Mind – Page 13 – Maverick Philosopher

Aquinas on Intentionality: Towards a Critique

Yesterday I quoted Peter Geach in exposition of Aquinas' theory of intentionality. I will now quote Anthony Kenny in exposition of the same doctrine:

The form is individuated when existing with esse naturale in an actual example of a species; it is also individuated, in quite a different way, when it exists with esse intentionale in the mind of a thinker. Suppose that I think of a crocodile. There seem to be two things that make this thought the thought that it is: first, that it is a thought of a crocodile and not, say, of an elephant; second, that it is my thought and not yours or President Bush's. Other things may be true of thoughts — e.g. that they are interesting, obsessive, vague — but these seem to be the two things essential to any thoughts: that they should be someone's thoughts, and that they should be thoughts of something. The theory of intentionality is meant to set out both these features. The form of crocodile when existing in nature is individuated by the matter it informs; when existing intentionally, it is individuated by the person in whose mind it exists. (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 169)

The idea, then, is that one and the same form is both in the thing outside the mind (the crocodile in Kenny's example) and in the mind of the person who is thinking about the crocodile. It is this self-same form that makes the thought a thought of a crocodile as opposed to a thought of something else. But the form exists in mind and in thing in two different ways. It exists in the mind with esse intentionale (intentional be-ing), but exists in the thing with esse naturale (natural be-ing). (My use of 'be-ing' to translate esse is not for the sake of being cute but to underscore the crucial distinction between the infinitive esse (to be) and the present participle ens, both of which can be translated with 'being.')

The distinction between the two modes of be-ing is needed in order to avoid the consequence that a mind thinking about a crocodile either has a crocodile in it or is itself a crocodile. A thought of a red sunset is not a red thought, and a thought of a crocodile does not have the properties characteristic of a crocodile.

I now pass over to critique. Let's first note a distinction that I fudged yesterday for the sake of brevity, brevity being the soul of blog. Reverting to yesterday's example, it is the distinction between thinking of a cat (some cat or other) and thinking of a particular cat such as Max Black. It is one thing to explain how my thought of a cat is a thought of a cat (as opposed to a dog or a kangaroo), and quite another to explain how my thought of Max the cat is a thought of Max. The Thomist theory may well be up to the first task. But I'm not sure it is up to the second.

Matter is the principium individuationis. What makes a cat an individual cat numerically distinct from other cats is its signate or designated matter (materia signata). In extramental reality, then, Max's individuality is bound up with his signate matter. But when Max's form exists in my mind with esse intentionale, it is exists in an immaterial way. What then individuates Max's form as it exists in my mind with esse intentionale? And if nothing individuates it, then what makes my thought of Max the cat a thought of Max (as opposed to a thought of some cat or other)?

I hope to expatiate further on this tomorrow.

Two Puzzles Anent Brentano’s 1874 Locus Classicus on Intentionality

All contemporary discussion of intentionality traces back to an oft-quoted passage from Franz Brentano's Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint. First published in 1874 in German, this influential book had to wait 99 years until it saw the light of day in the Anglosphere. And in the Anglosphere to go untranslated is to go unread. Here is the passage:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Humanities Press, 1973, ed. McAlister, p. 88)

This passage is not only puzzling in itself, but also puzzling in that it is not clear what it has to do with the discussions of intentionality that it spawned. I think most philosophers nowadays would agree that something like the following is the thesis of intentionality:

Thesis of Intentionality. It is characteristic of certain mental states (the intentional states) to refer beyond themselves to items (i) that are not part of the state and (ii) may or may not exist.

Example. If I am in a state of desire, then a complete description of this mental state must include a specification of what it is that I desire. One cannot simply desire, or just desire. At a bare minimum we need to distinguish between the desiring and that which is desired. As Brentano says above, in desire something is desired.

