On my personal blog, I have been writing a series of posts summarizing in a relatively brief way some of the main arguments for the immateriality of the human mind. W4 readers might find them of interest. What follows is the latest installment of the series. Earlier installments can be found here, here, and here, with a related post here (though what follows is largely independent of these earlier posts).
The arguments considered so far in the series have been more or less “modern” rather than “classical.” They focus on those aspects of the mind most familiar to contemporary philosophers, namely intentionality (the meaningfulness or directedness beyond themselves of thoughts and the like) and qualia (those aspects of a conscious experience which are directly knowable only via introspection, and thus only by the one undergoing the experience). And they contend that, given the mechanistic conception of matter taken for granted by modern philosophers (dualists and materialists alike), these features of the mind are necessarily immaterial.
Classical arguments for the immateriality of the mind, by which I mean the sort common within Western philosophy prior to Descartes and defended by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, are very different. You won’t find the latter thinkers going on about either qualia or intentionality, because the very notions of qualia and intentionality, as usually understood, are artifacts of the modern mechanistic re-conception of the material world. “Qualia” are what you get when you deny that matter can have anything like the sensible qualities it seems to have in ordinary experience. “Intentionality” is what you get when you insist that the material world is devoid of anything like final causality, when you go on accordingly to relocate all meaning and purpose within the mind, and when you also go on in turn to characterize mental states as internal “representations” of an external reality. I have said a little bit about all of this in earlier posts, and it is a theme I explore in great detail in The Last Superstition.
For Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and other ancients and medievals, the main reason why the mind has to be immaterial concerns its affinity to its primary objects of knowledge, namely universals, which are themselves immaterial. When properly fleshed out and understood, this sort of argument is in my view decisive. Yet it has received very little attention from contemporary philosophers, partly, I think, because of their general ignorance of what the ancients and medievals thought, and partly because the logic of the mechanistic revolution inaugurated by Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, et al. has pushed them into so cramped and narrow a conceptual space that they can hardly even conceive any alternative to it. The result is that when they do address the arguments of the ancients and medievals (concerning this subject or any other), they almost always distort them in the most grotesque fashion, anachronistically reading into them assumptions that make sense only if one takes for granted conceptions of matter, mind, causation, etc. that the older thinkers in question would have regarded as deeply mistaken and muddleheaded. (Thus is Aristotle made out to be a “functionalist” vis-à-vis the mind, Aquinas’s Fifth Way is read as if it were an anticipation of Paley’s feeble “design argument,” etc.)
In The Last Superstition, I explain at length why some form of realism about universals is rationally unavoidable. (Whether it is the Platonic form of realism, the Aristotelian one, or the Scholastic one that we should endorse is a separate matter irrelevant to present purposes.) I am not going to attempt to summarize that case here, but the examples to follow should suffice to give a sense of how an argument from the reality of universals to the immateriality of the mind might proceed. Readers wanting a fuller treatment should consult TLS.
Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. And so forth. In general, to grasp a concept is simply not the same thing as having a mental image. (Again, see TLS for more details.)
Now the thought you are having about triangularity when you grasp it must be as determinate or exact as triangularity itself, otherwise it just wouldn’t be a thought about triangularity in the first place, but only a thought about some approximation of triangularity. Yet material things are never determinate or exact in this way. Any material triangle, for example, is always only ever an approximation of perfect triangularity (since it is bound to have sides that are less than perfectly straight, etc., even if this is undetectable to the naked eye). And in general, material symbols and representations are inherently always to some extent vague, ambiguous, or otherwise inexact, susceptible of various alternative interpretations. It follows, then, that any thought you might have about triangularity is not something material; in particular, it is not some process occurring in the brain. And what goes for triangularity goes for any thought that involves the grasp of a universal, since universals in general (or at least very many of them, in case someone should wish to dispute this) are determinate and exact in a way material objects and processes cannot be.
