Mind – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Mysterian Materialism and Mysterian Trinitarianism

Here are some thoughts that may provoke a fruitful discussion with Vlastimil Vohanka on the topic of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind and in theology. He kindly sent me his rich and stimulating paper, "Mysterianism about Consciousness and the Trinity." The paper is available here along with other works of his. His view is that a mysterian line is defensible in both the philosophy of mind and in Trinitarian theology. I have some doubts.

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

Look, we are just complex physical systems, nothing more. And yet we think and are conscious. Therefore, we are wholly material beings who think and are conscious. We cannot understand how this is possible. But what is actual is possible whether or we we are able to understand how it is possible. So the fact that we cannot understand how it is possible that thinking and consciousness are nothing more than brain activity does not show that they are not brain activity. It shows that the how is beyond our understanding. What we have here, then, is a mystery: a proposition that is true and non-contradictory despite our inability to understand how it could be true.

What motivates this mysterian materialism? Two things. There is first of all the deep conviction shared by many today that there is exactly one world, this mind-independent physical world, that we are parts of it, that nothing in us is not part of it, and that it and us are wholly natural and in no respect supernatural. This naturalist conviction implies that there is nothing special about us, that we are continuous with the rest of nature. We are nothing special in that we have no higher origin or higher destiny. There is no God who created us in his image and likeness. And there is no higher happiness other than the transient and fitful happiness that some of us can eke out, if we are lucky, here below. We are irremediably mortal and natural, like everything else that lives, and anything (conscience, consciousness, self-consciousness, ability to reason, love and longing, sensus divinitatis, etc.) that suggests otherwise is susceptible of a wholly naturalistic explanation. Part of why people embrace the naturalist conviction is that it puts paid to central tenets of old-time religion: God, the soul, post-mortem rewards and punishments, the libertarian freedom of the will, man's being an image and likeness of God, etc. So hostility to religion is certainly, for some, part of the psychological (if not logical) motivation for the acceptance of the naturalist conviction.

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

This mysterianism is an epistemological position according to which our contingent but unalterable make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious. The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us. Our cognitive architecture (a phrase I believe Colin McGinn employs) blocks our epistemic access to those properties the understanding of which would render intelligible to us how we can be both wholly material and yet the subjects of intentional and non-intentional mental states.

Well, this mysterianism is certainly to be preferred to an eliminativism which argues from the unintelligibility of a material thing's thinking to the nonexistence of its thinking. But eliminativism is a lunatic position best left to the exceedingly intelligent lunatics who dreamt it up. I won't waste any words here refuting this mindless doctrine; I have wasted words elsewhere.

We should note that one could be a mysterian in the philosophy of mind without being a mysterian materialist. One could be a mysterian substance dualist. Some maintain that the interaction problem dooms substance dualism. A mysterian might hold that substance dualism is true, that mind-body interaction is unintelligible, that interaction occurs, and that our inability to understand how mind-body interaction occurs merely shows a cognitive limitation on our part. It seems obvious that there is nothing in the nature of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind to require that one be a mysterian materialist/physicalist/naturalist.

We should also note that one could be a mysterian in areas other than the philosophy of mind, in theology, for example.

Mysterianism as a general strategy rests on a fairly solid foundation. First of all, it is a self-evident modal axiom that actuality entails possiblity. It is also self-evident that if x is possible, then it does not follow that we are in a position to understand how it is possible. So it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations. Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality.

But surely there is something very strange about maintaining that there are true mysteries. A true mystery is a true proposition that is unintelligible to us, though not unintelligible in itself. Now here is my difficulty in a nutshell. If a proposition either is or entails a broadly-logical contradiction, then I wouldn't know what I had before my mind if I had such a proposition before my mind. And if I didn't know exactly which proposition I had before my mind, I wouldn't know exactly which proposition I was claiming was both true and mysterious.

Bear with me as I try to clarify my objection.

Before I can take a position with respect to a proposition I must know what that proposition is. I must know the identity of the proposition. But a proposition that strikes my mind as unintelligible is not one about whose identity I can be sure.

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

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

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

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

If you say with a straight face "Snow is white and snow is not white" and you are neither equivocating on any term, nor making any distinction with respect to time or respect, and I charitably refuse to impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction of the form *p & ~p,* then I must say that I have no idea at all which proposition you are trying to convey to me. And so I naturally practice epoché with respect to your utterance.

(I grant that there is a sense in which a self-contradictory proposition — *No dog is a dog* for example — is intelligible (understandable): for if I did not understand the proposition I would not understand it to be self-contradictory and thus necessarily false. What I mean by 'intelligible' here is 'understandable as broadly-logically possibly true.' On this narrow use of 'intelligible,' a claim to the effect that no dog is a dog or that snow both is and is not white is unintelligible.)

