Mind – Page 8 – Maverick Philosopher

Mind and Matter

Here are a couple of theses that are part of my credo, though I do not merely believe them, but think I have good reasons for believing them:

Thesis 1: One cannot get mind from matter no matter how the matter is arranged or how complexly arranged. That mind should arise from matter is unintelligible.

To appreciate the force of this thesis, let's run through some objections. And I do mean run: what follows has to be cursory.

Objection 1. "There is no question of getting mind from matter; mental states and properties just are states and properties of the material world, patterns of behavior perhaps, or patterns of neural activity."

Response 1. Of course I reject identity theories that reduce the mental to the physical, whether they be type-type identity theories or merely token-token identity theories. I have written an 'unconscionable' number of posts on this topic I and am not inclined to repeat myself in any detail. But if you tell me that, say, my thinking about Prague is identical to a complex state of my brain, I would dismiss that as obvious nonsense and for a very good reason. My occurent thinking, at this moment, is of or about or directed to an object that, for all I know, was nuked out of existence — God forbid — a second ago and this without prejudice to my act of thinking's now being about precisely the object it is about. Now this intrinsic object-directedness or intrinsic intentionality of my act of thinking — to use the philosopher's term of art — is not a property that it makes any sense to ascribe to any physical object or state. Now if x has a property that y lacks, or vice versa, then of course x cannot be identical to y.

Objection 2. "There simply are no mental states as you claim, and the argument from intentionality you give can be run in reverse so as to prove it."

Response 2. The objector is suggesting the following argument: "(1) If mental states such as thinking about Prague are anything, then they are brain states; (2) such mental states exhibit intrinsic intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits intrinsic intentionality; therefore (4) there are no mental states."

This eliminativist argument issues in a conclusion that is obviously, breathtakingly false, and so one of the premises must be false. The stinker is of course (1).

Objection 3. "Granted, it is unintelligible that mind should arise from matter as conceived in current physics. But the matter that we know might hide and contain within itself occult powers beyond the ken of current or any future physics, including the power to give rise to mind."

Reply 3. The game is up when materialists reach for occult powers. The only matter we know about is the matter of ordinary experience and physics. And there is no place in matter so conceived for occult powers that give rise to mind. If you tell me that what thinks when I think is an intracranial hunk of meat, then you are ascribing a power to matter that destroys the very concept of matter that you started with and that you need to articulate your materialism.

Thesis 2: That matter should arise from mind is not unintelligible.

Why not? Because intrinsic to mind is object-directedness, or object-positing. Mind by its nature is of objects distinct from mind. Mind has the power to create objects distinct from itself and its states. This power is not occult. It is open to us in reflection. The entire material cosmos could be be just a huge system of intentional objects for a sufficiently capacious and powerful mind. The thought is thinkable. It is intelligible. That is not to say it is true or to say that we have good reasons for believing it. It has its difficulties, but it makes sense in the way it makes no sense to maintain that mind arises from matter. That is an absurdity that can be seen to be such by hard thinking.

So we get an asymmetry. Matter could, for all we know, be the product of mind, but mind could not, for all we know, be the product of matter.

Ted Honderich is One Quirky Writer

I am reading Ted Honderich, On Consciousness (Edinburgh UP, 2004) and trying to get a handle on just what his theory of consciousness as existence amounts to. An awkward and quirky writer, he doesn't make things easy on the reader, and doesn't seem to realize that in this very fast brave new world of ours the writer must get to the point without unnecessary circumlocution if he wants to keep his reader glued to the page. Here is an example of Honderich's style, from p. 206:

The other option from spiritualism now deserves the name of being devout physicalism. You can say and write, in a career that keeps an eye on some of science, maybe two, and is forgetful of reflective experience, that being conscious or aware of something is only having certain physical properties in the head. Usually this cranialism is a matter of only neural properties as we know them — thought of computationally or with microtubules to the fore or in any other way you like.

[Note the awkward placement of "Maybe two." It belongs right after "eye."]

Nobody not on the philosophical job of trying to approximate more to some of science or horse sense believes this either. We all know, to make use of a pefectly proper and enlightening parody, that consciousness, isn't just cells, however fancily or fancifully conceived. Everybody on the job tries to give a place to or register what they know when they're not on the job. But they can't do it if they have it that consciousness has only neural properties or conceivably silicon or otherwise physical properties, no matter how they are conceived additionally.

