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

The Meaning of Life 561misled by fuzzy thinking or by beguiling but empty idioms of language,such as the pronoun J. Statements about consciousness, will, self, andethics cannot be verified by mathematical proof or empirical test, so theyare meaningless. But this answer leaves us incredulous, not enlightened.As Descartes observed, our own consciousness is the most indubitablething there is. It is a datum to be explained; it cannot be defined out ofexistence by regulations about what we are allowed to call meaningful (tosay nothing of ethical statements, such as that slavery and the Holocaustwere wrong).A third approach is to domesticate the problem by collapsing it withone we can solve. Consciousness is activity in layer 4 of the cortex, or thecontents of short-term memory. Free will is in the anterior cingulate sulcusor the executive subroutine. Morality is kin selection and reciprocalaltruism. Each suggestion of this kind, to the extent that it is correct,does solve one problem, but it just as surely leaves unsolved the mainproblem. How does activity in layer 4 of the cortex cause my private,pungent, tangy sensation of redness? I can imagine a creature whoselayer 4 is active but who does not have the sensation of red or the sensationof anything; no law of biology rules the creature out. No account ofthe causal effects of the cingulate sulcus can explain how humanchoices are are not caused at all, hence something we can be heldresponsible for. Theories of the evolution of the moral sense can explainwhy we condemn evil acts against ourselves and our kith and kin, butcannot explain the conviction, as unshakable as our grasp of geometry,that some acts are inherently wrong even if their net effects are neutralor beneficial to our overall well-being.I am partial to a different solution, defended by McGinn and basedon speculations by Noam Chomsky, the biologist Gunther Stent, andbefore them David Hume. Maybe philosophical problems are hard notbecause they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science,but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipmentto solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds areorgans, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selectionto solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors,not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capableof asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory.We cannot see in ultraviolet light. We cannot mentally rotate an object inthe fourth dimension. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums likefree will and sentience.