Back to the mysterian materialist. I must put his asseverations within the Husserlian brackets. He bids me accept propositions that as far as I can tell are not propositions at all. A proposition is a sense, but the 'propositions' he bids me accept make no sense. For example, he wants me to accept that my present memories of Boston are all identical to states of my brain. That makes no sense. Memory states are intentional states: they have content. No physical state has content, or could have content. So no intentional state could be a physical state. The very idea is unintelligible. To be precise: it is unintelligible as something broadly logically possible. The vocabularies we use when speaking of brain states and mental states respectively are radically incommensurable. Axon, dendrite, synapse, etc. on the one hand, qualia, intentionality, content, etc. on the other. Even if one were to know everything there is to know about the electro-chemistry and neuro-anatomy of the brain one would still have no clue as to how consciousness arises from it. By consciousness, I mean not only qualia but intentional (object-directed) states.

But where there are no thoughts one can always mouth words. So one can mouth the words, 'Memories are in the head' or 'Thoughts are literally brain states.' But one cannot attach a non-contradictory thought to the words.

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

To say of a sensory quale q that it is identical to a brain state b is to say something that is unintelligible. For if q = b, then they share all properties, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. But it is plain that they do not share all properties: the quale but not the brain state has a phenomenological feel, a Nagelian what it-is-like, an element of irreducible subjectivity. Thus the materialist identity claim is seen with a just a tiny bit of reasoning to be utterly unintelligible.

If you tell me that one and the same item in my skull has both physical and phenomenological properties, then I say you have changed the subject: you now have a dual-aspect theory going. I will then press you on what this third item is that has both physical and phenomenological features.

Suppose you stick to the topic but make a mysterian move. You grant me that it is unintelligible for us that q = b, but insist that it is intelligible in itself. You say it is true in reality despite the irremediable appearance of unintelligibility. It is true and non-contradictory in reality that sensory qualia and thoughts are nothing other than events or processes transpiring inside the skull. You say it is true and non-contradictory that when I think about Boston that thinking is just something going on in my head, adding that it is and will remain a mystery how this could be.

My objection can be put as follows. We have a verbal formulation (VF) such as 'Qualia are brain states.' VF expresses the unintelligible-for-us proposition (UFUP) *Qualia are brain states.* We are told that VF is true even though we, with our cognitive limitations, cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true. So there must be a true intelligible-in-itself proposition (IIIP) distinct from (UFUP) to which we have no access. How is IIIP related to VF? It cannot be that VF expresses IIIP. VF expresses UFUP. So we are supposed to accept a proposition to which we have no access, a proposition that stands in no specifiable relation to VF. But surely that I cannot do. I cannot accept a proposition to which I have no access.

The formulations of the trinitarian theist appear to be in the same logical boat. I am of course assuming that the logical problem of the Trinity cannot be solved on the discursive plane. That is, one cannot solve it in the usual way by making distinctions. If one could solve it in this way, then there would be no need to make a mysterian move. The doctrine would be rationally acceptable as it stands, though not rationally provable since the triunity of God can be known only by revelation.

To sum up my objection. We are offered a verbal formulation, e.g., "There is one God in three divine persons." This verbal formulation expresses a proposition that is unintelligible to us. (It is unintelligible to us because contradictions can be derived from it using given doctrinal elements and unquestionable notions such as the transitivity of identity.) We are assured, however, that while the manifest proposition is unintelligible to us, the verbal formulation expresses a second proposition that is true and intelligible in itself. But since this proposition is inaccessible, one annot accept it, reject it, or suspend judgment with respect to it.

If you tell me that there are not two propositions, but that one and the same proposition is both unintelligible to us but intelligible in itself, then I will ask you which proposition this is.

I suppose what I am saying is that a true proposition that is a mystery is an item so indeterminate that one cannot take up any attitude to it except that of Withdrawal or epoché as I defined this term.

Which is Harder to Conceive?

Which is harder to conceive, that something wholly immaterial could be alive or that something wholly material could be alive?

Some Philosophical Positions Valuable Only as Foils: Extreme Nominalism and Eliminative Materialism

By a philosophical foil I mean a view or position that contrasts with other positions in such a way as to highlight the often superior qualities of the other positions. Foils are useful for mapping the spaces of theories and as termini of theoretical spectra. Consider the spectrum of positions stretching from extreme nominalism to Plato's Theory of Forms. The end points are reasonably viewed as foils. It seems to me that some philosophical positions are valuable and worthy of study only as foils and not as serious candidates for the office of 'true theory.' Here are two of several examples. Since everything in philosophy is controverted, I expect these will be too. The foil of one is the truth of another. Ain't philosophy grand? But I like the following examples, and I am the man whose intellectual and spiritual exigencies I am most interested in satisfying.

Extreme Nominalism. This is the view that there are no properties. If you tell me that there are no properties, I will be inclined to 'show you the door.' Of course there are properties. The only reasonable questions pertain to their nature. Are they universals or particulars? Can they exist unexemplified or not? Are they constituents of the things that have them or not? Is there a property for every meaningful predicate? Are there disjunctive properties? And so on. The reasonable question is not whether there are properties, but what they are.
Eliminative Materialism. This is surely a lunatic philosophy of mind. An eliminative materialist is a bit like a person who blows her brains out to be rid of a headache. No head, no headache, no problem! Too quick you say? Perhaps. So let me expatiate further.