Unfortunately, the word 'something' will cause some people to stumble including some esteemed members of the Commenter Corps. They will get it into their heads that a concrete episode of desire cannot exist unless there also exists, independently of the desire, something that is desired. But this cannot be what is meant. For if Poindexter desires a perpetuum mobile, he is just as much in a state of desire as his pal Percy who desires Poindexter's sloop, despite the fact that there is and can be no perpetuum mobile, while there is Poindexter's sloop. And as for wanting a sloop, it could be that Percy wants a sloop without wanting any sloop that (presently) exists: he wants a sloop that satisfies a description that no sloop in existence satisfies. Or a woman wants a baby. She doesn't want to adopt or kidnap an existing baby; she wants to 'bring a baby into the world.' Obviously, her longing is for something that does not presently exist, and indeed for something that does not exist at all if what does not yet exist does not exist.

In cases like these , the states of desire refer beyond themselves to items that are (i) not part of the states and that (ii) do not exist. After all, someone who wants a sloop does not want a mental state, or any part of a mental state, or anything immanent to a mental state, or anything whose existence depends on the existence of a mental state. Wanting a sloop, by its very intentional structure, intends something which, if it exists, exists independently of any mental state. And note that from the fact that there is nothing that satisfies the sloop-desire it does not follow that the desire is directed to an immanent object.

It is also important to realize that the reference beyond itself of mental acts is an intrinsic (nonrelational) feature of these acts: what makes my thought of Las Vegas precisely a thought of Las Vegas is not the obtaining of a relation between me (or my mental state) and the city of Las Vegas. For suppose I am thinking of Las Vegas, and while I am thinking of it God does to it what he is said to have done to Sodom and Gomorrah. Would my thinking of Las Vegas be in any way affected as to its own inner nature? No. The act of thinking and its content are what they are whether or not the external object exists.

Part of the thesis of intentionality , then, is that certain mental states are intrinsically such as to point beyond themselves to items that may or may not exist. Intrinsically, because the object-directedness is not parasitic upon the actual existence of the external object. But can one find the thesis of intentionality as I have spelled it out in the above passage?

No, and that is our first puzzle. It is puzzling that the 1874 'charter' has little to do with what subsequently flew under the flag 'intentionality.' Two points:

a. Although Brentano speaks of "reference to an object," he makes it clear that this object is an immanent object, one contained in the mental phenomenon or act. As such, the object is indistinguishable from a mental content. And then there is the talk of "the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object." 'Inexistence' does not mean nonexistence but existence-in (inesse). The idea is that the object exists in the act and not independently of the act. But then the object is a mere content, and the notion of a reference beyond the mental state to something transcendent of it is lost.

b. It is also striking that in the 1874 passage there is no mention of the crucial feature of intentionality that is always mentioned in later discussions of it, namely, that the items to which intentional states refer may or may not exist, or may or may not obtain (in the case of states of affairs). For example, if Loughner believes that the earth is flat, then his mental state is directed toward a state of affairs which, if it obtains, is a state of affairs involving the earth and nothing mental. But neither the obtaining nor the nonobtaining of this state of affairs follows from Loughner's being in the belief-state.

It seems as if for the Brentano of 1874 intentionality is something wholly internal to the mental phenomenon, a relation that connects the act with its content, but does not point beyond the content to the external world. "If every mental phenomenon includes as object something within itself," then every intentional object exists in the mode: existence-in. I am therefore inclined to agree with Tim Crane: "Brentano’s original 1874 doctrine of intentional inexistence has nothing to do with the problem of how we can think about things that do not exist."

Of course, in the later Brentano intentionality is tied to the latter problem. On Crane's analysis, Brentano simply changed his mind after 1874. I see it slightly differently: the later view is implicit in the 1874 passage but cannot emerge clearly because of Brentano's adherence to Scholastic conceptuality. But this is a contested exegetical point.

The second puzzle concerns an apparent misunderstanding by Brentano of the Scholastic doctrine of esse intentionale. This is puzzling because Brentano was steeped in Aristotle and the Scholastics due to his priestly formation, not to mention his doctoral work under Trendelenburg.