As James F. Ross has argued, some of the best-known arguments of twentieth-century analytic philosophy reinforce this judgment. For instance, Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation and Kripke’s argument regarding “quaddition” show that there is in principle nothing in the facts about human behavior or physiology, or in any other physicalistically “respectable” set of facts, that can determine (say) whether by “gavagai” I mean “rabbit” or “undetached rabbit part,” or whether I am doing addition rather than “quaddition.” Indeed, these arguments show that this same indeterminacy afflicts everything I say or do. Yet it is simply false that everything I say or do is indeterminate in this way. For example, should I deploy modus ponens in defending a Quine- or Kripke-style argument, what I will be deploying is indeed modus ponens and not some mere approximation of modus ponens; certainly it had better be modus ponens and not some mere approximation, otherwise my arguments would all be invalid. Nor will it do to suggest that maybe all my arguments really are invalid, for even to deny that I ever really use modus ponens but only ever approximate it requires that I first grasp determinately what modus ponens is before judging that I never really engage in it. Similarly, if someone wanted to deny that we ever really grasp perfect triangularity, he would first have to grasp it himself before going on to judge (obviously falsely, in that case) that it is something we never grasp.
So, there is no coherent sense to be made of the suggestion that all of our thoughts are indeterminate. But if at least some of them are determinate, and no physical process or set of physical facts is ever determinate, it follows that at least some of our thoughts are not physical. (Ross’s argument, by the way, is elegantly developed in his article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy in 1992. A later version of this article is available at his website, in the form of a chapter of his book manuscript Hidden Necessities.)
That is one way an argument from realism about universals to the immateriality of the mind can be developed. There are other ways too, which I will summarize in future posts.
Whatever one thinks of arguments like this, it is important to understand that (like the other arguments I’ve presented in this series) they are not the sort that might be undermined by the findings of neuroscience, or any other empirical science for that matter. They are not “soul of the gaps” arguments which purport to give a quasi-scientific explanation of some psychological phenomenon that we simply haven’t got enough empirical data to explain in a materialistic way. Rather, they purport to show that it is in principle impossible, conceptually impossible, for the intellect to be accounted for in a materialistic way. If such arguments work at all, they establish conclusively that the intellect could no more be identified with processes in the brain than two and two could make five. If they are mistaken, they would be mistaken in the way one might make a mistake in attempting to carry out a geometrical proof, and not by virtue of having failed to take account of this or that finding of brain research.
Comments (36)
Ed, would it be fair to summarize the argument here thus?
1. When I conceive of a perfect triangle, my concept is determinate and non-fuzzy.
2. All physical things are to some extent indeterminate and/or fuzzy.
Therefore,
3. My concept of a perfect triangle is not a physical thing.
I shd. add that my own favorite Cartesian-style argument for the nature of the mind as a non-physical thing is intended (at least by me) to be conceptual and non-empirical:
1. I can conceive clearly and distinctly of my mind's existing when no physical object or process exists.
Therefore,
2. It is logically possible for my mind to exist when no physical object or process exists.
3. It is not logically possible for anything that is a physical object or process to exist when no physical object or process exists.
Therefore,
4. My mind is not any physical object or process.
Posted by Lydia | October 30, 2008 9:46 AM
Lydia,
I'm with you on points 1, 2 and 3. But I don't yet see how you get to 4 from any of them, or all of them.
Can you make the connection more explicit, so that even I can get it?
Yes, I know that's a lot to ask!
Posted by Michael Bauman | October 30, 2008 10:35 AM
Well, it's possible that having had only _one_ cup of coffee before writing I messed up, but it still looks pretty straightforward to me after getting some more UV rays into the pupils and hopefully waking up the hypothalmus a bit better: If (#2) it's logically possible for my mind to do something (exist in the absence of any physical object or process) that (#3) it is impossible for anything that simply, literally, _is_ a physical object or process to do, then (#4) my mind cannot literally be a physical object or process.
Usually people balk either at #1 ("How do you know you are clearly and distinctly conceiving of that?") or at the move from 1 to 2 (questioning the conceivability test for logical possibility).
Posted by Lydia | October 30, 2008 11:03 AM
Lydia,
I believe that the materialists would argue that your first premise begs the question because whether or not your mind can conceive anything "when no physical object or process exists" is precisely the question at issue.
Posted by George R. | October 30, 2008 11:18 AM
George, the first premise is a truth that can be seen directly, by direct apprehension of one's own mind and a comparison of that to one's concept of a physical object or process. I state it because I do, in fact, conceive of the mind's so existing. Here: I'm doing it right now. :-) The materialist can try to tell me, "You can't be doing that," but my saying that I am, in fact, doing so is not the same thing as anybody's begging the question, and of course he can't erase the event of so conceiving from my mind just by telling me that I'm not actually doing it. I think the materialist could also so conceive himself with a little introspection. He just refuses to admit that he can do so, or else he denies the conceivability test of possibility (move from 1 to 2). I'm not sure that I understand the syntax of the rest of your sentence. I'm not saying that it is in fact the case that no physical object or process exists. Of course, as a matter of contingent fact, such objects and processes do exist. I'm saying that I can conceive of the counterfactual: My mind's existing in the absence of any physical object or process.
