Chapter 1
Introduction
If you are in molecular biology, chemistry, or physics, then the name Francis Crick should ring a bell. Most famous for his co-discovery of DNA with Jim Watson, which saw them both winning the Nobel Prize, Francis Crick was a true polymath, who crossed over from physics to molecular biology. After helping in the discovery of DNA, he set out to investigate the nature of consciousness, which even for him, was an ambitious goal. In his book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis", he examines consciousness i.e. the soul, using a scientific approach. His a priori is that a comprehensive understanding of how the brain works should be sufficient to explain the nature of consciousness.
What you will learn: According to Francis Crick, if the problem of consciousness is to be solved, efforts should be directed into understanding the neurons that make up the brain, and how they interact with each other. A lot of people do not seem to share this view. Crick sets out to empathize why that might be, why they might be wrong and why it is reasonable to adopt a scientific approach in the study of consciousness.
What is The Astonishing Hypothesis? Put simply, The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “you are nothing but a pack of neurons”. Your thoughts, behaviors, and everything else that makes you human, can be understood and explained at the level of the brain. Most people alive today find this such a counterintuitive idea that it truly can—according to Crick—be called astonishing. The moniker partly demonstrates his optimism on the subject, for it is not inconceivable that some people would find this idea annoying rather than astonishing.
Fortunately, most religions—even in their disparate beliefs about life after death—largely overlap on the idea that humans have souls. This is partly, if not mainly, the reason that the Astonishing Hypothesis has been met with a lot of resistance. Casting doubt on the existence of the soul is radioactive to most religious people, as this challenges a fundamental aspect of their belief system and identity. “If there is no soul then what is the point of existence?”, is one of the first questions to enter the vacant room in the mind previously occupied by the concept of a soul, prior to its defenestration. Such thoughts are psychologically destabilising and tend to be avoided, sometimes for good reason.
Crick lists three reasons that make The Astonishing Hypothesis so surprising to people, and why it is usually met with resistance:
Many people have a problem with taking the reductionist approach when tackling questions of the soul. For this reason, many people tend to think that reducing consciousness to the study of cells and molecules is a bad and insufficient approach that will not succeed in getting us closer to understanding its essence, let alone how it arises. Crick counters this argument by acknowledging how reductionism is largely responsible for the major advances in all of science. He asserts that this is the best theoretical approach so far, and until we encounter a better one, this one will have to do. Crick’s optimism is evident in this chapter, as he dismisses each objection with counterexamples that have so far been fruitful in all areas of scientific research: physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. Without reductionism, most of modern medicine would not exist, advances in technology would be lagging, the food industry would shrink etc. With all these tangibles that are a direct product of the reductionist approach, what other approach could yield comparable results?
The nature of consciousness - since we have difficulty describing lived experience with words—the problem of qualia i.e. explaining the painfulness of pain, the redness of red—it presents a problem when we assume we can explain consciousness via scientific means or language. However, Crick thinks this problem can be ameliorated by describing the neural correlates of conscious experiences. If these are constant between individuals, then they are sufficient. The neural correlate of red, for example, would not necessarily convey the subjective experience of red, but it would let us know what interactions occurring at the cell level elicit the subjective experience. If the same neural correlate is employed when another subject has the same experience, then we can rely on this neural correlate to describe what happens in the brain when subjects have that experience, without necessarily understanding the subjective experience itself.
We feel like we have Free Will - if we study the neural correlates of consciousness, we run the risk of asserting that our decisions are by-products of neurons interacting with each other. This robs us of agency, making us feel that we are nothing but glorified puppets dancing to the tune of the laws of physics. That is very disturbing to most humans. Normal humans, if I might add. Crick hints at the possibility of our Will not being Free but only appearing to be free. He does not go too much into Free Will, for now, as he refers to it in a later chapter.
Blogger's Thoughts: Crick’s optimism is something to be admired. The hard problem of consciousness i.e., why any physical state is conscious rather than unconscious, is called that for a good reason; it is hard to investigate. In this first chapter Crick lays out his hypothesis and presents a list of three objections to it. He presents counterarguments against each and clarifies his goal; to find the neural correlates of conscious experience. That is, to correlate behavior/experience with neuronal activity in the brain. In chapter 2 he takes us into the general nature of consciousness.
I think this will not convince people who are outside the field, living their normal everyday lives. However, with time, it might be possible to do so, given that the global atheist and agnostic population is continuously rising. Still, even he admits that on a normal day, scientists see themselves as being agents of their decisions, and practically live their everyday lives as agents with souls. This, to me, makes this whole endeavour difficult to sell to the public. It is extremely difficult to have this conversation with anyone, even scientists, without coming off as a naive new world skeptic who needs the word of God in his life. What do I think? Do I think we have souls? Fortunately, you will have to keep reading…….