, I had trouble getting through it—until I realized why: the book uses its assumptions in order to “prove” its conclusion (materialism is, therefore materialism is). Go ahead—take another look at your copy and you’ll see what I mean. It’s that way because it has to be that way—no one has yet “explained” consciousness scientifically. If someone did, that would be a bestseller now, wouldn’t it?
A neuron will never possess a noun. Sorry. A little more from Professor Robinson:
“It is not uncommon for the scientifically committed psychologist to express disbelief when scholars entertaining other perspectives insist that a scientific account of human action and human experience is not any nearer than it was in pre-Socratic times. There is, mixed with this disbelief, a conviction often stated that those who do not subscribe to the scientific accounts are clutching at the straws of metaphysical dualism and religious mysticism. It seems that this reaction to the scholar’s reservation is prompted by the fear that such a reservation must be based on a denial of the validity of science itself. To believe, for example, that studies of the behavior of nonhuman organisms is not likely to illuminate the factors responsible for human conduct is, we are to understand, a rejection of Darwinian theory. To question whether neurophysiological findings bear directly on the question of psychic causation is to question determinism. There is a danger in this perspective, and the danger is greater to science than it is to those perspectives that are assumed to be hostile to the scientific agenda. The danger is that of stagnation, for, if there is a sure road to intellectual atrophy, it is paved with the complacent certainty that one’s critics are deluded.”
As stated by University of Maryland physicist Robert Park in his review of John Horgan’s The End of Science, “Science has manned the battlements against postmodern heresy, only to discover postmodernism inside the wall.”
The “bottom line,” Cecil, is that, yes, you are entitled to believe, in spite of postmodern scientism and all other forms of fundamentalism. I select root beer over Coke, and my memes go pound sand. You nailed it in the final paragraph of your article: “We are entitled to believe that we are…self-aware creatures…who select among alternatives and who can reasonably be held to account for the consequences.” Exactly. But we should accept that this statement is not exactly a scientific (objectively testable) proposition. Like you said, sometimes, we just know.
Thank you again for your wonderful columns and books.
Respectfully yours,
Clark Coogan
P.S. Anyone interested in updates on my book project, just drop an e-mail to info@plainthinking.org. I don’t share addresses with anyone. Best Regards,
)