Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 12 Fall 1994

              Mr. Santayana and the New Mysterians
Consciousness has lately become considered a fit subject for scientific research.
Neuroscientists have been tracking paths, through human brains, of electrical
and chemical activity associated with a variety of conscious choices and
actions. They have already obtained some fascinating results, and there is every reason
to dunk that, in time, they will find neural correlates for a wide range of conscious
experiences. Whether this will lead to an explanation of how awareness can arise In
organic life forms, whether a solution to the mind-body problem can be anticipated,
these are entirely different questions. Many cognitive scientists are optimistic (like
good scientists). There are others, however, who anticipate in-principle reasons why
the project must in the end lead to impasse. Some have argued that the capacity of the
human brain as It has evolved may be inadequate to deal with such problems. These
make an analogy with less complex life forms, whose brains are insufficiently powerful
to deal with certain mental tasks: a monkey's brain would just not be powerful enough
to master quantum mechanics. It stands to reason that there are tasks which the human
brain cannot master, and an understanding by the mind of itself is seen as a candidate
for this.
Such scepticism can be seen as a hindrance to the healthy progress of cognitive
science, and those who voice these doubts have been given the pejorative label "the
new mysterians." The old mysterians were the dualists, who held that mind was
inaccessible to science because it had a different substantial seat quite independent of
the body and the brain. New mysterians reject dualism; they are naturalists, who
believe that some property or properties of the brain do explain consciousness — but
that these properties are inaccessible. Of course, doubts that consciousness would yield
up its secrets to experimental science have not been confined to dualists. It was only
a short time ago that behaviourism dominated psychology, and consciousness was
entirely banned from scientific discourse. The new mysterians accept consciousness,
are willing to discuss it, and give it a natural seat in the brain; they merely are sceptical
about an experimental science of mind.
Santayana might be characterized as a new mysterian, according to these criteria.
He Is strongly naturalistic, but believes that the mental (behaviour aside) will always
need to be treated subjectively; the quantitative methods of objective science are not
suited to deal with the realm of spirit, m his treatment, however, the reasons for this
have little to do with brain capacity or power. They are tied rather to Santayana's
scepticism, and do not have the ad hoc character evident when brain size is taken as
the explanation. I shall sketch these reasons (in the three leftover pages of this
Bulletin).
Although it was not his first concern, Santayana spent considerable time reflecting
on the status of scientific knowledge when he wrote The Realm of Matter. What he
arrived at was in many respects similar to fairly standard views. He endorsed the idea
that studies of the mind, if they were to be scientific, would have to be behavioural.
And he held that science has its foundation in regularities discovered in the changing
material world, but that theories built upon these uniformities are always somewhat
suspect. This latter is very close to that offered by standard positivist philosophy of
science, and is eminently plausible. But Santayana gave a superior and more durable
formulation of the theory. The empiricist statement of this classical account is in terms
of laws, scientific formulations of what we find as physical regularities, and- not as the