Category: Mind

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. 

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.

The Mysterian Materialist Speaks

There are different sorts of materialism about the mind, among them eliminative materialism, identity-materialism, and functionalism.  There is also mysterian materialism. Here is a little speech by a mysterian materialist:

Look, we are just complex physical systems, and as such wholly understandable in natural-scientific terms, if not now in full, then in the future.  And yet we think and are conscious.  Therefore, we are wholly material beings who think and are conscious.  We  cannot understand how this is possible. But it is actual, hence possible, whether or not we understand or even can understand how it is possible.  It's a mystery, but true nonetheless.

What motivates this mysterian view?  There is first of all the deep conviction shared by many today that there is exactly one world, this physical world, that we are parts of it, that nothing in us is not part of it, and that it and us are wholly understandable in terms of the natural sciences.  This naturalist conviction implies that there is nothing special about us, that we are continuous with the rest of nature.  We are nothing special in that we have no higher origin or destiny.  We are mortal, like everything else that lives, and anything (conscience, consciousness, ability to reason, sensus divinitatis, etc.) that suggests otherwise is susceptible of a wholly naturalistic explanation.  Part of why people embrace the naturalist conviction is that it puts paid to central tenets of old-time religion: God, the soul, post-mortem rewards and punishments, the libertarian freedom of the will, man's being an image and likeness of God, etc.  So hostility to religion is certainly, for some, part of the psychological  (if not logical) motivation for the acceptance of the naturalist conviction.

Now take the naturalist conviction and conjoin it to the intellectually honest admission that we have no idea at all how it is so much as possible for a wholly material being to think and enjoy conscious states.  The conjunction of the Conviction and the Admission generates a mysterian position according to which one affirms as true a proposition that one cannot understand as possibly true, namely, the proposition that we are wholly material beings  susceptible of exhaustive natural-scientific explanation who nonetheless think, feel, love, make and feel subject to moral demands, etc.

This mysterianism is an epistemological position  according to which our very make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious.  The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us.

Well, this mysterianism is certainly to be preferred to an eliminativism which argues from the unintellibility of a material thing's thinking to  the nonexistence of its thinking.  But eliminativism is a lunatic position best left to the exceedingly intelligent lunatics who dreamt it up.

The mysterian position cannot be so readily dismissed.  But surely there is something very strange about maintaining that there are true mysteries.  If a proposition either is or entails a broadly-logical contradiction, then I wouldn't know what I had before my mind if I had such a proposition before my mind.  And if I didn't know exactly which proposition I had before my mind, I wouldn't know exactly which proposition I was claiming was both true and mysterious.

Before I can take a position with respect to a proposition I must know what the hell that proposition is.

I count four positions or attitudes one can take toward a proposition: accept as true, reject as false, suspend judgment as to truth-value, practice epoché , ἐποχή.  Pithier still: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withdraw.  The first three are self-explanatory.  By Withdraw I mean: take no position on whether or not there is even a proposition (ein Gedanke, a complete thought) before one's mind.  (The notion is derived via Benson Mates from Sextus Empiricus.)  Withdrawal goes farther than Suspension.  To suspend is to refuse to accept or reject a well-defined proposition while accepting that there is such a proposition before one's mind.  In the state of Withdrawal I take no position on whether or not there is a well-defined proposition before my mind.

Example.  A Trinitarian says, 'There is exactly one God in three divine persons.'  Studying the doctrine I come to the conclusion that I can attach no definite sense to it on the ground that it seems to me to entail one or more logical contradictions.   That is not a case of rejection or of suspension; it is a case of epoché.  I 'bracket' (to borrow a term now from Husserl) two questions: the question as to truth-value, and the more fundamental question as to whether or not there is even a proposition (a unified, coherent, sense-structure) before my mind as opposed to an incoherent, un-unified bunch of word-senses.

Suppose you say to me, "Snow is white and snow is not white."  Being the charitable fellow that I am known to be, I would not churlishly jump to impute to you the assertion of a contradiction.  I would take you to be using a contradictory form of words to express a non-contradictory proposition, perhaps, the proposition that snow is white where I didn't relieve myself, but not white where I did.  Or something like that.  The time-honored method of showing an apparent contradiction to be merely apparent is by making a distinction in respect of time, or respect, or word sense.

But if someone insists that he means literally that snow is white and snow is not white where there is no distinction in respect of time, respect, or sense of the word 'white,' then I wouldn't know what the content of the assertion was.  I wouldn't know which proposition my interlocutor was trying get across to me.  For if my interlocutor was otherwise rational,  the principle of charity would forbid me from imputing a contradiction to him.  I would have to practice withdrawal.

