Property Dualism, the Red Ball Analogy, and Emergence

This post advances the discussion in the ComBox attached to Could Brains Have Mental Properties?

It would be very easy to be a property dualist in the philosophy of mind if one were also a substance dualist.  What I am having trouble understanding is how a property dualist can be a substance monist. In contemporary discussions, the one category of substances is that of material substances. 'Property dualism,' then, is an abbreviated name for the position in the philosophy of mind according to which mental and physical properties are mutually irreducible — hence the dualism — but had by the only kind of substances there are, material substances.  Hence the monism.  But having employed the traditional jargon,  I'll now drop the irridescent word 'substance' which will undoubtedly cause many to stumble and use 'particular' instead.  A particular is an unrepeatable entity.  It needn't be a continuant.  Events and processes count as particulars.

To come directly to my difficulty. How can an irreducibly mental property be instantiated by a physical particular?  An irreducibly mental property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any physical property.  Examples of mental properties:  being in pain; thinking about Thanksgiving dinner; having a blue sensation; wanting a cup of coffee.  This post assumes that at least some mental properties are irreducibly mental.  Various arguments have been given; this is not the place to rehearse them.  An irreducibly physical property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any mental property.  Examples of physical properties: impedance, ductility, motion, solubility, weighing 10 kg.  I will assume that all physical properties are irreducibly physical.  (It is not that I rule out idealism; it's that the goddess of blogging reminds me that brevity is the soul of blog.)

To further focus the question we need to exclude relational properties.  Weaver's Needle has the property of being thought about by me now.  So a physical particular has now an irreducibly mental property.  But this is unproblematic because the property in question is relational: it does not affect the Needle in its intrinsic nature.  But if my brain is what does the thinking in me, and I am thinking about Weaver's Needle, it is not so easy to understand how my brain, a physical thing, can have the irreducibly mental  intrinsic property, thinking about Weaver's Needle. (If you think that is not an intrinsic property, substitute wanting a sloop, given that there is  no particular sloop in existence that I want.)

So in what follows by 'irreducibly mental properties' I mean 'irreducibly mental intrinsic properties.'

My question is whether the following tetrad is consistent:

1. There are irreducibly mental properties.
2. There are irreducibly physical properties.
3. All particulars are physical particulars.
4. Some but not all particulars instantiate irreducibly mental and irreducibly physical properties.

You might think there is no problem.  Color and shape properties are mutually irreducible. Yet some physical particulars instantiate both color and shape properties.  A red ball is both red and spherical despite the mutual irreducibility of redness and sphericity.  Imagine that the red ball is red all the way through and not red merely on its surface.  This will preempt one from saying that the ball is red in virtue of a proper part of it being red.

So why can't mental and physical properties be had by one and the same physical particular?  Doesn't the analogy show that the tetrad is consistent?  Mental properties are to physical properties as color properties are to shape properties.  Just as one and the same physical particular, a ball say, can be both red and spherical, one and the same particular, a brain (or a portion of a brain or an event or process in a brain) can be both located in a region of space and thinking about Boston or feeling nostalgic.

I will now argue that the analogy is hopeless.

A Point of Disanalogy

Colors and shapes are mutually irreducible, but they are also such that color properties cannot be  instantiated without shape properties being instantiated, and vice versa.  I am talking about colors and shapes in Sellars' "manifest image," colors and shapes as they appear to normal visual perceivers.   No color is a shape; but it is also true that there are no colored particulars without shapes, and no shaped particulars without colors.   This is a point of phenomenology.  One cannot see a colored particular without seeing something that has some shape or other, and vice versa.  (And this is so even if the particular is an after-image.)  But only some material things are minds.  So we have a disanalogy.  Wherever a color property is instantiated, a shape property is instantiated, and wherever a shape property is instantiated, a color property is instantiated.  But it is not the case that wherever a physical property is instantiated a mental property instantiated.  There are plenty of physical particulars that lack mental features even if it is true that everything with mental features also has physical features.  Why the asymmetry?  This needs to be explained.

Mental Properties as Emergent Properties

Assuming that all particulars are physical particulars  — that there are no unembodied or disembodied or possibly disembodied minds — why do only some particulars have mental properties? Probably the most plausible thing to say is that only some physical systems are sufficiently complex to 'give rise' to mentality.  This implies that mental properties are  emergent:  they are system features that are not reducible to or explicable in terms of the properties of the parts of the system even when their causal interactions are taken into account.

