Month: November 2011

Could Brains Have Mental Properties?

1. Many philosophers of mind who eschew substance dualism opt for a property dualism.   Allowing only one category of substances, material substances, they allow at least two categories of properties, mental and physical.  An example of a mental property is sensing red, or to put it adverbially, the property of sensing redly, or in a Chisholmian variant, being-appeared-to-redly.  Any sensory quale would serve as an example of a mental property.  Their irreducibility to physical properties is the reason for thinking of them as irreducibly mental properties.  This post, taking for granted this irreducibility, focuses on the question whether it is coherent to suppose that a mental property could be had by a physical substance.  Before proceeding, I will note that it is not just qualia, but also the phenomena of intentionality that supply us with putative mental properties.  Recalling as I am right now a particular dark and rainy night in Charlottesville, Virginia, I am in an intentional state.  So one can reasonably speak of my now instantiating an intentional mental property.

In sum, there are (instantiated) mental properties and there are (instantiated) physical properties, and the former are irreducible to the latter.

2. Now could a physical thing such as a (functioning) brain, or a part thereof, be the possessor of a mental property?  Finding this incoherent, I suggest that if there are instantiated mental properties, then there are irreducibly mental subjects.  Or perhaps you prefer the contrapositive:  If there are no irreducibly mental subjects, then there are no irreducibly mental properties.  But it all depends on what exactly we mean by mental and physical properties.

3. What is a physical property?  An example is the property of weighing 10 kg.  Although there are plenty of things that weigh 10 kg, the property of weighing 10 kg does not itself weigh 10 kg.  Physical properties are not themselves physical.   So in what sense are physical properties 'physical'? It seems we must say that physical properties are physical in virtue of being properties of physical items.  And what would the latter be?  Well, tables and chairs, and their parts, and their parts, all the way down to celluose molecules, and their atomic parts, and so on, together with the fields and forces pertaining to them, with chemistry and physics being the ultimate authorities as to what exactly counts as physical. 

So I'm not saying that a physical property is a property of a physical thing where a physical thing is a thing having physical properties.  That would be circular.  I am saying that a physical property is a property of a physical item where physical items are (i) obvious meso- and macro-particulars such as tables and turnips and planets, and (ii) the much less obvious micro-particulars that natural science tells us all these things are ultimately made of.  Taking a stab at a definition:

D1. P is a physical property =df P is such that, if it is instantiated, then it is instantiated by a physical item.

Admirably latitudinarian, this definition allows a property to be physical even if no actual item possesses it.  This is is as it should be.  

4. Now if a physical property is a property of physical items, then a mental property is a property of mental items.  After all, no mental property is itself a mind.  No mental property feels anything, or thinks about any thing or wants anything. Just as no physical property is a body, no mental property is a mind.  So, in parallel with (D1), we have

D2.  P is a mental property =df P is such that, if it is instantiated, then it is instantiated by a mental item.

(D2) implies that if there are  any instantiated mental properties, there there are irreducibly mental items, i.e., minds or mental subjects.  Now there are instantiated mental properties.  Therefore, there are irreducibly mental subjects.  For all I have shown, these subjects might be momentary entities, hence not substances in the full sense of the term, where this implies being a continuant.  The main point, however, is that what instantiates mental properties must be irreducibly mental and so cannot be physical.  Therefore, brains could not have mental properties.

This flies in the face of much current opinion.  So let's think about it some more.  If you countenance irreducibly mental properties being instantiated by brains, do you also countenance irreducibly physical properties being instantiated by nonphysical items such as minds or abstracta?  Do you consider it an open question whether some numbers have mass, density, velocity?  How fast, and in what direction, is that mathematical function moving?  If physical properties cannot be instantiated by nonphysical items, but mental properties can be instantited by nonmental items, then we are owed an explanation of this asymmetry.  It is difficult to see what that explanation could be.

Conclusion

5. My argument, then, is this:

a) If there are any instantiated mental properties, then there are irreducibly mental subjects.
b) There are some instantiated mental properties.
Therefore
c)  There are irreducibly mental subjects.

(a) rests on (D2).

The attempt to combine property dualism with substance monism is a failure.  If all substances are physical, then all properties of these substances are physical.  If, on the other hand, there are both mental and physical properties, then there must be both mental and physical subjects, if not substances.  A physical item can no more instantiate a mental property than a mental item can instantiate a physical property. 

Legal’s Mate Via the Smith-Morra Gambit

The summer of '95 found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A lovely place hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. The largesse of the American taxpayer had made it possible for me to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Virginia. One dark and rainy night, wearied by philosophy of science arcana, I stumbled into the C-ville chess club, sat down opposite an old man, and uncorked this miniature:

 Vallicella – Oldtimer, Charlottesville, 1995

1. e4 c5 2. d4 cd 3. c3 dc 4. Nxc3 e5 5. Nf3 d6 6. Bc4 Bg4 7. Nxe5 Bxd1 8. Bxf7+ Ke2 9. Nd5 mate.

