Mind – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Mental Act Nominalism with an Application to Divine Simplicity

This entry continues a discussion with Dan M. begun here.

Before we get to the main event, a terminological quibble. A view that denies some category of entity I would call eliminativist, not nominalist. I say this because one can be a nominalist about properties without denying their existence. Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. Tom is red and ripe and juicy and other things besides. It is a Moorean fact, I would say, that Tom has properties, and that, in general, things have properties. After all, Tom is red and ripe, etc. It's a datum, a given, a starting point. A sensible question is not whether there are properties, but what they are. Of course there are properties. What is controversial is whether they are universals or particulars, mind-dependent or mind-independent, immanent or transcendent, constituents or not of the things that have them, etc.

Still, there are those parsimonious souls who deny that there are properties. They accept predicates such as 'red' and 'ripe' but deny that in extralinguistic reality there are properties corresponding to these or to any predicates. These people are called extreme nominalists. It's a lunatic position in my view valuable only as a foil for the development of a saner view. But moderate nominalism is not a lunatic view. This is the view that there are properties all right; it's just that properties are not universals, but particulars, trope theory being one way of cashing out this view. My Trope category goes into more detail on this.

The present point, however, is simply this: a moderate nominalist about properties does not deny the existence of properties. So my suggestion is that if you are out to deny some category K of entity (i.e., deny of a putative category that it has members) then you should label your position as eliminativist about Ks, not nominalist about Ks. Dan is an eliminativist about mental acts, not a nominalist about them.

But this is a merely terminological point. Having made it, I will now irenically acquiesce in Dan's terminology for the space of this post. Dan writes with admirable clarity:

As you explain my proposal (I'll call it "Mental Act Nominalism" or "MAN"), an ontological assay of propositional attitudes will only turn up two entities, the agent and the proposition. The agent's having the relevant attitude (e.g., belief, doubt) to the proposition is not itself construed as an additional entity. You say that this view is committed to "a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction."

[. . .]

Turning to your concern. You suggest that "such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among" various propositional attitudes (belief, doubt, etc.). And after discussing some examples, you say they provide "phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts." And you add: "The differences among [various attitudes] will then be act-differences, differences in the type of mental acts."

The gist of my reply is that we can perhaps account for the differences you speak of without committing ourselves to the existence of the relevant mental acts/states.

Consider these two situations:

(A) Dan wonders whether Bill owns cats.

(B) Dan believes that Bill owns cats.

(We may suppose there was a time lapse between them.) What should the ontological assays of (A) and (B) include? As you described MAN, its ontological assays of propositional attitudes deliver just two entities, the relevant agent and proposition. So on this approach, we get these two assays:

(A Assay 1) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 1) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats.

These assays fail to differentiate situations A and B. However, it's not clear to me that MAN has to be implemented in this way. Consider these alternative assays:

(A Assay 2) Dan, the relation wondering whether, the proposition Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 2) Dan, the relation believing that, the proposition Bill owns cats.

These assays do differentiate A and B, by virtue of the different relations. I think MAN is prima facie compatible with these assays, since the main aim of MAN is not to deny the existence of propositional attitude relations per se, but to deny the existence of mental acts or states consisting in the agent's having the relevant attitude. So, MAN must reject, for example, these assays:

(A Assay 3) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats, the state Dan's wondering whether Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 3) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats, the state Dan's believing that Bill owns cats.

So perhaps we can be realists about propositional attitude relations, but nominalists about propositional attitude states (of affairs). The former would give us a robust basis to differentiate different kinds of propositional attitudes, while the latter would preserve MAN.

BV: The issue is now one of deciding which tripartite assay to accept, mine, or Dan's. Where I have mental acts or states, he has relations. Mental acts are datable particulars, where a particular is an unrepeatable item. Dan's relations are, I take it, universals, where a universal is a repeatable item.

Suppose that Dan, who has not seen his elderly neighbor Sam come out of his house in a week, fears that he is dead. What does the world have to contain for 'Dan fears that Sam is dead' to be true? Suppose that it contains Dan, the relation fears that, and the proposition Sam is dead, but not the mental act, state, or event of Dan's fearing that Sam is dead. Then I will point out that Dan, the relation fears that, and the proposition Sam is dead can all three exist without it being the case that Dan fears that Sam is dead. The collection of these three items does not suffice as truthmaker for the sentence in question.