Bear in mind that not every system feature is emergent.  Suppose a wall is made of 1000 piled stones and nothing else, each stone weighing one lb.  It follows that the system — the wall — weighs 1000 lbs.  But the property of weighing 1000 lbs., though a property of the whole and not of any part, is not an emergent property.  For it is determined by the properties of the parts.  In a more complicated system, the parts causally interact in significant ways.  (The stones in the wall interact too, but in insignificant ways.)  Think of a wrist watch.  The property of showing high noon, though a system property, is not an emergent property because it is determined by the properties and causal interactions of the parts.

An emergent property is one that is irreducible to the properties and causal interactions of the items in its emergence base, but somehow emerges from that emergence base and remains tied to it.  The notion of emergence is a curious and possibly incoherent one, combining as it does the notions of irreducibility and dependency.  An emergent property is dependent in that (i) it cannot exist uninstantiated, and (ii) it cannot exist unless the emergence base is sufficiently complex, and will continue to exist only as long as the emergence base retains its 'sufficient complexity.'    An emergent property is irreducible in that it cannot be accounted for in terms of the properties and interactions of the items in the emergence base.  This suggests that emergent properties are real iff they induce causal powers in their possessors above and beyond the causal powers that are explicable in terms of the items in the emergence base.

My point is that if only some physical systems exhibit mentality, namely, those systems that manifest a high degree of (biological) complexity,  then the mental properties of these systems must be emergent properties, properties that induce special causal powers in their possessors.  But then we must ask what are the possessors of these emergent mental properties.  The system as a whole, no doubt.  But what does that mean?  The mereological sum of the physical items that make up the system in question?  But a mereological sum is too frail a reed to support a property.  Indeed, some see no real distinction at all between a sum and its members.  We need something more substantial to serve as support of mental properties.  But I am at a loss to say what that more substantial something is.

The argument so far is as follows.  The red ball analogy fails because only some physical particulars instantiate irreducibly mental properties. This is readily explainable if irreducibly mental properties are emergent properties.  Emergent properties are system properties, properties of complex (biological) systems. But then the question arises as to what these emergent properties are properties of.  They can't be properties of the parts of a system taken distributively any more than the property of weighing 1000 lbs. can be taken to be a property of the stones composing a wall taken distributively.  So emergent properties are properties of wholes or collections of some sort.  But this seems problematic.

For one thing, there are many mental properties had by one minded organism.  I see a javelina; I hear it; I smell it. All in the unity of one consciousness.  The mental properties are not just instantiated; they are co-instantiated, instantiated in or by one thing.  If Manny sees, Moe hears, and Jack smells, it does not follow that there is one minded organism that does all three.  So if mental properties are emergent system properties we need to know which one item it is that instantiates them and unifies them.  The brain as a whole?  What does that mean?  No matter how we construe wholes, whether as mereological sums, mathematical sets ordered or unordered, aggregates, what-have-you, no whole is 'substantiatial' enough to unify the various mental properties that minded organisms exhibit.

It is also unclear how a mere collection could be the subject of experience.  The subject of experience is not merely the support and unifier of mental properties; it is also that which is aware (whether intentionally or non-intentionally) in virtue of the instantiation of the mental propertiers.  How could the subject of experience be a collection of objects?

So I remain in the dark as to what exactly property dualism could be if it is supposed to be a coherent  position.  What is it exactly that instantiates mental properties on this view?

Don’t Say ‘Turkey Day’

Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.

With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991.  And now it's 2011.  May the Grim Reaper, the Ultimate Repo Man, impart a spring to my step, and a glide to my stride.  We take it to the limit. One more time.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Absolute Truth and Necessary Truth

Absolute truth and necessary truth are not the same.

Let our example be the proposition p expressed by 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 44 B.C.' Given that p is true, it is true in all actual circumstances. That is, its truth-value does not vary from time to time, place to place, person to person, or relative to any other parameter in the actual world. P is true now, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. P is true in Los Angeles, in Bangkok, and on Alpha Centauri. It is true whether Joe Blow affirms it, denies it, or has never even thought about it. And what goes for Blow goes for Jane Schmoe.

In this sense, p is absolutely or nonrelatively true. But that is not to say that p is necessarily true. A proposition q is necessarily true if and only if q is true in all possible worlds, to use a Leibnizian expression. To avoid 'world' I can say: in all possible circumstances. (A world could be thought of as a maximal circumstance.)  A proposition q is contingently true iff (i) q is true in the actual circumstances, but (ii) not true in all possible circumstances. Now our proposition p concerning Caesar is obviously only contingently true: there is no broadly logical or metaphysical necessity that he cross the Rubicon in 44 BC. He might have crossed it earlier or later, or not at all. Or said river might never have existed for him to cross.

