"The Troubled Spirit”
“You're probing into areas of the mind we know very little about. Of course, that's what makes it so fascinating.”
~Helena Russell to Dan Mateo
Attempting through experimentation to find a means of communicating with plants, Dan Mateo unwittingly unleashes a dark spectre, a disfigured form that makes furtive appearances accompanied by a cold wind.
Mateo’s boss and girlfriend are successively found dead, and Mateo believes that his experiment is what unleashed the menace, whatever its nature. Victor Bergman persuades Koenig that they should recreate Mateo’s experiment, to find some way of combating the entity.
The experiment proceeds, and the spectre appears – and turns out to be a version of Mateo himself, a future version that has died, harboring all his thoughts, emotions, fears, and his need for absolution. When Mateo dies shortly thereafter, his body disfigured with burns, the spectre is reabsorbed into him.
Lots going on here. In “The Troubled Spirit”, Alpha is “haunted” by what seems to be a ghost of some kind. We see it in the following forms:
A shadowy human figure in the background;
A physical presence that can put its hands around someone’s neck;
A mere shadow on the wall of a travel tube car;
A clearly human figure that fades into existence, touches someone on the shoulder, then fades away.
That’s the physical manifestation, convoluted enough to cause us to ask if it is a physical manifestation, or something else. Is the show buying into the actual existence of ghosts? That question pops up in the episode itself, between Carter, Morrow and Bergman, the latter declaring, “Supernatural? No. Paranormal? Yes.”
Bergman argues that we normally only use 18% of our brain power, and that Mateo seems to have tapped, through his experiment, the other 82%. And that must account for whatever weirdness is going on.
The weirdness itself, we might conclude is “psychic” in that it is happening in everyone’s minds, rather than physically. In support of this idea, when two characters turn up dead after having encountered this spirit in a very bad mood, Dr. Russell declares that they weren’t killed through physical force, but because all their fear circuits blew in their brains. A mental phenomenon. Put all of this together, and the conclusion that the paranormal events everyone is experiencing are in everyone’s minds, put there somehow by Mateo’s supercharged subconscious, resolves the inconsistencies observed in the entity itself. (It doesn’t resolve the cold waves that ripple through Alpha, but hey, no theory is perfect...)
What about the behavioral side?
Ghosts and spirits, in human lore, generally act just like the people they emulate in appearance. In the apparition seen after Mateo’s experiment, we observe rage, a hunger for vengeance – all very human. Under its behaviors, there is necessarily perception and intentionality. Again, very human.
The point being: this thing has a mind. And given its possible natures – a copy of another human? An immaterial entity? A manifestation of psychic energy? Can those things have minds? It opens the door to thinking about the nature of mind.
Theories of Mind
What exactly is a mind?
We’ve already reviewed the answer of science above; the mind is the product of the physical brain – brains cause minds. That is where we are today, and the field of philosophy – though still inclined to quibble over some of the wording – is in essentially the same place.
But it wasn’t always so, and the alternatives philosophy has generated in the past are interesting and worthy of some scrutiny. They are variations on Cartesian Dualism (see also Platonic Dualism, if you’re interested) and they include:22
Epiphenominalism. This is a physically-based dualism, where the mind and body are separate, distinct entities, but the body acts upon the mind to create thought and feeling – the mind, being immaterial, cannot in turn act upon the body.
Interactionism. This is a dualism in which the mind and body are separate and distinct, but each acts upon the other, fusing them into a single entity.
Double aspect theory. Those philosophers who don’t see how either the mind or body could act upon the other, but acknowledge that they clearly do interact, propose that they are two different versions of the same thing (without fully clarifying what that might be.)
Parallelism. Going farther out, some philosophers don’t believe that the mind and body can act upon each other, but also won’t grant that they are variations on a theme, and so propose that we account for the shared history of an individual’s mind and body by proposing they are not the same thing, but that there is a causal connection between them (again, without fully clarifying what that might be).
Pre-established harmony. In an attempt to advance parallelism, some philosophers have declared that the causal connection between mind and body is God. Easy peasy!
Occasionalism. This idea is another step into pre-established harmony parallelism, in which God’s active role in the causality of an individual is to be the cause of that individual’s mental life, moment by moment, and to actively coordinate its correspondence to their physical body.
