Intelligibility

 

 

The concept of intelligibility is often used by philosophers but not often analyzed. The OED gives this simple definition of “intelligible”: “able to be understood”, but it follows that up with a definition proper to philosophy: “able to be understood only by the intellect”. The intellect is the faculty that makes things intelligible; without it nothing would be. Clearly, intelligibility is a relational concept: something (we are not told what) is intelligible only if it is understood (possibly potentially) by someone, or by someone’s intellect. Logically, the concept is like being perceivable or knowable: a non-mental entity is said to be perceivable or knowable or intelligible in relation to a mind equipped with certain cognitive powers. We might paraphrase the dictionary definition by saying that something is intelligible if and only if it is graspable by the intellect (not by the senses or the faculty of knowing): it is intellectual apprehension. But what is that exactly? One tradition has it that intellectual apprehension belongs to the domain of the a priori—mathematics, logic, the forms, maybe philosophy itself. But it would be wrong to limit the concept to these areas, since the empirical world can be intelligible too, i.e. understood by the intellect. This is a special kind of cognition, distinct from perception and knowledge—superior, deeper, more penetrating. In it the world is made peculiarly transparent to the mind, not in a blur or superficially or inadequately. It is, we might say, an elevated type of insight, not to be identified with simply knowing brute facts.

What would count as paradigm instances of the intelligible? Mathematics is the standard example, both pure and applied. Numbers and geometric figures are inherently intelligible, but so is their application to the world: when we describe the world mathematically we make it intelligible, because we make it graspable by the intellect. Mathematical laws are the central examples. This doesn’t mean that everything in physics is intelligible, but the common assumption is that physics is our best hope of rendering the world intelligible–and mathematics is central to physics. However, there is another area of intelligibility that should be mentioned—belief-desire psychology. We make actions intelligible by relating them to beliefs and desires: actions are intelligible in the light of the beliefs and desires that lead to them. We render the action rational by describing it in this way, and hence we understand it; there is nothing brute or opaque about it. Just as with mathematics, there is a whiff of the a priori: the idea of rationality as a normative domain is invoked–hence the practical syllogism.[1] In both cases an ideal structure is brought to bear on concrete reality, thereby rendering it intelligible. This is not something we detect with our senses; we apply it, by means of the intellect, to the things we perceive. We render the world intelligible rather than see it to be so.[2]

I am inclined to suppose that these are the only cases of intelligibility in the natural world. Mere perceptual knowledge is never by itself intelligible knowledge; nor is causal knowledge, since it merely tells us what causes what, not what abstract principles underlie the causal connections. Physics might tell us that gravity causes motion, but without a mathematical law this does not render nature intelligible. Animals can have perceptual and causal knowledge, but they don’t have intelligible knowledge of the kind delivered by mathematical physics. Cartesian mechanism was supposed to make the physical world intelligible and it was a quantitative account of matter and motion. The case of biology is interesting: it is not generally thought of as having an a priori component, but it is supposed to provide understanding of the biological world. Does Darwin’s theory make evolution intelligible? It has a mathematical side because it uses the notion of frequency—advantageous traits lead to greater frequency in the population than disadvantageous ones. And we can quantify many aspects of animal behavior and genetic propagation. But there is also the teleological notion of function, which brings biology close to psychology: the heart beats as it does because that is its function (compare: a person beats a drum because he desires to). It is as if bodily organs desire to do what it is their function to do. Moreover, the standard way of understanding natural selection is analogous to intentional selection by agents—nature selects certain organisms to survive as selective breeders do. So biology falls under teleological conceptions and hence inherits the intelligibility that belongs to such conceptions (it is the same for theories that attribute evolution to God’s design). Thus biology is not a clear counterexample to the thesis that mathematics and teleology are the sole types of intelligibility. Merely knowing that clouds cause rain does not render the cloud-rain nexus intelligible: we must either treat it mathematically or conceive it teleologically to do that. In fact, the mathematical method works in this case because we can describe clouds as aggregates of water droplets subject to mathematically describable forces—rain thereby becomes intelligible.