Note that contingent is not the same as contingently true.  If a proposition is contingently true, then it is actually true.  But if a proposition is contingent it may or may not be actually true.  I was born by Caesarean section but  I might not have been.  So the proposition *BV was not born by Caesarean section* though false is contingent: it is true in some but not all possible worlds and false in the actual world.

Here are some theses I am fairly sure of:

1. There are no relative truths: every truth is absolute.
2. An absolute truth need not be a necessary truth: some absolute  truths are contingent.
3. Every truth, whether necessary or contingent, is true in all actual circumstances.
4. The ontological property of absoluteness is not to be confused with any epistemological property such as  that of being known with certainty.

Are All Genuine Problems Soluble? A Metaphilosophical Antilogism

The old questions are still debated.  The problems remain unsolved after millenia: there is no consensus among the competent.  But what does interminable debate and lack of consensus show? That philosophical problems are genuine but insoluble or that they are not genuine because insoluble?  Or something else?

Our metaphilosophical problem may be cast in the mold of an antilogism:

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.

Each limb of this aporetic triad lays serious claim to our acceptance.  (1) will strike many as self-evident, especially if soluble means 'soluble eventually' or perhaps  'soluble in principle.'  (2) is a good induction based on two and one half millenia of philosophical experience.  Or can you point to a central or core problem that has been solved to the satisfaction of all able practioners?  Give me an example if you think you have one, and I will blow it clean out of the water.  (3) certainly seems to be true, does it not?  The main problems of philosophy when carefully and rigorously formulated are as genuine as any problem.  And yet the triad's limbs cannot all be true.  The first two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the third.  So one of them must be rejected.

Think about this metaproblem.  Is it not genuine and important?

For every antilogism there are three corresponding syllogisms, and so our antilogism gives rise to the following three syllogistic arguments:

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No  problem of philosophy is soluble.
—–
~3. No problem of philosophy is genuine.

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
—–
~2. Some problems of philosophy are soluble.

2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
—–
~1. Some genuine problems are not soluble.

Each of these syllogisms is valid.  But only one can be sound.  Which one?  Is there any rational way to decide?  The first syllogism encapsulates the view of the logical positivist Moritz Schlick as expressed in his "The Turning Point in Philosophy."  His thesis is that the problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems.  But if so, then the metaproblem we have been discussing, which of course is a philosophical problem, is a also a pseudo-problem.  But if it is a pseudo-problem, then it has no solution.  But it does have a solution for Schlick, one that consists in denying (3).  So the Schlick solution is incoherent.  On the one hand, he maintains that the problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems.  On the other hand, he thinks that the metaproblem of whether philosophical problems are pseudoproblems has a solution.  Thus his position leads to a contradiction.

Many will plump for the second syllogism.  They will be forgiven for so plumping.  They are the optimists who fancy that in the fullness of time solutions will be upon us.

I put my money on the third syllogism. I reject (1), thereby maintaining that some genuine problems are insoluble. Indeed, I want to go further.  I want to maintain that all genuine philosophical problems are insoluble.  I consider the above metaphilosophical problem to be an example of a genuine but insoluble problem.  So I am not claiming that my rejection of (1) solves the metaphilosophical problem. If I made that claim then I would be contradicting myself.  I would be claiming that philosophical problems are insoluble but that the metaproblem (which is a philosophical problem) is soluble. So what am I saying?

Perhaps what I am saying is that I have no compelling reason to prefer the third syllogism to the other two, but that my preferring of the third is rationally acceptable, rationally supportable, and may well lay bare the truth of the matter. 

Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot down in the streets of Dallas, Texas on this day in 1963.  Yes, I remember exactly where I was and exactly what I was doing when I heard the news.  But I won't bore you with that. Here are Part One and Part Two of a couple of interesting video clips about Jack Ruby who shot Lee Harvey Oswald who shot JFK.

He Was a Friend of Mine, the Byrds' tribute to JFK.  Based on a traditional song, here sung by Dylan, and here by Dave van Ronk.