This is the case even if the relation in question is an immanent universal, that is, one that cannot exist instantiated. It could be that Dan exists, the proposition Sam is dead exists, and the relation fears that exists in virtue of being instantiated by the pair (Pam, the proposition Hillary is sad.) It is possible that all three of these items exist and 'Dan fears that Sam is dead' is false.

We need something to tie together the three items in question. On my tripartite analysis it is the mental act that ties them together. So I am arguing that we cannot get by without positing something like the particular Dan's fearing that Sam is dead.

How can a simple God know contingent truths, such as Bill owns cats? On the version of MAN that accepts bona fide relations, we say: God bears the relation believing that to the proposition Bill owns cats. There are just three entities to which this situation commits us: God, the relation, and the proposition. There is no state (construed as a bona fide entity) of God's believing that Bill owns cats.

BV: But if S bears R to p, this implies that R is instantiated by the ordered pair (S, p), and that this relation-instantiation is a state or state of affairs or event. It is clearly something in addition to its constituents inasmuch as it is their truthmaking togetherness. And this bring us back to our original difficulty of explaining how a simple God can know contingent truths.

Nagel on Dennett: Is Consciousness an Illusion?

A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull)

To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist.

My Nagel category; my Dennett category.

Killer Quote:

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began. Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms. This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' — bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.

Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image. Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It’s the world according to us." But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us. Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.

The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us. Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself' relativizing what comes within the former's scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke. Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . . "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)

Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals. I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view. It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?

Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter. (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.) Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.

Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us. If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.

Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.

The Primacy of the Intentional Revisited

Long-time reader writes,

I was going through some of your posts from earlier this month (Belief, Designation, and Substitution, January 10, 2017) and was interested in seeing your comment that "[l]inguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality."

. . . I have to say that your above sentence was the first time I've heard anyone articulate what you have articulated in such a direct manner. It's something that certainly makes the most sense to me in terms of thinking about some of the broad discussion points in the field, but I'm surprised, actually, that no one I've come across has articulated this, and I'm curious whether that lacuna has to do with the analytic tradition's anti-metaphysical tendencies (of a more robust type of metaphysics, in any event): if one moves the object of analysis from questions about how language refers to how the mind refers, perhaps it gets one into hoary metaphysical waters that people back in the day would rather have left alone. Is this actually the case or am I missing something or is the whole thing simply too obvious for most people to bother mentioning?

It is actually an old debate within analytic philosophy. I would refer you to the 1957 Roderick Chisholm-Wilfrid Sellars correspondence although the debate antedates their discussion. Your note warrants the reposting of an old entry from six years ago. This is a redacted and expanded version.

Note to the Astute Opponent: Can you come up with a powerful counterargument to the primacy of the intentional? I'd like to test whether there is perhaps an aporia here.

The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic

Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is. Very simply, (mental) intentionality is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states. (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the epistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment. Dispositionality would count as physical intentionality.)

Suppose a neighbor asks me about Max Black, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks. The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery. The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else. Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max? How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible? How does it work? How does the mental act of thinking 'grab onto' a thing whose existence does not depend on my or anyone's thinking?

Why should there be a problem about this? Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life. But a cat is not. First of all, no cat is an event. Second, no cat is a content of consciousness. It's an object of consciousness but not a content of consciousness. Cats ain't in the head or in the mind. Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my skull, or spatially inside my nonspatial mind, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind: it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking, if me and my mind cease to exist. He needs for his existence my thinking of him as little as my thinking needs to be about him. We are external to each other. Cats are physical things out in the physical world. And yet my thinking of Max 'reaches' beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat. How is this possible? What must our ontology include for it to be possible?

To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him. (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness. But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain. So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object. But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?

How is it that the act of thinking and its content 'in the mind' hooks onto the thing 'in the world' and in such a way that true judgments can be made about the thing, judgments that articulate the nature and existence of thing as it is in itself apart from any (finite) thinking directed upon it?

Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. This thesis consists of the following subtheses:

A. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic, or intentional character. There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red. After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German. It doesn't mean anything to a speaker of German qua speaker of German. In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning. Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on screen, etc. have no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature. It is a matter of conventional that they mean what they mean. And that brings minds into the picture.

B. So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic: whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional. Mind is the source of all intelligibility. Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible.

C. There can be mind without language, but no language without mind. Laird Addis puts it like this:

Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language. Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states. The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)

These considerations strike me as decisive. Or are there counter-considerations that 'cancel them out'?

Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy

The influential Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)

What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term of art (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. Such states are intrinsically such that they 'take an accusative.' The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The idea is not merely that when one perceives one perceives something or other; the idea is that when one perceives, one perceives some specific object, the very object of that very act. The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or may or may not be true in the case of propositional objects. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object." It is also why Husserl can 'bracket' the existence of the object for phenomenological purposes. Intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is relation-like. This is an important point that many contemporaries seem incapable of wrapping their heads around.

There are some interesting points of analogy between intentionality and potentiality. An intentional state exhibits

a. directedness to an object
b. an object that may or may nor exist
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.

An Indiscernibility Argument for Dualism: Does it Beg the Question?

Here is a simple indiscernibility argument for substance dualism, presented simply:

1. If two things are identical, then whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and vice versa.
2. It is true of me that I can (logically) exist disembodied.
3. It is not true of any body that it can (logically) exist disembodied.
Therefore
4. I am not identical with any body.

The argument is valid in point of logical form, and (1), the Indiscernibility of Identicals, cannot be reasonably disputed. (3) too is irreproachable: it is surely impossible that a physical body exist without its body. My coffee cup can survive the loss of its handle, but not the loss of its very self. Destroy all its parts and you destroy it. So the soundness of the argument rides on the truth of (2). If (2) is true, there is no escaping the truth of (4). For an argument to be probative, however, it is not enough that it be sound; the premises must either be known to be true or at least reasonably believed to be true.

Do I have good reason to think that it is logically possible that I exist without a body? If so, then it is not necessarily the case that if you destroy all my physical parts, you destroy me. Well, the following is true and known to be true:

5. It is conceivable that I exist without a body.

By 'conceivable,' I don't just mean thinkable — round squares are thinkable — I mean thinkable without logical contradiction. And surely it is thinkable without logical contradiction that I exist without a body. Read your Descartes. I had a student once, a hopeless materialist, albeit otherwise alert and intelligent, who just could not appreciate the point. He kept repeating, "But if I shoot you dead, then you cease to exist!" What I found bizarre was that his religious upbringing hadn't even softened him up for the conceivability of post-mortem existence. It was as if he was so sunk into his bodily existence that the mere thought of not being identical to his body was unavailable to him. So I branded him a Cave-dweller and gave up on him. And then some years later, I gave up on teaching entirely. Why spend your life among unteachable troglodytes?

But now comes the hard part. How do we move validly from conceivability to possibility, from (5) to (2)? (2) affirms the (broadly) logical possibility of disembodied existence. But it is not clear why being able to conceive a state of affairs should guarantee its logical possibility. Note that it would serve no purpose to stipulate that logical possibility just is conceivability. That would have all the advantages of theft over honest toil. Broadly logical possibility is a species of real possibility, and one cannot just assume that what one can conceive without contradiction is possible in reality. (On the other hand, one can be certain that a concept harboring a contradiction cannot have anything answering to it in reality.)

Consider the FBI, the floating bar of iron. If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to the FBI's logical possibility. If I think of the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron (e.g., hardness) but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. There seems to be no logical contradiction in the thought of a hard metal that floats.

But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn implies that it will sink in water. For someone with this richer understanding, the FBI is a bar of iron that both floats and does not float — which is a contradiction.