Are these two modes of intelligibility unrelated? They certainly seem so at first glance: mathematics is one thing, psychology another. But perhaps there are some significant commonalities or areas of overlap. Psychology has its quantitative aspects, both scientific and common sense; in particular, we have the ideas of strength of desire and degree of belief. These are formalized in decision theory, a mathematical theory; so ordinary psychological understanding is capable of mathematical formulation in addition to being teleological. There is also a good deal of mathematics in the psychology of perception and elsewhere. We thus have a kind of double intelligibility in psychology, though the mathematical component is not as salient as it is in physics. In the case of mathematics itself, we can ask whether it has any teleological dimension, any built-in purpose. Formalists might say so, relying on the notion that mathematics reduces to symbolism and symbolism has a purpose; an instrumentalist view of mathematics would then be indicated. The same can be said for intuitionism: mathematics is a mental construction and that construction has a purpose—it is a kind of mental artifact that we employ in certain ways. Mathematics has a purpose and our application of it to the empirical world is the fulfillment of that purpose. Platonism, however, seems to banish purpose from mathematics, viewing it as a non-human objective realm of reality that pre-dates human existence. But that is not so clear on reflection: for there is an uncanny fit between mathematics as an abstract inquiry and the nature of empirical reality. For example, numbers are remarkably useful for counting objects, and geometry seems tailor made for describing objects in space. Is this just a happy accident? One could swear that mathematics was designed so as to be applied in these ways. Yet, according to Platonism, mathematical reality follows its own internal rules and was not constructed by human minds in any way. Its usefulness is therefore entirely contingent, extrinsic to its inner nature. Thus Platonism pulls away from the idea that mathematics has a purpose that is realized in its applications.

Here an ingenious theist may spot his chance: God designed mathematics to be both an objective abstract structure and imbued with purpose! His relation to mathematics is like our relation to our machines: both are objective constituents of reality but both are also purposive. Mathematics is objective-cum-functional.[3] So even Platonism may be understood (at a stretch) to incorporate a teleological dimension, though obscurely so; in which case, it shares something with psychology. The two are not then completely separate conceptually, though it would obviously be wrong to reduce one to the other. If so, we have a more unified or integrated theory of intelligibility than we might have hoped for: our two paradigm cases turn out to have more in common than appears at first sight. We might even speak of the “teleological-mathematical” as the cornerstone of intelligibility: this joint conceptual structure is the key to making nature intelligible to ourselves—transparent to the intellect. Where it applies we have intelligibility–otherwise we don’t.

And what about unintelligibility? What are the paradigm cases of that? Nonsense is surely at the top of the list—garbled speech, ungrammatical sentences, and rampant non sequitur. Here we can make no sense of what we hear: the words don’t add up to a semantically coherent whole. The purpose of words is to join with other words according to rules to produce meaningful sentences, but in nonsense speech this purpose breaks down. The combinatorial power of grammar, itself a type of computational structure, fails to apply to nonsensical products. There is an absence of both fulfilled purpose and mathematical order: it is like saying, “Zero plus addition over prime number equals infinity”—mathematical nonsense. In nonsense abstract form and purpose fail to apply. And the same is true of actions in general: a person’s actions are said to be unintelligible when we can discern no purpose in them, when even the abstract structure belief and desire fails to apply. We also find unintelligibility in science—quantum theory being the prime example. The idea of God playing dice with the universe is an expression of teleological chaos at the root of things—what could God’s purpose be in playing cosmic dice? We feel we cannot make sense of things if no agency could ever act as reality is thought to demand. In the case of the mysteries of mind we also use the notion of unintelligibility—for example, the nexus of consciousness and the brain is said to be unintelligible. Here again we have no coherent mathematics to apply and it is difficult to see how the brain can fulfill the purpose of producing consciousness. If we could see how an agent could build a brain so as to mathematically guarantee that consciousness would be the result, then we would regard the psychophysical nexus as intelligible; but we lack any such understanding, so we declare the connection unintelligible, at least for now. Thus the scaffolding of intelligibility applies in some areas but not in all, more or less dramatically. We can bring it to bear in some cases but not in every case. It is the idea (and ideal) of making intellectual sense—conformity to the paradigms of mathematics and commonsense psychology being the model.

We try to extend the paradigms into various corners of the world; sometimes we succeed, sometimes not. If we lacked these conceptual structures, nothing would be intelligible to us—we would at best have perceptual and causal knowledge (as we may presume is the state of animal cognition). The special type of comprehension that we call intellectual understanding is constituted by these two types of thinking—the mathematical and the teleological. They afford us a kind of transparency and order not available otherwise. And notice that they are not perceptually based: we don’t see the world as mathematically or teleologically ordered; we bring these notions tothe given, rather than deriving them from it. They are not licensed by strict empiricism. There is something projective at work here—imposed, self-generated. We make the world intelligible; we don’t find it to be so—except in the sense that we discover that things turn out that way. We apply our intellect to empirical reality and thereby render it intelligible; we don’t have impressions of intelligibility as we have impressions of color and shape. Intelligibility is not a sense datum.

