The "Argument from Reason" or the "Argument from Mind" mind, and the cardinal difficulty of naturalism
Why and how would and could a mindless universe, the physical realm devoid of consciousness, self-awareness, and perception, have created beings equipped with all these faculties by a mere fluke? A mere luck by chance?
Aristotle reasoned that for rational minds to exist in the universe, the source or cause behind the universe's existence must itself be an intelligent, rational mind or consciousness. Why? Because you cannot get something greater than what the cause itself comprises or contains. But the fundamental issue is in reality not about something "greater" arising, but rather, something of an entirely different essence or nature appearing - which violates a core metaphysical principle. A mindless, non-conscious material cause like the hypothetical early universe described by naturalism is incapable of producing something as qualitatively different as subjective consciousness, rationality, and intentionality. The primary problem is not one of degrees of complexity, but of a categorical distinction in kind between the mindless and the mental, the unconscious and the conscious. Electrons, particles, forces, energy - all of these material entities exhibit consistent patterns based on physical laws. But none of them, even in immense complexity, exhibit the intrinsic properties of subjectivity, self-awareness, and rational intellection that minds do.
It's akin to asking how you could get subjective personal experiences of tasting chocolate from mere chemical cocoa molecules. Or how you could derive the first-person "what-it's-like" sensation of feeling happy from mere neural firing patterns. There is an impassable translational barrier between the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective. No amount of complicated interactions between unconscious matter and energy have been coherently shown to produce the inherent properties of conscious experience and intentional cognition. If consciousness was merely an aggregate property of matter, then why don't individual particles or smaller conglomerations like individual neurons already exhibit proto-mental qualities? What is the uniquely special configuration that neurons in a brain possess that makes consciousness suddenly "emerge"?
This highlights the core issue - minds/consciousness don't seem capable of arising from re-configurations of matter alone precisely because they are something fundamentally different in essence, not just degree of complexity. The primary problem is not getting something "greater," but something categorically distinct - subjective, experiential, rational minds from wholly unmental, non-conscious material prior causes. The claim that consciousness emerges from the sheer complexity of billions of neurons interacting is an example of the "fallacy of composition." The fallacy of composition is a logically flawed inference where one assumes that something is true of the whole based solely on it being true of the parts that make up that whole. In the case of consciousness emerging from neural complexity, the fallacy is committed by assuming that even though individual neurons do not possess subjective experience or qualitative feelings, simply combining billions of unconscious neurons together will somehow magically give rise to conscious subjective experience at the macro level. However, there is no basis for this inference. Just as putting together any number of non-conscious physical parts like rocks, chairs or toasters will never spontaneously generate consciousness, so too merely adding up unconscious neurons fails to bridge the explanatory gap to subjective experience.
Each neuron and its electrochemical activity is an objective physical process, fully describable by the physical sciences. Nowhere in the physical description is there any explanation for how the insensate causes could give rise to the effect of inner subjective experience. This highlights a deeply problematic metaphysical divide - between the objective and the subjective, the physical and the experiential. Rearranging physical process A and B still only gives you different objective processes, not an explanation for subjective felt experience. The emergence of consciousness from mere complexity suffers from trying to derive a trait of the whole (subjective experience) from parts that simply do not have that trait (individual neurons). It is akin to claiming a skyscraper somehow acquires the novel ability to reproduce itself because it is composed of many smaller units like bricks that clearly lack such an ability.
So while the brain exhibits staggering complexity, complexity alone does not constitute an adequate explanatory basis for the emergence of consciousness according to the principles of logic and inference. The fallacy of composition represents a significant gap in naturalistic theories of mind. Aristotle stated: "Since there is a rugged portion which produces, not by virtue of deliberate reason, in creatures which are not products of rationality, so, too, the source which produced the universe as a whole cannot have deliberated." In other words, an unconscious, non-rational source or set of material processes cannot coherently give rise to beings with higher capabilities like reason, consciousness, and intentionality. That would be akin to arguing that silly putty or rocks could someday produce sophisticated robots or computers purely by chance motions and re-configurations.
Aristotle highlighted the inherent contradiction in supposing that an unguided, non-rational source like a hypothetical universe of pure matter and energy could ultimately produce the immense complexity and rationality inherent in the human mind purely by happenstance combinations of material particles. His argument poses a profound challenge to naturalistic explanations that attempt to account for the existence of rational, conscious minds solely through fundamentally mindless material processes like chemical reactions, physical forces, and undirected natural selection acting on random mutations.