What this example seems to show is that my failing to find a contradiction in my concept of X does not entail that X is logically possible; for it may be that my concept of X is insufficiently determinate, and that if I had a sufficiently determinate concept of X, then I would see from the concept alone that X is logically impossible. Now let's apply this to our problem. My disembodied existence is conceivable. But it might well be that my identity with my body is hidden from my powers of conception in a way similar to, but more radical than, the way the logical impossibility of floating iron is hidden from someone whose concept of iron is inadequate. It may be that my belief in the possibility of disembodied existence feeds on ignorance. How can I rule out this possibility?

If the only way to rule it out is by assuming the truth of (4), then the modal argument begs the question. So I conclude that the above argument is not rationally compelling or rationally coercive: a consumer of the argument can reasonably resist it. But the argument is rationally defensible and does provide a good though not compelling argument for dualism.

Two Senses of ‘Mystery’ and McGinn’s Mysterianism

Joel Hunter writes,

In the context of an exchange between a Catholic and a Protestant, I came across a quote of Gerard Manley Hopkins that reminded me of your posts on mysterianism.

You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also. This happens in some things; to you, in religion. But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty; without certainty, without formulation, there is no interest … The clearer the formulation, the greater the interest. At bottom, the source of interest is the same in both cases, in your mind and in ours; it is the unknown, the reserve of truth beyond what the mind reaches and still feels to be behind. But the interest a Catholic feels is, if I may say so, of a far finer kind than yours.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges

This made me wonder whether mind-body mysterians like McGinn are really of the second type. If one holds that our inability to understand how a mental state could be a brain state is because of a natural limitation on our cognitive powers, like our inability to smell things that a dog can smell, then we might yet hold that this mystery is of type 1 – an "interesting uncertainty." One way that a materialist like McGinn might hold that consciousness is a type 1 mystery is to argue that, as with other of our physical powers, say vision, we could develop ways to augment our cognitive powers to understand thoughts we cannot (yet) think. The recent movie Lucy tangentially explores this.

Also, there's always the alien hypothesis, which seems to interest some very bright people, like Hawking. Intellectually, we may be bonobos compared to a more advanced race in the universe, whose cognitive powers far surpass our own, and for whom the solution to the mind-body problem is discussed and proven in the first year of their grade school. Of course, this is nothing more than an alien-of-the-gaps conjecture.

……………………………………….

BV responds:

In the Hopkins passage, which I find very obscure, two senses of 'mystery' are distinguished. They seem to me to be as follows.

Mystery-1: A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known. For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is, if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting. A more timely example: The singer Prince's death came about as a result of his opioid addiction in tandem with a grueling work schedule. The aim of research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.'

Mystery-2: A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.

An example is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them). The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means. What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible. Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth. We cannot understand how it is possible. But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible. (Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered.)

So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true. For it could be like this: given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!

One sort of mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense. Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense?

McGinn 'takes it on faith' that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc. It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned. Of course mental activity is brain activity! What the hell else could it be? You think and feel with your brain, not your johnson, and certainly not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle)

But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states. Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian. He grants their force and then says something like this:

It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process. But it is a brain process. It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth. It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.

As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case unalterable. And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian. What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory.

This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity. And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into heaven soul and body!

It would be very interesting to hear what James Anderson and Dale Tuggy have to say about this. They have gone far deeper into the mysteries of mysterianism than I have.

Filed under: Mysterianism

On the Separation and Attachment of Soul and Body

I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back. The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body." The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion. But his colorful phraseology got me thinking.

The words 'soul' and 'spirit' carry a cargo of both religious and substance-dualist connotations. And that is the way I will use them. The soul is that in us which thinks in the broad Cartesian sense of 'think.' it is the subject of consciousness and self-consciousness and moral sense (conscience). It is the thinker of our thoughts and the agent of our actions. It is the ultimate reference of the first person singular pronoun 'I' in its indexical use. But I must add that the soul is these things construed as capable of independent existence, as having not only an immaterial nature, but also an immaterial nature capable of existing on its own apart from these gross physical bodies with which we are all too familiar. So 'soul' is a theoretical term; it is not datanic or theory-neutral. 'Consciousness,' by contrast, is theory neutral. If you deny that there are souls, you will be forgiven, and you may even be right. If you deny that there is consciousness, however, then you are either a sophist, a lunatic, or an eliminativist, which is to say, a lunatic. Sophists and lunatics are not to be debated; they are to be 'shown the door.'

