Actually, that’s exactly what it means. I assure you that you cannot find a theory as to how the physical brain can perceive nonphysical phenomena (like mathematics). The most common way to resolve the dilemma (which I think is the same thing as what they call “the hard problem of consciousness”) is just to say that our ability to do math and language is instinctive:
- The Language Instinct by Pinker.
- The Number Sense by Dehaene
- The Math Instinct by Devlin
- The Human Instinct by Miller
- The Consciousness Instinct, by Gazzaniga. (At the end of his book, he admits that his solution is “not very scientific”.)
But to call our ability to perceive numbers and words instinctive is an incredibly ironic answer. After all, instincts are things we do without thinking, so to say we can do math or language instinctively is like saying we can thinking without thinking!!! A laptop can instantly solve massively complex math equations and then give you the answer in one of a dozen languages because that’s what it’s programmed to do. My liver can do all kinds of complex chemistry because that’s what it’s programmed to do. But it would be incoherent to declare that either the laptop or the liver is actually thinking. By contrast, we ourselves cannot do such things without thinking very slowly and carefully. You cannot comprehend this sentence if you’re on autopilot. (And if you are on autopilot it’s because you’re thinking about something else!)
With apologies again for invading this stream, I’ve been encouraged to redirect it over to What Words Are Not. In the most recent post I summarized the answer of one leading neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, in his book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.
You know a couple of you questioned my motives in–in a gracious and appropriate manner–for making this argument. But I really don’t think this threatens evolutionary theory. (Although we couldn’t speculate on how an immaterial mind evolved, we can still accept all the theories about how the brain evolved.)