And so it is with the mysterian materialist.  He bids me accept propositions that as far as 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.

No doubt there is an illusion of sense.  There is nothing syntactically wrong with 'Thoughts are brain states' or 'Sensory qualia are physical features of the brain.'  And the individual words have meaning.  What's more, the words taken together seem to convey a coherent thought in the way in which 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination' does not seem to convey a coherent thought.  But when the meaning is made explicit, the unintelligibility becomes manifest.

My thesis is that the mysterian thesis that these unintelligible claims are true but mysterious in that they cannot be understood by us to be so much as possibly true, is itself unintelligible.  For again, what is the identity of the proposition that I am supposed toaccept as both true and mysterious?

Mysterianism is the conjunction of the naturalist conviction  and the intellectually honest admission that no one has any idea of how to account for consciousness in natural-scientific terms.  Given that mysterianism is untenable for the reason I adduced, the reasonable thing to do is to jettison the naturalist conviction which, after all, is merely a conviction, a deep-seated belief that is just happening to to be getting a lot of play these days.

Here is a brief explanation of mysterianism with some references.

Pascal Again on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience

BLAISE%20PASCAL%20PORTAIt is surprising what different people will read into and read out of a text.  A reader challenged me to find a valid argument in Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57): "What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial."

Rising to the challenge, I offered this:

1. We are sentient: we feel pleasure, pain, etc. (suppressed premise)
2. Nothing material could be sentient.
Therefore
3. As subjects of sentient states we are not material beings.

 

This is a valid argument, hence not a non-sequitur, as my correspondent had claimed.   (Non sequitur is Latin for 'it does not follow.')

There is no doubt that we have material bodies.  And there is no doubt that many physical pains and pleasures can be assigned more or less determinate bodily locations,  typically where some damage or stimulation has occurred or is occuring.  Those are 'Moorean facts.'  As data of the problem they are not in dispute.  The question, however, is whether that which feels pleasure and pain, etc., call it the subject of sentient states, is material or immaterial in nature.  Pascal thinks it obvious that it is not.  I don't think it is obvious one way or the other.  But I do maintain that there are very good reasons to hold that the subject of sentient states is immaterial.  To put it another way, I don't think it is obvious that materialism about the mind is false.  But I do think it is reasonably rejectable.

My correspondent subsequently suggested the following argumentative reconstruction of the above passage:
 
1. We feel pleasures, pains, etc.
2. We do not feel these sensations "in our hand or arm or flesh or blood."
3. Therefore, not in any part of our body or in our body as a whole.
4. So, if not in our body (the "material" part of us), then in an "immaterial" part of us (mind or spirit).
5. So, An immaterial part of us must exist as the only part of us in which pleasures, pains, etc can reside.
 
The trouble with this reconstruction is that it is uncharitable: it ascribes to the genius Pascal a premise he could not possibly maintain, namely, (2).  (2) is plainly false, and so not reasonably imputed to any half-way intelligent person, let alone to one of the most powerful minds of the 17th century.  "I take it that Pascal meant to suggest that we don't experience pains and pleasures as located in various parts of our body. But we do, all the time."
 
But surely Pascal in not denying the obvious, namely, that we say things like, 'Doc, I've got a pain on the left side of my left knee.'  It is a plain fact that we experience physical pains and pleasures as located in various part of our body: toothaches in a tooth, headaches in or at the head, etc. 
 
The point, however, is that the pleasures and pains as felt, as experienced, as data of consciousness, cannot be identified with anything physical.  It may sound paradoxical, but it is true: physical pains and pleasures are mental in nature.  My patella is not mental in nature, nor is my chondromalacia patellae, nor are it causes.  But the pain I feel is mental in nature.  And it is clearly  not literally in the knee, or literally in any part of my body or brain.  'In' is a spatial word.  You will not find my knee pain literally in my knee or literally in my brain.  What you will find are the physical causes of the pain.
 
That's one point.  Related to it is the point that the subject (that which feels them and that in which they inhere) of these sensory qualia is also irreducibly mental in nature.  (No doubt the transition from the first point to the second is subject to Humean scruples, but that is whole other post.)
 
Now it may not be obvious that Pascal is right to maintain that pains and their subjects are irreducibly mental in nature, and thus immaterial.  But I think it is perfectly obvious that this is what Pascal is maintaining., and that what he is maintaining is in no way ruled out by any obvious fact.   My judgment, of course, is not based on that one slender quoted passage but on having read the whole of Pascal's magnificent book of Thoughts.  