Some strains of thought have it that the world is actually not intelligible at all, not as an objective trait of reality. Instead we force it into an appearance of intelligibility by imposing our own minds on it. Thus nothing is inherently teleological or mathematical: there is no purpose in psychology and the physical world is not a mathematical structure. Ideally, we should banish both ways of thinking from psychology and physics: no goals and no numbers. One need not agree with this point of view to appreciate its motivation: goals and numbers are not part of the given but a conceptual apparatus that we bring to bear in order to organize the facts. They are how weunderstand things not how things are in themselves (phenomenal not noumenal). Thus we cannot really make sense of the world, only our apprehension of it; in itself the world is without sense, not subject to intellectual comprehension at all. It is all, as the saying goes, just one damn thing after another, without rhyme or reason. To say that the world is intelligible can only mean that we can apply the apparatus of mathematics and teleology to it in order to organize our knowledge, but it is quite indifferent to these invocations. This is certainly an intelligible position to take on intelligibility, to be set beside the more realist position that goals and numbers are part of the fabric of objective reality. I won’t attempt to decide the issue, though I incline to the realist view.[4]

 

Colin McGinn

[1] The same is true of exercises of theoretical reasoning, i.e. acquiring beliefs by rational processes: here we use logic, a normative discipline, as a means of rendering belief formation intelligible. It is like applying mathematics to empirical reality.

[2] It is sometimes supposed that the touchstone of intelligibility is conformity to commonsense categories and principles, as with the idea that causation works only by physical contact. But conformity to common sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for intelligibility: much of physics is not part of common sense but quite intelligible (the same is true of pure mathematics), and some commonsense categories are not intelligible (at least presently)—such as consciousness and free action, arguably. Moreover, common sense has little to do with specifically intellectual knowledge as opposed to practical knowledge.

[3] We can compare mathematics with morality in this respect: moral realism can be combined with a functional view of morality. Its truths are not dependent on the human mind, but they fit human life remarkably well, as if designed to do so. Morality is not irrelevant to human life, even if its basis is extra-human. Indeed, we need to be able to combine both moral realism and moral relevance in order to give a satisfactory account of morality, as we also do in the case of mathematics.

[4] I have not discussed the extremely controversial question of whether philosophy itself renders the world intelligible. The question turns on the nature of philosophy and the form of its findings. Let me just remark that concepts have a purpose and that the notion of a calculus of concepts is not to be rejected out of hand. On the other hand, philosophy is the domain of mystery par excellence.

 

 

Philosophical Events

 

 

There are many types of event: physical, chemical, astronomical, biological, psychological, social, economic, historical, cultural. Each type of event has its own science or field of study, so that disciplines are identified via types of event. In general, these disciplines describe, predict, and explain the events that form their subject matter. Naturally, this involves dealing with certain types of object in which the events participate—material bodies, molecules, stars, organisms, psychological subjects, social groups, economic institutions, historical figures, cultures. So the sciences all deal with characteristic types of events and their associated objects, as their names suggest. They are event-specific. But philosophy is not like this: it has no class of events to call its own. There are no philosophical events that form the subject matter of philosophy; the very phrase “philosophical event” is an oxymoron. What would it even be for an event to be philosophical? Of course, there are such events as philosophical conferences or philosophical publishing events (“It was a philosophical event when Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953”), but these are not what philosophy is about. It might be said that philosophy is about other kinds of event and object, those dealt with in the sciences—physical, psychological, biological, etc. It is about what other subjects are about, while having no subject matter to call its own. While physics, say, is about physical things, philosophy is not about philosophical things—a class of distinctively philosophical entities. It may postulate philosophical entities—platonic forms, immaterial spirits, Fregean truth-values, Meinongian subsistent beings—but it isn’t about a certain class of events and objects recognized to exist in the world. There are no specifically philosophical events whose nature it strives to discover.

