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Moderate Materialism

Rather than continue threadjacking Paul's latest, why not give Philosophy of Mind a post of its own?

Picking and choosing at will, here's my version of the story so far:

Paul defined "materialism" as "the doctrine that the material world is all there is."

Step2 claimed that "moderate materialists can emphasize the material world without rejecting poetic metaphor and our moral sense."

Paul replied that "most materialists are indeed moderate, in the sense of moderately disbelieving in materialism." [heh - good one! - ed.]

Bill Luse demanded to know: "What the hell is a moderate materialist?"

I suggested that emergent materialists, among others, were moderates, in comparison to eliminative materialists.

Bill Luse objected: "there's no such thing as a moderate materialist."

Lydia chimed in with Bill Luse: "hear, hear."

Well. OK. So here's [sic] my two bits:

(1) I do think it's worth distinguishing between the likes of John Searle, on the one hand, and Paul & Patricia Churchland (the most notorious representatives of eliminative materialism) on the other.

Not only does Searle's position have a distinguished pedigree, but it at least takes seriously the deep problems faced by any genuinely materialist position and tries to offer a solution. So it's no surprise that Ed Feser treats Searle very respectfully in his book. The Churchland's, on the other hand...well, as Ed puts it: "if [their view] doesn't sound utterly bizarre, you haven't understood it."

(2) Philosophy of Mind ain't my field, but, personally, I think that moderate materialism has one, if only one, strength - i.e., the weaknesses of the available alternatives:

Cartesian substance dualism?

Pan-psychism?

Neutral monism?

The craziness of it all is almost enough to drive one back into the arms of Aristotle & St. Thomas, with their "hylemorphic dualism."

Almost.

Comments (26)

Not only does Searle's position have a distinguished pedigree, but it at least takes seriously the deep problems faced by any genuinely materialist position and tries to offer a solution.
It seems to me that any materialist who did, indeed, "at least takes seriously the deep problems faced by any genuinely materialist position" would realize -- and simply admit -- that the prolem is materialism itself, and that the individual problems can be solved only by eliminating one's materialism. Or, alternately, by eliminating one's self, as the Churchlands attempt.

Isn't the big problem with emergent materialism the lack of any idea how the emerging takes place? I don't exactly keep up with these things.

But no, that's definitely a 'moderate' position compared to saying there are no minds period.

Can a Christian get away with anything short of some kind of dualism?

Cartesian substance dualism?

God forbid. Oh, wait...if materialism is true, we have a problem with the existence of God.

The craziness of it all is almost enough to drive one back into the arms of Aristotle & St. Thomas, with their "hylemorphic dualism."

I don't quite understand. It seems that all possible answers on the table are being rejected one by one. Whose arms do you propose to take refuge in?

Can a Christian get away with anything short of some kind of dualism?

Probably not - but why would a Christian even want to?

I'm surprised that no one has taken functionalism to task, since it is the paradigm of nonreductive (moderate?) materialism. The Churchlands are outsiders even among naturalists. Functionalism about qualia is a nonstarter, though, and as far as propositional attitudes are concerned, I don't see how functional processes can have truth-conditions.

Can a Christian get away with anything short of some kind of dualism?
Probably not - but why would a Christian even want to?

Some very bright ones think so, but I'm not persuaded. I think the attraction is wanting to explain how "mind" can fit in a certain view of the "material world" is the attraction. Otherwise known as having one's cake and eating it too. :)

The craziness of it all is almost enough to drive one back into the arms of Aristotle & St. Thomas, with their "hylemorphic dualism."

Almost.

Well, give it some time . . . and attention. Standing in for Feser until he puts in his two cents. :)

Pachyderminator asks:

Probably not - but why would a Christian even want to?

To be accepted by the world, particularly the philosophical world. Bottom line.

“Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.” - Arthur Conan Doyle
http://www.slate.com/id/2284721/pagenum/all/#p2

Isn't the big problem with emergent materialism the lack of any idea how the emerging takes place

How emergence takes place = microphysical supervenience.

