Category: Mind

On ‘Materialize’ and Materialism

 

Mind no matter

It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real.  "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is to exist outside the mind and outside its causes. The last two sentences may need some tweaking and some commentary, but let's move on to the question of the relation of materiality and existence.  Is the following true?

1) Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is a material thing.

(1) formulates a version of materialism: everything that exists is a material thing, and everything that is material exists. If true, (1) necessarily true. We surely don't want to say that (1) just happens to be true. The type of necessity? Not analytic and not narrowly logical. And of course not nomological: (1) is not a law of nature given that the laws of nature are logically contingent.  (1), if true, formulates a law of metaphysics. So I'll say it is metaphysically necessary. 

Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material? Are there material things that do not exist?

Wanted are nice clean  counterexamples that are not as questionable as (1) itself. I want to refute (1) if I can. Bear in mind that 'refute' is a verb of success. So angels won't do. How about numbers? Numbers are more credible than angels; numbers presumably exist; numbers are so-called 'abstract' objects outside of space and time and thus not material.  Hartry Field and other nominalists, however, will argue with some plausibility that numbers and other abstracta either do not exist or that there is no good reason to posit them.  Field wrote a book entitled Science Without Numbers.  (And of course he was not proposing that one could do physics without mathematics.) 

What is left by way of counterexamples to (1) if we exclude spiritual substances (God, gods, angels, demons, unembodied and disembodied souls) and so-called abstract objects (numbers, mathematical sets, Fregean-Bolzanian propositions, Chisholmian-Plantingian states of affairs, etc.)? 

Well, consider my present occurrent visual awareness of my lamp.  (Better yet: you consider your present occurrent awareness of anything .) This awareness of the lamp (genitivus obiectivus) is not the lamp; it exists, and it cannot be material in nature. The awareness is not a state of my body or brain, even if correlated with some such state. If it were a state of my body or brain, it would be material which is precisely what it cannot be. Why not? Because the awareness is an intentional or object-directed state and no material/physical state can exhibit intentionality.

This is as clean a counterexample as I can muster.  The awareness of material things is not itself a material thing. Less clean, but still a contender, is the subject of (genitivus subiectivus) the object-directed state , the mind, ego, self that is in the state.  If there is a self along the lines of a Cartesian res cogitans that is aware of a lamp when BV is aware of his lamp, then that self exists but is not material.

Have these considerations refuted (1)?  You tell me. What I will say is that they make the rejection of (1) reasonable.

The other class of putative counterexamples to (1) are items that are material but do not exist.  Unicorns and flying horses come to mind. Suppose that there are four categories of entity  item:  (i) immaterial minds, (ii) occurrent and dispositional states of minds, whether intentional or non-intentional; (iii) so-called 'abstract' objects; (iv) material things.  Where do such Meinongian nonentities as unicorns belong?  Obviously they belong in the fourth category.  They are material things even though they don't exist!

Has this second set of considerations refuted (1)? You tell me. 

Galen Strawson on Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

Substack latest.

Strawson is right against Humphrey, but his own theory is worthless.

See also: The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution

UPDATE (10/3).  A friend referred me to this article which I judge to be very bad indeed. See if you can make out what is wrong with it.

Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?

Top o' the Stack.

Thomas Beale writes,

Getting back to the topic of consciousness . . . . I think you will find this Royal Institution lecture by British neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey of interest.
 
He provides an outline of subjective phenomenal consciousness and how it could have evolved. One very interesting claim is that sentience could not have arrived prior to the evolution of mammals, since a) their neural transmission speed is much greater than cold-blooded animals and b) mammals are not tied to specific environments since they have inbuilt thermoregulation.
 
I interpret his claims as being a candidate for what Nagel seeks in his monograph Mind and Consciousness (2012) (a naturalistic theory of subjective consciousness) and also as refuting the general position of Dennett, i.e. that consciousness, qualia etc are just an illusion. Personally I think Dennett has failed to understand what he himself is saying when he claims that conscious experience is an 'illusion', as if calling it such makes it unreal.
 
Anyway, I believe you may find this an hour well spent.
 
Thanks for the link, Thomas, but I have only so many shovels. Given the bull your man has already spread, in the 2013 piece to which I respond in the Substack entry above, I am not inclined to waste fifty minutes watching a slow-moving video. Is there a transcript? Maybe he has come up with something better this time around. I rather doubt it. 
 
Perhaps you can summarize Humphrey's latest stab at the 'hard problem.' What is his solution? But first tell me what you accept and what you reject in my Substack article.
 

Thinking Meat?

Substack latest.

Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think?

Both of the following arguments are valid, but only one is sound. Which one is it?

Argument A.  Meat can't think.  My brain is meat.  Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain.  My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.

The Grain Problem

Ed Buckner writes,

Here is another problem that needs to be carefully phrased.

I want to say that the pitch of a musical note is continuous through time. I mean, at any point in continuous time, i.e. time as specified by the real numbers, the pitch of the note (e.g. middle C) is the same.

However, the “physical” property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events.

That strikes me as a problem for the kind of physicalism according to which qualities “as we perceive them” are identical with the properties that ground them. For pitch is temporally continuous, the oscillation that grounds it is not temporally continuous, ergo etc.

It is a problem indeed, Ed, although I have questions about your formulation of it.

The problem is known in the trade as the Grain Problem. Whether it surfaces before Sir Arthur Eddington, I don't know, but he raises it, or at least anticipates it with his question about the 'two tables.'  A lot of work was done on the Grain Problem by the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, son of the rather less distinguished Roy Wood Sellars, but nonetheless a quantity to be reckoned with in his day.