Perhaps, however, it's a little unfair to Ed for me to be defending my own argument when Ed is making a rather different one.
Posted by Lydia | October 30, 2008 11:54 AM
It follows, then, that any thought you might have about triangularity is not something material; in particular, it is not some process occurring in the brain.
I guess it hinges on what you mean by process in the brain. It seems to me that we have a routine process of memory retrieval followed by a projection of the three points connected with straight lines into the visual area of the brain. What is determinate in the process is that we have a pattern recognition of previous visual search patterns that is activated to synthesize new similar patterns.
Posted by Step2 | October 30, 2008 5:22 PM
The question being discussed here is the very question that set me to reading philosophy in the first place (hence, I'm back in college studying philosophy). As wary as I am of "holy grail" type arguments, this one seems to be a real candidate--a real defeater for materialism, which, for a person of my intuitions, is something akin to a holy grail (so I'll have to take a look at TLS post-haste). One of the most interesting features of this argument are its pedagogical qualities, since through it, the great divide between classical and modern philosophy is largely explained. Reading Searle, I got a sense of it but never quite grasped it--why (and how) the mind-body problem? I've been thinking about the question ever more steadily since first coming upon Prof. Feser and James Ross a few months ago, on Philosophia Perennis blog. The other great thing about this post is...
...a welcome break from politics.
Posted by thebyronicman | October 30, 2008 9:37 PM
Hello Lydia,
Your summary is OK, except that "concept" (like "idea") is ambiguous between something mind-dependent and something mind-independent, which might give the false impression that the argument rests on an equivocation. I'd rather summarize it in something like the following way:
1. The thought I am now having about triangularity is determinate with respect to its content,
2. Nothing physical is determinate with respect to its content,
So,
3. The thought I am now having about triangularity isn't something physical.
Re: the Cartesian argument you suggest, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to it (and I confess to a soft spot for rationalism in general), but my Aristotelico-Thomism makes me at least a little wary of the sort of rationalist method it employs.
Hello Step 2,
One problem with your suggestion is that concepts like "memory retrieval," "projection," "pattern recognition," etc. are already suffused with intentionality, and thus cannot, except in a totally question-begging way, count as purely physical determinate processes in the first place. Another problem is that even if the first problem were solved, there is still the question why we should suppose from the allegedly purely physical facts alone that the pattern that is "recognized" is triangularity specifically, rather than, say, trilaterality (i.e. three-sidedness). Because these are instantiated together, the same "patterns" in the brain that the one gives rise to the other will give rise to as well. And yet they are still different concepts: one could grasp triangularity without grasping trilaterality, and vice-versa. So the physical facts are insufficient to determine the content of the thought. (Again, this parallels Quine's point about "gavagai," even if Quine himself did not draw the anti-physicalistic lesson.)
BTW, re: the first problem I mentioned, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience by M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker (who are not dualists, FWIW) exposes how thoroughly the question-begging move of describing purportedly "purely material" neural processes in subtly (or even not so subtly) mentalistic terms permeates neuroscientific and philosophical discussions of these issues. In so many ways (many of which I discuss in The Last Superstition) the idea that materialism is somehow the rational default position rests on a relentless committing of some very basic fallacies.
Hello byronicman,
Yes indeed. As I came to realize only relatively late in my own philosophical life, the supposedly boring old problem of universals really is the key to everything (well, near enough, anyway), including the classical/modern divide. Re: the origins of the mind-body problem, that is a very big theme in TLS, especially the last two chapters. (There's even a section called "Inventing the Mind-Body Problem.") My good man, it was virtually written just for you... ;-)
Posted by Edward Feser | October 31, 2008 1:17 AM
I think that you and I end up pretty much in the same rationalist boat, Ed, because the first premise about the determinate content of the thought about triangularity is going to be justified (as far as I can see) in the same way as my first premise about conceiving of the mind as existing independently of the body. That is, they will both be seen by the subject to be true by introspection involving direct perception of the nature of one's own thoughts/concepts.