In the passage quoted Brentano identifies intentional inexistence with mental inexistence, which implies that below the level of mind there is no esse intentionale. But this is not Scholastic doctrine. For an explanation of this, see Gyula Klima. We will come back to this.

Intentionality: Peter Lupu’s ‘Surrogate Object’ Solution

I suggest we approach the problem, or one of the problems, of intentionality via the following aporetic triad:

1. We sometimes intend the nonexistent.
2. Intentionality is a relation.
3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

This is a nice neat way of formulating the problem because, on the one hand, each limb is extremely plausible while, on the other hand, the limbs appear collectively inconsistent. To solve the problem, one must either reject one of the limbs or show that the inconsistency is merely apparent.

Enter Peter Lupu's solution. He described it to me last night after Christmas dinner. He thinks we can uphold all three propositions. Thus his claim is that the triad is only apparently inconsistent.

Suppose Shaky Jake seeks the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine (LDM). Now seeking things like lost gold mines typically involves all sorts of physical actions; but at the root of, and animating, these actions are various mental states many of which are intentional or objected-directed. Believing, hoping, desiring, fearing, planning — these are all intentional states. Among them is the state of wanting. To want is to want something. Thus Jake wants, or wants to find, the LDM. But a subject's wanting of x does not entail the existence of x in the way that a subject's owning of x does entail the existence of x. You can't own, beat, eat, etc. what does not exist; but you can desire, imagine, think about, etc. what does not exist. This is a crucial fact about intentionality. Peter of course is well aware of it.

Now either the LDM exists or it does not. If it exists, then Jake's wanting relates him (or his mind) to the LDM in a way that is consistent with the truth of both (2) and (3). If the LDM does not exist, then Jake's wanting relates him (or his mind) to the CONTENT of Jake's mental act. But this too is consistent with the truth of both (2) and (3). For the content exists whether or not the object exists.

In this way, Peter thinks he can uphold each of (1)-(3). Supposing, as is overwhelmingly likely, that the LDM does not exist, (1) is true: Jake intends (in the mode of wanting) something nonexistent. This instance of intentionality is relational: it connects Jake's mind to a content. (2) is thus maintained. But so is (3): Jake's mind and the content both exist.

I will call this a 'surrogate object' solution. It works by substituting the content for the external object when the external object does not exist. This guarantees that there will always be an existent object, either the external object, or the surrogate object to serve as the object relatum of the intentional relation.

But isn't there an obvious objection to the 'surrogate object' solution? Jake wants a gold mine. He doesn't want a content. A gold mine is a physical thing. But whatever a content is, it is not a physical thing. A content is either mental as a part of the intentional mental state, or it is an abstract item of some sort. To appreciate this, let us consider more carefully what a content is. A content is an intermediary entity, roughly analogous to a Fregean sense (Sinn), which mediates between mind and external concrete reality. And like Fregean senses, contents do not reside in external concrete reality. They are either immanent to consciousness like Twardowski's contents, or abstracta like Frege's senses. And just as linguistic reference to the planet Venus is achieved via the sense of 'morning star' or via the sense of 'evening star,' mental reference to an object is achieved via a content. To employ the old Brentano terminology of presentations (Vorstellungen), the object is that which is presented in a presentation whereas the content is that through which it is presented.

Now my point against Peter is that when I want something that doesn't exist, my wanting cannot be said to relate me to a content. My wanting involves a content no doubt, but the content is not the object. Why not? Well, if I want a flying horse, I want a physical thing, an animal; but no content is a physical thing, let alone an animal. When Bobby Darin pined after his Dream Lover, it was something lusciously concrete and physical that he was pining after.

Suppose I am imagining Pegasus and thinking: Pegasus does not exist. The imagining is an intentional state that involves a content, the mental image. But this mental image exists. So it cannot be the mental image that I am thinking does not exist. It is Pegasus himself that I am thinking does not exist. And therein lies the puzzle.