Sellars Wilfrid IntentionalityHere is Sellars fils  in his seminal essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," reprinted in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Routledge, 1963). The portion I am about to quote is from pp. 35-37. I take the text from Chrucky's online version.

It is worth noting that we have here a recurrence of the essential features of Eddington's 'two tables' problem — the two tables being, in our terminology, the table of the manifest image and the table of the scientific image. There the problem was to 'fit together' the manifest table with the scientific table. Here the problem is to fit together the manifest sensation with its neurophysiological counterpart. And, interestingly enough, the problem in both cases is essentially the same: how to reconcile the ultimate homogeneity of the manifest image with the ultimate non-homogeneity of the system of scientific objects.

BV: Whether we are discussing colors with Sellars or sounds with Buckner, it is the same problem, that of reconciling the homogeneity of the manifest or phenomenal sensory quality with the non-homogeneity of the underlying  scientific explanatory posits. For Sellars, of course, these posits are not mere posits but ultimately real, as you will see if you read below the fold.

Buckner's formulation above leaves something to be desired, however. He cites the continuous perception over time of the same note, middle C, let us say. But then in the very next sentence he reverts to a rarefied mathematical concept of continuity, thereby mixing phenomenological description with a mathematico-scientific construct.   He thereby conflates phenomenal continuity with mathematical continuity.  When I hear middle C sounding from an organ, say, over a non-zero interval of time, five seconds say, do I hear a series of points of time — a series of temporally extension-less moments — the cardinality of which is 2-to-the-aleph-nought? No. (The cardinality of the set of real numbers (cardinality of the continuum) is) 

And then Ed goes on to say that "the 'physical' property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events." But that is not right either. Middle C depicted on an oscilloscope shows up as a sine wave:

Middle_C _or_262_hertz _on_a_virtual_oscilloscope

Obviously the sine wave is continuous. What Ed wants to say, of course, is that the heard sound, the phenomenal sound, does not fluctuate as does the physical reality does, the physical reality that "grounds the pitch." Ed is equivocating on 'continuous.'

But I know what he is getting at, and it is a genuine problem. I am merely complaining about his  formulation of it. Now back to Sellars, whose solution to the problem is not clear to me.

 

Continue reading “The Grain Problem”

The Phenomenal Principle

Ed Buckner sends this:

“If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality”. (Howard Robinson, Perception, 1994, London: Routledge, p. 32)

That is the question. If it sensibly appears to Jake that there is a green after-image, does it follow that there is something green of which Jake is aware?

I’m inclined to answer yes. But then we have the problem that there is nothing green and physical outside Jake’s brain, nor inside Jake’s brain. So what is it that is green? We agree that it can’t be a physical item, if Robinson’s Principle is true.

I recommend Robinson’s 1994 book, and also his November 2022 book Perception and Idealism.

Ed seems to be coming around. Robinson is asking the right question, and Ed answers in the affirmative or at least is so inclined. (By the way, I read Robinson's excellent Matter and Sense: A Critique of Contemporary Materialism, Cambridge UP, 1982, when it first came out. I expect his later work, which I haven't read, is equally good.)

It is best to approach the question from the first-person point of view. A green after-image sensibly appears to me. (It appears visually and so sensibly.) Does something appear or does nothing appear? The datum is not nothing, so it is something.  It is indubitably something. And it is a describable, definite something: green, pulsating, etc. The green item is not outside my head. But it is not inside my head either. (As Bill Lycan says, if I have something green inside my head, then I am in big trouble.)

It follows that the indubitable phenomenal datum cannot be a physical item that is green, pulsating, etc. The inference is correct and the conclusion is true.  What Ed should do is simply admit that there are sensory qualia.  But he appears loathe to do so. He needs to explain why. Is he ideologically committed to materialism? I don't think that's it. 

We know that Ed reasonably rejects the characteristic Meinongian thesis that (i) some of the items to which we refer both in thought and in language have no being (Sein) whatsoever (not Dasein, not Bestehen, not intentionales QuasiSein, not any Seinsmodus) but nevertheless (ii) are mind-independent Soseine that actually (not merely possibly) instantiate properties. But this rejection of Meinong cannot be a good reason for Ed to refuse to countenance the green after-image, and this for two  reasons. First, the sensory quale in question is not mind-independent. Second, it exists. In its case, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. The green after-image is perceived, and by the same stroke, it is/exists.

But it may be that Ed is confusing the green after-image with the green unicorn. And we did catch him in that confusion in an earlier thread. Suppose I am thinking about a green unicorn. Let's use 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian way to refer to any object-directed act of awareness, including imagining. Imagining a green unicorn, I am not imagining an image since a unicorn is an animal, not an image; I am imagining a unicorn. The object-directed act of mind purports to display a mind-independent animal,  not a mind-dependent image. 

But of course there are/exist no unicorns!  For that very reason, a sensory quale such as a green after-image cannot be assimilated to a green unicorn. What's more, unicorns are not mind-dependent. Qualia are; ergo, etc. 

Your move, Ed. Give us some good reasons why you will not admit qualia. If your reasons are neither pro-materialist not anti-Meinongian, what are they?

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.
 
Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.
 
Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.
 
To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  
 
Now ask yourself which of the following is true:
 
(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.
 
(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.
 
A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.
 
(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 
 
(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts — a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)
 
So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  
 
Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  
 
Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?
 
Combox open.