Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

560 J HOW THE MIND WORKSsolution in most times and places is mysticism and religion. Consciousnessis a divine spark in each of us. The self is the soul, an immaterialghost that floats above physical events. Souls just exist, or they were createdby God. God granted each soul a moral worth and the power ofchoice. He has stipulated what is good, and inscribes every soul's goodand evil acts in the book of life and rewards or punishes it after it leavesthe body. Knowledge is granted by God to the prophet or the seer, orguaranteed to all of us by God's honesty and omniscience. The solutionis explained in the rejoinder to the limerick (p. 316) about why the treecontinues to be when there's no one about in the quad:Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd:J am always about in the quad.And that's why the treewill continue to be,Since observed by Yours Faithfully, God.The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken whenhe wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms ofthe not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity,religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pileequally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God amind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How doeshe infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according tophysical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter?And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wiseand merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddishexpression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.Modern philosophers have tried three other solutions. One is to saythat the mysterious entities are an irreducible part of the universe and toleave it at that. The universe, we would conclude, contains space, time,gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, matter, energy, and consciousness(or will, or selves, or ethics, or meaning, or all of them). The answerto our curiosity about why the universe has consciousness is, "Get over it,it just does." We feel cheated because no insight has been offered, andbecause we know that the details of consciousness, will, and knowledgeare minutely related to the physiology of the brain. The irreducibility theoryleaves that a coincidence.A second approach is to deny that there is a problem. We have been