The Biochemical Jabberwocky

A list of all the purely material-chemical things: the earth, the waters, light, lack of it, you, me, applesauce, love and hatred, sulfur, Magna Carta, a paste made of sap and berries, the song “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, the town of Swampscott, Massachusetts. Also, your thought that this list exercise has already exhausted its purpose. But that’s it.

Now, if I left anything off the list, it is not that my list is incomplete. It’s not. That’s everything—I put down every single thing I know. So, the list itself is complete, and it’s just that my list will be expanded at a later date, too, as I learn of more things that are now and that have always been. But trust me when I tell you: all the things I’ve listed there truly, really, is everything, all catalogued, and nothing outside of it is anything at all.

The question of what everything is runs into this: if “everything” is measured and defined against the current body of knowledge of physics, or of biochemical processes, or the sciences as a whole, surely we might be inclined to agree that physics and biochemistry and all the rest of science is not complete. There is more there, and we should not be certain of an unknown. But if we imagine “everything” measured up against some future world in which science is complete in its reach—in other words, we achieve omniscience, we catalogue every subatomic raisin, every quirk and quark of the universe—how can we now predict what that omniscience looks like? Can we really define the material reality of our world according to the present, confident conception of what a future knowledge base will comprise?

As to the human body’s biochemical makeup, there is an “easy” and a “hard” problem, both of which might come before we start to worry about free will. The first, while not as “easy” as it may seem, comprises just the biochemical Rube Goldberg machine of tubes and channels and winches and pulleys inside each of us that allows us to be: to eat, to speak, to read and write, to sleep, perchance to dream, to flail about, to shart our pants in an important business meeting, to catch a whiff of our colleague’s having sharted. But the problem is perhaps easy in that we at least might find some mechanistic or behavioral explanation for it eventually, and we can explain each process with moderate confidence as its own independent structure and by reference as one layer of the larger physiological lasagna that comprises our body. The vocal chords vibrate like this, and the muscles and bones jiggle and joggle like that, and the bean burrito value meal moves through us like this, making an all-too-brief pit stop in our gut before its sudden departure.

The second problem, though, probably really is harder: how do we describe how it feels to be? An organism has consciousness if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism, says Thomas Nagel. The hell even is that something? “Pain is the firing of group C nerve fibers,” says Joseph Levine. It follows: how does pain feel? We have the biochemical explanation, sure, but how can the feel of it be explained?

What we do, mechanically, is accompanied by an experience of doing it, and a memory of having done it, and both a momentary perception and a separate memory by an Other of our doing it, too. Largely, those items appear to me—and obviously are at this moment in time—ineffable through biochemical explanations. There is, then, a biochemical Jabberwocky so monstrous and absurd that slaying it through a biochemical explanation seems deeply unlikely. And to ascribe even the “easy” problem entirely to biochemical certainties yet to be identified under the lens of a microscope feels to me equal in argumentative force as to ascribing it entirely to a God not yet spotted through the lens of a telescope.

So, assuming the easy part away, still we run into tough stuff: as David Chalmers poses, “ . . . even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?”

For further reading and thinking: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel; Frank Jackson’s “Mary’s Room”; Locke’s idea of two humans with inverted experiences of the color spectrum; the concept of the p-zombie, the question of how embedded or genetic instinct interacts with “levels” of consciousness (e.g., the “consciousness-ness” of birds flying in patterned flocks).