Suppose Peter responds as follows. "I grant you that it is not the mental image that I am thinking does not exist. For, as you point out, the image does exist. What I am doing is thinking that the mental image is not a mental image of anything. So when I imagine Pegasus and think: Pegasus does not exist, the object relatum is an existent item, the Pegasus image, and what I am thinking about it is that it is not an image of anything."

But this too is problematic. For the nonexistence of Pegasus cannot be identified with the Pegasus-images's not being an image of anything. And this for the simple reason that an objective fact such as the nonexistence of Pegasus cannot depend on the existence of mental images. There are times and possible worlds in which there are no mental images and yet at those times and worlds Pegasus does not exist.

But Peter persists: "Well, I can say that when I am thinking about Pegasus I am thinking about a necessarily existent conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are being a horse, having wings, etc., and when I think that Pegasus does not exist I am thinking that this conjunctive property is not instantiated. And when I think that Pegasus is winged, I am thinking that the conjunctive property has being winged as one of its conjuncts."

This is better, but still problematic. If Peter wants Pegasus, then presumably what he wants on his analysis is not the conjunctive property in question, but the being instantiated of this property. Being instantiated, however, is relational not monadic: if the conjunctive property is instantiated it is instantiated by an individual. And which individual must it be? Why, Pegasus! The analysis, it appears, is viciously circular. Let's review.

Peter wants to say that intentionality is a relation and that the holding of a relation entails the existence of all its relata. But Pegasus does not exist. To want Pegasus, then, cannot be to stand in relation to Pegasus, but to a surrogate object. If you say that the surrogate object is a necessarily existent property, then the problem is that wanting Peagsus, an animal, is not wanting a causally inert abstract object. If. on the other hand, you say that to want Pegasus is to want the being instantiated of that abstract object, then you want the being instantiated of that abstract object by existing Pegasus — in which case we have made no progress since Pegasus does not exist!

God, Evil, Matter and Mind: How Both Theists and Materialists Stand Pat in the Face of Objections

It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both true, then they are logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be consistent. This is so whether or not anyone is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be consistent. If something is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and one's inability to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case.

Example. No one has successfully answered Zeno's Paradoxes of motion. (No, kiddies, Wesley Salmon did not successfully rebut them; the 'calculus solution' is a joke.) But from the fact, if it is a fact, that no one has ever shown HOW motion is possible, it does not follow that motion is not possible.

So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."

Atheists and naturalists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshall?

Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or reason and materialism, or whatever, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on." He is liable to start talking, pompously, of his 'research program.' He may even wax quasi-religious with talk of "pinning his hopes on future science" as if — quite absurdly — knowing more and more about the meat within our skulls will finally resolve the outstanding questions. And what does science have to do with hope? There is also something exceedingly curious about hoping that one turns out to be just a material system, a bit of dust in the wind.

"I was so hoping to be proved to be nothing more than a clever land mammal slated for destruction, but, dammit all, there are reasons to think that we are more than animals and have a higher destiny. That sucks!"

Physical Pain: Some Distinctions and Theses

The topic of evil brought us to the topic of pain. Herewith, some distinctions and theses for your examination. With regard to physical pain, at least, we ought to distinguish among:

a) The physical substratum of the pain. The cause of the pain. In the case of lower back pain, for example, a pinched nerve. But not just the salient cause, e.g. the pinched nerve, but the totality of causal conditions in the body that 'underpin' the experience of pain. All that makes up the physical substratum of a physical pain.

b) The pain-as-felt, the felt pain. This is the pain one experiences or lives through. Pain as Er-lebnis. The phenomenal pain to which the subject of pain alone has access. (Access to the physical substratum is public; access to the felt pain is private.) With respect to felt pain, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. So for a felt pain, appearance and reality coincide. Its being as a mental datum is exhausted by its appearing. This is not the case with the physical substratum of the pain.

