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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 227
other basic expression of value, exists in every particle of the universe and
has the power to act, without awareness the action would be random and
mechanical. The Life Force, as Shaw always insisted, needs a brain.
A true science of the mind will come not by explaining away everything
mental but by seeking to learn how the phenomena we call physical relate
to the world of the mental. At present scientists are not even asking those
questions. Instead of denying the existence of the mind, of subjective experience,
as they do now, neurologists could search for the ways in which the
two appear to coincide. How do the chemical and electrical properties of the
brain reflect differences in subjective state? Is the observable state of the
brain different when one sees the color red than when green is perceived?
Are the nervous responses to visual stimuli different from those produced
by sound (other than the part of the brain affected). Recent noninvasive
procedures may make it possible to investigate such questions, but the
questions must first be recognized as legitimate: the present materialist
orthodoxy precludes them. It is possible that answers are inaccessible to us,
but we will never know that unless we do all we can to seek them. But how
much more would we understand our world and ourselves if we could discover
a one-to-one correspondence between observable “physical” processes
and mental states! If we made advances in that direction, we would
be able to begin asking the next question: how does teleological causation
work? Teleological causation, as has been noted, requires value (desire),
awareness, and agency. If we could locate the “physical” correlatives of
value and awareness, we would be in a position to learn about the nature of
that agency: what Shaw called Will. It would then be possible to formulate
respectable scientific hypotheses because teleological causation would produce
outcomes distinctly different from purely mechanical causes. That is,
predictions could be made that could be tested. We could actually begin to
develop a true science of the mind. Many scientists now, fearful that mind
is inaccessible to science yet deeply desirous of bringing all that exists under
the sway of science, sweep the problem away by denying the reality of
the mental.
Idealism, the theory that only mind exists, is just one of two classic
answers to materialism. The other is pan-psychism, the belief that mind is
in some fashion inherent in everything material. The vagueness of that
definition will suggest to thoughtful readers why the idea has found relatively
little favor. It seems initially an attractive alternative to materialism,
idealism, and Cartesian dualism. Materialism, considered logically, reduces
us all to unconscious automata; idealism provides no satisfactory explana-