(I take it that your use of 'thought' is intended to make it clear that you are talking about something mind-dependent, right? That is how I am using "concept" and "conceiving" in this context, as well.)
Posted by Lydia | October 31, 2008 9:45 AM
Re: the origins of the mind-body problem, that is a very big theme in TLS, especially the last two chapters. (There's even a section called "Inventing the Mind-Body Problem.") My good man, it was virtually written just for you... ;-)
I have the feeling that's the case. Ordering it up right now.
Posted by thebyronicman | October 31, 2008 11:03 AM
Hi Lydia, what I have in mind as distinctively "rationalist" is the idea that we can start with logical and/or metaphysical possibilities and go from there to conclusions about the essence of a thing. From an Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic POV this has things backwards: we have to know the essence of a thing first, before we can make any modal claims about it. This is why thinkers in the A-T-S tradition don't make use, either in this context or in (say) arguing for theism, of appeals to "possible worlds" and such. (It's also another source of egregious misunderstandings on the part of contemporary philosophers when they approach Aristotle, Aquinas, et al. -- e.g. they think Aquinas's Third Way is an argument from necessity and contingency in a Leibnizian possible worlds sense or what have you, when in fact it is nothing of the kind.)
Posted by Edward Feser | October 31, 2008 3:20 PM
Hello Dr. Feser,
Because these are instantiated together, the same "patterns" in the brain that the one gives rise to the other will give rise to as well. And yet they are still different concepts: one could grasp triangularity without grasping trilaterality, and vice-versa. So the physical facts are insufficient to determine the content of the thought.
I wonder if they are instantiated together are they actually "different" concepts? The way it is constructed (starting with lines instead of points) is changed but the result is the same concept. Can you point to a three sided object and correctly say it has any differences from a triangle?
I wasn't trying to beg any questions, I was trying to describe it as a process of information searches, data templates and pattern recognition. I hope you will allow that computer software can follow those routines.
Posted by Step2 | October 31, 2008 4:12 PM
I wonder if they are instantiated together are they actually "different" concepts?
Sure. The concept of a line is not the same as the concept of an angle; hence the concept of being three-sided is not the same as the concept of being three-angled. And one could grasp the one without grasping the other. For example, a child who is shown a triangle and told that it is made by drawing three lines in such-and-such a way might not realize that it thereby has three angles, for he might not yet have been taught what an "angle" is.
Anyway, what we have here is just a straightfoward example of the difference between intension and extension: like "the evening star" and "the morning star," "triangle" and "trilateral" may be extensionally equivalent but they nevertheless differ in intension. Part of the reason materialism cannot explain intentionality (with-a-t) is because it cannot deal with intensionality (with-an-s).
Re: computer software, sure it can follow those routines, precisely because it was designed to do so. That is to say, it counts as doing "information searches," "pattern recognition," etc. only because minds already existed which could assign the relevant meanings to the physical states of the system. For that reason, though, computer analogies utterly fail to cut any ice in showing that purely material systems have any determinate meaning on their own, or that the notion of computation somehow provides the key to explaining the mind in material terms.
(John Searle has done more than anyone else to expose the utter incoherence of the idea of the mind as a computer -- NOT in his famous "Chinese room" argument, but rather in the less well known but many times more devastating arguments put forward in chapter 9 of The Rediscovery of the Mind.)
For anyone who is interested, I discuss this matter (and the other arguments put forward in this post) more thoroughly not only in TLS, but also in my book Philosophy of Mind.
Posted by Edward Feser | October 31, 2008 6:02 PM
Let's assume that is true.
You seem to think that makes dualism correct by default. It doesn't. Postulating immaterial wonder-stuff has no explanatory power.
I may be mistaken, but I don't think Searle considers himself a dualist.
Posted by Robert | October 31, 2008 6:31 PM
Hello Robert,
If thoughts are real and they are not material, then they are immaterial. Hence dualism is established. (And BTW, I did not claim that the specific arguments in the Searle book chapter I cited all by themselves establish dualism, but rather only that they undermine a specific point Step2 was making.)
I don't know what "immaterial wonder-stuff" is, and I am neither "postulating" anything nor trying to "explain" anything. I am arguing that as a matter of conceptual necessity, a thought cannot be something material, whatever else it might be. The argument is not an "explanatory hypothesis" "postulated" in order to "account for" the "data" etc. It is rather a conceptual point about the nature of the data themselves.