Of course, you knew about Legal's mate. But did you know it could be reached via the Smith-Morra gambit?

More on Trishna

A reader usefully supplements my post Reininger Contra Buddhism:

Dear Professor Vallicella,

With reference to your recent post 'Reininger Contra Buddhism' you might be intrigued by chapter 5 of D. T. Suzuki's Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist where he talks about trishna at length and states:

"The later Buddhists realized that tṛiṣṇā was what constituted human nature–in fact, everything and anything that at all comes into existence–and that to deny tṛiṣṇā was committing suicide; to escape from tṛiṣṇā was the height of contradiction or a deed of absolute impossibility; and that the very thing that makes us wish to deny or to escape from tṛiṣṇā was tṛiṣṇā itself. Therefore, all that we could do for ourselves, or rather all that tṛiṣṇā could do for itself, was to make it turn to itself, to purify itself from all its encumbrances and defilements, by means of transcendental knowledge (prajñā). The later Buddhists then let tṛiṣṇā work on in its own way without being impeded by anything else. Tṛiṣṇā or "thirst" or "craving" then comes to be known as mahākaruṇā, or "absolute compassion," which they consider the essence of Buddhahood and Bodhisattvahood." (Section XI)

I suspect that his unusual interpretation was possibly influenced by his documented reading of Eckhart and Swedenborg, as much as any Buddhist sources, but I found it interesting to read such a famous Buddhist figure interpreting trishna in this way.

Thank you for your excellent blog.

Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms Have the Same Reference?

I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.'  To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example,  replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain…, he isn't claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

 The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality.  And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states.  Well, I have my doubts . . . .

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

The basic idea is that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweisen). Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.  

Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)

It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.

Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.

The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.

Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)

In vino veritas.

Malcolm on Mysterianism

No, not Norman Malcolm, our Malcolm:

Re: your recent post on Mysterianism, it seems that the central paragraph is this:

And so it is with the mysterian materialist. He bids me accept propositions that as far as I can tell are not propositions at all. A proposition is a sense, but the 'propositions' he bids me accept make no sense. For example, he wants me to accept that my present memories of Boston are all identical to states of my brain. That makes no sense. Memory states are intentional states: they have content. No physical state has content. So no intentional state could be a physical state. The very idea is unintelligible. Where there are no thoughts one can always mouth words. So one can mouth the words, 'Memories are in the head' or 'Thoughts are literally brain states.' But one cannot attach a noncontradictory thought to the words.

 
The hinge of it is the assertion "No physical state has content."

But isn't this itself the crux of the mysterian materialist's position? He will dispute your assertion, and reply that it appears that some very specific physical states (or perhaps more accurately, physical processes), namely those that arise in the uniquely complex material objects in our skulls, do in fact have content, and just how that is managed is what we do not yet understand. Your impossibility is his actuality, and so his mystery.

You are right that the mysterian materialist will maintain that some physical states do have content.  But he also maintains that we will never be able to understand how this is possible.  Thus your 'not yet understand' is not accurate. As Colin McGinn, head honcho of the mysterian materialists, puts it, "My thesis is that consciousness depends on an unknowable natural property of the brain." (The Mysterious Flame, p. 28,emphasis added)  Someone who holds that with the advance of neuroscience we will eventually solve the mind-body problem is not a mysterian.

The mysterian materialist position is that mental activity just is brain activity.  If that is actually so, then it is possibly so whether or not we can render intelligible to ourselves how it is so.  For McGinn, we will never render this intelligible because it is impossible to do so.  The mind-body problem is "perfectly genuine" (212) but has never been solved and is indeed insoluble because "our minds are not equipped to solve it, rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory or evolution by natural selection." (212)

You  are right: my impossibility is his actuality.  For him, the proposition that some physical states have content is true but a mystery.  So he asserts what he takes to be a well-defined and possibly true proposition — *Some physical states have content* — but also asserts that the question of how this proposition is possible will not ever, and cannot ever, be answered due to the limitations of our cognitive architecture.

My claim is that there is no well-defined proposition before us, or rather that there is no proposition before us that could be true.  There is the sentence 'Some physical states have content' but this sentence expresses no proposition  that could be true.  It's a little like 'Some color is a sound.'  That sentence does not express a proposition that could be true.  I don't believe you would credit the sort of  mysterian who maintains that it is true that some colors are sounds, and therefore possibly true, despite our inability to explain how it is true.  You would laugh out of the room the guy who said it was true but a mystery.  You would say, 'Get out of here, you are talking nonsense.'