Honderich's thought is not so much expressed as buried in the above mess of verbiage. Here is the thought which is correct as far as it goes expressed in three sentences.

Devout physicalism is the main alternative to spiritualism, or substance dualism. But only someone who fails to reflect on his actual experience could suppose that being conscious of something is a matter of the instantiation of neural properties in the brain. Both philosopher and layman know that consciousness is not brain cells, but the philosopher trying to be scientific is apt to forget it.

Here is Colin McGinn's savage review of Honderich's book. Be aware that there is personal animus between the two men.

On Multiplying Modes of Existence

Am I committed to an uneconomical multiplication of modes of existence? I said that the following set of propositions is logically consistent:

a. Tom is thinking of a unicorn
b. Unicorns do not exist in reality
c. Tom's mental state is object-directed; it is an intentional state.
d. The object of Tom's mental state does not exist in reality.
e. The merely intentional object is not nothing.
f. The merely intentional object enjoys intentional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from existence in reality.

David Brightly in a comment constructs a similar set:

By analogy with your (a)–(f) can we not also consistently assert the following?

a. This tapestry, rather beautifully, depicts a unicorn.
b. Unicorns do not exist in the (C1)-sense.
c. The tapestry is object-directed; it is a depictional entity.
d. The object of the tapestry does not (C1)-exist.
e. The merely depicted object is not nothing.
f. The merely depicted object enjoys depictional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from (C1)-existence.

Likewise,

Whereas my view is that when Tom thinks of a unicorn, he is thinking of something, an item that exists merely as the object of Tom's act of thinking, but does not exist mind-independently,

has the analogy,

When the tapestry depicts a unicorn, it is depicting something, an item that exists merely as the object of the tapestry's depicting, but does not exist tapestry-independently.

Three points.

First, the intentionality of Tom's thinking is original while the intentionality of the tapestry is derivative. The tapestry is not intrinsically intentional, but derives its intentionality from a mind's taking of the merely physical object as a picture or image of something else. By itself, the tapestry depicts nothing. It is just a piece of cloth.

Given the first point, my second is that there are not two kinds of intentionality or object-directedness, but only one, the intentionality of the viewer of the tapestry who takes it as representing something, a unicorn. 'Derivative' in 'derivative intentionality' is an alienans adjective.

Third, if there are not two kinds of intentionality, then there is no call to distinguish, in addition to (C1)-existence (real existence) and intentional existence, depictional existence.

In this way I think I can avoid multiplying modes of existence by the multiplicity of types of physical things (scribbles on paper, trail markers, grooves in vinyl, etc.) that can be taken to represent something.

Sexuality and Sex Organs

Can one learn all about human sexuality by studying the human organs of generation? The very notion is risible. Can one learn all about human affectivity by studying that most reliable and indefatigable of pumps, the human heart? Risible again. It is similarly risible to think that one can learn all about the mind by studying that marvellously complex hunk of meat, the brain.

Merely Intentional Objects and the ‘Existential Fallacy’

London Ed wants to pin the 'existential fallacy' on me. He writes and I respond in blue:

Continue reading “Merely Intentional Objects and the ‘Existential Fallacy’”

Paul Churchland on Eliminative Materialism

Via Ed Feser, I see that that Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness has appeared in a third edition. Just what the world needs. I concur with Ed's judgment:

The only thing more outrageous than Churchland’s persistence in superficiality and caricature would be the continued widespread use of his book as a main text for introductory courses in philosophy of mind — at least if it were not heavily supplemented with readings that correct his errors, and actually bother to present the main arguments for dualism.

To 'celebrate' this great event in the publishing world, I post a revised version of an entry from about five years ago:

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.

Pascal on Materialism

"Atheists should say things that are perfectly clear. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material." (Krailsheimer, #161, p. 82) An atheist needn't be a mortalist, and a mortalist needn't be an atheist. But let that pass. Although the one does not logically require the other, or the other the one, atheism and mortalism naturally 'go together.' (McTaggart, for example, was an atheist but an immortalist with, apparently, no breach of logical consistency.)

If it were perfectly clear that that the soul is mortal as the body is mortal, then then why all the wild disagreement among materialists/naturalists/physicalists? Think of all their different theories. For example, there are eliminative materialists who rely on the (true) premise that no brain state is intrinsically intentional. They conclude that there are no mental states given that mental states are intrinsically intentional. But other materialists reject the (true) premise, maintaining that some brain states are intrinsically intentional, namely, the ones that are identical to mental states.

