Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson

This is a difficult book to understand. It's not hard because I disagree with it, or because it's obtuse or painfully written. On the contrary, it's wonderfully written with style and erudition. It is, however, difficult. I say this as someone who is comfortable reading hard material and yet I think I must confess I'm not sure I picked up everything Robinson has to say.

I agree with her general thesis; that the mind is not something we should eject simply because we've begun to be able to shine lights into the physical stuff of the brain and see the shadows that flicker there. As fond as some people are of saying that the mind is an illusion, Robinson is as keen to point out that if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck then it's probably a duck and calling it a non-duck fowl shaped organism is only a strategy of obfuscation.

If this was all she was doing then the review (and the material) would be easy enough to grasp. Robinson is more concerned with the pseudo-science and quasi-philosophical frameworks that have grown up around strange notions of the brain, the mind and consciousness. For her it's not even that the 'mind is an illusion' paradox is the problem, it's the underlying metaphysical standpoint that feels driven to obliterate subjectivity from the explanatory narrative of who we are and what it means to be human. Scientism has failed to quantify this phenomena (and real science respectfully keeps its distance) but instead of mature into real science and accept the bounds of what can and can't be measured it has instead sought to deny the existence of the thing it can't bring to heel.

Looking at troublesome ideas such as altruism and human nature, Robinson takes some of the key tangential struts of anti-mind philosophy and subjects them to elegantly brutal muggings. What emerges is what the philosopher Jonathan Ree coins the art of philosophy - the ability to take long thoughts and eschew instant (and simple) answers for the superficial scratchings they normally are. Robinson's art here is to demonstrate in the small items a long thought - that mind is essential to all human meaning and understanding. In a crass and crude summary of her argument - one could say that if the mind is an illusion then science is also an illusion because we cannot argue that it is objective because the only medium through which we interpret our findings it itself untrustworthy - reality becomes the ultimate in unreliable witnesses.

I heartily recommend this book - read in order and straight through. It is hard but well worth the effort.