Note: this is not an explanation, just the name for the phenomenon. How do things supervene? We have no idea, although a branch of theoretical physics posits synergetics as the way in which order is generated out of seeming randomness. Based on the ideas of the physicist, Hermann Haken, order is generated from seeming randomness by the presence of a controlling equation that is unseen, but governs the motion and actions of the particles. Of course, the question Haken doesn't ask is, "Who created the equations."

The Chicken

'Like those who assume that "evolution" produces consciousness, Kurzweil erects his whole structure on the materialist assumption that the human mind (soul, the conscious self) is a purely material phenomenon, a sort of side effect of the brain. This seems obvious to the materialist. But it only seems obvious because he is a materialist. And it only seems persuasive to others who are not necessarily committed to materialism because the scientific rationalism of our time has disposed them to think this way'

Maclin Horton, from this post:

http://lightondarkwater.typepad.com/lodw/2011/02/singularly.html

Like most modern philosophy, philosophy of mind is filled with men who refuse to think about what is most fundamental and instead rely upon unquestioned assumptions and dogmatic constraints in which there is only enough room to construct a pet theory that everybody knows is wrong anyway. Read Dennett, Churchland, Davidson, Kim, and ask yourself if any of these men have a good concept of that which they are trying to explain or, more precisely, explain away.

You do not have to be a disciple of Aristotle to see that he is still one of the only philosophers to first ask "What is most distinctive of mind?" Only then does he follow with any analysis and only then does it make sense to question whether or not the mind can possibly be material.

This approach will probably never become mainstream, though. A true philosophy of mind must start with a philosophy of what is outside of mind, and a true philosophy of what is outside of mind must question the coherency of saying that something is made entirely of matter. In fact, the least likely person to give a robust account of matter is the materialist.

Steve,
The craziness of it all is almost enough to drive one back into the arms of Aristotle & St. Thomas, with their "hylemorphic dualism."

Almost.

If you label it "integrative dualism" ... then at least you avoid the taint of association with Aristotle and St. Thomas.

;)

I too am inclined to think that moderate materialism is a non-starter, although I can understand why someone would be attracted to that view. The best efforts to find a "middle-way" between dualism and eliminativism seem to have come up empty, but this was not always the case. Around 25 years ago, some version of causal-informational or teleological semantics probably looked extremely promising. Despite the prima facie plausibility of these theories, it now seems clear now that they are pretty hopeless- the misrepresentation problem and the disjunction problem (among others) simply do not have credible solutions that can be stated in purely causal and informational terms. Since Dennett's instrumentalist "intentional stance" theory is demonstrably incoherent, eliminativism and dualism seem to me like the only live options that are left. But I am curious, Steve: given how many absurd views analytic philosophy of mind has produced over the last 40 years, what seems so "crazy" about hylemorphism? Or is the statement merely rhetorical?

E.R. Bourne:

A true philosophy of mind must start with a philosophy of what is outside of mind, and a true philosophy of what is outside of mind must question the coherency of saying that something is made entirely of matter. In fact, the least likely person to give a robust account of matter is the materialist.

How true. How true. Or to put it another way, the materialist can't tell us what matter is for the simple reason he can't tell us what matter isn't.

Or to put it another way, the materialist can't tell us what matter is for the simple reason he can't tell us what matter isn't.
In somewhat the manner of: "the hypothesis which explains *everything* explains nothing"?

With (perhaps) a corollary being: "the metaphysic which eliminates everything but matter eliminates that, too" or, perhaps: "the metaphysic which reduces everything to matter finds it has nothing left with which to work"?

And, not least, the metaphysic that eliminates everything but matter has eliminated any possibility of explanation. Thereby winnowing down to 0 the sum total of things that can be explained. Good system, that.

It seems that one has two possibilities: infinite complexity with zero explanation or Divine simplicity with infinite explanation.

The Chicken

Well, you know, the two numbers 'zero' and 'infinity' are intimately related -- 'infinity' being the result of division by 'zero.'

mark - many thanks for the link to Oderberg's piece on "hylemorphic dualism" - I think it's first rate.

