Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think the ruler suffices. No, you can’t say the ruler suffices. Look, I want to go back to your prior question, which, I think, is a fundamentally difficult question. We do not know what constitutes the transition from non-conscious life to conscious life. Now, we also don’t know exactly what constitutes the transition from non-life to life. We have some difficulties figuring that out as well. We were having a conversation about difficulties in the Christian interpretation of the human person. I think the interaction between what we know at the moment or understand at the moment about evolution in human origins and the traditional Christian account of the fall, that there are some real points of tension in there that Christianity has not figured out a perfectly satisfying resolution of. That would be a different kind of book than this one. There is an interesting argument there, but it’s an interesting argument precisely because it takes place in a larger context, where we have good reasons to take the supernaturalism of the human mind very, very seriously. It’s a mystery not just because the Christians don’t have a full account of it, because the materialists don’t have an account of it at all, because there is no satisfying materialist account at the moment of what consciousness is, why we experience it the way we do, and so on. Nor is there a satisfying account — now, I’m going to circle us back to the measurement problem — of why our consciousness is capable of all this successful measurement at all. The difficulty for the materialist isn’t just that you have this fine-tuned universe that, in its basic structure, seems to have been jerry-rigged for our emergence. It’s not just that problem, which the materialist tries to solve by positing an infinity of invisible worlds that are supposed to be more compelling than fairyland. Not sure why. The further problem — it goes down to us, but then it goes back up because human consciousness has turned out to be really good at not just figuring out how to survive on the African savannah, but figuring out how to plumb the deepest secrets of the physical laws of the universe. We’ve figured out something about quantum mechanics, something about this deep structure of the universe that is very peculiar in a narrative where it’s trilobite brains giving way to monkey brains. Put it this way: If it seems incredibly unlikely that the universe should be fine-tuned in a way that allows for the development of conscious life, it seems to me even more unlikely that that conscious life would then work its way back up to understand the secrets of the universe in full. I think I’m closer to the Colin McGinn view that we’re just not smart enough to understand consciousness. It’s a puzzle. It should make us more agnostic about many things, but it’s not an excuse to go multiply all these other entities.…

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