ch test our resolve, and at the end we’ll be judged on how we’ve coped. Will we be Carol Thatchers, destined for fame-and-fortune heaven, or Elaine Lordans, cast off into outer darkness?
I don’t buy any of this myself, but it’s a perfectly respectable position to take, given that we’re still no nearer understanding what goes on that makes us what we are, the mystery of consciousness. And many are beginning to doubt that we ever will.
I’m not sure who first came up with this – I think I read it in something by Raymond Tallis: the idea that philosophy alternates between periods of puzzling over the mind, and periods of puzzling over language. For much of the 20th Century Anglo-American philosophy was concerned with language (they called it linguistic philosophy: that’s how I know), but recently it seems to be all about mind: mind as a computer, mind as a modular Swiss army knife, or even mind as an illusion. Perhaps it’s because of the recent emphasis on the brain, the Nineties being “the decade of the brain”, which meant the focus was on brain-as-mind, with some of the most interesting books in the field being written by neurologists like Antonio Damasio. So maybe soon we’re due a swing back to language. It’s always seemed to me – and I offer this with no argument whatsoever (this is a blog post, for Chrissakes, not a paper in a philosophy journal) – that when/if we get some kind of grip on language, then the mind issue will sort itself out. Or to put that in a different way, what really differentiates us from other animals isn’t so much the quality of our consciousness, or our morality, but simply our ability to speak. The great mystery, it strikes me, is language. Everything “human” stems from that.
As for Intelligent Design, well, if I were a crusading Christian, that’s the line I’d be pushing. Let the scientists have their evolution; the evidence is overwhelming. But language now – there’s Intelligent Design for you. That’s when God stepped in (and later gave us the Tower of Babel when he realised it was a bit too much of a good thing). For the moment no scientist is going to be able to come up with any decent arguments against you. It’d give them something a bit more substantial as a target to aim at than what’s currently on offer from the fundamentalists.
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