It is ironic that through the reflective processes involved in science and philosophy, arguments are developed that deny any unity to the self that created the arguments. As Mary Midgley points out in her book Are You an Illusion? (2014), why should we accept the idea that we are an illusion when the very idea is being put forward by a supposedly deconstructed self whose unity is itself an illusion? It would seem that much modern thought has tied itself in knots.
While the substance dualism of Descartes looks like a failure, Descartes’ affirmation of ‘I think therefore I am’ in his Discourse on Method (1637) recognises that if we do not exist it is absurd to suggest that we can be deceived about existing. So, we have to ask whether the idea of the self as an illusion really makes any sense. As Midgley rather acerbically observes, we have let the Pythagorean exaltation of mathematics trump concepts like mind and free will that seem unable to pay it homage by opening themselves fully to mathematical causal modelling. As the philosopher John Searle remarks in his book Mind (2005, p. 34), ‘There is a sense in which materialism is the religion of our time, at least among most of the professional experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and other disciplines that study the mind.’ We are left with a reductive understanding of science, that eats all before it, which is often referred to as ‘scientism’. Yet without mind what reality do mathematics and physics have? Can consciousness and mind be so easily dismissed?
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