This Place of Prose and Poetry. Lucian Krukowski

      One solution would be to avoid such epistemic complexity and join (however reluctantly) with the forces that categorically champion places as being the concrete locations we desire: All spaces are places. It can then be said: There are no spaces in (that occur to) the mind (however absent-minded or far-fetched)—that are not places in the body, most notably, in the brain.

      But where does this get us? Of course, adherents of the opposing view—that mind is not reducible to location—can be dismissed as a grab-bag of myopic Hegelians, retired relativists, nostalgic flower-children, and other skeptics and visionaries whose interests are variously directed to undermining reductionist theories—and by so doing, to give credence to their preferences for wandering from concrete place to open space.

      Such skeptics typically don’t believe that translations between languages (mind-talk and brain-talk) can be definitive (salve-veritate)—because truth is not always the goal. They also don’t believe that explanatory theories are cumulative (contra Hegel). What they believe, instead, is that theories are only richer or more meager—depending on how they explain what we use, flee from, or marvel at. Simply put: the analytic, pragmatic, aesthetic, when extended beyond academic civility, speak different languages. At stake, here, is not the notion that mind is “located in” or “the same as” the brain. It is, rather, the poverty of brain-theory’s explanatory function as well as the weakness of its predictive power—when it comes to issues that are mind-specific—emotion, volition, appreciation, meaning, morality, imagination— to dredge up an embattled term—“subjective.” These are issues that have different explanatory parameters than do “objective” ones.

      The inter-translateability between quality and quantity remains a question. In cosmological theory, the hyphen in space-time is as uneasy as it is in mind-body or in inside-outside; “unobservable” and “immeasurable” are offered as attributes of real entities—as in “dark matter.” In political theory, “freedom” and “equality” vacillate between support and antagonism, as do “progress” and “justice.” Language, in such cases, stretches to accommodate them.

      Advocates of separate theories of “mind” and “brain” are heartened in their beliefs when they peer across the fence and see how the advocates of “mind-as-brain” fare in trying to map the “soft” problems of ethics, aesthetics, private consciousness—as well, indeed, as the ”hard” ones of incessant wars and observational indeterminacy—onto a neuronal matrix. The (soft) question: “What makes people act this way?” can be answered by the (hard) rejoinder: “We’ll soon have an organic handle on all those differences in belief, and we’ll be able to offer explanations (as well as cures) for every brain-place that is their origin. Unfortunately, we have so far been hindered by atavars (like you) of mind-speak—those poetic-psychologic-sociologic-spiritualistic-babblers—who refuse to come around to accepting the one place that (soon—soon) offers a full account.”

      In contrast, the mind—as the mind-ists insist—is not simply a location. Rather, it has places which it shares (physically but indeterminately) with the brain—but it can also be located (metaphorically) in spaces that are not (in) the brain—and it responds to questions that are not answerable by (perusal of) the brain.

      The task of mind-defenders is to fend off the regimentists and reductionists who offer the dictum that we can locate all this flotsam of thinking, willing, feeling, creating, wanting, loving, hating, despairing—time past and time future—within the brain-scans etc., offered by neurologists in the laboratories.

      Such an empirical fix can be seen as a laudable ambition, but its realization would create a brave new world that I, for one, would not want to live in. Theoretical advances can diminish as well as enhance the “quality of life”—in the sense that the “explained” subject is often smaller —definitionally impoverished—than the earlier one to be explained. In this case, the subject is conscious life. So (in the non-linear way of mind-ists) I look at the conflict from the vantage of a different place.

      The study of physics (as I limitedly understand it) has gone far beyond location-in-place in its search for reality. Quarks, in experimental situations, appear in time-spans that occur only in our recordings— the accelerators, i.e., that produce ever-smaller, more basic variants of known particles, are increasingly subject to (or independent of) observational parsimony. One question is: How miniscule can these variants be before it can only be said that they are fictionally observed—although they perhaps are not really fictional—for they really exist as they are used—sometimes satisfying theorems, sometimes inspiring art—even when not observable.

      Then we have string theory—a celestial conceit if ever there was one—which is offered as (finally) underlying the whole of material nature—no more problems reconciling the forces of celestial mechanics with the forces inside the atom. Although strings can be figured and reconfigured in theory—as being the most inclusive and explanatory ur-phenomena we yet have, they, by their very formulation, are not subject, being ur-dimensional, to perceptual verification in plain old time and space. They cannot, alas, be so strummed (by us) as to (adequately) sound the music of the spheres. They cannot even, so I’m told, account for the workings of our world’s particular place in the new inclusiveness.

      The notion of consciousness is analogously difficult. Consciousness, too, is a phenomenon in and of the world—but it is not reducible to the empiricism of place and time—even (especially) when it is purportedly explained via a tangle of firing neurons. Someday we may sort out each and every tangle—who knows? The ideal of adequacy lurks behind every scientific theory. But for now, the philosophically ambitious mind risks becoming a captive of the medically innocent brain. Acknowledging the value of historical error, we might call the brain the new pineal gland—the doorway (transfer station) through which we will bring body and mind together. Parenthetically, in a religious context, where we would accept another entity—soul—into our schema, we might then say that mind is the pineal gland between body and soul—a transfer between existence and belief.

      Descartes’ hope for a seamless transition between the ineffable soul and the matter-of-fact mind foundered, among other things, on bad physiology. But there is no doubt these days (do you still have some?) that everything the mind conceives has correlation with actions in the brain.

      Where else? Well then, let’s ask the metaphoricians:

      Correlations can be found between cold toes and a runny nose —

      or maybe also in a field of ancient thistles

      that prick your quick, but bloom at end of winter.

      Or even in the hallowed courts that decide

      (with diagrams) the proper pathways

      between the what’s when’s and how’s of lovers—

      (recent courts have trouble with the why’s).

      There are correlations everywhere—look not here but there.

      “Where else?”—that arrogant question—implies that someday we can cap it all: We will finally find the ultimate physical particle, match technologically advanced observation to the increasing expansion of the universe—and, at the same time, we will stuff mind and its misbehaving surrogate, consciousness, so completely into the brain that there will be no distinction left to pester us.

      But some things, you know, are always left outside—those peripheral irritants that test the boundaries of every explanation. Think about the defunct certainties (just recently) that girded the attempts to reduce language to sense-data and then, through logical construction, into objects: “Erlebs” join “Qualia” (Carnap and Goodman) in the salon of benighted visions of transparent reference. But there still may be good conversation in way-stations with the older advocates of ether and phlogiston—not to mention the four humours—and think about the over-soul. Those folks knew how to party!

      This overflow of certainty, these failures—if you will—I accept as travails of the soul. But here I give the term ‘soul’ a special usage—as a name for programmatic