Like many critics of dualism, you are obviously beholden to the false assumption that arguments for dualism are quasi-scientific, hypothetical, and explanatory in character. They are not that at all. They are instead attempts at metaphysical demonstration, more akin to geometrical proofs (though not exactly like geometrical proofs) than to empirical hypotheses. Hence they cannot be understood or evaluated the way one would understand or evaluate an empirical hypothesis, but rather in terms appropriate to the evaluation of would-be metaphysical demonstrations in general. If they fail, they do not fail for the sorts of reasons why empirical hypotheses fail (e.g. considerations of parsimony, fit with background knowledge, etc.) but for other sorts of reason.
Of course, like other critics of dualism, you might also think that empirical hypothesis formation is the only legitimate form of rational justification and that there is no such thing as a metaphyscial demonstration. But to insist on this sort of view -- known as "scientism" and associated with people like Quine, Dennett, the Churchlands, and many others -- would in the present context simply be to beg the queston, since the sorts of arguments I'm describing claim precisely to provide a metaphysical demonstration that the mind is immaterial. (Into the bargain, scientism is also self-refuting, since it is itself a metaphysical claim rather than an empirical one.)
Anyway, I discuss all of this at length in TLS.
Re: Searle, you are right that he does not consider himself a dualist, but pretty much everyone else in the world (whether a friend or foe of his) does consider him one, since dualism is what his arguments, taken as a whole, do entail whether he likes it or not. I've discussed some of the reasons why in a paper which you'll find here:
http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/searle.html
Posted by Edward Feser | October 31, 2008 6:58 PM
What sorts of reason?
I think Thomas Metzinger provides a robust conceptual tool kit that might help you emerge from your intuitive burka. In Being No One he presents his phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, a material solution to the hard problem.
----------------------
A person with a cut corpus callosum will tell you she sees a circle if shown a circle in her right visual field, but if shown the word "triangle" in the left visual field she will say she did not see anything. However, place a pencil in her left hand, and she will draw a triangle.
So if the concept of "triangularity" is contained in her immaterial mind, why cannot her mind cause her verbal left brain to say what she saw?
She cannot, because she has two minds, not one.
It takes nothing mystical or philosophical to demonstrate that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. All you need is a bone saw and a sharp knife.
Now I suppose you could argue that the knife has an immaterial doppelganger that severed her soul when the surgeon split her brain, but that would cause a shock wave in the Vatican. I doubt you'll want to go there.
V.S. Ramachandran has a split brain patient who's left hemisphere is a Christian and right hemisphere is an Atheist. Work that one out with your other way of knowing.
Posted by Robert | October 31, 2008 8:43 PM
Robert,
Perhaps a gentleman as superiorly intelligent as yourself might be able to answer this: is the number "2" material?
Posted by aristocles | October 31, 2008 8:52 PM
Robert,
There are serious arguments, and then there are question-begging, ill-informed smart-ass remarks coupled with red herrings and attacks on straw men. So far, I'm seeing only the latter coming from you. I could waste my time continuing this exchange, or I could take my kids out trick-or-treating. Think I'll opt for the latter. Happy Halloween...
Posted by Edward Feser | October 31, 2008 8:53 PM
In addition to Prof. Feser's very fine article on Searle, Jaegwon Kim (himself a materialist) works the same problem in Mental Causation in Searle's "Biological Naturalism," (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. LV, no.1 Mar 1995) at least partly coming to the same conclusion as Prof. Feser--that Searle's "solution" to the mind-body problem is no solution at all. Jaegwon doesn't come right out and say that Searle is just a property dualist who won't own up to it, but he thinks that Searle is not "entitled" to his position on consciousness "given the rest of his comittments."
Posted by thebyronicman | October 31, 2008 8:57 PM
Robert,
I think what Prof. Feser might say in reply (I think) is something more or less akin to this: You are attacking Descartes' (via Ryle) "Ghost in the Machine" conception which the property dualist does not, of course, hold, since the property dualist accepts that brains cause consciousness. It's just that to say that brains cause consciousness is not the same thing as to saying that consciousness is ontologically reducible to the brain. Hence you haven't taken the time to understand Feser's argument, nor the property dualist position in general, and are thus attacking a strawman. Feser:
and:Your example of the person with the severed corpus collosum wouldn't take the dualist by surprise philosophically, since his position would likely lead him to expect that a damaged brain would have an adverse effect on consciousness.