C.S. Lewis did an excellent job highlighting what he called "the cardinal difficulty of naturalism" - the very same problem Aristotle identified long ago. Aristotle pointed out the inherent contradiction in supposing that an unconscious, non-rational source like our universe of pure matter and energy could produce the rational, conscious minds we witness in human beings. As he put it, you cannot get something greater than what the cause itself comprises. C.S. Lewis revived and expounded on this critique in his works. Lewis referred to it as "the cardinal difficulty of naturalism" - namely, the inability of any naturalistic, materialistic philosophy to adequately account for the phenomenon of reason itself arising from an unguided, irrational source. In his book Miracles, Lewis provocatively stated: "Unless the primal admission is consciously kept in mind, naturalism can be defeated by a backward movement towards more concrete events - a 'regress' which shows that nature, if naturalism were true, would never have arisen."
What Lewis means is that if we follow the naturalistic story back to its beginning, we inevitably encounter an initial state of affairs that is fundamentally mindless, non-rational, and lacking any inherent foundation for intelligence, consciousness or rationality to later emerge. And yet, here we are - undeniably rational, thinking beings. Lewis contends this is an insuperable philosophical difficulty for naturalism. As he colorfully puts it, "You don't get orchids out of whale bone and ammonia whether modern thought has banned miracles or not." Just like Aristotle, Lewis argues this screams "design" and points decisively to an original rational mind or consciousness behind the universe. Why? Because following naturalism's own creation story backward reaches an inherent dead-end regarding the origin of reason, intentionality and consciousness in the natural world. So whether looking through the lens of ancient Greek philosophy or modern Christian thinkers like Lewis, we see a profound challenge to any materialistic account of reality arising through mindless, unguided processes. The existence of rational minds poses what both Aristotle and Lewis considered an intractable "cardinal difficulty" for naturalism that points unavoidably to an intelligent, rational mind as the source of it all.
Einstein wrote in his "Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge": "I am convinced that...the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all—when viewed logically—the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences. ...we have the habit of combining certain concepts and conceptual relations (propositions) so definitely with certain sense experiences that we do not become conscious of the gulf—logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts and propositions."
In other words, Einstein recognized that our conscious thoughts, concepts, and propositional knowledge are fundamentally distinct from and cannot be logically derived or induced from mere sense experiences of the physical world alone. There is an "unbridgeable gulf" separating the two realms. So Einstein was very clear in highlighting this profound metaphysical divide - the inability of physical observations and sensory experiences alone to logically account for or give rise to the abstract realm of conceptual thought, reasoning, and conscious awareness. His quotes pointedly challenge purely physicalist explanations that attempt to reduce consciousness and abstract thought to simply emergent properties of matter and energy configurations. Einstein saw an intractable "unbridgeable gulf" between the two domains based on our current understanding.
This chasm is further exemplified by the seeming indivisibility of conscious experience, in stark contrast to the divisibility of matter down into constituents like quarks, fermions, and discrete units of energy. If consciousness were simply an emergent product of material complexity, it should share matter's divisible nature.
Christof Koch is a prominent neuroscientist known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He claimed: "Consciousness is a fundamental property of complex systems, and it may not be tied to a specific type of brain or organism. Rather, it emerges whenever a system has a sufficient level of complexity and integrated information." Christof Koch, "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist"
This is highly problematic: The article "Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness" Link discusses experiments performed on two split-brain patients whose corpus callosum had been severed to treat epilepsy. The key finding was that despite the lack of communication between the hemispheres, the patients showed unified conscious awareness and ability to respond to stimuli across the entire visual field, regardless of which hemisphere was initially processing the information. This challenges the traditional view that split-brain patients have two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.
The article states this finding directly in the conclusion: "In conclusion, with two patients, and across a wide variety of tasks we have shown that severing the cortical connections between the two hemispheres does not seem to lead to two independent conscious agents within one brain. Instead, we observed that patients without a corpus callosum were able to respond accurately to stimuli appearing anywhere in the visual field, regardless of whether they responded verbally, with the left or the right hand—despite not being able to compare stimuli between visual half-fields, and despite finding separate levels of performance in each visual half-field for labelling or matching stimuli."
So the key quote indicating that consciousness remained undivided in these split-brain patients is:
"In conclusion, with two patients, and across a wide variety of tasks we have shown that severing the cortical connections between the two hemispheres does not seem to lead to two independent conscious agents within one brain."
