Are you an Illusion by Mary Midgley

Are you an Illusion by Mary Midgley

Are You an Illusion? How does that question make you feel? Mary Midgley poses the question both whimsically and seriously. Given that a vast corpus of contemporary neuroscience and psychology today questions the existence of “free-will”, and asserts that consciousness is no more than a by-product of neurons firing off in the brain or other unspecified bio-chemical processes, the conclusion of such studies is that the sense of a self is an illusion. Mary Midgley not only argues that the conclusion is nonsensical but that the scientists themselves probably don’t believe it either. At least with regard to themselves.

Mary Midgley is no anti-science nut. A respected philosopher who has produced a large corpus of books on moral philosophy and the philosophy of science, she is grounded solidly in Darwinian Evolution. She deserves a serious hearing, even if her views challenge prevailing scientific views.

How did we come to accept as scientific facts concepts that in her view clearly don’t make sense: that we don’t have free will, that our self doesn’t exist, that animals have no emotions, that nature and evolution have no purpose. She concedes that many scientific findings are “counter-intuitive”. Example: the Earth moves at 30km/second through space but we are not aware of it. However, the findings of science have to make sense. Our subjective experience of a self, of free-will and of consciousness cannot be swept under the carpet because our materialistic prejudice makes them inconvenient. The conflict, she perceives, is between empirical science and scientism about which she says,

"Scientism exalts the idea of science on its own, causing people to become fixated on the assumptions that seemed scientific to them during their formative years. This prevents them from seeing contrary facts however glaring they may be…"

How did “scientism’s assumptions come to be accepted as dogma? Mary Midgley offers answers that while disturbing do need to be looked at seriously. The banishing of “the self”, at the start of the 20th century was the foundation of the behaviouristic psychology. Behaviour was seen as measurable, a scientific quantity, while the psyche was an unscientific construct. It might feel perfectly real but it was still viewed as an illusion. She suggests that this choice was made because scientists were uncomfortable with the psyche, in particular with the unconscious; a fundamentally non-rational entity whose exploration was seen as too threatening. What you found there could up-end your rational world view. Anyone who has undergone psychoanalysis will tell you that it is not for the fainthearted. Coming face to face with your demons takes a lot of guts.

Scientism also allows us to exploit the Earth’s resources and to exploit animals without any regard to how those animals feel. Its philosophy makes it a perfect companion for free-market capitalism. The notion that nature is there to be subdued, and that man (the masculine gender) is made to exploit nature (generally regarded as feminine) is a dogma of our times. It has allowed us to build our technological world, to pillage the natural world and drive species to extinction without any pangs of conscience. It’s no coincidence that the rise of “The Selfish Gene” evolutionary theory ran parallel with rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both champions of Ayn Rand’s Virtue of Selfishness.

At the age of 94 Mary Midgley has put forward a strong case for reviewing our materialistic assumptions about nature. Would that we all have the mental clarity and verve to write such a book when we’re in our nineties.