Regress? What Regress? Truth-Making Revisited

Ed continues to repeat his regress argument against truth-makers, despite my hurling invective at it.  I think I called it "breathtakingly rotten" or something equally offensive, all in good fun of course:

I have argued (e.g. here and here that the notion of a ‘truthmaker’ leads to an infinite regress. If there is such a truthmaker, an entity that makes a proposition like ‘Socrates sits’ true – let it be A – then it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. But then there would have to be a further truthmaker for A existing. I.e. the sentence “A exists” can be true or false, and so requires a further truthmaker B, that makes it true when B exists. But then “B exists” requires yet another truthmaker, and so on ad infinitum.

Now what is the regress supposed to be?  There is an entity  A and it makes-true sentence s.  A is not a sentence, or any other type of representation.  Since we can talk about A, we can say 'A exists.'  'A exists' is contingently true, so it too needs a truth-maker.  So far, so good.

Ed assumes that the truth-maker for "A exists' must be distinct from the truth-maker for s.  Without this assumption, the regress can't get started.  Therefore, to show that his regress argument is bogus, it suffices to show that one and the same entity A can serve as the truth-maker for both s and 'A exists.'

Suppose the truth-maker of 'Tom is tired' is the fact, Tom's being tired.  Now consider the sentence 'Tom's being tired exists.'  I claim that the truth-maker of both sentences is Tom's being tired.   I conclude that there is no regress.

To appreciate this you must note that while 'Tom is tired' is a predication, 'Tom's being tired exists' is not.  It is an existential sentence like 'Tom exists.'  So while the predication requires a fact for its truth-maker, the existential sentence does not.  It does not need a fact as a truth-maker any more than 'Tom exists' does.  The truth-maker of the latter is just Tom.  The truth-maker of  'Tom's being tired' is not the fact, Tom'sbeing tired's existence, but just  Tom's being tired.

There is a second reason why the regress cannot arise.  Ed is a nominalist. He eschews propositions and believes only in sentences.  Well, there is no need for there to be the sentence 'A exists'!  If no one says that A exists, then there is no sentence 'A exists.'  And of course nonexistent sentences do not need truth-makers.   And if someone does say that A exists, there is no need that he, or anyone else, say that the truth-maker of 'A exists' exists.  So for this reason too the regress can't get started.

Ed ends his post on this strange note: "If we buy the idea of a ‘truthbearer’ (a proposition, a thought, whatever), the idea of a ‘truthmaker’ comes with it."  That's plainly false.  That there are truth-bearers is self-evident; that there are truth-makers is not.  Must I dilate further on this self-evident point?  Second, if the quoted sentence is true, and Ed's regress argument is sound, the upshot is that there are no truth-bearers, which is absurd.  In effect, Ed has provided a reductio ad absurdum of his own claim that there are no truth-makers!

What Ed says about representation and the representation of the faithfulness of a representation would require a separate post to discuss.  But I sense the conflation of epistemological questions with ontological ones.

The Link Between Postmodernism and the Left

From Thomas Nagel's essay, "The Sleep of Reason" in Concealment and Exposure (Oxford 2002), p.174 (emphasis added):

 . . . I think there is a more direct link between postmodernism and the traditional ideas of the Left. The explanation of all ostensibly rational forms of thought in terms of social influences is a generalization of the old Marxist idea of ideology, by which moral principles were all debunked as rationalizations of class interest. The new relativists, with Nietzschean extravagance, have merely extended their exposure of the hollowness of pretensions to objectivity to science and everything else. Like its narrower predecessor, this form of analysis sees "objectivity" as a mask of the exercise of power, and so provides natural expression of class hatred. Postmodernism's specifically academic appeal comes from its being another in the sequence of all-purpose "unmasking" strategies that offer a way to criticize the intellectual efforts of others, not by engaging with them on the ground, but by diagnosing them from a superior vantage point and charging them with inadequate self-awareness. Logical positivism and Marxism have in the past been used by academics in this way, and postmodernist relativism is natural for the role. It may now be on the way out, but I suspect there will continue to be a market in the huge American academy for a quick fix of some kind. If it is not social constructionism, it will be something else — Darwinian explanations of virtually everything, perhaps.

Could Brains Have Mental Properties?

1. Many philosophers of mind who eschew substance dualism opt for a property dualism.   Allowing only one category of substances, material substances, they allow at least two categories of properties, mental and physical.  An example of a mental property is sensing red, or to put it adverbially, the property of sensing redly, or in a Chisholmian variant, being-appeared-to-redly.  Any sensory quale would serve as an example of a mental property.  Their irreducibility to physical properties is the reason for thinking of them as irreducibly mental properties.  This post, taking for granted this irreducibility, focuses on the question whether it is coherent to suppose that a mental property could be had by a physical substance.  Before proceeding, I will note that it is not just qualia, but also the phenomena of intentionality that supply us with putative mental properties.  Recalling as I am right now a particular dark and rainy night in Charlottesville, Virginia, I am in an intentional state.  So one can reasonably speak of my now instantiating an intentional mental property.