The findings from the split-brain patient experiments reported in this article directly contradict Christof Koch's claim that consciousness emerges solely from the complexity and integrated information within a system, irrespective of the specific type of system. If consciousness was purely a product of complexity and integrated information, as Koch suggests, then severing the corpus callosum - the main communication pathway between the two cerebral hemispheres - should have resulted in two independent conscious agents within the split-brain patients' minds. Each hemisphere processes information independently and has its own level of integrated complexity, which according to Koch's view, should give rise to separate conscious experiences. However, the experiments showed that despite the lack of communication and integration between the hemispheres, the patients demonstrated a unified conscious experience and ability to respond to stimuli across their entire visual field. This demonstrates that consciousness is not an emergent property arising from any sufficiently complex system, but rather, is more fundamentally tied to the biological brain as an integrated whole.
Even if we had a complete understanding of the neural correlates and information processing in the brain, there is still an explanatory gap in accounting for why those physical processes give rise to subjective, first-person conscious experience. Physics and neuroscience deal with objective, third-person observational data, not the inner qualitative feel of consciousness. Our subjective experience appears unified across different sensory modalities, memories, thoughts etc. But the brain consists of distributed specialized modules processing information in parallel. How and why do these isolated processes bind together into one seamless conscious stream? Computational models can simulate and replicate information processing in the brain, but subjective experience has a non-computational, non-algorithmic quality that is impossible to capture in symbolic rules and logic. Consciousness is an irreducibly first-person phenomena. Its subjective, inner nature seems to resist full capture by third-person objective descriptions based on material properties and functional roles. Conscious thoughts exhibit intentionality - the capacity to be about or represent something. This meaning and semantic quality is difficult if not impossible to reduce to purely physical processes. Our first-person sense of being a unified, persisting self or subject of consciousness across time appears distinct from the constantly changing physical substrate of the brain's neural activity patterns. While the brain acts as the physical vehicle or correlate of consciousness, there are deep conceptual challenges in deriving subjective experience itself purely from material properties, information states and neural dynamics. The apparent formality, meaning and subjectivity intrinsic to consciousness hints at it arising from a deeper ground of being that transcends physical matter and information as currently understood.
Why and how would and could a mindless universe, the physical realm devoid of consciousness, self-awareness, and perception, have created beings equipped with all these faculties by a mere fluke? A mere luck by chance?
Aristotle reasoned that for rational minds to exist in the universe, the source or cause behind the universe's existence must itself be an intelligent, rational mind or consciousness. Why? Because you cannot get something greater than what the cause itself comprises or contains. But the fundamental issue is in reality not about something "greater" arising, but rather, something of an entirely different essence or nature appearing - which violates a core metaphysical principle. A mindless, non-conscious material cause like the hypothetical early universe described by naturalism is incapable of producing something as qualitatively different as subjective consciousness, rationality, and intentionality. The primary problem is not one of degrees of complexity, but of a categorical distinction in kind between the mindless and the mental, the unconscious and the conscious. Electrons, particles, forces, energy - all of these material entities exhibit consistent patterns based on physical laws. But none of them, even in immense complexity, exhibit the intrinsic properties of subjectivity, self-awareness, and rational intellection that minds do.
It's akin to asking how you could get subjective personal experiences of tasting chocolate from mere chemical cocoa molecules. Or how you could derive the first-person "what-it's-like" sensation of feeling happy from mere neural firing patterns. There is an impassable translational barrier between the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective. No amount of complicated interactions between unconscious matter and energy have been coherently shown to produce the inherent properties of conscious experience and intentional cognition. If consciousness was merely an aggregate property of matter, then why don't individual particles or smaller conglomerations like individual neurons already exhibit proto-mental qualities? What is the uniquely special configuration that neurons in a brain possess that makes consciousness suddenly "emerge"?
This highlights the core issue - minds/consciousness don't seem capable of arising from re-configurations of matter alone precisely because they are something fundamentally different in essence, not just degree of complexity. The primary problem is not getting something "greater," but something categorically distinct - subjective, experiential, rational minds from wholly unmental, non-conscious material prior causes. The claim that consciousness emerges from the sheer complexity of billions of neurons interacting is an example of the "fallacy of composition." The fallacy of composition is a logically flawed inference where one assumes that something is true of the whole based solely on it being true of the parts that make up that whole. In the case of consciousness emerging from neural complexity, the fallacy is committed by assuming that even though individual neurons do not possess subjective experience or qualitative feelings, simply combining billions of unconscious neurons together will somehow magically give rise to conscious subjective experience at the macro level. However, there is no basis for this inference. Just as putting together any number of non-conscious physical parts like rocks, chairs or toasters will never spontaneously generate consciousness, so too merely adding up unconscious neurons fails to bridge the explanatory gap to subjective experience.