So here is a deep dispute within the materialist camp. Identity theorists affirm what eliminativists deny, namely, that there are mental states. Members of each camp believe that materialism is true, but they contradict each other as to why it is true. Now if it not clear why materialism is true, then it is hardly clear that it is true. That, I take it, is Pascal's point.

It is not clear that the soul is material (and thus mortal) and it is not clear that it isn't. Neither view is ruled out or ruled in by the reason resident in the thinking reeds we are. So you are free to believe either way. And you are free to act either way. If you act and live as if the soul is immortal, then you may come to believe that it is. (See the 'holy water' passage.) What's more, if you believe that it is then you will live better in this world if not beyond it. So why not believe?

Of course, you may be constitutionally incapable of believing. In that case you have a problem that is better addressed by a psychotherapist than by a philosopher.

Made for Thinking

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer #620:

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author, and our end.

Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking about what it means to be a king or to be a man.

The Relevance of Conscious Robots for the Philosophy of Mind

Do you understand lasagne? Of course you do. But I understand it better because I know how to make it from ingredients none of which is lasagne. (If I were to 'make' lasagne by fusing eight squares of lasagne, and you were a philosopher, you would protest that I hadn't made lasagne but had 'presupposed' it. And you'd be right. That would be like making coffee by pouring eight cups of coffee into a carafe.)

It is tempting to suppose that what we know how to make, we understand. (He said with a sidelong glance in the direction of Giambattista Vico.) Let's give into the temptation. Suppose one day humans create a robot that is really conscious, conscious in the way I believe my wife is conscious. Whether or not I know that she is, in that tough sense of 'know' that entails being certain, I do not doubt for a second that my wife is a genuine bearer of intentional and non-intentional mental states. She has feelings just as I do and she thinks about things just as I do, and this is not a matter of ascription on my part as when I ascribe to my chess computer the 'desire' to inflict mate. Her verbal and non-verbal behavior do not merely simulate, even if exactly, behavior that is expressive of real consciousness; it is behavior that is expressive of real consciousness.

So suppose we have a really conscious robot fabricated to look like a woman, so well fabricated, let us assume, as to fool a gynecologist. If we know that that conscious being is a robot, we may find it hard to believe that she is really conscious. But suppose we can convince ourselves that our robot is really conscious and enjoys an 'inner' life just as we do.

What implications would this have for the mind-body problem? Would the existence of a really conscious robot that we had constructed from non-conscious material parts show that consciousness was a natural phenomenon that arises or emerges from sufficently complicated configurations of wholly material parts? Would it put paid to substance dualism? Would it show that there was nothing supernatural about consciousness? Could one refute substance dualism and the notion that consciousness (including self-consciousness and all spiritual functions) has a higher (non-natural) origin by building a conscious robot?

Many would say 'yes.' But I say 'no.'

If we make a really conscious robot, if we 'synthesize' consciousness and the unity of consciousness from non-conscious materials, what we have done is to assemble components that form a unified physical thing at which consciousness is manifested. But this neutral description of what we have done leaves open two possibilities:

1. The one is that consciousness simply comes into existence without cause at that complex configuration of physical components but is in no way caused by or emergent from that complex configuration. In this case we have not synthesized consciousness from nonconscious materials; we have simply brought together certain material components at which consciousness appears.

2. The other possibility is that consciousness comes into manifestation at the complex configuration of physical componets ab extra, from outside the natural sphere. A crude theological way of thinking of this would be that a purely spiritual being, God, 'implants' consciousness in sufficiently complex physical systems.

On both (1) and (2), consciousness arises at a certain level of materal complexity, but not from matter. On (1) it just arises as a matter of brute fact. On (2), consciousness comes from consciousness. On neither does consciousness have a natural origin. On (1) consciousness does not originate from anything. On (2) it has a non-natural origin.

Given these two possibilities, one cannot validly infer that consciousness is a wholly natural phenomenon from the existence of conscious robots. The existence of conscious robots is logically consistent with (1), with (2), and with the naturalist hypothesis that consciousness is purely natural.

