McGinn on mind and space

Thoughts and experiences seem to lack spatial location.  It makes sense to say of a certain cluster of neurons firing that they are located several centimeters in from your left ear.  But it seems to make no sense to say that your experience of feeling nervous, or your thought about the Pythagorean Theorem, is located several centimeters in from your left ear.  After all, no one who opened up your skull or took an X-ray of your head would see the thought or the experience, nor would either be detectible through any other perceptual means.  In his book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World , Colin McGinn defends this commonsense supposition that mental states and processes are not locatable in space.This is one reason McGinn does not subscribe to any of the standard versions of materialism (though he is not a dualist either).  Material things and processes are spatially locatable, so that it cannot, in any straightforward sense, be said that a thought or experience is identical to a material thing or process.  Or at least, this conclusion seems to follow, in McGinn’s view, unless we come up with some alternative conception of space.

Putting aside for purposes of the present post what McGinn has to say about the possibility of an alternative conception of space, let’s consider a speculation that he develops on the basis of the ordinary notion of space.  Time and space as we know them now came into being, it is commonly held, with the Big Bang.  McGinn suggests that the Big Bang must have had a cause.  Not being a theist, he does not think of this as a divine cause.  But he does think that, since it was the cause of the existence of space, it must itself be non-spatial. 
Now, the problem that mind and space pose for materialism, in McGinn’s view, is that it is difficult to see how matter, which is spatial, can give rise to mind, which is non-spatial.  Yet the example of the Big Bang, he suggests, shows that the causal relation can go in the other direction.  That is to say, the non-spatial can give rise to the spatial.  How this works is not something McGinn claims to understand.  His claim is only that it does seem to happen.  Furthermore, there is, he acknowledges, an obvious causal relation of somesort between mental events and material events in the brain.  So, if it is reasonable to think that the non-spatial can give rise to the spatial, it seems no less reasonable to think that the spatial can give rise to the non-spatial.  In McGinn’s view, there is arguably some kind of natural process by which one gives rise to the other and vice versa.
The idea is reminiscent of Plato’s cyclical argument in the Phaedo, which holds that things arise out of their opposites (though McGinn does not deploy the idea to argue for the soul’s immortality, as Plato does).  If the spatial and non-spatial can give rise to one another, then maybe, McGinn suggests, what is happening when brain events give rise to mind is a kind of miniature and partial reversal of the process that caused the Big Bang.  McGinn is well aware that this sounds pretty weird.  But he is just “spit-balling” rather than putting it forward as a settled opinion, and he thinks that accounting for the mind is in any case bound to require entertaining some unusual possibilities.
Now, McGinn treats the non-spatial as if it were distinct from the mental.  He seems to suppose that, just as space may or may not contain some particular material object, so too the non-spatial, whatever it is like, may or may not contain mental states and processes.  His proposal seems to be that the non-spatial reality that preceded the Big Bang was non-mental, and that when the brain gives rise to the mind, what happens is that it generates a non-spatial reality to which mental features are somehow at the same time added.
But why suppose that this is what is going on?  It is, after all, controversial whether space could exist in the absence of any matter whatsoever.  Space could exist whether or not chairs or trees exist, but it is not so clear that it could exist if there were no physical objects at all.  So, by analogy, why suppose that non-spatial reality could exist in the absence of any mentalfeatures whatsoever?  Why not suppose instead that for the non-spatial to exist is ipso facto for something mental to exist?  As far as I can tell, McGinn gives no explicit reason for denying this.  He just takes it for granted that some kind of non-spatial reality could exist completely apart from the mental.
To be sure, McGinn does note that numbers are examples of things that do not exist in a spatial way.  You can perceive the numeral “3,” but you cannot perceive the number 3.  So might McGinn not argue that numbers and other mathematical objects provide a model for what it would be for a non-spatial reality to exist apart from anything mental?
But there are a couple of problems with this suggestion.  First, abstract objects like numbers are generally understood to be causally inert.  The number 3, for example, can’t do anything.  Yet the non-spatial kind of reality McGinn posits is supposed to be causally efficacious.  It can cause the Big Bang, for example.  So, what McGinn needs to show is that there could be something that is non-spatial, non-mental, and causally efficacious all at the same time.  Numbers and other abstract objects don’t provide examples of that.
Another problem is that it is debatable whether numbers and other abstract objects really can exist apart from minds in the first place.  Aristotelian realists argue that they cannot.  Abstract objects, on their view, exist only in intellects which abstract them from concrete individuals.  The universal TRIANGULARITY, for example, exists only in intellects which abstract that pattern from concrete individual triangles.   THREENESS is another abstraction that exists only in an intellect that abstracts that pattern from concrete individuals.  And so forth.  (See chapter 3 of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God for a defense of this view – or to be more precise, for a defense of the Scholastic realist variation on the Aristotelian view.)
Suppose, then, that McGinn is wrong, and that any concrete and causally efficacious non-spatial reality would be mental in its nature.  Then, for one thing, when brains generate minds (as he says they do), there aren’t two things going on here, viz. the generation of something non-spatial and then a separate act of addition to this non-spatial reality of mental properties.  Rather, there is just one thing, the generation of a non-spatial-cum-mental reality.  For another thing, and perhaps more momentously, for the Big Bang to have been generated by a non-spatial reality would ipso facto for it to have been generated by a mind of some sort. 
Would this amount to a theistic scenario – to God’s creating the universe at the Big Bang?   No, not necessarily, and certainly not without further argumentation.  For one thing, there is nothing in the cyclical scenario described by McGinn that would entail that the non-spatial cause of the Big Bang is infinite in nature, or something that exists of absolute necessity, or that it has the other divine attributes.  It could be a merely finite (if still impressive) mind of some sort.
For another thing, the cyclical process posited by McGinn would in fact if anything point away from a truly theistic scenario.  He thinks of the non-spatial giving rise to the spatial and vice versa.  He also thinks of the spatial as giving rise to finite, human non-spatial minds.  So, even if he were to accept that the cause of the Big Bang was a mind of some sort, his model would seem to entail (by analogy with the spatial to non-spatial direction of causation) that it might be a merely finite mind, and a mind that itself arose from some previous spatial reality.  Those are not conclusions that are compatible with genuine theism (certainly not classical theism).
If McGinn’s supposition that the non-spatial reality that he speculates may have caused the Big Bang would be non-mental is motivated by a desire to avoid theism – though I hasten to add that he does not say or imply that it is – then he needn’t have worried.  Though McGinn’s speculations go well beyond anything most materialists would be comfortable with, they are still pretty firmly within a naturalistframework, broadly construed.  McGinn advocates expanding our conception of the natural world, even radically.  But that is a different thing from the view that there is something beyond the natural world.  (McGinn’s naturalism is more like Thomas Nagel’s than like Alex Rosenberg’s, but it is still naturalism.)