The most obvious objection to eliminative materialism (EM) is that it denies obvious data, the very data without which there would be no philosophy of mind in the first place. Introspection directly reveals the existence of pains, anxieties, pleasures, and the like. Suppose I have a headache. The pain, qua felt, cannot be doubted or denied. Its esse is its percipi. To identify the pain with a brain state makes a modicum of sense, at least initially; but it makes no sense at all to deny the existence of the very datum that gets us discussing this topic in the first place. But Paul M. Churchland (Matter and Consciousness, rev. ed. MIT Press, 1988, pp. 47-48) has a response to this sort of objection:

The eliminative materialist will reply that that argument makes the same
mistake that an ancient or medieval person would be making if he insisted that
he could just see with his own eyes that the heavens form a turning sphere, or
that witches exist. The fact is, all observation occurs within some system of
concepts, and our observation judgments are only as good as the conceptual
framework in which they are expressed. In all three cases — the starry sphere,
witches, and the familiar mental states — precisely what is challenged is the
integrity of the background conceptual frameworks in which the observation
judgments are expressed. To insist on the validity of one's experiences,
traditionally interpreted, is therefore to beg the very question at issue. For
in all three cases, the question is whether we should reconceive the
nature of some familiar observational domain.

Even if we grant that "all observation occurs within some system of concepts," is the experiencing of a pain a case of observation? If you know your Brentano, you know that early on in Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint he makes a distinction between inner observation (innere Beobachtung) and inner perception (innere Warhnehmung). Suppose one suddenly becomes angry. The experiencing of anger is an inner perception, but not an inner observation. The difference is between living in and through one's anger and objectifying it in an act of reflection. The act of inner observation causes the anger to subside, unlike the inner perception which does not.

Reflecting on this phenomenological difference, one sees how crude Churchland's scheme is. He thinks that mental data such as pains and pleasures are on a par with outer objects like stars and planets. It is readily granted with respect to the latter that seeing is seeing-as. A medieval man who sees the heavens as a turning sphere is interpreting the visual data in the light of a false theory; he is applying an outmoded conceptual framework. But there is no comparable sense in which my feeling of pain involves the application of a conceptual framework to an inner datum.

Suppose I feel a pain. I might conceptualize it as tooth-ache pain in which case I assign it some such cause as a process of decay in a tooth. But I can 'bracket' or suspend that conceptualization and consider the pain in its purely qualitative, felt, character. It is then nothing more than a sensory quale. I might even go so far as to abstract from its painfulness. This quale, precisely as I experience it, is nothing like a distant object that I conceptualize as this or that.

Now the existence of this rock-bottom sensory datum is indubitable and refutes the eliminativist claim. For this datum is not a product of conceptualization, but is something that is the 'raw material' of conceptualization. The felt pain qua felt is not an object of observation, something external to the observer, but an Erlebnis, something I live-through (er-leben). It is not something outside of me that I subsume under a concept, but a content (Husserl: ein reeller Inhalt) of my consciousness. I live my pain, I don't observe it. It is not a product of conceptualization — in the way a distant light in the sky can be variously conceptualized as a planet, natural satellite, artificial satellite, star, double-star, UFO, etc. — but a matter for conceptualization.

So the answer to Churchland is as follows. There can be no question of re-conceptualizing fundamental sensory data since there was no conceptualization to start with. So I am not begging the question against Churchland when I insist that pains exist: I am not assuming that the "traditional conceptualization" is the correct one. I am denying his presupposition, namely, that there is conceptualization in a case like this.

Most fundamentally, I am questioning the Kantian-Sellarsian presupposition that the data of inner sense are in as much need of categorial interpretation as the data of outer sense. If there is no categorization at this level, then there is no possibility of a re-categorization in neuroscientific
terms.

What is astonishing about eliminative materialists is that they refuse to take the blatant falsity of their conclusions as showing that they went wrong somewhere in their reasoning. In the grip of their scientistic assumptions, they deny the very data that any reasonable person would take as a plain refutation of their claims.

Memory, Matter, Mind

Memory loss points to the materiality of mind while memory's exercise points to its immateriality. Mind is mysterious, but memorial mind is even more so, situated as it is at the crossroads of intentionality and time.

The Hard Problem Now a Play

By Tom Stoppard. Via Daniel McInerny via Tom Coleman.

I have always thought the 'hard problem' vs. 'easy problem' distinction in the philosophy of mind to be rather silly.

See Intentionality Not a 'Hard Problem' for Physicalists?

Marcia Cavell Defends Colin McGinn Against the “Hysterical” Patricia Churchland

Here, with a response by McGinn. Merits the coveted MavPhil imprimatur and nihil obstat.