The felt pain factors into two aspects:

c) The sensory quale of the felt pain, its raw feel to use an old expression of Herbert Feigl. This is the qualitative content, the Nagelian what-it-is-like of the felt pain. Each pain feels like something to the one who has it, though he would be hard pressed to put this feeling into words.

d) The painfulness of the felt pain. The felt pain has a quality, but this quality is not the same as its painfulness. Thus I factor the felt pain into the sensory quale (raw feel) and the painfulness of it. Suppose I am outside in the cold and I feel a stinging sensation in my bare hands. It seems that the painfulness of this sensation depends, at least in part, on my attitude toward it, my aversion. Or consider any olfactory sensation you take to be unpleasant, the smell of cooking broccoli, say. One can learn to overcome such aversions, which is not to say that one overcomes the sensation itself. Or perhaps you are in a public restroom. You focus on the stench and remind yourself that it is only a sensation and one that betokens nothing harmful to the body. As a result of this reflection, the unpleasantness diminishes while the sensation itself remains constant. A reasonable inference from phenomena such as these is that the sensory quale of a pain and its painfulness are distinct, and not just conceptually, but in reality. In some cases it is the attitude of aversion that makes a sensory quale into a pain sensation, but I don't claim that this is true for all cases.

Two Theses

T1. Felt pain is mental, a conscious phenomenon. This is true of both physical and psychological pain. Physical pain, toothache, headache, backache and the like are called 'physical' because of their physical substrata — see (a) above — even though in themselves they are mental. Felt pain cannot be identified with any physical process. Correlated, but not identified.

T2. Felt physical pain is a conscious state with no intentional object. Pains are non-intentional experiences. They are not of or about anything in the way that believing and desiring are
object-directed. But here I need an argument since some maintain that pains exhibit intentionality or object-directedness.

Suppose we compare a visual perceiving of my foot, and a feeling of pain 'in' my foot. The perceiving of my foot is an intentional experience: the act of perceiving 'takes an accusative,' is directed to an object. The perceiving presents the foot as having such and such properties. But what does the pain present? It doesn't present damage to the foot, although there presumably is damage to the foot, a torn Achilles tendon, perhaps. The torn tendon is the cause of the pain sensation, but it is not the intentional object of the pain sensation. The torn tendon is hidden from the pain experience in the way the foot is not hidden from the visual experience. So what is the intentional object of the pain sensation? I say there is none. There is a pain sensation and its cause, but no intentional object. The cause is not presented to me by the pain sensation.

The relation of intentional experience to intentional object is nothing like the relation of pain to its cause. If X is caused by Y, then both X and Y must exist. But if X is an awareness-of Y, if X is intentionally related to Y, then Y need not exist.

For more on non-intentional experiences, see the Intentionality category.

If the Universe Can Arise out of Nothing, then so can Mind

Over breakfast yesterday morning, Peter Lupu uncorked a penetrating observation. The gist of it I took to be as follows. If a naturalist maintains that the physical universe can arise out of nothing without divine or other supernatural agency, then the naturalist cannot rule out the possibility that other things so arise, minds for example — a result that appears curiously inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of naturalism. Here is how I would spell out the Lupine thought.

The central thrust of naturalism as an ontological thesis is that the whole of reality is exhausted by the space-time system and what it contains. (To catalog what exactly it contains is a job for the physicist.) But this bald thesis can be weakened in ways consistent with the spirit of naturalism. The weakening makes naturalism more defensible. And so I will irenically assume that it is consistent with the spirit of a latitudinarian naturalism to admit abstracta of various sorts such as Fregean propositions and mathmatical sets. We may also irenically allow the naturalist various emergent/supervenient properties so long as it is understood that emergence/supervenience presupposes an emergence/supervenience base, and that this base is material in nature. I will even go so far as to allow the naturalist emergent/supervenient substances such as individual minds. But again, if this is to count as naturalism, then (i) their arisal must be from matter, and (ii) they cannot, after arising, exist in complete independence of matter.

What every naturalism rules out, including the latitudinarian version just sketched, is the existence of God, classically conceived, or any sort of Absolute Mind, as well as the existence of unembodied and disembodied finite minds.