My point could be put as follows. Even if we succeed in creating machines with (literal) minds, this has no bearing on the mind-body problem. This is because it leaves open the three possibilities mentioned. Suppose you are a conscious robot who is thinking about the mind-body problem. Substance dualism would be an option for you. You could not validly infer that your mind is not an immaterial substance from the fact that you were created in Palo Alto by robotics engineers. Same goes with me. I am not a robot, but a conscious animal who came into the world inter faeces et urinam. (Actually, if the truth be told, I came into the this vale of tears by Caesarean section; but let's not quibble: you came into it inter faeces et urinam.) But I cannot validly infer from the fact of my animal origin that my consciousness is a wholly natural function.

Now suppose naturalism is true. There is still the problem of the unintelligibility of the arisal of consciousness from brain matter, an unintelligibility that Colin McGinn, naturalist and atheist, has rightly insisted on. This unintelligibility will not be diminished one iota by the arrival of conscious robots should such robots make the scene in the coming years.

Thomas Nagel on the Central Argument of His Mind and Cosmos

Here. Excerpt:

This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.

There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.

Nagel, of course, rejects each of (a)-(d).

My overview of Nagel's book is here. More detailed posts on Nagel are in the aptly denominated Nagel category.

The comments on Nagel's piece are mostly garbage. There is something offensive about allowing any birdbrain to leave his droppings on an essay by one of our best philosophers.

The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

Is Philosophy of Mind Relevant to the Practice of Neuroscience?

This from a reader:

There’s a youngster here considering going to college to study neuroscience, and I’m doing my best to inoculate him against scientism while offering a case for dualism. I’ve offered broad worldview reasons why that would matter, but I’m not sure off the top of my head what I would say if he asked what professional difference it would make to be a dualist neuroscientist. The dualist would say that areas X and Y are associated with and bear some causal relationship with the mind’s being in state ABC, while the physicalist would say that areas X and Y constitute or realize or give rise to state ABC. Pharma would be just as effective, placebo effects aside, if one takes a physicalist rather than a dualist interpretation of the mind-body problem. Metaphysically and religiously, there are huge differences, but during the time I was intensely reflecting on the metaphysics of mind the question of what difference it might make to a neuroscientist qua neuroscientist never entered my mind. If you have any thoughts off the top of your…er, mind I would be most grateful.

Off the top of my 'head,' it seems to me that, with only three exceptions, it should make no difference at all to the practicing neuroscientist what philosophy of mind he accepts. Emergentist, epiphenomenalist, property dualist, hylomorphic dualist, substance dualist, type-type identity theorist, parallelist, occasionalist, functionalist, panpsychist, dual-aspect theorist, mysterian, idealist, — whatever the position, I can't see it affecting the study of that most marvellous and most complex intercranial hunk of meat we call the brain.

Eliminativism, solipsism, and behaviorism are the exceptions.

One of the things that neuroscientists do is to determine the neural correlates of conscious states. To work out the correlations requires taking seriously the reports of a conscious test subject who reports sincerely from his first-person point of view on the content and quality of his experiences as different regions of his brain are artificially stimulated in various ways. Now if our neuroscientist is an eliminativist, then it seems to me that he cannot, consistently with his eliminativism, take seriously the verbal reports of the test subject. For if there are no mental states, then the reports are about precisely nothing. And you cannot correlate nothing with something.

Suppose now that our neuroscientist is a solipist. He believes in other brains, but not in other minds. He holds that his is the only mind. It seems that our solipsistic brain researcher could not, consistently with his solipsism, take seriously the reports of the test subject. He could not take them as being reports of anything. He could take them only as verbal behavior, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Something similar would seem to hold for the behaviorist neuroscientist. What the (analytical) behaviorist does it to identify mental states with behavior (linguistic or non-linguistic) and/or with dispositions to behave. Thus my belief that it is about to rain is nothing other than my rummaging for an umbrella in the closet, and the like. My feeling of pain is my grimacing, etc. The analytical behaviorist does not deny that they are beliefs and desires and sensory states such as pleasure and pain. His project is not eliminativist but identitarian. There are beliefs and desires and pains, he thinks; it is just that what they are are bits of behavior and/or behavioral dispositions.

But if my pain just is my grimacing, wincing, etc. , then the brain scientist has no need of my verbal reports. Stimulating the 'pain center' of my brain, he need merely look at my overt behavior.

One issue here is whether analytical behaviorism can be kept from collapsing into eliminative behaviorism. If mind is just behavior, then that is tantamount to saying that there is no mind. This, I take it, is the point of the old joke about the two behaviorist sex partners, "It was good for you, how was it for me?" If the feeling just is the behavior, then there is no feeling.