In fairness to Churchland, it is her letter, not her, that Cavell calls "hysterical." A politically incorrect word these days, I should think. Isn't 'hysterical' etymologically related to the Latin and Greek words for womb? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

hysterical (adj.): 1610s, from Latin hystericus "of the womb," from Greek hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Meaning "very funny" (by 1939) is from the notion of uncontrollable fits of laughter. Related: Hysterically.

The Academic Philosophers of Consciousness

Too many of the academic philosophers of consciousness are overly concerned with the paltriest aspects of consciousness, so-called qualia, and work their tails off trying to convince themselves and others that they are no threat to physicalism.

While man's nobility lies in the power of thought whereby he traverses all of time and existence, our materialists labor mightily to make physicalism safe for the smell of cooked onions.

Patricia Churchland versus Colin McGinn on Mysterianism

It's a win for McGinn.

Here's Churchland:

The view for which McGinn is known is a jejune prediction, namely that science cannot ever solve the problem of how the brain produces consciousness. On what does he base his prediction? Flimsy stuff. First, he is pretty sure our brain is not up to the job. Why not? Try this: a blind man does not experience color, and he will not do so even when we explain the brain mechanisms of experiencing color. Added to which, McGinn says that he cannot begin to imagine what it is like to be a bat, or how conscious experience might be scientifically explained (his brain not being up to the job, as he insists). This cognitive inadequacy he deems to have universal epistemological significance.

Alongside the arrogance, here is one whopping flaw: no causal explanation for a phenomenon, such as color vision, should be expected to actually produce that phenomenon. Here is why: the neural pathways involved in visually experiencing color are not the same pathways as those involved in intellectually understanding the mechanisms for experiencing color. Roughly speaking, experiencing color depends on areas in the back of the brain (visual areas) and intellectual understanding of an explanation depends on areas in the front of the brain.

Now what does this snark and misdirection have to do with anything McGinn actually maintains? Nothing that I can see. Here's McGinn:

Churchland’s account of my arguments for our cognitive limitations with respect to explaining consciousness bears little relation to what I have written in several books, as anyone who has dipped into those books will appreciate. What she refers to as a “whopping flaw” in my position (and that of many others) is simply a complete misreading of what has been argued: the point is not that having a causal explanation for a phenomenon should produce that phenomenon, so that a blind man will be made to see by having a good theory of vision. The point is rather that a blind man will not understand what color vision is merely by finding out about the brain mechanisms that underlie it, since he needs acquaintance with the color experiences themselves.

Churchland 0 – McGinn 1.

The articles below should help you understand some of the issues.

Must Singular Thoughts be Object-Dependent?

What follows are some ideas from London Ed about a book he is writing. He solicits comments. Mine are in blue.

The logical form thing was entertaining but rather off-topic re the fictional names thing. On which, Peter requested some more.

Let’s step right back. I want to kick off the book with an observation about how illusion impedes the progress of science. It looks as though the sun is going round the earth, so early theories of the universe had the earth standing still. It seems as though objects are continuously solid, and so science rejected the atomists’ theory and adopted Aristotle’s theory for more than a millenium.

A final example from the psychology of perception: in 1638, Descartes takes a eye of a bull and shows how images are projected onto the retina. He finally disproves the ‘emissive theory of sight’. The emissive theory is the naturally occurring idea that eyesight is emitted from your eye and travels to and hits the distant object you are looking at. If you ask a young child why you can’t see when your eyes are shut, he replies (‘because the eyesight can’t get out’).

Scientific progress is [often] about rejecting theories based on what our cognitive and perceptual framework suggests to us, and adopting theories based on diligent observation and logic.

We reject ‘eyebeams’. We reject the natural idea that the mental or sensitive faculty can act at a distance. When we look at the moon, science rejects the idea that a little ethereal piece of us is travelling a quarter of a million miles into space. Yet – turning to the main subject of the book – some philosophers think that objects themselves somehow enter our thoughts. Russell writes to Frege, saying “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high”. Kaplan mentions, with apparent approval, the idea that the proposition ‘John is tall’ has two components: the property expressed by the predicate ‘is tall’, and the individual John. “That’s right, John himself, right there, trapped in a proposition”. The dominant theory in modern philosophical logic is ‘direct reference’, or object-dependent theories of semantics: a proper name has no meaning except its bearer, and so the meaning of ‘John is tall’ has precisely the components that Kaplan describes.

BV: I too find the notion that there are Russellian (as opposed to Fregean) propositions very hard to swallow. If belief is a propositional attitude, and I believe that Peter is now doing his grades, it is surely not Peter himself, intestinal contents and all, who is a constituent of the proposition that is the accusative of my act of belief. The subject constituent of the proposition cannot be that infinitely propertied gnarly chunk of external reality, but must be a thinner sort of object, one manageable by a finite mind, something along the lines of a Fregean sense.