The naturalist, then, takes as ontologically basic the physical universe, the system of space-time-matter, and denies the existence of non-emergent/supervenient concreta distinct from this system. Well now, what explains the existence of the physical universe, especially if it is only finitely old? One answer, and perhaps the only answer available to the naturalist, is that it came into existence ex nihilo without cause, and thus without divine cause. Hence

1. The physical universe came into existence from nothing without cause.

Applying Existential Generalization and the modal rule ab esse ad posse we get

2. It is possible that something come into existence from nothing without cause.

If so, how can the naturalist exclude the possibility of minds coming into existence but not emerging from a material base? If he thinks it possible that the universe came into existence ex nihilo, then he must allow that it is possible that divine and finite minds also have come into existence ex nihilo. But this is a possibility he cannot countenance given his commitment to saying that everything that exists is either physical or determined by the physical.

This seems to put the naturalist in an embarrassing position. If the universe is finitely old, then it came into existence. You could say it 'emerged.' But on naturalism, there cannot be emergence except from a material base. So either the universe did not emerge or it did, in which case (2) is true and the principle that everything either is or is determined by the physical is violated.

Consciousness: What Evolutionary Good Is It?

Bear in mind that the word 'consciousness' has several distinct meanings. 'Consciousness' can refer to the state of being awake, to the ability to introspect internal states, and to the phenomenon of attention. But 'consciousness' insofar as it poses a 'hard problem' for physicalists is the subjective quality of experience.

These subjective qualities can be features of sensations, but they need not be. Smashing my knee against a table leg elicits a certain unpleasant sensation. The felt quality of that sensation is an example of a conscious datum in the relevant sense. But so is the shimmering quality of a magnificent Saguaro cactus standing sentinel on a distant ridgeline as viewed in the lambent light of the desert Southwest. Qualia, then, can be associated with intentional objects and not merely with non-intentional states like sensations. Pressing some Husserlian jargon into service, we might distinguish between noematic qualia and hyletic qualia.

Consciousness Without Self-Consciousness

Just over the transom:

A friend of mine and I have ongoing discussions about consciousness. Some of his beliefs I have a hard time accepting. He believes for example that his cat doesn't have conscious experience. I can't put my finger on why I have such a hard time accepting this, but I do. One issue that has come up is whether you can have consciousness without self-awareness. In the discussions he has brought up the issue of blindsight, and claimed its an example of perception without consciousness. This doesn't make any sense to me. It seems to me that talk of perception presupposes consciousness. I was curious as to your thoughts on this matter.

There appear to be two separate questions here.

Q1: Are animals such as cats conscious? It would suffice for their being conscious that they experience pleasure or pain. Do cats experience pain? When I inadvertently step on my cat's foot, she exhibits pain-behavior (makes a certain characteristic sound, shrinks back, gives me a certain look, begins licking the foot.) Now that pain-behavior is not identical to the felt pain, if there is one; but it is evidence for its existence. Or so say I. But now we are approaching the problem of other minds which is too intricate to be discussed in this post. In any case, I don't believe this is what you are asking about. For my part, I no more doubt that my cat is conscious than I doubt that my wife is. Both are sentient beings! But how do I KNOW that? This, roughly, is the problem of other minds. Here is an organism in my visual field. I believe it has a mind more or less similar to my own (less in the case of the cat, more in the case of the wife). The problem is to provide the grounds for that belief. The belief goes well beyond what is strictly evident to the senses; so what justifies it? It is an epistemological problem. Not to be confused with the ontological question whether wife or cat could be philosophical 'zombies.'

Q2: Can there be consciousness without self-consciousness? This may be what you are really asking about. Can one be conscious of an object without being conscious of being conscious of it? I would say yes. The following sometimes happens to some people. They have been driving for some time, negotiating curves, braking, accelerating, etc. But then they suddenly realize that for the last few miles they haven't been conscious of doing these things. They've been 'blanked out.' And yet they were conscious of the road, the cars in front of them, etc., else they would have crashed. We could say that they were conscious of their environment and of the objects in its without being conscious of being conscious of all these things.