A substance, among other things, is an entity metaphysically capable of independent existence. The soul is a substance. It does not require some other thing in which to exist. (Nulla res indiget ad existendum.) So it is capable of independent existence. We encounter it as 'attached' to the body, but it can 'separate' from the body. The question is what these words mean in this context. The problem is to ascribe some coherent sense to them. What is the nature of this strange attachment?

1. Only physical things can be physically separated and physically attached. (The toenail from the toe; the stamp to the envelope; the spark plug from the cylinder; the yolk from the white, etc.) The soul is not a physical thing; ergo, souls cannot be physically separated from or attached to anything. So in this context we are not to take 'separation' and 'attachment' in any physical or material sense, whether gross or subtle. So don't think of ghosts or spooks floating out of gross bodies. Spook-stuff is still stuff, while what we are talking about now is not 'stuffy' at all.

2. It follows from this that every physical model is inadequate and just as, or more, misleading than helpful. The soul is not like the pilot in the ship, the man in his house, the oyster in the shell, the prisoner in his cell. These analogies may capture certain aspects of the soul-body relation, but they occlude others so that on balance they are of little use. But they are of some use. The morally sensitive, for example, experience a tension between their higher nature and their animal inclinations. There is more to the moral life than a struggle against the lusts of the flesh, but that is part of it. Thus the resonance of the Socratic image of the body as the prison-house of the soul.

3. The soul-body relation cannot literally be an instance of a physical relation, nor could it be an instance of a logical or mathematical or mereological or set-theoretical relation. We can lump these last four together under the rubric 'abstract relations.' Presumably the soul-body relation is sui generis. It's its own thing. Just as it would be absurd to say that entailment is an instance of a physical relation, it is absurd to suppose that soul-body is an instance of a physical or a logico-mathematical relation. The soul is neither a physical entity nor an abstract entity.

4. It seems to follow that if the the soul-body relation is sui generis, then there can be no model for it borrowed from some more familiar realm. The relation can only be understood in 'soulic,' or as I will say, spiritual terms. It can only be understood in its own terms. So let's consider mental or spiritual attachment. I am attached to my cat in the sense that, were he to die, I would grieve. Clearly, this is not a physical relation. Whether he is on my lap or far away, the attachment is the same. Spiritual attachment is consistent with physical separation. And spiritual non-attachment (spiritual separation) is consistent with physical proximity and indeed contact.

We allow ourselves to become attached to all sorts of things, people, and ideas, especially our own ideas. Attachments wax and wane. Many are foolish and even delusional. We become attached to what cannot last as if it will last forever. We become attached to what has no value. We have trouble apportioning our degree of attachment to the reality and value of attachment's object. As has been appreciated in many religions and wisdom traditions, much of our misery arises from desire and attachment to the objects of desire. For Pali Buddhism it is desire as such that is the problem; on more moderate views inordinate and misdirected desire. We are also capable of non-attachment or detachment, and this has been recommended in different ways and to different degrees by the religions and the wisdom traditions. There can be no doubt that non-attachment is a major component in wisdom.

5. None of this attaching and detaching would be possible without intentionality. The spiritual self, by virtue of its intentionality, flees itself and loses itself among the objects of its attachment. Chief among these is the mundane self: the body, the personality, their pasts, and the myriad of objects that one takes to be one's own. My car, my house, my wife, my children, my brilliant insights . . . . And now I come to my speculation. The soul attaches itself to this body here in a manner similar to the way it attaches itself to everything else to which it attaches itself. So attaching itself, my soul makes this body here my body. I come to 'inhabit' this body here, thereby making it my body, by my having chosen this body as the material locus of my subjectivity, as the vehicle of my trajectory through space-time. But when" Where? How? I chose this fall into time?

I am telling a Platonic story. I am penning yet another footnote to Plato. Who can believe it? Well, consider the alternatives! You are not your body and yet you are attached to it. What is your theory as to the nature of this attachment? I know what you will say. And I will have no trouble poking holes in it.