The purpose of the proposed book is to advance science by showing how such object-dependent theories are deeply mistaken, and also to explain why they are so compelling, because of their basis on a cognitive illusion as powerful as the illusions that underlie the geocentric theory, or the emissive theory of sight.

What is the illusion? The argument for object dependence is roughly as follows

(1) We can have so-called ‘singular thoughts’, such as when we think that John is tall, i.e. when we have thoughts expressable [expressible] by propositions [sentences, not propositions] whose subject term is a proper name or some other non-descriptive singular term.

(2) A singular term tells us which individual the proposition is about, without telling us anything about it. I.e. singular terms, proper names, demonstratives, etc. are non-descriptive. They are ‘bare individuators’.

BV: This is not quite right. Consider the the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' This is an indexical expression. If BV says, 'I am hungry,' he refers to BV; if PL says 'I am hungry,' he refers to PL. Either way, something is conveyed about the nature of the referent, namely, that it is a person or a self. So what Ed said is false as it stands. A use of 'I' does tell us something about the individual the sentence containing 'I' is about.

Examples are easily multiplied. Apart from the innovations of the Pee Cee, 'she' tells us that the individual referred to is female. 'Here' tells us that the item denoted is a place, typically. 'Now' picks out times. And there are other examples.

There are no bare items. Hence there cannot be reference to bare items. All reference conveys some property of the thing referred to. But variables may be a counterexample. Consider 'For any x, x = x.' One could perhaps uses variables in such a way that there is no restriction on what they range over. But it might be best to stay away from this labyrinth.

One criticism, then, is that there are no bare individuators. A second is that it is not a singular term, but a use of a singular term that individuates. Thus 'I' individuates nothing. It is PL's use of 'I' that picks out PL.

(3) If a singular term is non-descriptive, its meaning is the individual it individuates. A singular term cannot tell us which individual the proposition is about, unless there exists such an individual.

The course of the book is then to show why we don’t have to be forced into assumption (3). There doesn’t have to be (or to exist) an individual that is individuated. The theory of non-descriptive singular terms is then developed in the way I suggested in my earlier posts. Consider the inference

Frodo is a hobbit
Frodo has large feet
——-
Some hobbit has large feet

I want to argue that the semantics of ‘Frodo’ is purely inferential. I.e. to understand the meaning of ‘Frodo’ in that argument, it is enough to understand the inference that it generates. That is all.

BV: 'Frodo' doesn't generate anything. What you want to say is that the meaning of 'Frodo' is exhausted by the inferential role this term plays in the (valid) argument depicted. Sorry to be such a linguistic prick.

What you are saying is that 'Frodo,' though empty, has a meaning, but this meaning is wholly reducible to the purely syntactical role it plays in the above argument. (So you are not an eliminativist about the meanings of empty names.) But if the role is purely syntactical, then the role of 'Frodo' is the same as the role of the arbitrary individual constant 'f' in the following valid schema:

Hf
Lf
——-
(Ex)(Hx & Lx).

But then what distinguishes the meaning of 'Frodo' from that of 'Gandalf'?

Meinongian nonentities are out. Fregean senses are out. There are no referents in the cases of empty names. And yet they have meaning. So the meaning is purely syntactical. Well, I don't see how you can squeeze meaning out of bare syntax. Again, what distinguishes the meaning of the empty names just cited? The obviously differ in meaning, despite lacking both Sinn and Bedeutung.

We don’t need an object-dependent semantics to explain such inferences, and hence we don’t need object-dependence to explain the semantics of proper names. If an inferential semantics is sufficient, then the Razor tells us it is necesssary: Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.

BV: You should state explicitly that you intend your inferential semantics to hold both for empty and nonempty names.

And now we see the illusion. The proposition

John is thinking of Obama (or Frodo, or whomever)

has a relational form: “—is thinking of –”. But it does not express a relation. The illusion consists in the way that the relation of the language so strongly suggests a relation in reality. It is the illusion that causes us “to multiply the things principally signified by terms in accordance with the multiplication of the terms”.

That’s the main idea. Obviously a lot of middle terms have been left out. Have at it.

BV: So I suppose what you are saying is that belief in the intentionality of thought is as illusory as the belief in the emissive theory of sight. Just as the the eye does not emit an ethereal something that travels to the moon, e.g., the mind or the 'I' of the mind — all puns intended! — does not shoot out a ray of intentionality that gloms onto some Meinongian object, or some Thomistic merely intentional object, or some really existent object.

You face two main hurdles. The first I already mentioned. You have to explain how to squeeze semantics from mere syntax. The second is that there are theoretical alternatives to the view that intentionality is a relation other than yours. To mention just one: there are adverbial theories of intentionality that avoid an act-object analysis of mental reference.

John Searle Interviewed

This shot of the old philosopher by the fire with his shootin' ahrn nicely complements some of the combative things he says in the Zan Boag interview at NewPhilosopher. (HT: Karl White.) For example, "I don’t read much philosophy, it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up…so mostly I read works of fiction and history."

