The Really Hard Problem

"This book is by Owen Flanagan who is one of the best people currently working in the philosophy of mind . He’s starting off with an idea from the philosophy of mind called the hard problem. The hard problem is the problem of figuring out how a physical system like the brain can have consciousness . And it certainly is a difficult problem. It’s one on which lots of progress is being made right now, though it’s still not at all solved. Flanagan has written a bunch of books that are very well informed by current work in psychology and neuroscience, and he’s also written about the hard problem. But in this book he is dealing with what he calls ‘the really hard problem’, which is the problem of the meaning of life. If, as he thinks, the human being is not anything that’s supernatural, if there’s no such thing as a soul, there’s no such thing as immortality, if, as Damasio assumed, we’re just a biological system, how is it possible that we could have meaningful lives? That’s what he takes to be the really hard problem. And many people have reacted the same way. Lots of people have thought that if there isn’t a God, and if there isn’t religious truth, then life is inherently meaningless. How, if you take a more secular, naturalistic, scientific approach, can you find meaning in life? And he’s got some very interesting things to say about that. It’s the question I try to tackle in my book. But his approach… He doesn’t actually have a solution, but it’s a very good book. There’s a lot of discussion of Buddhism in it. He’s very interested in Buddhism , not as a religion, but as a way of life. He takes a lot of practical ideas from the Dalai Lama – such as having positive emotions and avoiding conflicts as recipes for finding meaning in your life. He pursues various avenues for thinking about how there can be meaningful lives in a physical world. But he doesn’t have a crisp answer. Nevertheless, it’s an extremely intelligent exploration of the question. What he does in a fair amount of detail is to consider the relation between Buddhism and the philosophical questions. He proposes to do what he calls naturalising spirituality. Naturalising means to give a scientific account of something. So he wants to take the notion of spirituality away from its traditional religious notion of involving souls and immortality and Gods and angels and things like that, and talk about ways in which people can find meaning in their lives through social practices and through rituals, including the kinds of rituals that are practised in Buddhism. I’m not sure that’s very successful. Although the Dalai Lama expresses a lot of interest in modern science, if you read his works, he’s got a traditional view of reality as something that’s based on the mind, rather than the scientific view that I know Flanagan shares with me, that the mind is something that results from biological and physical processes. Nevertheless, Flanagan does an interesting job of exploring the possibilities of coming up with a naturalistic notion of spirituality. Buddhism is a flexible school of thought, so you could argue about what the main point is. But, yes, for anything that is spiritual in the traditional sense, for example if you believe in ideas about reincarnation, obviously the soul is not something material, because it has to be able to survive into the next life. When people asked me about spirituality I used to say: ‘Oh I don’t believe in spirits.’ My preferred way to deal with the question of spirituality is simply to eliminate it. But I think he does a very interesting job of trying to retain a notion of spirituality that fits with science. The aspects of spirituality that he’s really interested in, which are the aspects of the meaning of life that interest me, are questions of ethics and values. I think both of those things, and the package that goes with them, except for the metaphysical part, can survive from a scientific, naturalistic perspective. Sure. There are certainly lots of things from those religious traditions that point to things that are valuable in human life, regardless of whether you believe there’s a God and immortality."