In a famous passage Kant says that "The 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." That is a good way of putting it. It must be possible for me to say 'I am now aware that the light is red' when I see that the light is red, but there needn't be this self-awareness for there to be the conscious perception that the light is red. So I suggest we say this: every consciousness is potentially self-conscious, but not every consciousness is actually self-conscious.

This is a murky topic due to the murkiness of the phenomenology. It is made even more murky when the first-person POV of phenomenology is blended with the third-person POV of neuroscience.

An Analogy for the Categorial Difference Between Consciousness and Matter

Some people pin their hopes on future science for a solution of the problem of consciousness as if hope, which has a place in religion, has any place in a strictly scientific worldview. If we only knew enough about the brain, these people opine, we would understand how consciousness arises from it.

But consider an analogy. Suppose you explain to a person that the natural number series is infinite, that there is no largest natural number since for every n, there is n + 1. The person seems to understand, but then objects when you say that it is impossible that there be a largest natural number due to the very nature of the natural number series. Your use of 'impossible' sticks in the guy's craw. He tilts Leftward, you see, and he thinks, quite confusedly, that anything's possible. He doesn't like it when people invoke natures and impossibilities and necessities and lay claim to a priori knowledge. That's too rigid and static for his taste. So he says,

Materialist Mysterianism

I wonder whether mysterianism in defense of such theological doctrines as the Trinity does not in the end backfire by making possible the philosophical justification of philosophical theses incompatible with it. To ease our way into this line of inquiry, let us consider materialist mysterianism.

1. If mysterianism is an acceptable approach in theology, why can't a materialist make use of it in the philosophy of mind? The (positive) mysterian maintains that there are true propositions which appear (and presumably must appear given our 'present' cognitive make-up) contradictory. This is not to be confused with dialetheism, the view that there are some true contradictions. For the mysterian there are no true contradictions, but there are some truths that must appear to us as contradictory due to our cognitive limitations.

Continue reading “Materialist Mysterianism”

God and Evil, Mind and Matter

It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both true, then they are logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be consistent. This is so whether or not anyone is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be consistent. If something is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and my inability, or anyone's inability, to explain how it is possible that such-and-such be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case. So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The logical point I have just made is rock-solid. I now apply it to two disparate subject-matters. The one is the well-known problem of evil faced by theists. The other is the equally well-known 'problem of mind' that materialists face, namely, the problem of reconciling the existence of the phenomena of mind with the belief that nothing concrete is immaterial.

Conceivability, Possibility, Self, and Body

A reader sent me the following argument which he considers a good one:

1. It is conceivable that I exist without my present body (or any part of it).
2. Therefore, it is possible that I exist without my present body (or any part of it).
3. Therefore, I have a property P that my body does not, namely, being such that possibly, I exist when my body (or any part of it) doesn't.
4. Therefore, I am not my body (or any part of it).

The argument as it stands is enthymematic. The inferential move from (3) to (4) requires an auxiliary premise, one which is easily supplied. It is the contrapositive of the Identity of Indiscernibles, and so we can call it the Discernibility of the Diverse, to wit: If two things differ in respect of a property, then they are numerically diverse (not numerically identical). That is a rough formulation, but it is good enough for present purposes. With the assistance of DD, the move from (3) to (4) is unproblematic.

I should think the move from (2) to (3) is also unproblematic. The inference from (1) to (2), however, puzzles me and troubles me. I accept the conclusion: I cannot for the life of me see how I could be strictly and numerically identical to my body or any part of it. So I would like the above argument, or a reasonable facsimile, to be valid. But I stumble over the move from (1) to (2). To validate this inference we need some such principle as

CEP. For any proposition p, conceivably p entails possibly p.