The surly (Searle-y?) reference is to externalist theories of mind such as Ted Honderich's and Clark and Chalmers' The Extended Mind.

I found this exchange interesting:

You say that consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain, and that where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is reality. Can you elaborate on this?

John Searle: Consciousness exists only insofar as it is experienced by a human or animal subject. OK, now grant me that consciousness is a genuine biological phenomenon. Well, all the same it’s somewhat different from other biological phenomena because it only exists insofar as it is experienced. However, that does give it an interesting status. You can’t refute the existence of consciousness by showing that it’s just an illusion because the illusion/ reality distinction rests on the difference between how things consciously seem to us and how they really are. But where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to me that I’m conscious, then I am conscious. You can’t make the illusion/reality distinction for the very existence of consciousness the way you can for sunsets and rainbows because the distinction is between how things consciously seem and how they really are.

You also say that consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire.

John Searle: Consciousness is a biological property like digestion or photosynthesis. Now why isn’t that screamingly obvious to anybody who’s had any education? And I think the answer is these twin traditions. On the one hand there’s God, the soul and immortality that says it’s really not part of the physical world, and then there is the almost as bad tradition of scientific materialism that says it’s not a part of the physical world. They both make the same mistake, they refuse to take consciousness on its own terms as a biological phenomenon like digestion, or photosynthesis, or mitosis, or miosis, or any other biological phenomenon.

Part of what Searle says in his first response is importantly correct. Since the distinction between illusion and reality presupposes the reality of consciousness, it makes no sense to suppose that consciousness might be an illusion, let alone assert such a monstrous thesis. It amazes me that there are people who are not persuaded by such luminous and straightforward reasoning. But pace Searle it does not follow that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. If biological phenomena are those phenomena that are in principle exhaustively intelligible in terms of the science of biology, then I don't see how consciousness could be biological even if it is found only in biologically alive beings. Can the what-it-is-like feature be accounted for in purely biological terms? (That's a rhetorical question.) And that's just for starters.

In the second response, Searle claims that consciousness is a biological property and that this ought to be "screamingly obvious" to anyone with "any education." Come on, John! Do you really want to suggest that the philosophical problem of consciousness as this is rigorously formulated by people like Colin McGinn is easily solved just be getting one's empirical facts straight? Do you really mean to imply that people who do not agree with your philosophy of mind are ignorant of plain biological facts? If consciousness were a biological phenomenon just like digestion or photosynthesis or mitosis or meiosis, then consciousness would be as unproblematic as the foregoing. It isn't.

Why is it that there is a philosophical problem of consciousness, but no philosophical problem of digestion? Note the obvious difference between the following two questions. Q1: How is consciousness possible given that it really exists, arises in the brain, but is inexplicable in terms of what we know and can expect to know about animal and human brains? Q2: How is digestion possible given that it really exists, takes place in the stomach and its 'peripherals,' but is inexplicable in terms of what we know and can know about animal and human gastrointestinal systems?

Obviously, there is a philosophical problem about consciousness but no philosophical problem about digestion. And note that even if some philosopher argues that there is no genuine philosophical problem about consciousness, because one has, say, been bewitched by language, or has fallen afoul of some such draconian principle as the Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Meaningfulness, no philosopher would dream of arguing that there is no genuine philosophical problem of digestion. It needs no arguing. For whether or not there is a genuine problem about consciousness, there is a putative problem about it. But there is not even a putative philosophical problem about digestion. The only problems concerning digestion are those that can be solved by taking an antacid or by consulting a gastroenterologist or by doing more empirical gut science.

This is why it is at least possible with a modicum of sense to argue that the philosophy of mind collapses into the neuroscience of the brain, but impossible sensibly to argue that the the philosophy of digestion collapses into gastroenterology or that the philosophy of blood filtering and detoxification collapses into hepatology. There is no philosophy of digestion or philosophy of blood filtering and detoxification.

It is obviously not obvious that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Searle is brilliant when it comes to exposing the faults of other theories of mind, but he is oblivious to the problems with his own. Searle 'knows' in his gut that naturalism just has to be true, which is why he cannot for a second take seriously any suggestion that consciousness might have a higher origin. But he ought to admit that his comparison of consciousness to digestion and photosynthesis and mitosis and meiosis is completely bogus. He can still be a naturalist, however, either by pinning his hopes on some presently incoceivable future science or by going mysterian in the manner of McGinn.

More on Searle in my appropriately appellated Searle category.

Christian Physicalism?

J. P. Moreland is against it. Me too. More generally, I oppose any amalgamation of classical theism and materialism about the mind. (See my "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 160-180.) Here are some excerpts from Moreland's piece:

Christianity is a dualist, interactionist religion in this sense: God, angels/demons, and the souls of men and beasts are immaterial substances that can causally interact with the world. Specifically, human persons are (or have) souls that are spiritual substances that ground personal identity in a disembodied intermediate state between death and final resurrection . . . .