Pascal on the Subject of Experience: A Non Sequitur?

I recently quoted Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57): "What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial."

 A reader comments, "Doesn't P. 108 strike you as a hopeless non-sequitur, if we take it as an argument at all? Just try to recast it as a valid inference."

If I thought that the aphorism embodied a non sequitur, I would not have approvingly quoted it.  So let me rise to the challenge and present Pascal's thought in the form of a valid argument.

But let's first note that  the first question in the Pascal quotation is genuine while the second is rhetorical.  The second, therefore, is a statement  in interrogative dress.  The second question expresses the proposition that nothing material is the subject of sentient states.  Needless to say, Pascal is not talking about just hand, arm, flesh, and blood.  They are but examples of any physical part of the body where 'body' covers brain as well.

But does the passage embody an argument?   The 'must' in the third sentence suggests that it does. So let's interpret the passage as expressing an enthymematic argument. The argument could be made explicit as follows:

1. We are sentient: we feel pleasure, pain, etc.  (suppressed premise)
2. Nothing material could be sentient.
Therefore
3. As subjects of sentient states we are not material beings.

Clarificatory note: (2) is to be understood as saying that nothing material could be the ultimate subject of sentient states, the ultimate bearer or possessor of such states.  This is compatible with the admission that, in a secondary sense, the body of a sentient being is also sentient.  (Compare indicative sentences and the propositions they express.  That propositions are the primary truth-bearers does not prevent us from saying that sentences are in a secondary sense either true or false.) 

The above is a valid argument: the conclusion follows from the premises.  Hence the Pascal passage, interpreted as I have interpreted, does not embody a non sequitur, let alone a "hopeless" non sequitur.

Of course, a much more interesting question is whether we have good reason to accept the premises.  Since the first is self-evident, the soundness of the argument rides on the second.   Now some will say that the argument begs the question at the second premise.  But that depends on what exactly 'begging the question' amounts to.  Let's not go there.  And please note that begging the question is an informal fallacy, whereas accusations of non sequitur question the formal validity of arguments.  I will cheerfully concede, however, that the anti-materialist must support (2): he cannot just proclaim it obvious or self-evident as he can in the case of (1).

I will conclude by pointing out that although (2) is not self-evident, neither is its negation.  So this is a point on which reasonable dispute is possible.  This is a live issue.  (That some do not consider it such is not to the point.) Subsequent posts will examine the case for the immateriality of the subject of experience.   

What am I?

Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57):

What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.

Is it my eyeglasses that see yonder mountain? No, they are merely part of the instrumentality of vision. Is it my eyes that see the mountain, or any part of the eye (retina, cornea, etc.)? The optic nerves or the visual cortex? All of this stuff hooked together? If you say yes, then what accounts for the unity of the visual experience? Eyeglasses, eyes, and all the rest are merely parts of the instrumentality of visual consciousness, its physical substratum. Not eye, but I see the mountain. What am I? Arguably, if not obviously, something immaterial.

Zombies and Other Minds

 

 Zombies 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zombies and Other Minds are both well-known philosophical topics, though Zombies are 'hotter': the heyday of Other Minds debates was back in the '50s and '60s. How are they related? Not by identity, though some do confuse the two topics. They are distinct in that Other Minds belongs to epistemology whereas Zombies belongs to ontology. Let me see if I can work this out in detail.

 1. What is a zombie? 

You will have gathered that a zombie is a creature of philosophical fiction conjured up to render graphic a philosophical issue and to throw certain questions in the philosophy of mind into relief.    A zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness.  Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish as in the picture above.)  When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.)  I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie.  But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion.  His denial of qualia is not evidence.  It might just be evidence of his being a sophist.  More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier. 

2. Where do zombies come from?  

Zombies surface within the context of discussions of physicalism. Physicalism is an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about what ultimately exists,  what exists in the most fundamental sense of 'exists.'  The physicalist is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties. What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. This implies that all mental facts supervene upon physical facts.  So if a being is conscious, then this fact about it supervenes upon, is determined by, its physical properties.  This implies that there cannot be two beings, indiscernible with respect to all physical properties, such that the one is conscious while the other is not.  This in turn rules out the possibility of zombies.  For, if physicalism is true, once the physical properties are fixed, the mental properties are also automatically fixed.