CEP is what I want to discuss. The possibility in question is not epistemic but real, and is that species of real possibility called broadly logical or metaphysical. Now here is a reason why I have doubts about CEP. I accept that there is an Absolute. Now any decent Absolute (the One of Plotinus is a good candidate as is the God of Aquinas) will be a necessary being, one whose possibility entails its actuality. An Absolute, then, cannot not exist if it exists: it either exists in every possible world or in no world. To prove that an Absolute exists all I need is the premise, Possibly an Absolute exists. I may think to infer this proposition from Conceivably an Absolute exists, by way of CEP. Unfortunately, it seems I can just as easily conceive of the nonexistence of a an Absolute. To paraphrase Hume, whatever I can conceive as existent I can just as easily conceive as nonexistent. We can call that Hume's Existence Principle:

HEP. Everything (concrete) is such that its nonexistence is conceivable.

If HEP is true, then every being is contingent. But if CEP is true, then at least one being is noncontingent. This shows that either CEP is false or HEP is false. Since I am strongly inclined to accept HEP, I have doubts about CEP.

Clearly, much depends on what we mean by 'conceivable.' Trading Latin for Anglo-Saxon, to be conceivable is to be thinkable. But since there is a sense in which logical contradictions are thinkable, we must add: thinkable without broadly logical contradiction. By whom? The average schmuck? Or the ideally penetrative intellect? If an ideally penetrative intellect examines a proposition and detects no broadly logical contradiction, then there will be no gap between conceivability in this sense and possibility. But our intellects are not ideally penetrative. Suppose a person reads and understands Zorn's Lemma, reads and understands the Axiom of Choice, and then is asked whether it is possible that the first be true and the second false. He examines the conjunction of Zorn's Lemma with the negation of the Axiom of Choice and discerns no contradiction. So he concludes that it is possible that the Lemma be true and the Axiom false. He would be wrong since the two are provably equivalent. This shows, I think, that for intellects like ours one cannot in general validly infer possibility from conceivability.

Returning to our opening argument, I would say that it is plausible and renders dualism rationally acceptable. But it doesn't establish dualism. For the move from (1) to (2) is questionable.

What is to stop a materialist from running the argument in reverse? He denies the conclusion and then denies (2). If you insist that your non-identity with your body is conceivable and therefore possible, he tells you that it only seems so to you, and that seeming is not being. Or else he rejects CEP

Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder

Peter Lupu comments:

Bill has argued that my murder-argument relies upon a faulty analogy. I have a very general response to this charge: while the murder-argument indeed relies upon an analogy, the analogy upon which it relies is one employed by the soul-theorists themselves. Thus, I contend that if the soul-theorists are entitled to a certain analogy, then I am entitled to use the very same analogy in order to marshal an argument against this or that aspect of the soul-hypothesis. And conversely, if I am not entitled to use a certain analogy, then the soul-theorists are not entitled to it either. But, as I shall show, if the soul-theorists are not entitled to the relevant analogy, then there is an even more direct argument than the murder-argument I have given to the conclusion that according to soul-theorists murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing. [What Peter means to say is not that soul-theorists officially maintain as part of their theory that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing, but that, whether or not soul theorists realize it, soul-theory entails that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing.]

Continue reading “Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder”

J. P. Moreland on Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (Part One)

(The following review will be crossposted shortly at Prosblogion. Comments are closed here, but will be open there.)

Apart from what Alvin Plantinga calls creative anti-realism, the two main philosophical options for many of us in the West are some version of naturalism and some version of Judeo-Christian theism. As its title indicates, J. P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) supports the theistic position by way of a penetrating critique of naturalism and such associated doctrines as scientism. Moreland briefly discusses creative anti-realism in the guise of postmodernism on pp. 13-14, but I won’t report on that except to say that his arguments against it, albeit brief, are to my mind decisive. Section One of this review will present in some detail Moreland’s conception of naturalism and what it entails. Sections Two and Three will discuss his argument from consciousness for the existence of God. Section Four will ever so briefly report on the contents of the rest of the book. In Part Two of this review I hope to discuss Moreland’s critique of Thomas Nagel’s Dismissive Naturalism. Numbers in parentheses are page references. Words and phrases enclosed in double quotation marks are quotations from Moreland. Inverted commas are employed for mentioning and ‘scaring.’

Continue reading “J. P. Moreland on Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (Part One)”