To the cynical this may suggest a lack of legitimate subject matter—philosophy is about nothing![1] The sciences are about things we can point to and identify, but philosophy has the null subject matter—it is just hot air devoid of any real anchor. Not only does it make no progress; it has no object of investigation on which progress could be made. Indeed, that is why it makes no progress—it isn’t about anything. But this dismissive attitude is far too quick: for philosophy isn’t alone in lacking a specific ontology of events on which to work. There are no logical events or moral events or mathematical events either. Does that mean that logic, morality, and mathematics have no legitimate subject matter? Not a specific type of event, to be sure, but does that exhaust the possibilities? Logic is about logical relations, morality is about right and wrong, mathematics is about mathematical truth: it is just that these subject matters are not event-like. There is no such thing as a number turning even or a moral value coming into existence or a logical entailment being derailed. What these subjects are about is a controversial question, but we are not required to suppose that they must be about events or about nothing—maybe they are about structures or properties or concepts or facts. Events happen, but not everything real is a happening. Philosophy belongs with these subjects in being about no distinctive class of events, but that doesn’t prevent it from being about structures or properties or concepts or facts. In fact, I believe that philosophy is about logical reality, and logic is not directed at events either.[2]

A more positive response to the recognition that philosophy is not about philosophical events is that this provides a neat way to define the nature of philosophy. It belongs to that class of intellectual inquiries that do not deal with events; it is not event-directed. Sometimes it is said that philosophy is about thought, or again about language, but on one interpretation this cannot be true: it cannot be about episodes of thought, or episodes of language, or else it would be about a particular class of events—as psychology is. It cannot be about mental acts or speech acts, since acts are events. It could be about the structure or content of thought or language, but not their occurrence—not concrete happenings. This conception is partly prompted by a desire to find something solidly empirical for philosophy to be about, but that is precisely the wrong move: it tries to assimilate philosophy to the empirical sciences that traffic in concrete events. That is the exact opposite of what philosophy does. If philosophy were about events of ordinary linguistic usage, then there would be philosophical events; but there are no philosophical events, so philosophy can’t be about that. There are events of ordinary linguistic usage, but they are the subject matter of other disciplines—linguistics, sociology—not philosophy as such. This is like supposing that morality is about events of moral (or immoral) action, but it is not about such events—rather, it is about the rules and principles that should guide action. Morality is not concerned with the description, prediction, and explanation of actions deemed moral or immoral—that is a matter for the psychology of behavior. Maybe speech acts could provide useful data for philosophy, but they are not its proper subject matter in the way that physical events are the proper subject matter of physics or speech behavior is the proper subject matter of psycholinguistics. The same is true for mathematical acts and the proper subject matter of mathematics—mathematics is not about events of doing mathematics. This is why there are no mathematical events, though there are events with a mathematical subject matter (e.g. actual calculations).

More to the point, it might be wondered how this fact about philosophy relates to the traditional idea that philosophy is an a priori science (like logic and mathematics—or even morality under some interpretations). It relates closely, but the ideas are not identical. The a priori claim is epistemological; the event claim is ontological or semantic. To say that philosophy is an a priori discipline is to say that the knowledge it produces is gained independently of experience (as the phrase goes); to say that philosophy is not about philosophical events is to make an ontological or semantic claim concerning the type of reality with which philosophy is occupied. Putting both claims together, we could say that philosophy is a priori precisely because it is not about events, that being the mark of the a posteriori. In any case, the claims are different, though related. Perhaps if there were philosophical events (whatever that might mean) philosophy would not be a priori, since those events would interact with our senses to produce philosophical knowledge; but the very oddity of that supposition shows how bizarre it is to think that there are philosophical events. In this sense it is quite wrong to hold that philosophy is “continuous with science”, as if philosophy has the same general shape as science but brings its own subject matter. We can say that biology is continuous with physics and chemistry, but in that sense philosophy is not continuous with those disciplines—as if it were concerned with a special more rarified type of event. The same can be said of logic, morality, and mathematics—none of these are “continuous with science” if that means they share science’s general preoccupation with events. Obviously, this is connected to the fact that the sciences seek causal explanations, events being the stuff of causation, but these non-event disciplines are not in that line of business. We canreasonably claim that philosophy is continuous with logic, morality, and mathematics, since all these disciplines are dedicated to aspects of reality that go beyond events; and indeed the affinity is generally recognized.