Posted by thebyronicman | October 31, 2008 9:16 PM
Numbers are concepts contained in minds, which are properties of some brains. I suspect soon we will have imaging techniques of sufficient resolution that will identify the neuronal pattern that is "2". But that of course is not the same thing as the subjective experience of "2". I acknowledge the explanatory gap. I personally don't find labeling things "immaterial" useful in anyway. In a universe with no brains, there are no numbers.
Surrender accepted. Have fun.
(Seriously though, look into Metzinger's work.)
Posted by Robert | October 31, 2008 9:19 PM
Shirley, you must be joking? Seriously, look into Feser's work.
Posted by thebyronicman | October 31, 2008 9:42 PM
Don't call me Shirley.
When a person makes a statement, which is immediately followed by another statement that begins "Seriously though . . .", you have sufficient warrant to take the first comment as a jest.
Posted by Robert | October 31, 2008 10:31 PM
Speaking as a dualist (the Rambo sort) I am mildly amused by the dogmatic statement that someone has a patient the left side of whose brain (please note the spelling of 'whose'--one would hope a learned materialist could get that right) "is a Christian" and the right side of whose brain "is an atheist." I mean, if you're a materialist, what the dickens could this even mean? The best I have been able to gather from a bit of googling is that some method was used that supposedly permitted the experimenter to "ask questions" of one hemisphere as opposed to the other regarding the existence of God. The claim is that affirmative answers to these questions were obtained from the "Christian" side and were not obtained from the "atheist" side.
I mean, I'm just reeling. My whole philosophical worldview is shaken.
/sarc
By the way, I wholeheartedly applaud Ed's comments about the fact that the immateriality of the mind is a matter of conceptual necessity. I also had some profound thoughts on the subject of essences and rationalism, but they are too long to fit into this combox. Well, actually, I'm too sleepy to write them out.
Hope everybody had a great All Hallow's Eve. My last act of the evening shd. be to put up an All Saints' post, however feeble, at my personal blog.
Posted by Lydia | October 31, 2008 10:38 PM
Thanks for highlighting my clunky grammatical error. My mother would horrified. I'll try and find that Ramachandran reference. It may have been in a lecture I saw on video.
In split brain patients you can communicate with the right hemisphere through drawing with the left hand. Maybe writing with the left hand too, I'm not sure. Check it out on youtube.
Posted by Robert | October 31, 2008 11:22 PM
Found it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DCSJdhy3-0
Posted by Robert | October 31, 2008 11:27 PM
For Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and other ancients and medievals, the main reason why the mind has to be immaterial concerns its affinity to its primary objects of knowledge, namely universals, which are themselves immaterial.
Not a philosopher, I had never met this idea before. It is new to me. Very interesting.
Whatever one thinks of arguments like this, ... they purport to show that it is in principle impossible, conceptually impossible, for the intellect to be accounted for in a materialistic way. If such arguments work at all, they establish conclusively that the intellect could no more be identified with processes in the brain than two and two could make five. If they are mistaken, they would be mistaken in the way one might make a mistake in attempting to carry out a geometrical proof, and not by virtue of having failed to take account of this or that finding of brain research.
Fair enough. My question regards the geometrical proof, as it were.
And in general, material symbols and representations are inherently always to some extent vague, ambiguous, or otherwise inexact, susceptible of various alternative interpretations.
Well, yes, but, even if so, what is one to make of this? Suppose that I were an ancient Egyptian state land surveyor, responsible to settle real property disputes after the annual flood. My records (on clay tablets or papyri or whatever Egyptian surveyors happened to use) would consist of various symbols that meant that this one owned so many acres and that one, so many, in such-and-such a geographical relation to one another. My symbols would be ambiguous on several levels, for I might misspell a name, or I might inadequately record what fraction of a large rock lay on which property, or I might drop one of my clay tablets and break it, or the survey after the flood might find it impossible fully to reconcile table 22 with table 35, or a tablet might bear a footnote recording conflicting information given the surveyor by a certain landlord and his tenant, and so on. On the other hand, finding my tablets centuries later, though you might misinterpret their markings as, say, an order of battle, is there any objective sense in which your alternative interpretation could be regarded as correct? Would such an alternative interpretation not be objectively mistaken?