[. . .]

In my view, Christian physicalism involves a politically correct revision of the biblical text that fails to be convincing . . . .

[. . .]

The irrelevance of neuroscience also becomes evident when we consider the recent best seller Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander. Regardless of one’s view of the credibility of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in general, or of Alexander’s in particular, one thing is clear. Before whatever it was that happened to him (and I believe his NDE was real but no not agree with his interpretation of some of what happened to him), Alexander believed the (allegedly) standard neuroscientific view that specific regions of the brain generate and possess specific states of conscious. But after his NDE, Alexander came to believe that it is the soul that possesses consciousness, not the brain, and the various mental states of the soul are in two-way causal interaction with specific regions of the brain. Here’s the point: His change in viewpoint was a change in metaphysics that did not require him to reject or alter a single neuroscientific fact. Dualism and physicalism are empirically equivalent views consistent with all and only the same scientific data. Thus, the authority of science cannot be appropriated to provide any grounds whatsoever for favoring one view over another.

I'm with J.P on the irrelevance of neuroscience to the philosophy of mind, and vice versa, but with three minor exceptions that I explain in the third article cited below.

Sophistry in True Detective: On the Supposed Illusion of Having a Self

The other day I referred to the following bit of dialogue from the new HBO series, True Detective, as sophistry. Now I will explain why I think it to be such. Here is the part I want to focus on. The words are put in the mouth of the anti-natalist Rustin Cohle. I've ommitted the responses of the Woody Harrelson character.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Sorting through this crap is as painful as reading the typical student paper. Where does one start with such a farrago of Unsinn? But here goes. The main points made above are these:

1. The emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness in human animals is an accident, a fluke of evolution.

2. We are each under the illusion of having, or being, a self when in fact there are no selves.

3. We have been programmed by nature to suffer from this illusion.

4. The honorable thing to do is to deny our programming, refuse to procreate, and embrace our extinction as a species.

Each of these theses is either extremely dubious or demonstrably incoherent, taken singly, not to mention the dubiousness of the 'is'-'ought' inference from (3) to (4). But in this entry I will address (2) alone.

'There are no selves' is what our anti-natalist means when he say that everybody is nobody. For it is a Moorean fact, undeniable even by our anti-natalist, that every living human body is some living human body or other. He is not denying that plain fact but that these living human bodies are selves.

Performative Inconsistency

Now 'There are no selves,' if asserted by a being who understands what he says and means what he says, is asserted by a conscious and self-conscious being. But that is just what a self is. A self is a conscious being capable of expressing explicit self-consciousness by the use of the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' Therefore, a self that asserts that there are no selves falls into performative inconsistency. The very act or performance of asserting that there are no selves or that one is not a self falsifies the content of the assertion. For that performance is a performance of a self.

The claim that there are no selves is therefore self-refuting.

Assertion is a speech act. But we get the same result if one merely thinks the thought that one is not a self without expressing it via an assertive utterance. If I think the thought *I am not a self,* then that thought is falsified by the act of thinking it since the act is the act of a self.

The point can also be made as follows. If there are no selves, then I am not a self. But if I am not a self, then I do not exist. Perhaps some living human body exists, but that body cannot be my body if I do not exist. What makes this body my body is its connection with me. So I must exist for some body to be my body. My body is my body and not my body's body. So I am not identical to my body. I have a body. 'This body is this body' is a tautology. 'I am this body' is not a tautology. If I exist, then I am distinct from my body and from any body.

So if I am not a self, then I do not exist. But the thought that I do not exist is unthinkable as true. Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if 'I' picks out merely a momentary self. (I am not committed by this line of reasoning to a substantial self that remains numerically the same over time.) So we have performative inconsistency.

This reasoning does not show that I am a necessary being, or that I have or am an immortal soul, or even that I am a res cogitans in Descartes' sense. What it shows is that the self cannot be an illusion. It shows that anyone who carefully considers whether or not he is a self can attain the certain insight that he is at least as long as he is thinking these thoughts.

Soviel Schein, soviel Sein

There is another way of looking at it. If each of us is under the illusion of having a self or being a self, then who is being fooled? To whom does this false seeming appear? There cannot be illusions in a world without conscious beings. An illusion by its very nature is an illusion to consciousness. So if consciousness is an illusion, then it is not an illusion. The same holds for the self. If the self is an illusion, then the self is not an illusion.

There cannot be Schein (illusion) without Sein (being). "So much seeming, so much being."

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy. And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research. Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy. A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader. It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]." In the body of the article we read:

This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience.

For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly – although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.

Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.

Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.

Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner. (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.

I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point. Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about. What is conscience?

Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference. It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory. It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.

The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions. Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't. Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should. If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is. Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to nonmoral consciousness: if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.

So just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience. Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains. Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question. Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong. That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.

Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole? If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain. But this is impossible. A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state. But no physical state is object-directed. So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state.