So my answer to my correspondent, just off the top of my 'head,' without having thought much about this issue, is that a neuroscientist's philosophy of mind, if he has one, should have no effect on his practice of neuroscience except in the three cases mentioned.

But here is another wrinkle that just occured to me. Consider scientism, which is not a position in the philosophy of mind, but a position in epistemology. If our neuroscientist were a scientisticist (to coin a term as barbarous as its nominatum), and thus one who held that only natural science is knowledge, then how could he credit the reports of his test subject given that these reports are made from the first-person point of view and are not about matters that are third-person verifiable?

If you poke around in my visual cortex and I report seeing red, and you credit my report as veridical, then you admit that there is a source of knowledge that is not natural-scientific, and thus you contradict your scientism.

So I tentatively suggest that no neuroscientist who investigates the neural correlates of consciousness can be a scientisticist!

Galen Strawson versus Colin McGinn

Galen Strawson in Little Gray Cells:

The intuitive puzzle is clear, and McGinn presents it with multilayered intensity. He is right that we can never hope to understand how consciousness as we know it in everyday life relates to the brain considered as a lump of matter. But it doesn't follow that consciousness is a mystery — except insofar as everything is. This move rests on a large assumption that is almost universally held, although it is certainly false.

This is the assumption that we have a pretty good understanding of the nature of matter — of matter in space — of the physical in general. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in a material world seems mystifying. For what exactly is puzzling about consciousness, once we put the assumption aside? We know just what it is like. Suppose you have an experience of redness, or pain, and consider it just as such. There doesn't seem to be any room for anything that could be called failure to understand what it is. You know what it is.

BV comments: Strawson is right about one thing: we know what consciousness is from our own case. We experience pains and pleasures, and so on. (And he is also right to avoid the eliminativism that tempts many.) But he misses the problem that McGinn so masterfully presents. It is is not consciousness as we experience it that is puzzling, but how consciousness arises from the gray matter in our skulls. We understand consciousness from the first-person point of view, and our physics gives us a very good understanding of matter from the third-person point of view. What we don't understand is how matter can be conscious.

It is not consciousness that is puzzling, then, but matter. What the existence of consciousness shows is that we have a profoundly inadequate grasp on the nature of matter. McGinn agrees with this last point, in fact: with considerable speculative panache, he develops the idea that there must be something deficient in our idea of space, as well as in our idea of matter. But he still wants to stress the mysteriousness of consciousness; to which the reply, once again, is that we find consciousness mysterious only because we have a bad picture of matter.

BV: Strawson is not making sense. There is nothing particularly puzzling about consciousness, and, contrary to what he says, there is nothing particularly puzzling about brains. What is puzzling is how a brain can be conscious. He doesn't seem to grasp the problem. Besides, how can the existence of consciousness show that we have an inadequate grasp of matter? What does that even mean?

Can anything be done? I think physics can help, by undermining features of our picture of matter that make it appear so totally different from consciousness. The first step is very simple: to begin with, perhaps, one takes it that matter is simply solid stuff, uniform, non-particulate (the ultimate Norwegian cheese). Then one learns that it is composed of distinct atoms — solid particles that cohere closely together to make up objects, but that have empty space (roughly speaking) between them. Then one learns that these atoms are themselves made up of tiny, separate particles, and full of empty space themselves. One learns that matter is not at all what one thought.

Now one may accept this while retaining the idea that matter is at root solid, dense lumpen stuff, utterly different from consciousness. For so far this picture preserves the idea that there are true particles of matter: tiny grainy bits of ultimate stuff that are in themselves truly solid. And one may say that only these, strictly speaking, are matter — matter as such. But it's been a long time since the 18th-century philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley pointed out that there are no scientific grounds for supposing that the fundamental constituents of matter have any truly solid central part, and the picture of grainy, inert particles has effectively disappeared in the strangenesses of modern quantum theory and superstring theory.

Current physics, then, thinks of matter as a thing of forces, energy, fields. And it can also seem natural to think of consciousness as a form or manifestation of energy, as a kind of force, and even, perhaps, as a kind of field. You may still feel the two things are deeply heterogeneous, but you really have no good reason to believe this. You just don't know enough about matter. When McGinn speaks of the ''squishy'' brain, he vividly expresses part of our ordinary idea of matter. But when physics inspects the volume of space-time occupied by a brain, what does it find? It finds a vibrant play of energy, an astonishingly insubstantial, radiant form.