Being a priori and being concerned with something other than events are connected characteristics, but the latter is fundamental. When philosophy concerns itself with events of the ordinary type, as with the question of the relation between mental events and physical events, it is not concerned with some proprietary type of philosophical event; it is concerned with the nature of the relation between the two ordinary types of event—that is its proper subject matter. This is why the subject matter of philosophy includes all types of event but not a specific type of event peculiar to it.[3] According to one tradition, philosophy is concerned exclusively with concepts, understood abstractly, and this well captures the sense in which it is not the study of a certain type of event. The obvious fact that there are no philosophical events dramatizes the point that philosophy is not as other sciences. We could say that it is a “formal science”, but it is more illuminating to say that it has no event-like subject matter. As remarked, I think that its subject matter is logical reality, and that is far removed from the world of passing events and perishable happenings. Trying to reconfigure philosophy so that it resembles the event orientation of the sciences only leads to distortion, confusion, and cynicism.

 

C

[1] Like Seinfeld, a show about nothing, which was quite philosophical. At least astrology is about something!

[2] See my “Philosophy Defined” and Truth By Analysis. According to this conception of science and philosophy, the science of events could be completed without any philosophical problem being resolved: all events could be described, predicted, and explained without making a start on the problems of philosophy. This shows that science will never take the place of philosophy.

[3] It would be wrong to suppose that philosophy is identical with the union of all event-directed sciences, since that would simply make it a very inclusive empirical science. In order to study philosophy one would need to master all the sciences and no more.

 

 

 

The Concept of Miracle

 

 

Where do we get the concept of the miraculous? Why does that concept seem compelling to us? Why do we take to it so readily? It is not, to be sure, from the observation of miracles, in the style of empiricism—we don’t have perceptions of actual miracles. Nor, presumably, is it innate: what would be the use of a concept so inapplicable? Apparently it is a complex concept, so it could be constructed from simpler components, but why does it grip us—why this concept and not any of the indefinitely many other concepts that we might construct? Why does it seem so natural, so inevitable? It is a conceptual universal, but nothing about the world to which we apply it suggests its necessity. What explains its presence in the human conceptual scheme? Even those who reject its application most fervently are familiar with the concept itself.

Here is how the OED defines “miracle”: “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws, attributed to divine agency”. This is too narrow for our purposes, since not all supernatural events are thought to be welcome, nor assigned to divine agency. Some are unwelcome and assigned to malign forces—the Devil is deemed capable of devilish “miracles”, i.e. extraordinary events not explicable by natural or scientific law. The broader concept we are interested in connotes the uncanny, the inexplicable, the exempt from natural law—the weird, the spooky. How does that idea enter our thoughts? Whence the concept of magic, whether for good or ill? Might it simply never have occurred to us? Is it just a dispensable historical accident, a piece of cultural detritus with no discernible foundation? Or does it have deep roots in our experience of the world, including ourselves?

I once compared the emergence of consciousness from the brain to the miracle of converting water into wine.[1] Why did I do that? It was because the concept of the miraculous suggests itself when considering the way consciousness arises from the physical world: this seems uncanny, contrary to natural law, freakish, inexplicable. I emphasized that this can only be an appearance—consciousness is not really miraculous. The mind is not objectively a miracle; rather, it is a mystery that looks like a miracle. But now I want to invert that thought and make a speculative suggestion: we get the concept of a miracle from our sense of ourselves as conscious beings. We strike ourselves as freakish and uncanny, at least when we reach a certain level of self-consciousness, and we then project this idea onto things outside of us. The dependence of mind on body appears unintelligible, extraordinary, possibly a sign of divine agency (assuming we find consciousness a “welcome event”). So it is not so much that the brain is like water and the mind is like wine; rather, water is like the brain and wine is like the mind. The emergence of mind from matter is the paradigm of the miraculous–everything else is projection and extension. Thus the concept arises spontaneously in us as a consequence of our very nature, at least as that nature strikes us; it isn’t just an adventitious eccentricity of culture. We don’t regard the mind-brain connection as miraculous because we alreadyhave the concept of a miracle from some other source; we derive the concept of the miraculous from our apprehension of ourselves as psychophysical beings. This is why it is universal and deep seated. This is why the concept seems so familiar, so easy to grasp. No wonder people often feel that the supernatural is all around them and ever-present—because it is part of our nature (as we apprehend ourselves). We see the world as spooky because we are spooky. In fact, of course, we are not objectively spooky, just deeply mysterious; but we convert a mystery into a miracle and then spread the concept outwards. After all, if we are a miracle inside, why can’t there be miracles outside? When someone miraculously rises from the dead (allegedly) isn’t this just like the way conscious life rises from dead matter, even when that matter resides in a living brain? There is that peculiar sense of getting something from nothing that attends all putative miracles. And the miracle of consciousness does occur all the time—every time a baby is conceived, every time we wake from sleep, every time our brain causes a thought. So why can’t external miracles happen regularly too? Clearly they are possible because they happen all the time in our own lives. Is water turning into wine any more impossible than brain chemicals turning into consciousness? In fact, it looks a lot more possible, what with water and wine both being liquids and all.