Sorry, been out of town and offline most of this week. Re: Searle, he calls his own position "biological naturalism" to distinguish it from the standard materialist positions. But it's really just a placeholder for an actual theory, for while Searle holds that mental processes are entirely caused by neural processes, he doesn't claim to know how. He doesn't think any extant version of materialism comes close to working, but doesn't want to be a dualist either. In fact I (and lots of other people) think he is in effect a kind of property dualist, even if he doesn't realize it, as I argue here:

http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/searle.html

His problem, IMHO, is that like most contemporary philosophers he is locked into a conceptual framework that makes materialism, idealism, neutral monism or dualism of a broadly Cartesian sort seem like the only possible options. Since he judges (rightly, in my view) that none of the other views can be right, he tries to sketch out an alternative, but rather than being a kind of middle ground between materialism and property dualism, it is really just an ambiguous way of stating the latter. But Searle's real contribution to the mind-body problem is as a critic, not a positive theorist.

I would say (and have argued in several places, e.g. in Aquinas and in The Last Superstition) that the mind-body problem is really an artifact of the anti-Aristotelian revolution of the early moderns. There is no "mind-body problem," of the sort we're familiar with today, in ancient and medieval philosophy. It arises with the early moderns' mathematicized re-definition of matter and truncated conception of causality (formal and final causes chucked out, material and efficient causes redefined) -- therein lay the origins of the "interaction problem," of the notion of "qualia" that are "non-physical" etc. etc.

It is worth emphasizing too that of the four modern families of theories mentioned above, materialism has only recently been taken seriously by very many philosophers. Historically, even most religious skeptics rejected it in favor of some riff on one of the other views. (If I were a naturalist, I'd opt for some kind of neutral monism -- as I did when I was a naturalist.)

Steve, if you haven't done so, do look at Oderberg's Real Essentialism too, where the paper you refer to is more or less reprinted (as chapter 10) and incorporated into a larger defense of hylemorphism. There is also Oderberg's paper "Concepts, Dualism, and the Human Intellect":

http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Concepts,%20Dualism%20and%20Human%20Intellect.pdf

and James Ross's paper "Immaterial Aspects of Thought":

http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/ross-immateriality.pdf

both of which are important for (among other reasons) their emphasis on the crucial point that it is our powers of conceptual thought, and not "qualia" and the like, that show that our nature is not entirely material.

It seems that one has two possibilities: infinite complexity with zero explanation or Divine simplicity with infinite explanation.

Because nothing describes moderate like two extremes. You could instead choose finite complexity with some explanation, i.e. the world of increasingly complex culture and knowledge as it has evolved over the centuries.

Or to put it another way, the materialist can't tell us what matter is for the simple reason he can't tell us what matter isn't.

Still, a definition in negative terms isn't really an explanation. Read Gilson's The Unity of Philosophical Experience on that. It's a great book and a pleasure to read, whether you're a Thomist or not.

But Searle's real contribution to the mind-body problem is as a critic, not a positive theorist.

I think that's very important. "Treating Searle with respect" needn't mean treating him as having a consistent, clear, positive position.

...the materialist can't tell us what matter is for the simple reason he can't tell us what matter isn't.

It isn't supernatural, but it does contain integrated organizational relationships within dynamic systems that are governed by physical laws and nonlinear biological impulses, including highly differentiated survival strategies. If you wanted to ask why biological matter has survival strategies while the rest doesn't, that would be an interesting question to try to answer.

It isn't supernatural, but it does contain integrated organizational relationships within dynamic systems that are governed by physical laws and nonlinear biological impulses, including highly differentiated survival strategies.

Step2, even before you get to the last phrase, there are a lot of philosophical underpinnings to that view of "matter" that are still in debate. I think that few would dispute that there are indeed things that have organization, but calling these "things" matter basically assumes what you want to prove. If you wanted to say that they "have" matter or "entail" matter, that would probably not be assuming so much.

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