All this being so, do we have any good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that legitimates surprise at the thought that consciousness is itself wholly physical? We do not. And that is the first, crucial step that one must take when facing up to the problem of consciousness.

BV: Strawson is maintaining that the sense of the utter heterogeneity of matter and consciousness arises from an inadequate conception of matter, and that if we had an adequate conception the sense of heterogeneity would dissipate. We would then understand consciousness to be a purely material phenomenon. Now it is true that our concept of matter is pegged to the state of physics, and also true that we now have a more adequate conception of matter than we had in earlier centuries. Well, suppose the volume of space-time occupied by a brain is filled with "a vibrant play of energy, an astonishingly insubstantial, radiant form," as Strawson lyrically puts it. The problem remains: how does brain matter so conceived give rise to consciousness, not to mention thought? The problem remains on any extant conception of matter, no matter how "insubstantial." Strawson is fooling himself if he thinks that the problem arises only on the assumption that matter is the 'ultimate Norwegian cheese."

Strawson is doing nothing more than giving expression to his faith and hope that someday physics will have advanced to the point where it will become intelligible how the brain matter in animals of our complexity can be conscious. But he has no idea of what the solution will look like. He is gesturing hopefully in the direction of he-knows-not-what. Both he and McGinn are naturalists. But he is an optimist where McGinn is a pessimist. Strawson pins his hopes on future physics. McGinn has no such faith or hope. His view is that the matter-consciousness problem has a solution but it is one our cognitive architecture prevents us from ever knowing.

Both philosophers are naturalists who maintain that there is nothing non-natural or supernatural about consciousness. I am not a naturalist. But if I were I would say that McGinn's position is the more reasonable of the two. What best explains the intractability, hitherto, of the problems in the philosophy of mind? Our lack of understanding of physics, or something about our cogntive architecture that makes it impossible for us to grasp the solution? I'd put my money on the latter.

So far, then: McGinn 1; Strawson 0.

A Reader Defends Kurzweil against McGinn

Will Duquette e-mails and I respond in blue.

Having followed your link to McGinn's review of Kurzweil's book, "How to Create a Mind," it seems to me that there's something McGinn is missing that weakens his critique. Mind you, I agree that Kurzweil is mistaken; but there's a piece of Kurzweil's view of things that McGinn doesn't see (or discounts) that is is crucial to understanding him.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Kurzweil; but I've been a software engineer for over two decades where McGinn has not, and there are some habits of thought common to the computer science community. For example, computer software and hardware are often designed as networks of cooperating subsystems, each of which has its own responsibility, and so we fall naturally into a homunculistic manner of speaking when working out designs. And this is practically useful: it aids communication among designers, even if it is philosophically perilous.

Anyway, here's the point that I would make back to McGinn if I were Kurzweil: patterns outside the brain lead to patterns inside the brain. A digital camera sees a scene in the world through a lens, and uses hardware and software to turn it into a pattern of bits. Other programs can then operate on that pattern of bits, doing (for example) pattern recognition; others can turn the bits back into something visible (e.g., a web browser).

REPLY: McGinn needn't disagree with any of this, though he would bid you be very careful about 'see' and 'recognition.' A digital camera does not literally see anything any more than my eye glasses literally see things. Light bouncing off external objects causes certain changes in the camera which are then encoded in a pattern of binary digits. (I take it that your 'bit' is short for 'binary digit.') And because the camera does not literally see anything, it cannot literally remember what it has (figuratively) 'seen.' The same goes for pattern recognition. Speaking literally, there is no recognition taking place. All that is going on is a mechanical simulation of recognition.

To the extent, then, that sensory images are encoded and stored as data in the brain, the notion that memories (even remembering to buy cat food) might be regarded as patterns and processed by the brain as patterns is quite reasonable.

REPLY: This is precisely what I deny. Memories are intentional experiences: they are of or about something; they are object-directed; they have content. One cannot just remember; in every case to remember is to remember something, e.g., that I must buy cat food. No physical state, and thus no brain state, is object-directed or content-laden. Therefore, memories are not identical to states of the brain such as patterns of neuron firings. Correlated perhaps, but not identical to.