Idealism. This is materialism’s opposite extreme, and as such isn’t really a variation of dualism; it’s the idea that the physical universe doesn’t even really exist at all, but that it is purely a creation of mind. That mind may or may not be God, and to a philosophical idealist, it (ironically) doesn’t really matter.
Whew!
Okay, not all of those are interesting; some of them are downright silly. But this gives us a sense of how powerful the human impulse is to imagine oneself as somehow transcending the other creatures and objects in nature. As philosopher Richard Taylor put it,
“Dualism of mind and body has been, and always is, firmly received by millions of unthinking people partly because it is congenial to the religious framework in which their everyday metaphysical opinions are formed” he wrote, “and partly, no doubt, because everyone wishes to think of himself as something more than just one more item of matter in the world.”
But dualism, science increasingly tells us, is wishful thinking. The human mind is firmly embedded in the human brain.
The material mind
Where can we go from there?
If it was as simple as brains cause minds, we’d pretty much be done. But, of course, it’s not that simple.
The materialism account of mind relies purely on matter and its behavior, crediting the existence of consciousness and mental states exclusively to the behavior of matter and the underlying laws of physics. The Nobel-winning Francis Crick describes this as “the Astonishing Hypothesis” - the idea that all the complexities of human consciousness and all the richness of human experience are accounted for by the firing of neurons in our skulls.
The materialism account carries with it several significant implications.
Disembodied minds – souls, ghosts, etc. - don’t exist, not in Heaven or Hell or any similar place;
There is no afterlife;
There is no way to leave the body, and any practices or processes that purport to do so are ineffective and pointless;
Reincarnation, body-switching, and other phenomena are nothing more than legend or wishful thinking.
This, despite Star Trek’s “Turnabout Intruder” and migratory Vulcan katra, as well as Star Wars Force ghosts.
But we digress. There is nuance to materialistic accounts, all the same. They must account for consciousness – how can matter become ‘self-aware’? - and intentionality, or ‘aboutness’: the property of something being about something else.
Here are some of the attempts:
Eliminative materialism. This approach deals with accounting for mental states and intentionality by declaring that they don’t really exist; they are simply illusions.
Reductive materialism. In this account, all physical processes that produce mental states, consciousness, intentionality are the product of lower-level sub-processes, and can be understood through analyses of their relationship to behavior.
Soft materialism. This account accepts that mental states and intentionality may not be reducible in practice, but that this ultimately doesn’t matter; it only implies that there is some relationship between mind and matter that is somehow more intricate than simple causal dependence.
Each of these has its problems.
Eliminative materialism goes very much against the scientific grain; it’s very much a cop-out to discount something we all regularly experience as an illusion, simply because we don’t yet fully agree on an account of it.
Reductive materialism seems to minimize the contribution of consciousness to our behavior; it implies we aren’t yet fully describing consciousness, nor the experience of it, leaving reductive accounts to ambiguous to be of lasting value.
Soft materialism seems like just another term for interactionism.
Where, then, can we turn, to complete a proper accounting of the nature of mind?
Mind-Brain Identity Theory
The remaining account – Mind-Brain Identity Theory – is ridiculously simple, but requires that we let go of a long-held preconception, one that goes back dozens of centuries and continues to propagate all around us, in science, philosophy, and religion – the assumption that the mind and brain are two different things.
Brains cause minds, we said above, but to completely clean up this landscape, we need to acknowledge that this phrasing of the reality of mind is just a linguistic accommodation of those ancient preconceptions.
Mind-Brain Identity Theory says, very simply, that the states and processes of the mind are the states and processes of the brain. Thinking of mind and brain as two different things preserves, in essence, the complications and cul de sacs of dualism, using different words.
Put another way: mental states, consciousness and intentionality are not correlated with brain processes; they are brain processes. It can be as simple as brain is what the mind is, and mind is what the brain does.
Or, to clarify it a bit more – mind/brain might be better understood as we understood calculator/circuit in the years before digital calculators were programmable: circuit is what the calculator is, and calculate is what the circuit does.23
This clearly moves us forward both scientifically and philosophically, clearing away much cognitive and linguistic debris while tossing overboard long-clutched baggage that has weighed us down. But it certainly won’t be any more fun for lovers of science fiction than accepting the constraints on machine evolution.
On the other hand, none of us will actually ever sail into the void in a crater on the moon, either...
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