A Curious Extrapolation

The old man's libido on the wane, he thinks more clearly and more truly about sexual matters. And when the waning of all his physical forces and endowments reaches its term — will he then think best of all, or not at all?

The dove soars through the air and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance. But the dove is mistaken. The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle. Are we like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly. Do we need the body to think? Is the body necessary for thought? Pascal says that our whole dignity consist in thought. Is our dignity tied of necessity to the flesh ?

Or are we like the rocket whose propulsion has nothing to do with wings, the rocket the principle of whose propulsion is Newton's Third Law of Motion: To every action there is an equal but opposite reaction?

A curious extrapolation and a strange analogy.

God and Mind: Indiscernibility Arguments

Are the Christian and Muslim Gods the same? Why not settle this in short order with a nice, crisp, Indiscernibility argument? To wit,

a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
b. The God of the Christians and that of the Muslims do not share all intrinsic properties: the former is triune while the latter is not.
Therefore
c. The God of the Christians is not identical to that of the Muslims.

Not so fast!

With no breach of formal-logical propriety one could just as easily run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c) to the negation of (b). They are the same God, so they do share all intrinsic properties!

But then what about triunity? One could claim that triunity is not an intrinsic property. A Muslim might claim that triunity is a relational property, a property that involves a relation to the false beliefs of Christians. In other words, triunity is the relational property of being believed falsely by Christians to be a Trinity.

Clearly, a relational property of this sort cannot be used to show numerical diversity. Otherwise, one could 'show' that the morning and evening 'stars' are not the same because Shlomo of Brooklyn believes of one that it is a planet but of the other than it is a star.

Now consider a 'mind' argument.

a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
b*. This occurrent thinking of Venus and its associated brain state do not share all intrinsic properties: my mental state is intentional (object-directed) whereas my brain state is not.
Therefore
c*. This occurrent thinking of Venus is not identical to its associated brain state.

Not so fast! A resolute token-token mind-brain identity theorist will run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c*) to the negation of (b*).

But then what about intentionality? The materialist could claim that intentionality is not an intrinsic property, but a relational one. Taking a page from Daniel Dennett, he might argue that intentionality is a matter of ascription: nothing is intrinsically intentional. We ascribe intentionality to what, in itself, is non-intentional. So in reality all there is is the brain state. The intentionality is our addition.

Now Dennett's ascriptivist theory of intentionality strikes me as absurd: it is either viciously infinitely regressive, or else viciously circular. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the infinite regress is benign. Can I show that it is not without begging the question?

Question for the distinguished MavPhil commentariat: Are there good grounds here for solubility-skepticism when it comes to philosophical problems?

“And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable. Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd, or else dismissing it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities. And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

In the Incarnation the Word nailed itself to the flesh in anticipation of later being nailed to the wood of the cross to suffer the ultimate fate of everything material and composite: dissolution. Christ dies like each of us will die, utterly, alone, abandoned. But then the mystery: He rises again. Is this the central conundrum of Christianity? He rises, but not as a pure spirit. He rises body and soul.

God is the Word ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God"); the Word becomes flesh; the flesh nailed to wood becomes dead matter and nothing Wordly or Verbal or Logical or Spiritual or Sense Bearing, and so next-to-nothing; but then the next-to-nothing rises and ascends body and soul to the Father by the power of the Father. Christ rises bodily and ascends bodily. A strange idea: bodily ascension out of the entire spatio-temporal-bodily matrix! He ascends to the Father who is pure spirit. So, in ascending, Christ brings matter, albeit a transformed or transfigured matter, into the spiritual realm which must therefore be amenable to such materialization. It must permit it, be patient of it. The divine spiritual milieu cannot be essentially impervious to material penetration.

Before the creation and before the Incarnation of the Creator into the created order divine spirit had the power to manifest itself materially, and in the Incarnation the power not only to manifest itself materially but to become material. The divine Word becomes flesh; the Word does not merely manifest itself in a fleshly vehicle. It becomes that vehicle and comes to suffer the fate of all such vehicles, dissolution. The divine spirit was always already apt for materialization: it bore this possibility within it from the beginning. It was always already in some way disposed toward materialization. On the other hand, matter was always already apt for spiritualization.