3. What useful work do zombies do? 

If zombies are metaphysically (broadly logically) possible, then physicalism is false.  That's their job: to serve as counterexamples to physicalism.  For if zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation: a zombie has all the same physical properties as its indiscernible non-zombie twin, but is not conscious.  The possibility of zombies implies that consciousness is non-supervenient, something in addition to a being's physical makeup.  So one anti-physicalist argument goes like this:

1. If physicalism is true, then every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation. 
2. If zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
3. Zombies are possible.
Therefore
4. Physicalism is not true.

This is a valid argument the soundness of which rides on premise (3).  Here is where the fight will come.  Without questioning the validity of the argument — physicalists after all are benighted but not stupid — the physicalist will run the argument in reverse.  He will deny the conclusion and then deny (3).  In effect, he will argue from (1) & (2) & (~4)  to (~3).  He will deny the very possibility of zombies.  He will insist that anything that behaves just like a conscious person and has the 'innards' of a conscious person JUST IS a conscious person.

Now I find that absurd: it is a denial of that subjectivity which is properly accessed only via the irreducible first-person singular point of view.  Nevertheless, I will have a devil of a time budging my materialist-functionalist interlocutor.  Materialists are bloody objectivists: they think that anythng that is not objectively accessible in the third-person way just isn't there at all, or it if is 'there,' is not to be taken seriously.

Can one support (3) in a manner so compelling as to convince the recalcitrant materialist?  After all, (3) is not self-evident.  If it were self-evident, then we would have a 'knock-down' argument against physicalism.  But there are few if any  'knock-down' (absolutely compelling)  arguments in philosophy. 

Now zombies are certainly conceivable.  But it is not clear whether conceivability entails metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility, which is in play in (3).    So it is not clear whether the conceivability of zombies is a compelling  reason to reject physicalism.  The question of the relation between conceivability and possibility is a difficult one.  There is some discussion of this in the conceivability category.

The truth of physicalism is not my main concern this Halloween.  My main concern is merely to explain the role of the zombie Gedankenexperiment.  The point is that zombies figure in discussions of the ontological thesis of physicalism.  If zombies are possible, then physicalism is false.

4.  Zombies and Other Minds

So what is the difference between the Zombie question and the Other Minds question?  I'll have to think about this in greater depth, but here are some 'shoot-from-the hip' remarks of the sort one can get away with on a weblog.

Suppose Dennett is a zombie as I suspect.  The poor creature has no inner life, no interiority. Since he has no mind in the sense of 'mind' in which I know that I have a mind, he cannot be an other mind to me or to any other minded individual.  If an organism has no mind, then no question can arise as to how one knows or rationally believes that it has a mind, nor any question as to how one knows nor rationally believes that it is in one state of mind rather than another.  It is these epistemological questions that arise within the context of discussions of Other Minds.

As I see it, if physicalism is true, then we are all zombies.  We are all stumbling around 'in the dark.'  But if so,  then the epistemological problems associated with the Other Minds debate should have fairly easy solutions.  If verbal and non-verbal behavior is constitutive of mentality, then I should be able to know that you are skeptical or angry or bored or fearful just by looking at your face, observing your 'body language,' and listening to your words.  External criteria would suffice.  But if we are not zombies, and physicalism is false, then the epistemological questions regain their urgency. 

Whatever the exact details, the Zombie and Other Minds questions are not to be conflated.

The Problem of the Existence of Consciousness

I tend to the view that all philosophical problems can be represented as aporetic polyads.  What's more, I maintain that philosophical problems ought to be so represented.  You haven't begun to philosophize until you have a well-defined puzzle, a putative inconsistency of plausibilities.  When you have an aporetic polyad on the table you have something to think your teeth into.  (An interesting and auspicious typo, that; I shall let it stand.)

Consider the problem of the existence of consciousness.  Nicholas Maxwell  formulates it as follows: "Why does sentience or consciousness exist at all?"  The trouble with this formulation is that it invites the retort:  Why not?  The question smacks of gratuitousness.  Why raise it? To remove the felt gratuitiousness a motive has to be supplied for posing the question. Now a most excellent motive is contradiction-avoidance.  If a set of plausibilities form an inconsistent set, then we have a problem.  For we cannot abide a contradiction.  Philosophers love a paradox, but they hate a contradiction.  So I suggest we put the problem of the existence of consciousness as follows:

1. Consciousness (sentience) exists.
2. Consciousness is contingent: given that it exists it might not have.
3. If x contingently exists, then x has an explanation of its existence in terms of a y distinct from x.
4. Consciousness has no explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.

