Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

218 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
from one side of the body to the opposite side of the brain, our consciousness
may be sitting backward in our heads just like the pilot in the imaginary
vehicle.
One objection to this idea is that it requires the existence of a homunculus,
which in turn leads to an infinite regress. If there is an image in the
brain, the argument goes, there must by a conscious entity there to observe
it: the homunculus (“little man”). But the consciousness of that
“little man” must now be explained. He (whatever “he” is) must be endowed
with another “little man.” And so on, infinitely. The answer to that
is that there is no need for a homunculus: all of our consciousness—our
sensory perceptions, both of our bodies and our surroundings, together
with our thoughts, emotions, ideas, and memories present to awareness—
constitutes a unified whole. Our sense of self, our awareness of our bodies,
our perceptions of the world, are all part of one thing. There is no need for
a humunculus and thus no regress. That is where the analogy to the pilot
of the strange vehicle breaks down. The television screens surrounding the
pilot are not actually like the images that are part of the brain’s awareness.
The individual dots of glowing chemicals are not “aware” of each other;
they are not part of a “consciousness”—except, that is, in the mind of the
pilot. At least we have no reason presently to imagine that they are. What
we think of as an observer and the observed is actually all part of one thing:
a unitary awareness. And the only place where such awareness exists, to
the best of our present scientific knowledge, is brains.
A more serious charge for most people is that this leads to solipsism: the
doctrine that I alone exist. As A. J. Ayer put it: “The great difficulty with
any theory of this kind is to see how we can be justified in inferring that
any such external objects exist at all” (Bertrand Russell 84). Russell deals
with this problem extensively in his Human Knowledge. He points out
first that, however logical solipsism may seem to some people (it seems
absurdly paradoxical to others), it is psychologically impossible to believe.
Russell tells of receiving a letter from an eminent logician who said that
“she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others” (Human
Knowledge 180). One can simply move from its psychological impossibility
to a pragmatic position, maintaining that the external world exists in
roughly the way our perception says it does because that is the only theory
that seems to work. Even the person who swears he firmly believes that
Mack trucks exist only as images in his own mind still looks both ways
before crossing the street. Essentially, though, we believe in the reality of
the world outside our skins in the same way that we believe in any scien-