The form of explanation I am suggesting resembles Hume on causation and the origins of animism. Hume couldn’t find a source for the concept of causation in external objects (no impression of necessary connection), so he sought it within the mind in our habit of anticipation; we then project this inner impression outwards and populate the world with causal relations. It is not that we derive our concept of causation from external objects and then project it inwards; we get the idea from our inner feeling of expectation and then project it outwards. By analogy, we sense miracle within ourselves (erroneously but intelligibly) and then project it onto the outside world. We are under the illusion that we are miraculous and we suppose that we are not alone in this. In the case of animism, we attribute the qualities of living things to inanimate objects, mistakenly assimilating them to ourselves: we find intention and will where they do not objectively exist. We have a first-person awareness of life and we spread it around indiscriminately—as we have a first-person awareness of the (seemingly) miraculous and then ascribe it to the world outside. No doubt we are motivated to do this in various ways, but the cognitive groundwork is prepared by our knowledge (sic) of ourselves. The idea of miracle is all too familiar from our ordinary experience.[2] Presumably other animals don’t have the concept of a miracle, because they don’t have the kind of self-consciousness that gives rise to it; but we humans apprehend ourselves as enigmas, which we then convert into the idea of a miracle. Suppose that dualism were really true and that causal interaction takes place in the pineal gland: that would strike us as a type of miracle and God might be invoked to make sense of it. This could be the origin of the concept of the miraculous, and it would be an intelligible explanation of how the general concept arises. But the same is true even if we don’t accept that kind of metaphysics, because emergence is mysterious anyway. The enigma of emergence is readily converted into the idea of miracle, and then projection does the rest.

The obvious next question is whether the concept of God has a similar type of origin. I won’t go into this deeply, but I will make a couple of suggestions. The concept of God is clearly a compound of other concepts: omnipotence, omniscience, moral perfection, immateriality, and infinity. The last two are the hardest to explain in that both concepts are difficult to account for: where do we get them? We obviously don’t see and touch immaterial spirits and derive the concept by abstraction; and the concept of an infinite being is likewise not derived from perceptual acquaintance with such entities. A plausible hypothesis is that we derive them from knowledge of our own nature, or at least the kind of limited awareness we have of our nature. We certainly don’t experience our own consciousness as material, so it is at least intelligible that we could form the idea of an immaterial being on this basis—even if we are not rightly so described. Crudely, we have an illusion of immateriality. In the case of infinity we have more than an illusion of infinity: we ourselves are infinite beings. I don’t mean that as spatial beings we are infinitely divisible; I mean that we have attributes that are characterized by infinity—namely, language and thought. I intend nothing mystical here; I am just making the familiar point that language and thought admit of infinitely many combinations of primitive elements. And we are aware of this fact about ourselves: we know that we have this kind of infinite potential. So we have no trouble forming the idea of an infinite being, combining it with the other attributes that define God. We thus come by the idea of an immaterial infinite being via contemplation of our own make-up: this concept is not alien to us. So it is not that we have an antecedent idea of God that we subsequently apply to ourselves, casting ourselves in his exalted image; rather, we use ourselves as model to construct the complex idea of God, which we then proceed to project onto the world. Whether the world really contains anything answering to this concept is another question, but the concept itself has its origin in our own nature. How else could we get it? The concept of the supernatural is ultimately based on a distorted picture of ourselves, as a result of partial understanding and incorrigible projection. Religion begins at home.[3]

 

Colin McGinn

[1] In “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” (1989).

[2] Does anyone ever really get over the discovery that his or her precious consciousness, in all its glory, is the result of that furrowed and frightful thing called the brain? The miracle seems almost cruel in its absurdity!

[3] Let me stress that this is a speculative proposal—other theories might be suggested. The advantage of the present proposal is that it finds a firm place for the concept of the supernatural in the natural world. We don’t want to discover that only the existence of the supernatural can explain the presence of that concept in our minds—not if we want a secular psychology anyway.