In sum, there are (instantiated) mental properties and there are (instantiated) physical properties, and the former are irreducible to the latter.

2. Now could a physical thing such as a (functioning) brain, or a part thereof, be the possessor of a mental property?  Finding this incoherent, I suggest that if there are instantiated mental properties, then there are irreducibly mental subjects.  Or perhaps you prefer the contrapositive:  If there are no irreducibly mental subjects, then there are no irreducibly mental properties.  But it all depends on what exactly we mean by mental and physical properties.

3. What is a physical property?  An example is the property of weighing 10 kg.  Although there are plenty of things that weigh 10 kg, the property of weighing 10 kg does not itself weigh 10 kg.  Physical properties are not themselves physical.   So in what sense are physical properties 'physical'? It seems we must say that physical properties are physical in virtue of being properties of physical items.  And what would the latter be?  Well, tables and chairs, and their parts, and their parts, all the way down to celluose molecules, and their atomic parts, and so on, together with the fields and forces pertaining to them, with chemistry and physics being the ultimate authorities as to what exactly counts as physical. 

So I'm not saying that a physical property is a property of a physical thing where a physical thing is a thing having physical properties.  That would be circular.  I am saying that a physical property is a property of a physical item where physical items are (i) obvious meso- and macro-particulars such as tables and turnips and planets, and (ii) the much less obvious micro-particulars that natural science tells us all these things are ultimately made of.  Taking a stab at a definition:

D1. P is a physical property =df P is such that, if it is instantiated, then it is instantiated by a physical item.

Admirably latitudinarian, this definition allows a property to be physical even if no actual item possesses it.  This is is as it should be.  

4. Now if a physical property is a property of physical items, then a mental property is a property of mental items.  After all, no mental property is itself a mind.  No mental property feels anything, or thinks about any thing or wants anything. Just as no physical property is a body, no mental property is a mind.  So, in parallel with (D1), we have

D2.  P is a mental property =df P is such that, if it is instantiated, then it is instantiated by a mental item.

(D2) implies that if there are  any instantiated mental properties, there there are irreducibly mental items, i.e., minds or mental subjects.  Now there are instantiated mental properties.  Therefore, there are irreducibly mental subjects.  For all I have shown, these subjects might be momentary entities, hence not substances in the full sense of the term, where this implies being a continuant.  The main point, however, is that what instantiates mental properties must be irreducibly mental and so cannot be physical.  Therefore, brains could not have mental properties.

This flies in the face of much current opinion.  So let's think about it some more.  If you countenance irreducibly mental properties being instantiated by brains, do you also countenance irreducibly physical properties being instantiated by nonphysical items such as minds or abstracta?  Do you consider it an open question whether some numbers have mass, density, velocity?  How fast, and in what direction, is that mathematical function moving?  If physical properties cannot be instantiated by nonphysical items, but mental properties can be instantited by nonmental items, then we are owed an explanation of this asymmetry.  It is difficult to see what that explanation could be.

Conclusion

5. My argument, then, is this:

a) If there are any instantiated mental properties, then there are irreducibly mental subjects.
b) There are some instantiated mental properties.
Therefore
c)  There are irreducibly mental subjects.

(a) rests on (D2).

The attempt to combine property dualism with substance monism is a failure.  If all substances are physical, then all properties of these substances are physical.  If, on the other hand, there are both mental and physical properties, then there must be both mental and physical subjects, if not substances.  A physical item can no more instantiate a mental property than a mental item can instantiate a physical property. 

Legal’s Mate Via the Smith-Morra Gambit

The summer of '95 found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A lovely place hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. The largesse of the American taxpayer had made it possible for me to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Virginia. One dark and rainy night, wearied by philosophy of science arcana, I stumbled into the C-ville chess club, sat down opposite an old man, and uncorked this miniature:

 Vallicella – Oldtimer, Charlottesville, 1995

1. e4 c5 2. d4 cd 3. c3 dc 4. Nxc3 e5 5. Nf3 d6 6. Bc4 Bg4 7. Nxe5 Bxd1 8. Bxf7+ Ke2 9. Nd5 mate.

Of course, you knew about Legal's mate. But did you know it could be reached via the Smith-Morra gambit?