Category: Mysterianism

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.