Rethinking Mind

Marilynne Robinson Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.

She is also the author of non fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, The Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) and Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010). She has written articles, essays and reviews for Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She has this to say about science and consciousness:

"For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM. . . .

By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain’s vulnerability as a physical object, [Steven Pinker] feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained. . . .

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. . . .

Physicists say a change in a split photon occurs simultaneously in its severed half, at any theoretical distance. As if there were no time or space, this information of change passes instantly from one to the other. Is an event that defies any understanding we have of causality a physical event? . . .

[If so] then perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical, and perhaps we ought not to be so confident in opposing it to a real or imagined nonphysical. More

Upload Your Mind To A Computer: It Beats The Alternative

You are driving 65 miles per hour, you are drunk, and your dog growls as she does every time she smells alcohol on your breath and you go over 60, but you are too drowsy to notice. Then it happens. That brick wall just leaped out into the middle of the highway.

If you awaken in the hospital you would learn that your car is totaled, and so is your head.

But you don't. You are brain dead. You are S.O.L., or sh*t out of luck, as my friend Louie would say.

Don't despair, though. Maybe you can survive drinking and driving if you wait a while. If you hold on until science figures out how to upload your mind into a computer. Then, if you hit a brick wall, your "you" will have been digitized. All that science needs to do is this: "Scientists must learn to extract your memories, feelings, values and beliefs in all their complex working relationships from your brain. Then they must be able to create a medium where you can thrive without your birth body." That shouldn't be too difficult, so wait a couple of years before you go on your next binge. . . . More at Obit.