Each neuron and its electrochemical activity is an objective physical process, fully describable by the physical sciences. Nowhere in the physical description is there any explanation for how the insensate causes could give rise to the effect of inner subjective experience. This highlights a deeply problematic metaphysical divide - between the objective and the subjective, the physical and the experiential. Rearranging physical process A and B still only gives you different objective processes, not an explanation for subjective felt experience. The emergence of consciousness from mere complexity suffers from trying to derive a trait of the whole (subjective experience) from parts that simply do not have that trait (individual neurons). It is akin to claiming a skyscraper somehow acquires the novel ability to reproduce itself because it is composed of many smaller units like bricks that clearly lack such an ability.
So while the brain exhibits staggering complexity, complexity alone does not constitute an adequate explanatory basis for the emergence of consciousness according to the principles of logic and inference. The fallacy of composition represents a significant gap in naturalistic theories of mind. Aristotle stated: "Since there is a rugged portion which produces, not by virtue of deliberate reason, in creatures which are not products of rationality, so, too, the source which produced the universe as a whole cannot have deliberated." In other words, an unconscious, non-rational source or set of material processes cannot coherently give rise to beings with higher capabilities like reason, consciousness, and intentionality. That would be akin to arguing that silly putty or rocks could someday produce sophisticated robots or computers purely by chance motions and re-configurations.
Aristotle highlighted the inherent contradiction in supposing that an unguided, non-rational source like a hypothetical universe of pure matter and energy could ultimately produce the immense complexity and rationality inherent in the human mind purely by happenstance combinations of material particles. His argument poses a profound challenge to naturalistic explanations that attempt to account for the existence of rational, conscious minds solely through fundamentally mindless material processes like chemical reactions, physical forces, and undirected natural selection acting on random mutations.
C.S. Lewis did an excellent job highlighting what he called "the cardinal difficulty of naturalism" - the very same problem Aristotle identified long ago. Aristotle pointed out the inherent contradiction in supposing that an unconscious, non-rational source like our universe of pure matter and energy could produce the rational, conscious minds we witness in human beings. As he put it, you cannot get something greater than what the cause itself comprises. C.S. Lewis revived and expounded on this critique in his works. Lewis referred to it as "the cardinal difficulty of naturalism" - namely, the inability of any naturalistic, materialistic philosophy to adequately account for the phenomenon of reason itself arising from an unguided, irrational source. In his book Miracles, Lewis provocatively stated: "Unless the primal admission is consciously kept in mind, naturalism can be defeated by a backward movement towards more concrete events - a 'regress' which shows that nature, if naturalism were true, would never have arisen."
What Lewis means is that if we follow the naturalistic story back to its beginning, we inevitably encounter an initial state of affairs that is fundamentally mindless, non-rational, and lacking any inherent foundation for intelligence, consciousness or rationality to later emerge. And yet, here we are - undeniably rational, thinking beings. Lewis contends this is an insuperable philosophical difficulty for naturalism. As he colorfully puts it, "You don't get orchids out of whale bone and ammonia whether modern thought has banned miracles or not." Just like Aristotle, Lewis argues this screams "design" and points decisively to an original rational mind or consciousness behind the universe. Why? Because following naturalism's own creation story backward reaches an inherent dead-end regarding the origin of reason, intentionality and consciousness in the natural world. So whether looking through the lens of ancient Greek philosophy or modern Christian thinkers like Lewis, we see a profound challenge to any materialistic account of reality arising through mindless, unguided processes. The existence of rational minds poses what both Aristotle and Lewis considered an intractable "cardinal difficulty" for naturalism that points unavoidably to an intelligent, rational mind as the source of it all.
Einstein wrote in his "Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge": "I am convinced that...the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all—when viewed logically—the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences. ...we have the habit of combining certain concepts and conceptual relations (propositions) so definitely with certain sense experiences that we do not become conscious of the gulf—logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts and propositions."