A tetrad of plausibilities.  Each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance.  Unfortunately, this foursome is logically inconsistent: the conjunction of any three limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (1) and (2) and (3) entails the negation of (4).  So the limbs cannot all be true.  But they are all very plausible.  Therein lies the problem.  Which one ought we reject to remove the contradiction?

Note the superiority of my aporetic formulation to Maxwell's formulation.  On my formulation we have a very clear problem that cries out for a solution.  But if I merely ask, 'Why does consciousness exist?' there is no clear problem.  You could retort, 'Why shouldn't it exist?' 'What's the problem?'  There is a problem because the existence of conbsciousness conflicts with other things we take for granted.

(1) is absolutely datanic and so undeniable.  If some crazy eliminativist were to deny (1) I would show him the door and give him the boot.  (Life is too short for discussions with lunatics.)

(4) is exceedingly plausible. To explain consciousness in terms of itself would be circular, hence no explanation.  So it has to be explained, if it can be explained, in terms of something distinct from it.  Since abstract objects cannot be invoked to explain concrete consciousness, consciousness, if it can be explained, must be explained in physical and physiological and chemical and biological terms. But this is also impossible as Maxwell makes clear using a version of the 'knowledge argument' made popular by T. Nagel and F. Jackson:

But physics, and that part of natural science in principle re-ducible to physics, cannot conceivably predict and explain fully the mental, or experiential, aspect of brain processes. Being blind from birth—or being deprived of ever having oneself experienced visual sensations—cannot in itself prevent one from understanding any part of physics. It cannot prevent one from understanding the physics of colour, light, physiology of colour perception and discrimination, just as well as any nor-mally sighted person. In order to understand physical concepts, such as mass, force, wavelength, energy, spin, charge, it is not necessary to have had the experience of any particular kind of sensation, such as the visual sensation of colour. All predictions of physics must also have this feature. In order to understand what it is for a poppy to be red, however, it is necessary to have experienced a special kind of sensation at some time in one’s life, namely the visual sensation of redness. A person blind from birth, who has never experienced any visual sensation, cannot know what redness is, where redness is the perceptual property, what we (normally sighted) see and experience, and not some physical correlate of this, light of such and wave-lengths, or the molecular structure of the surface of an object which causes it to absorb and reflect light of such and such wavelengths. It follows that no set of physical statements, however comprehensive, can predict that a poppy is red, or that a person has the visual experience of redness. Associated with neurological processes going on in our brains, there are mental or experiential features which lie irredeemably beyond the scope of physical description and explanation.

(2) is also exceedingly plausible: how could consciousness (sentience)  exist necessarily?  But (3), whichis a versionof the principle of sufficient reason, is also very plausible despite the glib asseverations of those who think quantum mechanics provides counterexamples to it. 

So what will it be?  Which of the four limbs will you reject? 

I am tempted to say that the problem is genuine but insoluble, that the problem is an aporia in the strongest sense of the term: a conceptual impasse, an intellectual knot that our paltry minds cannot untie.

But this invites the metaphilosophical response that all genuine problems are soluble.  Thus arises a metaphilosophical puzzle that can be set forth as an aporetic triad:

5. Only soluble problems are genuine.
6. The problem of the existence of consciousness is not soluble.
7.  The problem of the existence of consciousness is genuine.

This too is an inconsistent set.  But each limb is plausible.  Which will you reject? 

Could the Mind be the Brain?

Few philosophers nowadays would maintain the bald thesis that the mind is identical to the brain,  but it is a view that one  hears among the laity. So it is worth refuting, this being a blog that I hope is somewhat accessible to the proverbial 'educated layman.'  (One of my motives in starting it over seven years ago was to offer free philosophy lessons, thereby doing my bit to enlighten the masses and counteract, if ever so slightly, their immersion in panem et circenses.)  But note: proving that the mind cannot be identical to the brain does not amount to proving that the mind is capable of existing apart from some material embodiment or other.

So my question is this: Are mind and brain identical? To answer the question one must know what one means by 'identity.' I mean strict numerical sameness. Consider the sole of my boot and the print it leaves on the trail. Are boot sole and boot print identical? Well, if you permit the phrase 'qualitatively identical,' then they are qualitatively identical, identical in respect of at least one quality, namely, having the same shape. But they are obviously numerically distinct. Count 'em: one, two. You could say that there is a correlation between the two. But correlation is not identity. If x and y are correlated, then they are precisely not numerically identical but numerically distinct. Correlation entails numerical distinctness. 

So don't confuse qualitative with numerical identity, and don't confuse identity with correlation. That's the beginning of wisdom, but only the beginning.