Of course, as you've noted fairly often recently, a pattern of marks on a piece of paper has no meaning by itself, and a pattern of marks, however encoded in the brain, doesn't either. But Kurzweil, like most people these days, seems to have no notion of the distinction between the Sense and the Intellect; he thinks that only the Sense exists, and he, like Thomas Aquinas, puts memories and similar purely internal phenomena in the Sense. I don't think that's unreasonable. The problem is that he doesn't understand that the Intellect is different.

In short, Kurzweil is certainly too optimistic, but he might have a handle on the part of the problem that computers can actually do. He won't be able to program up a thinking mind; but perhaps he might do a decent lower animal of sorts.

REPLY: Again, I must disagree. You want to distinguish between sensing and thinking, and say that while there cannot be mechanical thinkers, there can be mechanical sensors, using 'thinking' and 'sensing' literally. I deny it. Talk of mechanical sensors is figurative only. I have a device under my kitchen sink that 'detects' water leaks. Two points. First, it does not literally sense anything. There is no mentality involved at all. It is a purely mechanical system. When water contacts one part of it, another part of it emits a beeping sound. That is just natural causation below the level of mind. I sense using it as an instrument, just as I see using my glasses as an instrument. I sense — I come to acquire sensory knowledge — that there is water where there ought not be using this contraption as an instrumental extension of my tactile and visual senses. Suppose I hired a little man to live under my sink to report leaks. That dude, if he did his job, would literally sense leaks. But the mechanical device does not literally sense anything. I interpret the beeping as indicating a leak.

The second point is that sensing is intentional: one senses that such-and-such. For example, one senses that water is present. But no mechanical system has states that exhibit original (as opposed to derivative) intentionality. So there can't be a purely mechanical sensor or thinker.

As for homunculus-talk, it is undoubtedly useful for engineering purposes, but one can be easily misled if one takes it literally. McGinn nails it:

Contemporary brain science is thus rife with unwarranted homunculus talk, presented as if it were sober established science. We have discovered that nerve fibers transmit electricity. We have not, in the same way, discovered that they transmit information. We have simply postulated this conclusion by falsely modeling neurons on persons. To put the point a little more formally: states of neurons do not have propositional content in the way states of mind have propositional content. The belief that London is rainy intrinsically and literally contains the propositional content that London is rainy, but no state of neurons contains that content in that way—as opposed to metaphorically or derivatively (this kind of point has been forcibly urged by John Searle for a long time).

And there is theoretical danger in such loose talk, because it fosters the illusion that we understand how the brain can give rise to the mind. One of the central attributes of mind is information (propositional content) and there is a difficult question about how informational states can come to exist in physical organisms. We are deluded if we think we can make progress on this question by attributing informational states to the brain. To be sure, if the brain were to process information, in the full-blooded sense, then it would be apt for producing states like belief; but it is simply not literally true that it processes information. We are accordingly left wondering how electrochemical activity can give rise to genuine informational states like knowledge, memory, and perception. As so often, surreptitious homunculus talk generates an illusion of theoretical understanding.

Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News

First the good news: Homunculism, McGinn's NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token. The devastation of the demolition job is commensurate with the chutzpah of Kurzweil's subtitle. It is not that McGinn has said anything really new, at least not in this review. The key points have been made before by Searle and Nagel and so many of us, but McGinn does the critical job with great clarity and great skill and gives it a (to me) slightly new slant: the ubiquity of the homuncular fallacy. (I won't explain what I mean; you'll catch my drift by carefully reading the review.)

I don't understand how anyone who is intelligent and informed could read with comprehension McGinn's piece and still take seriously the sort of neuroscientistic nonsense of Kurzweil and Company.

And please note that McGinn has no religious agenda: he is not out to resurrect the immortal soul or find a back door to the divine milieu. The man is an atheist, a mortalist and a (damned) liberal too. Just like Nagel. Neither of these gentlemen are looking for a way back to substance dualism. The former goes the mysterian route, the latter the panpsychist. Both are naturalists. More importantly, both are dispassionate truth-seekers.

And now for the bad and sad news: Prominent Philosopher to Leave U. of Miami in Wake of Misconduct Allegations.

UPDATE 7 June 2013. McGinn's side of the story is here, here, here, and here.

Sweet Dreams of Dennett

The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site. Here it is again, considerably reworked.

………..

I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it turned up for $13 in a used bookstore. So I bought it, unable to resist the self-infliction of yet more Dennettian sophistry. What am I? A masochist? A completist? A compulsive consciousness and qualia freak?