In other words, Einstein recognized that our conscious thoughts, concepts, and propositional knowledge are fundamentally distinct from and cannot be logically derived or induced from mere sense experiences of the physical world alone. There is an "unbridgeable gulf" separating the two realms. So Einstein was very clear in highlighting this profound metaphysical divide - the inability of physical observations and sensory experiences alone to logically account for or give rise to the abstract realm of conceptual thought, reasoning, and conscious awareness. His quotes pointedly challenge purely physicalist explanations that attempt to reduce consciousness and abstract thought to simply emergent properties of matter and energy configurations. Einstein saw an intractable "unbridgeable gulf" between the two domains based on our current understanding.
This chasm is further exemplified by the seeming indivisibility of conscious experience, in stark contrast to the divisibility of matter down into constituents like quarks, fermions, and discrete units of energy. If consciousness were simply an emergent product of material complexity, it should share matter's divisible nature.
Christof Koch is a prominent neuroscientist known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He claimed: "Consciousness is a fundamental property of complex systems, and it may not be tied to a specific type of brain or organism. Rather, it emerges whenever a system has a sufficient level of complexity and integrated information." Christof Koch, "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist"
This is highly problematic: The article "Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness" Link discusses experiments performed on two split-brain patients whose corpus callosum had been severed to treat epilepsy. The key finding was that despite the lack of communication between the hemispheres, the patients showed unified conscious awareness and ability to respond to stimuli across the entire visual field, regardless of which hemisphere was initially processing the information. This challenges the traditional view that split-brain patients have two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.
The article states this finding directly in the conclusion: "In conclusion, with two patients, and across a wide variety of tasks we have shown that severing the cortical connections between the two hemispheres does not seem to lead to two independent conscious agents within one brain. Instead, we observed that patients without a corpus callosum were able to respond accurately to stimuli appearing anywhere in the visual field, regardless of whether they responded verbally, with the left or the right hand—despite not being able to compare stimuli between visual half-fields, and despite finding separate levels of performance in each visual half-field for labelling or matching stimuli."
So the key quote indicating that consciousness remained undivided in these split-brain patients is:
"In conclusion, with two patients, and across a wide variety of tasks we have shown that severing the cortical connections between the two hemispheres does not seem to lead to two independent conscious agents within one brain."
The findings from the split-brain patient experiments reported in this article directly contradict Christof Koch's claim that consciousness emerges solely from the complexity and integrated information within a system, irrespective of the specific type of system. If consciousness was purely a product of complexity and integrated information, as Koch suggests, then severing the corpus callosum - the main communication pathway between the two cerebral hemispheres - should have resulted in two independent conscious agents within the split-brain patients' minds. Each hemisphere processes information independently and has its own level of integrated complexity, which according to Koch's view, should give rise to separate conscious experiences. However, the experiments showed that despite the lack of communication and integration between the hemispheres, the patients demonstrated a unified conscious experience and ability to respond to stimuli across their entire visual field. This demonstrates that consciousness is not an emergent property arising from any sufficiently complex system, but rather, is more fundamentally tied to the biological brain as an integrated whole.
Even if we had a complete understanding of the neural correlates and information processing in the brain, there is still an explanatory gap in accounting for why those physical processes give rise to subjective, first-person conscious experience. Physics and neuroscience deal with objective, third-person observational data, not the inner qualitative feel of consciousness. Our subjective experience appears unified across different sensory modalities, memories, thoughts etc. But the brain consists of distributed specialized modules processing information in parallel. How and why do these isolated processes bind together into one seamless conscious stream? Computational models can simulate and replicate information processing in the brain, but subjective experience has a non-computational, non-algorithmic quality that is impossible to capture in symbolic rules and logic. Consciousness is an irreducibly first-person phenomena. Its subjective, inner nature seems to resist full capture by third-person objective descriptions based on material properties and functional roles. Conscious thoughts exhibit intentionality - the capacity to be about or represent something. This meaning and semantic quality is difficult if not impossible to reduce to purely physical processes. Our first-person sense of being a unified, persisting self or subject of consciousness across time appears distinct from the constantly changing physical substrate of the brain's neural activity patterns. While the brain acts as the physical vehicle or correlate of consciousness, there are deep conceptual challenges in deriving subjective experience itself purely from material properties, information states and neural dynamics. The apparent formality, meaning and subjectivity intrinsic to consciousness hints at it arising from a deeper ground of being that transcends physical matter and information as currently understood.