I now introduce a principle known in the trade as the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Stated roughly, it says that if x and y are numerically identical, then they share all properties. (A precise formulation would have to address the question as to what exactly counts as a property.  Does 'is identical to Obama' pick out a property?)  The Indiscernibility of Identicals is not only true, but  necessarily true in the sense that it is impossible that x and y differ property-wise if they are numerically identical.

Given the self-evident necessary truth of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, if my mind is identical to my brain, then my mind and my brain share all properties: everything true of the one is true of the other, and vice versa. But it is clear that they do not share all properties. The brain is a physical thing with a definite mass, weight, location, size, shape. One can inject dyes into various of its subregions. One can insert electrodes into it. One can remove and discard parts of it. One can add parts.  I can literally give you a piece of my brain. (And you hope I won't.)  But can I literally give you a piece of my mind? Does my mind have a weight in grams? Is it  divisible?  Do my thoughts have a location or a volume?  if one thought has a second as its object, as when I reflect, is the second thought located above the second?  How far above?  Can we intelligibly speak of the voltage drop across a thought?

It is true that my mind is now wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. But it is either false or makes no sense to say that my brain is now wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. It follows from these facts alone that my mind and my brain cannot be identical.  The argument is very simple, and because so simple, very compelling (simplex sigillum veri):

If x and y differ property-wise, then x is not y.
Mind and brain differ in respect of the property of being wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. 
Ergo,
Mind is not brain.

The most we could say is that a proper part of the brain is thinking about the mind-body problem. Not everything the brain does is concerned with consciousness or with thinking. The parts that control   cardiac and respiratory functions have nothing directly to do with mental activity. Connected with this is the fact that, even if every mental event is a brain event, not every brain event is a mental event. A blockage of a brain-internal blood vessel is a brain event, but not one that is mental. The brain has perhaps 100 different structures and some of these such as the vascular and bony structures have nothing directly to do with mental phenomena. In simple terms, the brain cannot function without oxygenated blood pumped through a system of blood vessels, but those processes are not conscious   processes.  There is nothing mental about them.

So it is clear that the mind cannot be identical to the brain. If that identity held, then every brain state would be mental, which is obviously false. But what is wrong with holding the converse, namely, that every mental state is a brain state? 

A similar indiscernibility objection can be made.  If every mental state is a brain state, then every belief (e.g. my belief that Boston is on the Charles River) is a brain state.  But beliefs have properties that brain states cannot have.  One is the property of being either true or false; another is intentionality.  So no belief is a brain state.  But then there are mental states that are not brain states.

Here is another way to look at it.  For reasons already given, it is obvious that there are brain states that are not mental states.  So if there are mental states that are brain states, then there must be some properties that distinguish these brain states that are mental states from the brain states that are not mental states.  These properties will have to be specifically mental: no physical property could do the trick.  But then, applying  the Indiscernibility of Identicals once again, any brain state that was initially supposed to be a mental state would be seen to  have a property that would entail its non-identity witha brain state.  Think about it.

Three Dualisms: Simple, Compound, and Hylomorphic

This post continues my critique of hylomorphic dualism in the philosophy of mind. (See Hylomorphism category.) I will argue that hylomorphic dualism inherits one of the difficulties of compound substance dualism. But to understand the latter, we need to contrast it with simple or pure substance dualism. By 'substance' I mean primary substance, prote ousia in roughly Aristotle's sense. (But I hope to avoid exegetical bickering.) S is a primary substance if and only if S is broadly logically capable of independent existence.

Feser Defends Hylomorphic Dualism Against My Criticism

I want to thank Edward Feser for responding to my recent post, A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist.  And while you are at Ed's site, please read his outstanding entry, So you think you understand the cosmological argument?, an entry with which I agree entirely.

Ed writes,

Naturally, since I am a hylemorphic dualist, I completely disagree with Bill here. Let’s start with the last charge — that hylemorphic dualism “make[s] an exception in the case of the human soul [that] is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.” That the view is not “unmotivated and ad hoc” is easily shown. Bill himself would surely acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for hylemorphism, even if he doesn’t accept that view himself. He would also acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for dualism, a view he is sympathetic with. But then he should also acknowledge that someone could find both sorts of arguments convincing. And in that case he should acknowledge that someone could have good philosophical reasons for thinking that there must be some way to combine hylemorphism and dualism.