The subtitle is "Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness." That raises the question of how there could even be philosophical obstacles to such a science. I am not aware that philosophers control the sources of funding for neuroscience projects. And what could a philosopher say that could stymie brain science?

But let's look at a passage:

     If we are are to explain the conscious Subject, one way or another
     the transition from clueless cells to knowing organizations of
     cells must be made without any magic ingredients. This requirement
     presents theorists with what some see as a nasty dilemma . . . . If
     you propose a theory of the knowing Subject that describes whatever
     it describes as like the working of a vacant automated factory —
     not a Subject in sight — you will seem to many observers to have
     changed the subject or missed the point. On the other hand, if your
     theory still has tasks for a Subject to perform, still has a need
     for a Subject as witness, then . . . you have actually postponed
     the task of explaining what needs explaining.

     To me, one of the most fascinating bifurcations in the intellectual
     world today is between those to whom it is obvious — obvious —
     that a theory that leaves out the Subject is thereby disqualified
     as a theory of consciousness (in Chalmer's terms, it evades the
     Hard Problem), and those to whom it is just as obvious that any
     theory that doesn't leave out the Subject is disqualified. I submit
     that the former have to be wrong. . . . (p. 145)

Dennett has done a good job of focusing the issue. On the one side, the eliminativists who hold that the only way to explain the conscious Subject is by explaining it away. On the other side, those who are convinced that one cannot explain a datum by denying its existence.

What we have here fundamentally is a deep philosophical dispute about the nature of explanation, and not a debate confined to the philosophy of mind. What's more, it is not a debate that is going to be resolved by further empirical research. Not all legitimate questions are empirical questions.

It ought to be self-evident that any explanation that consigns the explanandum (that which is to be explained) to the status of nonexistence is a failure as an explanation. Eliminativist moves are confessions of failure. Any genuine explanation of X presupposes (and so cannot eliminate) the
existence of X. One cannot explain something by explaining it away. Two related points:

1. One cannot explain what does not exist. One cannot explain why unicorns roam the Superstition Wilderness, or why the surface of the moon is perfectly smooth. There is nothing to explain. In the case of consciousness, however, there is something to explain. So it at least makes sense to attempt to explain consciousness.

2. An explanation that entails the nonexistence of the explanandum is no explanation at all.

Both (1) and (2) are analytic truths that simply unpack the concept of explanation.

I once heard a proponent of Advaita Vedanta claim that advaitins don't explain the world; they explain it away. Now it is surely dubious in the extreme to think of this insistent and troubling plural world of our ongoing everyday acquaintance as an illusion. Whatever its exact ontological status, it exists. If it didn't there would be nothing to explain or explain away. And if one were to explain it away, as one with Brahman, then one would have precisely failed to explain it.

What Dennet is maintaining about consciousness and the Subject is even worse. There is some vestige of sense in the claim that the world is an illusion. It makes sense, at least initially, to say that there is an Absolute Consciousness and that the world is its illusion. But it is utterly absurd to maintain that consciousness is an illusion. The very distinction between illusion and reality presupposes consciousness. In a world without consciousness, nothing would appear, and so nothing would appear
falsely. Necessarily, no consciousness, no illusions. Illusions prove the reality of consciousness.

This is a very simple point. It is an 'armchair' point. All you have to do is think to know that it is true. But neither its being 'armchair' nor its being simple is an argument against it. The law of non-contradiction is simple and 'armchair' too.

The denigration of a priori knowledge is part and parcel of the pseudophilosophy of scientism.

Since consciousness exists, the project of explaining it at least makes sense, by (1). By (2), an eliminativist explanation is no explanation at all.

The thing about consciousness is that the only way to explain it in terms satisfactory to a materialist is by denying its existence. It is to Dennett's 'credit' that he drives to the very end of this dead-end road, thereby showing that it is a dead-end.

My most rigorous demolition of Dennett's scientistic sophistry is in Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

If Dennett were right, then we would all be zombies, including Dennett. (See Searle, Dennett, and Zombies.) But then there would be no consciousness to explain and to write fat books about.

The demand that consciousness be exhaustively explained in terms involving no tincture of consciousness is a demand that cannot be met. Explanation of what by whom to whom? Explanation is an inherently mind-involving notion. There are no explanations in nature. There is no way the science of matter can somehow close around the phenomena of mind and include them within its ambit. Science, like explanation, is inherently mind-involving.