➕ 5 — The Reality of Abstractions

His book is primarily about one particular emergent phenomenon, the mind – or, as he puts it, the ‘I’. He asks whether the mind can consistently be thought of as affecting the body – causing it to do one thing rather than another, given the all-embracing nature of the laws of physics. This is known as the mind–body problem. For instance, we often explain our actions in terms of choosing one action rather than another, but our bodies, including our brains, are completely controlled by the laws of physics, leaving no physical variable free for an ‘I’ to affect in order to make such a choice. Following the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Hofstadter eventually concludes that the ‘I’ is an illusion. Minds, he concludes, can’t ‘push material stuff around’, because ‘physical law alone would suffice to determine [its] behaviour’. Hence his reductionism. — page 117