So that is one absurdity. A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain. Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds. What is being examined here? Obviously not some bit of brain matter. And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.

If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan. But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate. No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.

There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk? Either way, absurdity. Examining is an intentional state. So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.

I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone sufficies to refute the scientistic nonsense. And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms. I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain. Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.

Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist: how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these nonnatural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme? Answers: It is not possible, and they don't.

Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation? Maybe not. Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity. David Gelernter is good on this.

On Seeing: Intentionality without Aspectuality?

Consider this argument:

1. Tom believes that the man at the podium is the Pope

2. The Pope is an Argentinian

Therefore

3. Tom believes that the man at the podium is Argentinian.

The argument is plainly invalid. For Tom may not believe that the Pope is an Argentinian. Now consider this argument:

4. Tom sees the Pope

2. The Pope is an Argentinian

Therefore

5. Tom sees an Argentinian.

Valid or invalid? That depends. 'Sees' is often taken to be a so-called verb of success: if S sees x, then it follows that x exists. On this understanding of 'sees' one cannot see what doesn't exist. Call this the existentially loaded sense of 'sees' and contrast it with the existentially neutral sense according to which 'S sees x' does not entail 'X exists.'

If 'sees' is understood in the existentially loaded way, then the second argument is valid, whether or not Tom knows that the Pope is Argentinian. For if Tom sees the Pope, then the object seen exists. But nothing can exist without properties, properties most of which are had independently of our mental states. If the object has the property F-ness, then the perceiver sees an F-thing, even if he doesn't see it as an F-thing. So Tom sees an Argentinian despite not seeing him as an Argentinian.

Now seeing in the existentially loaded sense might seem to be a perfectly good example of an intentional or object-directed state since one cannot see without seeing something. One cannot just see. Seeing takes an object.

But whether existentially loaded seeing is an intentional state depends on what all enters into the definition of an intentional state. Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality. What I am calling aspectuality is what John Searle calls "aspectual shape":

I have been using the term of art, "aspectual shape," to mark a universal feature of intentionality. It can be explained as follows: Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others. These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157)

The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state is such that every aspect of the object is before the mind of the person in the state. Suppose you see my car. You won't help being able to see it is as bright yellowish-green sport-utility vehicle. But you could easily see it without seeing it as a 2013 Jeep Wrangler. I take this to imply that the set of perceived aspects of any object of perception not only can be but must be incomplete. This should be obvious from the fact that, as Husserl liked to point out, outer perception is essentially perspectival. For example, all sides of the car are perceivable, but one cannot see the car from the front and from the rear simultaneously.

This aspectuality holds for intentional states generally. To coin an example, one can believe that a certain celestial body is the Evening Star without believing that it is the Morning Star. One can want to drink a Manhattan without wanting to drink a mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and Angostura bitters. As Searle says, "Every belief and every desire, and indeed every intentional phenomenon, has an aspectual shape." (157)

Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something. And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that even if every F is a G, one can be aware of x as F without being aware of x as G. Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.

But now it seems we have a problem. If that which is (phenomenlogically, not spatially) before my mind is necessarily property-incomplete, then either seeing is not existentially loaded, or existentially loaded seeing is not an intentional state. To put the problem as an aporetic tetrad:

1. If S sees x, then x exists

2. Seeing is an intentional state

3. Every intentional state has an aspectual shape: its object is incomplete

4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent. Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.

But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands. At least one of the limbs is false, but which one? I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection. That leaves (1) or (2).

I incline toward the rejection of (1). Seeing is an intentional state but it is not existence-entailing. My seeng of x does not entail the existence of x. What one sees (logically) may or may not exist. There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature. The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.

It is of course built into the intentionality of outer perception that what is intended is intended as existing whether or not the act or intentio exists. To put it paradoxically (and I owe this formulation to Wolfgang Cramer), the object intended is intended as non-object. That is, objects of outer perception are intended as existing independently of the mental acts that 'target' them, and thus not as merely intentional objects. But there is nothing like an 'ontological argument' in the vicinity. I cannot validly infer that the tree I see exists because it is intended as existing apart from my seeing. This is is an invalid 'ontological' inference:

A. X is intended as existing independently of any and all mental acts

ergo

B. X exists.

If the above is right, then seeing is an intentional state that shares the aspectuality common to all such states. A consequence of this is a rejection of 'externalism' about outer perception: the content of the mental state I am in when I see a tree does not depend on the existence of any tree. The object-directedness of the mental state is intrinsic to it and not dependent on any extrinsic relation to a mind-independent item. To turn Putnam on his head: the meaning is precisely 'in the head.'

Are there problems with this? We shall see. Externalism is a fascinating option. But I am highly annoyed that that typical analytic philosopher, Ted Honderich, who defends a version of externalism in his book On Consciousness, makes no mention of the externalist theories of Heidegger, Sartre or Butchvarov. How typical of the analytic ignoramus, not that all 'analysts' are ignorant of the history of philosophy.