How do we know it is nonsense?  We know this by thinking attentively about colors and sounds and by grasping that a color is not the sort of item that could be a sound.  Similalrly, we know it is nonsense to identify a memory of Boston with a brain state by thinking attentively of both and grasping that the one is not the sort of item that could be identical to the other.  (Because the one has content while the other doesn't so the two cannot be identical by the Indiscernibility of Identicals.)

Moving from content to qualia, I would say 'This smell of burnt garlic is identical to some brain state of mine' is on all fours with 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.'  It can't be so, and for a very deep reason: the very electro-chemical and other vocabulary (axons, dendrites, synapses, diffusion of sodium ions, voltage differentials, etc.) cannot be meaningfully combined with the vocabulary of phenomenology..  When you combine them you get nonsense.  The resulting propositions — if you want to call them that — cannot be true.

Isn't "No physical state has content", in this context at least, question-begging?

I don't believe I am simply begging the question.  It is more complicated than that.  It may help if I lay out both the mysterian and my argument.

Mysterian Argument

1. Mental activity is just brain activity. (Naturalist assumption)
2. We cannot understand how mental states could be identical to brain states.
Therefore
3. This inability to understand does not reflect an objective impossibility but an irremediable limitation in our cognitive architecture:  our minds are so structured that we will never be able to understand the mind-body link.

My Argument

2. We cannot understand how mental states could be identical to brain states.
~3. This inability reflects an objective impossibility.
Therefore
~1. Mental activity is not just brain activity.

The deep underlying issue here seems to be this:  Is our inability to understand how such-and-such is broadly-logically possible a sufficient reason for denying that such-and-such is objectively broadly-logically possible? To put it another way, the issue is whether there could be true mysteries, where a mystery is a proposition that by our best lights must appear either to be or to entail a broadly-logical contradiction.

This issue lies deeper than the naturalism issue.

A Contradictory Being Who Issues Contradictory Demands

We want a subordinate, a friend, a spouse to do our bidding, to embody in action our own intention, but also to show initiative, to anticipate our unstated wants and needs. Not content to command the other's body, making of it an extension of our will, we want also to command the other's freedom, making of  it an instrument of our freedom.

I say to wifey: Bring me back a case of Fat Tire Ale. Upon her return,  no ale is in evidence. Inquiring why not, I am told that it was unavailable. "Why then did you not fetch me a case of Sam Adam's Boston Ale?"

"Because that is not what you asked for, and had I brought back Sam Adam's you would have complained that it was not Fat Tire."

Reininger Contra Buddhism

Robert Reininger, Philosophie des Erlebens, p. 227:

   Gegen Buddhismus: Trishna nicht ertoeten (ausloeschen), sondern durch
   Ueberhoehung in den Dienst des Vernunftwillens stellen — sonst fehlt
   diesem die lebendige Kraft, die nur der Daseinsbejahung eignet (A 751,
   1932).

   Against Buddhism: Trishna is not to be killed or extinguished, but
   elevated and placed in the service of the rational will. Without this
   sublimation, the rational will lacks the vital force appropriate to the
   affirmation of existence. (tr. BV)
  

Trishna is Sanskrit for desire, thirst. Central to Buddhism is the notion that the suffering and general unsatisfactoriness of life is rooted in desire, and that salvation is to be had by the  extirpation of desire. Reininger's point is one with which I wholly  agree. The goal ought not be the extinction of desire, but its sublimation. Desire as such is not the problem; the problem is misdirected desire. Properly channeled and sublimated, desire provides the motive force for the rational will.

See my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

Different People to Different People

We are different people to different people, and different people are different people to us.

…………..

No aphorism can comment on itself, or justify itself, on pain of ceasing to be an aphorism.  But what I am now writing is not part of the above aphorism.

What makes a good aphorism?  A good aphorism is pithy, one or two sentences.  Three at most.  It must lay bare an important truth. A saying clever but false is not a good aphorism. And the same goes for clever but unintelligible.  A good aphorism should have 'literary merit' whatever exactly that is.  I suggest mine does have some, though you are free to disagree.  Note the play on 'different.'  The formulation exploits the ambiguity of 'different' as between numerical and qualitative senses.  We are qualitatively different people to numerically different people, and numerically different people are qualitatively different to us.  Had I written the thing just like that it would have been clear but clunky and devoid of whatever literary value it has.

The thought expressed is not only true but important in the sense that bearing it in mind can help one negotiate the social world with equanimity.  We meet people who like us, people who dislike us, and people who are indifferent.  Some can't see our faults for our virtues; other are virtues for our faults.  One can be discouraged and even depressed at the hostility one arouses in others.  One better takes this all in stride if one never forgets that we are:

Different people to different people.