If it would be, then do the tablets themselves not trade in the universals of the landowner and the acre, separate and apart from my mind or yours? If the tablets actually serve the objective purpose of reallocating land after the flood, then are the ideas not connected with the tablets themselves? Observe that I do not propose that the universals were connected with the land and the landowners; only that they were connected with the tablets. And, if the ideas are so connected, then are they somehow fuzzy in concept just because there is not a mind present to apprehend them in the abstract? Remember: the land actually does get reallocated after the flood, and it is the scratches on my tablets that govern this.
So, there is no coherent sense to be made of the suggestion that all of our thoughts are indeterminate. But if at least some of them are determinate, and no physical process or set of physical facts is ever determinate, it follows that at least some of our thoughts are not physical.
Very well, but what if I had (for some inscrutable reason) prepared an extra tablet recording that Pharaoh owned a billion acres above the cataract? No such billion acres exist, either above the cataract or below it, but the idea of a billion acres is perfectly valid and there my tablets are to record it.
In other words, I seem to mistake your concept. Somewhere in my questions then hides a flaw. Can you flush it out, or will you otherwise set me on the right path? For, it is not yet clear to me, an amateur, that a universal (in the specific sense in which you have established it) needs a mind present to apprehend it. Those tablets of mine are pretty abstract, after all, but they are entirely physical; and it seems to me that any alternative interpretation of them would be a mere misinterpretation.
Posted by Howard J. Harrison | November 1, 2008 1:55 AM
Robert, I watched the clip. I notice that he _assumes_ that he has "created two people" by the split-brain experiment, which is hardly encouraging as far as the objectivity of the experimenter is concerned. But the experiment as he describes it, even assuming his description to be accurate and controls to have been instituted within the experiment, does not show what he thinks it shows. Any dualist worth his salt should be an _interactive_ dualist and therefore should acknowledge that damage to the body, and especially the brain, can make a difference to the mind's reactions and abilities, because the mind is affected by the brain and by the body. This is no more a challenge to dualism than is the fact that a person's personality can be radically altered by drugs or that a person can become, because of brain damage, unable to communicate or think clearly at all. Obviously, the splitting of the brain is major surgery. R. makes a joke about whether the patient will or will not go to heaven when he dies, given that when using one hand (which is taken to indicate using one particular half of his brain) he marks the check-off box for "no" when asked if he believes in God, while he marks the check-off box for "yes" when writing with the other hand. It makes a good laugh line, but it is actually no more profound than the question, "If a person is brain damaged or drugged and subsequently claims that he does not believe in God but was a devout Christian before, does he go to heaven when he dies?" Protestants and Catholics, for example, may answer these questions differently, and even different varieties of Protestant may answer differently. Even those who believe that you can lose your faith and be damned as a result (not everyone does) could easily say that changes of opinion (or the appearance of changes of opinion) brought about by severe damage to the brain are hardly in the category of a considered and deliberate rejection of God and of grace.
None of these split brain experiments, however, shows that the mind just is the brain but only that the mind and the brain interact closely, which a dualist should not deny in the first place. That's really all. As Ed said, the question is not an empirical one.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2008 9:51 AM
Yes Lydia, I think that's exactly right. It strikes me as odd, although a prevalent phenomenon these days, that folks will take up an argument without first committing themselves to a solid understanding of the opposing position. There was a day when such an argument would have been almost universally considered not to be even an argument at all--at least among educated people. I think that's what we mean when we use the term 'strawman,' isn't it? I'm of course thinking about the form of the scholastic disputation, where you have to begin by laying out the question formally, and then recognize the strongest possible version of the opposing argument first, before proceeding on to the proposed refutation. "What do they teach them in these schools?" At the very least, I'd hope Robert would try a little harder to see that he hasn't yet touched the argument.
Posted by thebyronicman | November 1, 2008 1:23 PM
Hello Howard,
What you are describing is an ambiguity in someone's expression of certain concepts (i.e. in the documents he wrote up). But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the concepts themselves, which are being expressed, and which, as you indicate, do not need for their existence a mind which understands them. And it is only by comparison with those concepts that the expression counts as ambiguous in the first place: we know that X, Y, and Z are the things that could have been meant -- we grasp these determinate possibilities -- and then we wonder which one the documents were trying to convey. There may be no fact of the matter in such a case -- the guy who wrote the documents may not have had anything specific in mind -- but that is an ambiguity in (again) the expression of the concepts, not the concepts themselves.