We humans know from experience that we can in some measure spiritualize ourselves and indeed freely and by our own power. We know ourselves to be spiritual beings while also knowing ourselves to be animals, animated matter, necessarily dependent on inanimate matter including air, water, dead plants and dead meat. (When an animal eats another animal alive, the first is after the matter of the second, not after its being animated.)

Whether or not we exercise our severely limited power of self-spiritualization, we are spiritual animals whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not: we think. Each one of us is a hunk of thinking meat. We are meaning meat. How is this possible? The matter of physics cannot think. But we are thinking matter. This is the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us. We live it and we experience it.

We could call it the 'The Little Incarnation.' Mind is incarnated, enfleshed, in us. The Little Word, the Little Logos, has always already been incarnated is us, separating us as by an abyss from the rest of the animals. Here, in us, we have an ANALOGY to the Incarnation proper. In the latter, the Second Person of the Trinity does not take on a human body merely, but an individual human nature body and soul. So I speak of an analogy. Incarnation in the case of Christ is not a mere enfleshment or embodiment. The Little Incarnation in us is the apparently necessary enfleshment of our spiritual acts in animal flesh.

The mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us reflects the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in God. Divine spirit is pregnant with matter, and accepting of the risen matter of Christ, but matter is also pregnant with divine spirit. Mary is the mother of God. A material being gives birth to God. This is how the Word, who is God, is made flesh to dwell among us for our salvation from meaninglessness and abandonment to a material world that is merely material.

Matter in Mary is mater Dei. Matter in Mary is mother and matrix of the birth of God.

For a different take on the meaning of Christmas, see my Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism

In Does Matter Think? I wrote:

. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .

I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics. My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.

I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case. But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case. A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation. Christians believe that God became man. Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction. For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc. One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible. The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us — where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense – does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.

A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways. He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature. Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first. Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible. Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson:

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them. As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case). But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists. Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is. ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points. One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

In the Comments Vlastimil V. asked:

But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.

It is matter as understood by current physics. And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel. I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical. But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms. It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69) Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature. This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret. Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry? It doesn't strike me as particularly intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental. It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.

Galen Strawson on Zombies and Whether ‘Physical’ is a Natural Kind Term

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.) 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 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 horny zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a horny zombie. Indeed, there is nothing it is like to be a zombie, period.)

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 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 objectivists: they think that anything 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.

Now here is what Galen Strawson has to say:

4. Strawson on Zombies.

It is, finally, a mistake to think that we can know that ‘zombies’ could exist—where zombies are understood to be creatures that have no experiential properties although they are perfect physical duplicates (PPDs) of currently experiencing human beings like you and me.

The argument that PPD-zombies could exist proceeds from two premisses—[1] it is conceivable that PPD-zombies exist, [2] if something is conceivable, then it is possible. It is plainly valid, and (unlike many) I have no insuperable problem with [2]. The problem is that we can't know [1] to be true, and have no reason to think it is. To be a materialist is, precisely, to hold that it is false, and while materialism cannot be known to be true, it cannot be refuted a priori—as it could be if [1] were established. ‘Physical’, recall, is a natural kind term, and since we know that there is much that we do not know about the nature of the physical, we cannot claim to know that an experienceless PPD of a currently experiencing human being is conceivable, and could possibly (or ‘in some possible world’) exist.

This is just blatant question-begging on Strawson's part. We can't know that it is conceivable that zombies exist?! That zombies are conceivable is a very weak claim, and of course we can know it to be true, just by conceiving a zombie, whence it follows that we have excellent reason to think it is true. Strawson simply begs the question by assuming that materialism is true. He also begs the question by claiming that materialism cannot be refuted a priori. If you grant [2], as Strawson does, then what we have is an a priori refutation of materialism.