I agree that there are serious arguments for hylomorphism, and I especially agree that there are strong arguments for dualism.  And I agree that someone who finds both hylomorphism and dualism persuasive will have a motivation to try to combine them by showing how the special-metaphysical thesis of dualism can be accommodated within the general-metaphysical scheme of hylomorphism. 

But if one has good arguments for position A and good arguments for position B, it doesn't follow that one has good arguments for the combined position A + B.  For there may be a good reason why the two positions cannot be combined.  And so it is in the present case.  The case for hylomorphism and the case for dualism do not add up to a case for  hylomorphic dualism.  So while I agree with Ed that one who has good reason to be a hylomorphist and good reason to be a dualist will be powerfully motivated to combine the two positions, I do not agree that the reasons for hylomorphism and dualism, respectively, add up to reasons for the hylomorphic dualism.  A psychological motivation is not the same as a justificatory reason. 

Ed continues:

Nor, contrary to what Bill implies, is Aquinas somehow departing radically from Aristotle. For Aristotle too was committed both to hylemorphism and to the view that the intellect is immaterial — indeed, to the view that the active intellect is immortal. To be sure, that does not by itself show that Aristotle’s views are identical to or entail Aquinas’s; the Averroists took Aristotle’s position in a very different direction, and contemporary commentators often find it simply puzzling. But the reason they do — namely, that it seems odd to say both that the soul is the form of the body and that one of its capacities is somehow separable from the body — is similar to the reason Bill finds Aquinas’s position puzzling. Needless to say, Aristotle had no Christian theological ax to grind; he was simply following the philosophical arguments where they led. There is no reason to accuse Aquinas of doing anything different, and it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that the way to harmonize the various aspects of Aristotle’s position is the way Aquinas does. That does not mean that one might not still question whether Aquinas’s position is ultimately coherent (as Bill does), or criticize it on other grounds. But the charge that it is “wholly unmotivated and ad hoc” — a piece of Christian apologetics with no independent philosophical rationale — is, I think, completely unwarranted. 

Clearly, Aristotle had no Christian axe to grind.  And so if the active intellect (nous poietikos) mentioned in De Anima III, v (430a) is a subsistent element of the human soul, capable of existence independent of matter, then Aquinas' position on the human soul would have been anticipated by Aristotle, and what I said, or rather suspected, about Aquinas implanting Christian  notions in the foreign soil of Aristotelianism would be insupportable.  But the interpretation of De Anima III, v is a vexed and vexing matter as the material in the hyperlink Ed provided makes clear.  If, as some commentators maintain, Aristotle is discussing the divine mind and not the human mind, then it cannot be maintained that Aristotle was anticipating Aquinas.

The important question, of course, is whether the human soul, or any part theoreof, can be coherently conceived as a subsistent form, whether this is maintained by Aristotle or Aquinas or both.  Ed now addresses my puzzle head on:

The soul is, for Aquinas, the form of the body. So how could it possibly exist apart from the body? Bill asks why things should be any different with human beings than they are with Fido. But Aquinas is quite clear about the answer to that question: The difference is that the human soul carries out immaterial operations (i.e. intellectual ones) while a dog’s soul does not. And if it operates apart from matter and agere sequitur esse, then it must subsist apart from matter.

I grant that the human soul, unlike the canine, carries out immaterial operations.  The argument is this:

a.  The human soul engages in immaterial operations
b.  Agere sequitur esse: whatever operates I-ly must be (exist) I-ly.
Therefore
c.  The human soul, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially.

But how is this relevant to the issue I am raising?  Let's assume that the above argument is sound.  What it shows is that the human soul enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  But it does not show that a form of an animal body enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  It is one thing to establish that the human soul, or an element thereof, exists immaterially; quite another to show that this immaterial element is a form.  I hesitate to say that Ed is conflating these two questions.  What he might be doing is begging the question against me: he may be just assuming what I am questioning, namely, that the human soul is a form, and then taking an argument for the immateriality of the soul to be an argument for the immaterial existence of a form of the human body.  Quoting further from Feser:

Necessarily, a form is a form of that of which it is the form. But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form. These propositions cannot both be true.
That they can both be true can be seen when we keep in mind how Aristotelians understand concepts like necessity, possibility, essence, and the like. Suppose we say that it follows from the nature or essence of a dog that it has four legs. Does that mean every single dog necessarily has four legs? No, because a given dog might have lost a leg in an accident, or failed to develop all four legs due to some genetic defect, or (if only recently conceived and still in the womb) may simply not yet have developed all four legs. What it does mean is rather that a mature dog in its normal state will necessarily have four legs. As Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot have emphasized, “Aristotelian categoricals” of the form S’s are F convey a norm and are not accurately represented as either existential or universal statements of the sort familiar to modern logicians. “Dogs have four legs” is not saying “There is at least one dog, and it has four legs” and neither is it saying “For everything that is a dog, it is four legged.” It is saying that the typical dog, the normal (mature) dog, has four legs.