Anyway, my point was not to deny that ambiguity exists -- of course it does. My point was that at least sometimes our thoughts are unambiguous or determinate, and that all ambiguity or indeterminateness takes place in any event against a background of concepts that are determinate. It isn't, and cannot be, indeterminateness all the way down.
Posted by Edward Feser | November 1, 2008 2:37 PM
Do you have a separate argument against a bundle theory of the mind, Ed? I bring this up only because the conclusion of your argument as given concerns the non-physical nature of one's thoughts rather than of the mind that thinks the thoughts.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2008 3:25 PM
The concept of a line is not the same as the concept of an angle; hence the concept of being three-sided is not the same as the concept of being three-angled. And one could grasp the one without grasping the other.
Even if I do grasp them differently, the result is indistinguishable from a triangle. How this makes the template for triangles indeterminate is still a mystery.
Re: computer software, sure it can follow those routines, precisely because it was designed to do so. That is to say, it counts as doing "information searches," "pattern recognition," etc. only because minds already existed which could assign the relevant meanings to the physical states of the system.
Just because a process was developed via human design does not negate its explanatory power. Software is a material program which performs these functions in the world. Re: Searle, I haven’t read any of his books, but the Chinese Room argument fails because he looks in the wrong place. The philosophy of mind authors I do read all acknowledge that symbolic meaning is a very complex relational phenomenon which integrates multilayered combinations of computation and emotion. Searle postulates a Turing test machine that has an isolated communication pathway that is limited to simple formal rules, then he is confused why he cannot find meaningful content there.
Posted by Step2 | November 1, 2008 8:15 PM
[Address by given name seems to be the blog's custom, which I follow here.]
Ed,
The clarification is appreciated.
Posted by Howard J. Harrison | November 1, 2008 10:49 PM
Lydia,
From the Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphic POV (which, no surprise, is mine) the soul is not a complete substance, but rather one component (i.e. the form), along with the matter of the body, of a complete substance, viz. the living organism. Hence thinking has a subject as obviously as walking does, and the bundle hypothesis cannot arise. Of course, this goes well beyond anything I'm trying to do in this series of posts, which is only about why the mind, whatever it is, is (at least partly) immaterial. So I imagine Cartesian dualists and property dualists, and not just hylemorphic dualists, could accept what I've argued above.
Posted by Edward Feser | November 2, 2008 1:22 AM
Even if I do grasp them differently, the result is indistinguishable from a triangle. How this makes the template for triangles indeterminate is still a mystery.
Yes, the object itself is necesarily triangular as well as trilateral, but that is not what is in question vis-a-vis the specific point I was making in reply to your remarks about projections into the visual parts of the brain, etc. The point is that your thought about the object could represent it as trilateral without at the same time representing it as triangular. That is to say, your thought is determinately about trilaterality and not about triangularity. But there is nothing about the causal pathway from the object -- call it A -- to the relevant visual centers of the brain -- call the representation that purportedly exists there B -- that can account for this determinate content. A, the cause, is necessarily both trilateral and triangular, so B, the effect, should, given your account, represent it as both. Yet B does not represent it as "both trilateral and triangular" or even as "either trilateral or triangular" but simply as "trilateral."
Re: the purported explanatory power of computer analogies and the like, the problem in a nutshell is that they are supposed to be attempts to explain the intentional/psychological level in terms of non-intentional/physical causal processes, and yet when the latter processes are given a description rich enough to make the explanatory account at all plausible, the description invariably smuggles in the very intentional/psychological language that was supposed to be what was being explained. The result, accordingly, is also invariably an account that is either question-begging, or commits the homunculus fallacy, or is simply incoherent, or all of these at once.
I do not think you realize how very deep the problem is. You really should read Searle, and -- as I've already made clear -- I don't mean the Chinese Room stuff, which, while more significant than you give it credit for, is not nearly as penetrating or devastating as his later stuff. You should also read people like Jerry Fodor, who, though he is sympathetic to the sort of view you favor, clearly sees that it faces very serious problems. Searle and Fodor are no more sympathetic to dualism than I imagine you are, but they are IMHO more intellectually honest (and smarter) than the writers get the most attention.
Posted by Edward Feser | November 2, 2008 2:45 AM
Isn't all this talk basically reflective of Scholastic Philosophy and its classification of universal ideas: direct universal idea & reflex universal idea?
Posted by aristocles | November 3, 2008 5:11 PM