Strawson tells us that 'physical' is a natural kind term. What a strange idea! 'Water,' 'gold, 'tiger' are uncontroversial natural kind terms. They succeed in referring to what they were introduced to refer to despite our knowledge or ignorance of the nature of what they refer to. The ancient Greeks thought water was an element; Dalton held it to be HO; we take it to be H₂O. Water turned out to be a lot different than we thought, without prejudice to the reference of 'water.' So if 'physical' is a natural kind term, then it too can refer to things very different in nature than what we might have supposed. And so Strawson thinks that 'physical' can refer to what is irreducibly mental or experiential in whole or in part. In fact, Strawson allows that the physical — that which physics studies — could be wholly mental.

I don't know what this means. Perhaps Vlastimil can explain it to me.

Does Matter Think?

If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood.

Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter. Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think. To think is to think about something, and it is this intrinsic aboutness or original intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism. I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here. (Here is a characteristic post.)

But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think? Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare? Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not. Why not? Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the set of evens. It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible.

Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains. We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think. But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.

Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines. But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement. For that is a sort of dualism too. There are the physical properties and powers we know about, and the physical properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. So instead of an ontological property dualism or an ontological substance dualism we have an epistemological property dualism, a dualism as between properties and powers we know about and properties and powers we have no idea about.

There is, second, the ontological dualism as between thinking and feeling matter and ordinary hunks of matter that do not think or feel. Even the materialist must admit that there is a huge difference between Einstein and a piece of chalk. How explain that some parcels of matter think and some do not?

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!) of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos, a shift into another genus. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Will you say that consciousness emerges from certain parcels of sufficiently complex matter? But then it is not matter any more, is it? It is an emergent from matter. Emergentism is a form of ontological dualism. What's more, the word 'emergence' merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it. Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat? Do you believe in magic?

There is, third, a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mundane functions. Why are some brain states mental and others not?

The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics. On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. I tend to hold that this unintelligibility is a very good reason to hold that it is not my brain or any part thereof that thinks when I think, and that it is not my brain or any part thereof that feels when I feel. (I am using 'think' in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all instances of intentionality, and 'feel' to cover all non-intentional conscious states and events.)

"But from the fact that such-and-such is unintelligible to us now it does not follow that it is not the case." True. Two possibilities. It might be the case that p even though we will never understand how it is possible that p, and it might be the case that p, even though we cannot understand at present how it is possible that p. The first is a mysterian position, the second is not mysterian but a pin-hopes-on-future-science position.

My thesis is that it is reasonable to hold that when I think and feel it is not my brain or any part of it that thinks or feels. But who knows? Maybe future science will prove me wrong. It is just that I wouldn't lay any money on being wrong.

Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?)

…………………

A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights. Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull. I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion. Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here. Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:

There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.

"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it. We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else. If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin. Feel that, Dan? That's a quale. (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions. But I can't prove he isn't. Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)

In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself. He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think. The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings. So far I understand him. It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts. This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter. So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.

I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third. For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon. How does he know it? Obviously, he doesn't know it. It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one. After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel. I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances. But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so. All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.

Here is Strawson's argument in a nutshell:

1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.

2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.

Ergo

3. There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.

The problem with this argument is premise (2). It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism. I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:

4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.

5. We have no good reason to assume — it is wholly gratuitous to assume — that brain matter has occult powers.

Therefore

6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.

7. We know that (1) is true.

Therefore

8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false.

Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)

Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings." Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful. But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious? What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"? There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast. 'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast. And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical. To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting. It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous. It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast. If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.

Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical. We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't. That is a huge difference. What Strawson has to say is that in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter. Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.

But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter, does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?

If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical? God is a mind too. Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition. But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious — if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness — then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.

If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of. Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible. God is pure spirit, pure mind. How can Christ ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body, enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity? It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical. A mysterian would say it is a mystery. It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us.

On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here: some parcels of matter have amazing powers. For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel. It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat! If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and — without prejudice to his physicality — has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity. It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability. He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul.

The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. She too entered bodily into heaven. On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.

To sum up. If matter actually thinks and feels in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter. But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?

Eyes in the Mirror

The eyes you see in the mirror when you look at yourself are not seeing eyes but seen eyes. Strange but true: your seeing eyes are and must remain invisible.