I of course agree with the bit about the dog and his nature.  But I question its relevance to my point.  I grant that from the fact that it is the nature of a dog to have four legs it does not follow that every dog has four legs.  In parallel with this, Ed seems to be suggesting that while it is the nature of a form to be a form of something, it does not follow that every form is a form of something. I deny the parallel.  The claims are on different levels.  The 'canine' claim is about a particular nature (essence), dog-nature.  My claim is about the principles (in the scholastic sense) deployed by hylomorphic ontologists  in their ontological assays.  A form is a 'principle' not capable of independent existence in the manner of a primary substance.

How form and matter operate in the analysis of material substances becomes clearer if we examine a criticism the distinguished Aristotelian Henry Veatch lodges against Gustav Bergmann. (See here for the rest of the post from which the following blue section is excerpted and for bibliographical data.)

Veatch Contra Bergmann

Veatch now lodges a reasonable complaint against Bergmann. How could "matter or bare particulars [be] among the ultimates that one arrives at in a process of analysis. . ."? "For how could anything which in itself is wholly indeterminate and characterless ever qualify as a 'thing' or 'existent' at all?" (81) On Bergmann's assay, an ordinary particular has more basic entities as its ontological constituents. But if one of these constituents is an intrinsically indeterminate and intrinsically characterless entity, how could said entity exist at all, let alone be a building block out of which an ordinary particular is constructed?

For Veatch, form and matter are not ontological atoms in the way bare particulars and simple universals are ontological atoms for Bergmann. "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (80) 'Principle' is one of those words Scholastics like to use. Principles in this usage are not propositions. They are ontological factors invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own. Let me try to make Veatch's criticism as clear as I can.

An ordinary particular is a this-such. The thisness in a this-such is the determinable element while the suchness is the determination or set of determinations. Veatch's point against Bergmann is not that ordinary particulars are not composites, this-suches, or that the thisness in a this- such is not indeterminate yet determinable; his point is that the determinable element cannot be an ontological atom, an entity more basic than the composite into which it enters as ontological building block. The determinable element cannot be a basic existent; it must be a principle of a basic existent, where the basic existent is the this-such. This implies, contra Bergmann, that what is ontologically primary is the individual substance, the this-such, which entails that matter and form in an individual substance cannot exist apart from each other. They are in some sense 'abstractions' from the individual substance. The form in a material this-such is not merely tied to matter in general, in the way that Bergmannian first-order universals are tied to bare particulars in general; the form is tied to the very matter of the this-such in question. And the same goes for the matter: the designated matter (materia signata) of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates' substantial form.

Veatch says that Bergmann cannot have it both ways: "His bare particulars cannot at one and the same time be utterly bare and characterless in the manner of Aristotelian prime matter and yet also be 'things' and 'existents' in the manner of Aristotelian substances." (82-83)

 The point I want to underscore is that, as Veatch puts it,  "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being."  Ed continues,

Similarly, to say “Human souls are associated with bodies” is to say that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body, just like the human hand in its normal state is associated with its body. But it doesn’t follow that it cannot exist apart from the body, any more than it follows that the hand (at least while its tissues are still alive) can exist apart from the body. And again, the reason this is possible with the human soul and not with Fido’s soul is that the human soul, unlike Fido’s soul, carries out immaterial operations even when it is associated with the body.

Here again I think Ed is failing to engage the problem I raised.  I do not question that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body.  And I do not question that it can exist apart from its body.  What I am questioning is the conceptualization of the human soul as a form.  And so, while Ed has said many things with which I agree, he has not given me a reason to retract my criticism.  To put it another way, he has not given me a reason why I should accept argument A below over argument B:

Argument A:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; the human soul is the form of the human body; therefore, there are forms that can exist apart from the matter they inform.

Argument B:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; no form can exist apart from the matter it informs; therefore, the human soul is not the form of the human body.

I have another argument that Ed may recall from our discussions at my old Powerblogs site, namely, an argument based on the premise that a form cannot be a subject of experience, which is what a soul must be.  But that's a separate post.

Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence. 

Preliminaries

For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.)  And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.)  So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms.  Consciousness, by its very nature, is consciousness of something, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Continue reading “Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism”