Maverick Philosopher

Mental states such as wanting, imagining, perceiving, etc. exhibit intentionality, and they do so by their very nature: they are essentially (not accidentally) of or about or directed to objects. I cannot want without wanting something, a dog for instance. What I want may or may not exist without prejudice to my wanting it. My wanting a three-headed dog does not entail the existence of a three-headed dog. And the nonexistence of such a dog leaves my thought untouched: My thought is what it is, and has the content it has, despite the nonexistence of three-headed dogs. Compare wanting to owning: if I own a three-headed dog, then there exists a three-headed dog. So if there are no three-headed dogs, then I cannot own one. Ownership is held hostage to the existence of things owned.

Owning is a relation: the nonexistence of one its terms (relata) entails the relation's nonobtaining. Wanting is not a relation -- though it is relation-like, ein Relativliches, as Brentano observed in 1874 -- since the nonexistence of the thing wanted leaves the wanting unaffected. The same goes for all cases of intentionality. None of them are relations strictly speaking.

Now compare wanting a dog, a beer, a ham sandwich, a matter transmitter. What Searle calls the "psychological mode" is the same in all four cases: all four intentional states are tokens of the type, wanting. But the intentional contents are different.

One question is this: In virtue of what does an intentional state possess content? A related question: In virtue of what does an intentional state possess the specific content that individuates it? For Fodor a state gets its content from external relations to the world. Things in the external world cause our intentional states to have the content they have.

Although it is entirely 'natural' for a naturalist to say something like this, the suggestion is fraught with difficulties.

1. First of all, some thoughts are about the nonexistent. But what does not exist cannot cause anything. So it cannot be the case that all thoughts derive their content from things in the external world. Since Cerberus does not exist, he cannot be causally responsible for my Cerberus-thoughts. The thought has the content it has despite the fact that nothing answering to it exists in the external world.

2. But even in the case of thoughts about existent items, causal relations cannot suffice to explain content. Suppose I am thinking about my cat Caissa. What makes this cat thought about Caissa? The idea is that there is a causal chain, commencing with Caissa, that terminates in my having the thought in question. But this is hopeless for reasons spelled out in a previous post. Briefly, all sorts of things in the external world are involved in the etiology of my thought; but my thought is precisely about Caissa. And as Putnam has argued, any attempt at specifying the salient cause, the cause that brings about the cat thought, will presuppose intentional notions.

3. Suppose I am thinking about Hal, who exists, but I attribute to him a property he does not possess. The content of my thought is: Hal is hypertensive, when in truth he is hypotensive. Since hypertensive Hal does not exist, how can he cause my false thought about him to have the content it has?

Naturalists have answers to these sorts of objections. My claim, however, will be that their answers just make things worse.

1. We can introduce the notion of a proposition by saying that propositions are the vehicles or bearers of the truth-values. We can also say that they are the objects (accusatives) of such propositional attitudes as belief and desire. So far, agreement reigns. But to say the foregoing is just to say that propositions are entities that play a certain role, the role of truth-bearer, and the role of objects of the attitudes. One can presumably ask the further question as to what exactly is the nature of the entities that play those roles. This allows people to propose rather wild theories about what propositions are. Stalnaker's is a wild theory in my opinion.

2. According to Stalnaker, "a proposition is a function from possible worlds into truth-values." (p. 2) Note that S. says that a proposition is a function, not that it can be represented as one. The latter claim is innocuous; the former is not. But could a proposition be a function? Well, what is a function? A function has an 'argument' and a 'value.' If 2 is the argument of the squaring function, then 4 is the value. If -2 is the argument, 4 is the value. Essential to the notion of a function is that it assigns a unique output or value for each input or argument. A function can be thought of as a rule whereby one assigns a unique member of one set — call it the 'range' of the function to each member of another set — call it the 'domain' of the function.

3. Since everything in mathematics is a set, functions are sets. A binary function is a set of ordered pairs, and in general an n-ary function is a set of ordered n-tuples. So the squaring function is the set of all ordered pairs which set has as members <-3, 9>, <3, 9>, <-2, 4>, <2, 4>, <-1, 1>, <1, 1>, . . . .

A proposition, then, is a set of ordered pairs each member of which is of the form [W, TV] where W is a possible world and TV is a truth-value. Thus the proposition Socrates is wise is the set of ordered pairs which would have the following as members, where 'A' stands for the actual world: [A, T], [W1, F], [W2, T], . . . . Accordingly, a proposition is a monstrous set each element of which is an ordered pair whose first member is a possible world and whose second member is a truth-value. (Read the brackets as angle brackets.)

4. Sets are extensional entities: Two sets are the same iff they have all the same members. Since functions are sets, they too are extensional entities. And since propositions are functions, they also are extensional entities. This implies that two propositions are identical if they are true and false in all the same possible worlds. In other words, necessarily equivalent propositions are identical. As Stalnaker appreciates, this is highly counterintuitive. Surely (to use an example of my own), the Axiom of Choice is not the same proposition as Zorn's Lemma: one can accept the first while doubting the second. To prove their necessary equivalence is a nontrivial problem! One wants to insist that they differ in their very meaning or content. But on Stalnaker's extensionalist approach, this difference evaporates and they must be regarded as the very same proposition.

But there is worse to come. Stalnaker's extensionalism implies that there is only one necessary truth. Let P and Q be necessary truths. Since each is true in all possible worlds, there is nothing to distinguish them extensionally, and so they are identical.

5. But even apart from these difficulties, the very notion that a proposition is a set is absurd on the face of it. While there may be some latitude as to what propositions are, surely there are some things they cannot be, sets for example. Propositions are either trut or false. But it borders on incoherence to say that sets are either true or false. But that is what Stalnaker's view implies.

But much more needs to be said — in the next installment for which you will no doubt be waiting with bated breath. But now I'm off with wifey to the Five and Diner for some greasy American grub in a '50's environment.

The materialist, then, holds that everything is material: not just tables and rocks and black holes and their parts and microconstituents all the way down to the subatomic, but also human beings, their thoughts and feelings, and indeed anything that could be an existent object of their thinking.

If we think of all entities as divisible into three mutually irreducible disjoint categories, the material, the mental, and the abstract, then what the materialist is claiming is that the second two categories are empty. So the materialist is committed to denying the existence of God (as traditionally conceived), disembodied and unembodied minds/souls, unexemplified universals, and all 'Platonic' entities including Bolzano's Saetze an sich, Frege's Gedanken, and the like.

But what do we do with truth? Does it have a place in the materialist's world? Of particular interest is the truth of the materialist thesis itself, the truth of the proposition expressed by 'Everything is material.' If everything is material, then the truth or falsehood of this thesis must also be material. But if we cannot make sense of this, then materialism will be inconsistent with the conditions of its own truth.

There is a difference between truth and a truth. Truth is what is common to particular truths. Perhaps it is a property, the property of being true. (Frege thought otherwise, but his theory is so bizarre that I hesitate to bring it up.) A particular truth, on the other hand, is a true proposition, or, to put it more generally, a true truth-bearer.

So let's inquire into truth-bearers. A truth-bearer (truth-vehicle) is whatever can be appropriately characterized as either true or false. Not everything can be so characterized. A banana cannot be a truth-bearer, since no banana is either true or false. (If you say that a banana that is not fake is true, then you are equivocating on 'true.') But Poindexter's belief, of a particular banana, that it is ripe, is appropriately characterizable as either true or false, whence it follows that beliefs are candidates for the office of truth-bearer.

Other candidates: sentences-tokens, sentence-types, utterance-events, judgments, Fregean propositions. Clearly, nothing can be either true or false unless it has a sentence-like structure. Thus the set {Socrates, wisdom} cannot have a truth-value. And the same goes for {Socrates, Exemplifies, Wisdom}.

Now if a you are a materialist, then your options narrow: you cannot admit as candidate truth-bearers anything irreducibly mental or irreducibly abstract. You have to say that truth-bearers are material objects, whether simple or complex.

Herein lies the rub. It is difficult to understand how any material item, or collection of material items, could be true or false. A belief can be true or false because of its intentionality: it is of or about something distinct from itself; it is a representation. As such, it can represent things as they are, or the opposite. But materialists cannot allow that beliefs (occurrent believings) are irreducibly mental items; the materialist must either go eliminativist and deny the very existence of beliefs, or (more plausibly) attempt to identify beliefs with states of the brain. But a brain state is just a physical state of a physical organ.

Such states can be assigned semantic properties ab extra, but it is difficult to see how they could intrinsically possess semantic properties. How could a physical state be intrinsically such as to represent Bush, say, as hopelessly inarticulate, or Ted Kennedy as irremediably confused?

A similar argument can be deployed for any material item that is advanced as a candidate truth-bearer. Here on this screen are dark characters against a light background. You see these characters with your eyes. But you interpret them as meaningful with your mind. Now the meaning of these meaningful marks is not intrinsic to them as physical scribbles. For this reason it makes no sense to say that a declarative sentence-token is true or false qua string of physical marks.

It seems that we have driven the materialist into a corner. Qua materialist, he cannot admit as existent anything other than material items. But we have just seen that no material item can be either true or false. So there is no room for truths in the materialist's world. There is no room for truth since there is no room for truth-bearers.

It follows that there is no room for the putative truth that everything is material. There is no room for the falsehood of this thesis either. So we ought to conclude that materialism is inconsistent with the conditions of its own truth or falsity. Materialism as defined above is a self-refuting thesis. So it cannot be that the category of material items is the only nonempty category. If it is nonempty, at least one of the others has to be nonempty as well.

The eliminative materialist will reply that that argument makes the same mistake that an ancient or medieval person would be making if he insisted that he could just see with his own eyes that the heavens form a turning sphere, or that witches exist. The fact is, all observation occurs within some system of concepts, and our observation judgments are only as good as the conceptual framework in which they are expressed. In all three cases — the starry sphere, witches, and the familiar mental states — precisely what is challenged is the integrity of the background conceptual frameworks in which the observation judgments are expressed. To insist on the validity of one's experiences, traditionally interpreted, is therefore to beg the very question at issue. For in all three cases, the question is whether we should reconceive the nature of some familiar observational domain.

Even if we grant that "all observation occurs within some system of concepts," is the experiencing of a pain a case of observation? If you know your Brentano, you know that early on in Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint he makes a distinction between inner observation (innere Beobachtung) and inner perception (innere Warhnehmung). Suppose one suddenly becomes angry. The experiencing of anger is an inner perception, but not an inner observation. The difference is between living in and through one's anger and objectifying it in an act of reflection. The act of inner observation causes the anger to subside, unlike the inner perception which does not.

Reflecting on this phenomenological difference, one sees how crude Churchland's scheme is. He thinks that mental data such as pains and pleasures are on a par with outer objects like stars and planets. It is readily granted with respect to the latter that seeing is seeing-as. A medieval man who sees the heavens as a turning sphere is interpreting the visual data in the light of a false theory; he is applying an outmoded conceptual framework. But there is no comparable sense in which my feeling of pain involves the application of a conceptual framework to an inner datum.

Suppose I feel a pain. I might conceptualize it as tooth-ache pain in which case I assign it some such cause as a process of decay in a tooth. But I can 'bracket' or suspend that conceptualization and consider the pain in its purely qualitative character. It is then nothing more than a sensory quale. I might even go so far as to abstract from its painfulness.

Now the existence of this rock-bottom sensory datum is indubitable and refutes the eliminativist claim. For this datum is not a product of conceptualization, but is something that is the 'raw material' of conceptualization. The felt pain qua felt is not an object of observation, but an Erlebnis, something I live-through (er-leben). It is not something outside of me which I subsume under a concept, but a content (Husserl: ein reeller Inhalt) of my consciousness. I live my pain, I don't observe it. It is not a product of conceptualization -- in the way a distant light in the sky can be variously conceptualized as a planet, natural satellite, artificial satellite, star, double-star, UFO, etc. -- but a material or object of conceptualization.

So the answer to Churchland is as follows. There can be no question of re-conceptualizing fundamental sensory data since there was no conceptualization to start with. So I am not begging the question against Churchland when I insist that pains exist: I am not assuming that the "traditional conceptualization" is the correct one. I am denying his presupposition, namely, that there is conceptualization in a case like this.

Most fundamentally, I am questioning the Kantian-Sellarsian presupposition that the data of inner sense are in as much need of categorial interpretation as the data of outer sense. If there is no categorization at this level, then there is no possibility of a re-categorization in neuroscientific terms.

To answer this question we first need to define naturalism. This is not particularly easy, but in earlier posts I have plumped for David Armstrong's definition:

It is the contention that the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system. . . . The positive part of the thesis, that the spacetime system exists, is perhaps not very controversial . . . . The negative thesis, that the spacetime system is all there is, is more controversial. (A World of States of Affairs, p. 5)

If we accept Armstrong's definition — and I see no reason not to accept it — and if naturalism so defined is true, then the following do not, and presumably cannot, exist: God as classically conceived, disembodied minds/souls, unexemplified universals, and a whole range of objects variously characterizable as ideal, Platonic, or abstract, including Fregean propositions, Fregean senses in general, numbers, irreducible sets, and the like.

In sum, naturalism (N) is the thesis that reality is exhausted by the space-time system. So the question before us can be formulated thusly:

Q. Is there some proposition P such that (i) we know that P, and (ii) P entails ~N?

There are unexemplified universals entails ~N. But do we know that there are unexemplified universals? There are various arguments one can give, and some of them are valid and have plausible premises. But that is not to say that we know their conclusion. Similarly for arguments for Fregean propositions and other items on the above list.

Those of you who would return an affirmative answer to (Q) need to specify some values for 'P.'

Consider the true sentence '2 + 1 = 3' standardly interpreted as a truth of base-10 arithmetic. I say that this sentence is not about physical objects, but about abstract or ideal or 'Platonic' objects. (Forget about the historical Plato and his actual doctrines.) Such objects are neither spatial nor temporal nor mental. To say that they are abstract is to say that they are (i) necessarily existent (existent in all metaphysically possible worlds) and (ii) causally inert: they do not enter into causal relations as either causes or effects. The term 'abtract' is less than felicitous, suggesting as it does a product of a mental act of abstraction; but that infelicity is no part of its meaning in this context.

One way to support this 'platonism' is by considering the defects of alternative views. By 'support,' I mean make a rational case for. I doubt that one can provide 'knock-down' arguments for it. One alternative could be called physicalism. Bill Keezer in an earlier thread made this suggestion if I understood him correctly.

How might one interpret '2 + 1 = 3' physicalistically? One might interpret it as about piles of physical things. Whenever one has a pile of two things, and adds a third, the result is a pile of three physical things. Accordingly, the arithmetical sentence is not about certain platonic objects subsisting in splendid and serene isolation from the flux and shove of the spatiotemporal order; the sentence is an empirical generalization about physical piles. But surely this leaves something to be desired.

Here is a quick consideration. Set-theory is essential to modern mathematics. But it is difficult to see how sets could be identified with piles of physical things. For there are many more sets than there are piles. I've got a pile of two bricks, A and B. Corresponding to that pile is the set, {A, B}. That set has four subsets: {A, B}, {A}, {B}, { }. But they form a set, which is called the power set of the original set, namely: { {A, B}, {A}, {B}, { }}. But there is also the power set of that power set, and so on ad infinitum.

Clearly, there are no physical piles corresponding to all these sets. So sets cannot be identified with physical piles. Sets are mathematical objects. Therefore there are mathematical objects that cannot be identified with physical objects. Numbers are construable as sets. Therefore numbers cannot be identified with physical objects whence it follows that not everything is a physical object!

But let's be charitable. The argument the author is trying to give is something like this:

1. Numbers are not physical objects
Therefore
2. Numbers are mental constructions.

That this is a non sequitur should be obvious. For there is a third possibility: numbers are abstract or ideal or Platonic objects. This third possibility is seen to be plausible once one considers the difficulties with the view that numbers are mental constructions.

Note first that an abstract object is not one produced by a mental act of abstraction. For present purposes we can say that an abstract object is any entity that necessarily exists but is causally inert.

Note second that a number is not the same as a numeral. One and the same number can be represented by different numerals. Thus the same number is denoted by the Arabic '9' and the Roman 'IX.' Numerals are physical, while numbers are not. So no number is a numeral.

We also note that 9 in a base-10 or decimal system is equivalent to 1001 in a base-2 or binary system. When I speak of the number 9 I am referring to the denotatum of the numeral '9' as this numeral functions within our ordinary base-10 system. That denotatum is the say as the denotatum of '1001' as the latter functions within a base-2 system.

One and the same proposition can be expressed by different indicative sentences. Thus the binary sentence '1 + 1 = 10' expresses the same true proposition as is expressed by the decimal sentence '1 + 1 = 2.' But if the two sentences are both interpreted relative to the decimal system, then they express different propositions, one true and the other false.

Our question is whether numbers themselves are mental constructions, not whether numerals are mental constructions. This is connected with the question of whether mathematics is in any sense conventional. No doubt notation systems are conventional, i.e. decided upon by human beings (or whatever other intelligent critters there might be elsewhere); but it doesn't follow that numbers or other mathematical objects are.

If numbers themselves are mental constructions, then they depend on our existence for their existence. (Forget about extraterrestrial intelligences for the nonce.) The same goes for the truths in which they are involved. (Thus 7 and 9 and 16 are involved in the truth expressed by '7 + 9 = 16'.) But we didn't always exist. Consider a time before any minds existed, some time after the Big Bang and before the emergence of life on earth, say.

During that interval, the speed of light and the speed of sound were the same as they are now, and during that time the former was greater than the latter, as is the case now. Let 'c' denote the speed of light in a vacuum. C is identical to some number, which number depending on the units of measurement one employs. So c = 186,000 miles/sec (approximately). In the metric system, c = 300,000 km/sec (approximately). The point is that once the system of measurement is fixed -- which of course is conventional -- then some definite number is the SOL. Similarly with the speed of sound, SOS. Now

1. SOL > SOS

is true now and was true at the time when no humans existed. Of course, at that time the concept or notion or idea greater than (taken in its mathematical sense) did not exist since concepts (notions, ideas) cannot exist except 'in' a mind. ('In' here not to be taken spatially.) But the mathematical relation picked out by '>' existed. For if it did not, then (1) could not have been true at the time in question. And the same goes for the relational fact of SOL's being greater than SOS. That fact obtained at the time when no minds existed. So its constituents (the numbers and the greater than relation) had to exist at that time as well.

Therefore, mathematical objects cannot be our mental creations.

I stress this, because many don't understand it. They think that substance dualists deny facts that are well-known or scientifically established. One commenter, for example, compared substance dualists to flat-earthers — which of course shows total misunderstanding.

"Why is this the case, if our minds aren't simply something the brain is doing?" Because it could be the case even if our minds are not simply something the brain is doing. If substance dualism is true, then the mind is a substance. But note the following definition:

D1. X is a substance =df X is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

(D1) lays down what is meant by 'substance' in discussions about substance dualism in the philosophy of mind. That and that alone is what is meant by the term.

Note also that 'substance' has a half-dozen or so meanings and that in this context, 'substance' does not mean stuff. Thus the dualist cannot be blown out of the water by some such cheapshot as saying that he is committed to something self-contradictory like immaterial matter. (Not that Malcolm would reach for such a cheapshot.)

So for the dualist, the mind can exist without being embodied. But my mind, with which I am rather well acquainted, is an embodied mind. It is embodied as a matter of contingent fact, though not as a matter of metaphysical necessity. So it is not surprising that what goes on in my mind affects and is affected by what goes on in my brain and central nervous system. It is not surprising that the states of an embodied mind will be affected by alcohol in the bloodstream. In general, it is not suprising that (some) changes in the brain will bring about changes in the mind.

Since the facts that Malcolm adduces can be explained both materialistically and dualistically,, his adducing of said facts does not support materialism over dualism. Since the facts are consistent with both schemes, they do not entail either scheme.

So what Malcolm says in #1 is not a good reason to reject dualism. Of course, what I said in rebuttal does not provide a good positive reason to accept dualism over materialism. What I have done is merely remove a threat to the rationality of dualist belief.

A fourth reason is that, unlike most other theories of being qua being, physicalism is meant to be criticizable by way of observational testing. According to contemporary physicalists, the principles of physicalism are to be treated as high-level empirical hypotheses or generalizations.

What Post is saying, then, is that the metaphysical proposition

1. To be is to be physical

is an empirical generalization supported by natural science and open to disconfirmation by future experience. Three objections immediately come to mind.

Objection One

The gist of my first objection is that (1) cannot be an empirical generalization. Empirical generalizations, if true, are contingently true. So if (1) is an empirical generalization, then (1) is contingently true. But then it can't be the case that to be is to be physical.

Why not? Well, (1) asserts an identity between the 'property' of being (existence) and the 'property' of physicality. This identity entails the necessary equivalence

2. Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is physical.

(One cannot validly move from equivalence to identity, but one can validy infer an equivalence from an identity.)

The upshot is that (1) is both contingently true (because it is an empirical generalization) and not contingently true (because it entails a necessary truth). But this is a contradiction, so (1) is not an empirical generalization.

Once one appreciates this, one sees that physicalism cannot be supported by natural science. In general, metaphysical propositions about being qua being cannot be supported or refuted by naturalistic methods. Natural science cannot take the place of first philosophy.

But couldn't (1) be taken to assert the contingent identity of existence and physicality? I don't see how. Indeed, I have no idea what that could mean. If two individuals are identical, then that is necessarily the case. Contrapositively, if two individuals are possibly distinct, then they are distinct. Similarly, if two properties are possibly distinct, as they would be if they were only contingently identical, then they are distinct. Consider a possible world in which something exists that is not physical, the number 9 say, or perhaps some set of physical objects. In that world existence and physicality are distinct properties. But if they are distinct in one possible world, then they are distinct in all possible worlds, including the actual world.

Second Objection

My second objection is that (1), if true, supplies itself with a counterexample, and thus refutes itself. (1) expresses a proposition, call it P. (I take it to be self-evident that a proposition must not be confused with its physical embodiment whether it be marks on a page or pixels on a monitor.) So if (1) is true, then the proposition P expressed by (1) is physical. But there is no tenable theory of propositions according to which propositions are physical entities.

Frege's Gedanken, for example, despite their name, are Platonic entities and therefore nonphysical. The same goes for Bolzano's Saetze an sich. Suppose you say that propositions are not Platonic entities but exist only as the accusatives of judging minds. Still, such accusatives cannot be intelligibly viewed as a physical entities. They are senses, even if they cannot exist in splendid Platonic independence. Less plausibly, a proposition might be construed as some sort of set-theoretical construction, whether a set of utterance events or a set of possible worlds. But even these far-fetched theories don't help since sets are abstract entities, hence nonphysical.

Propositions, then, cannot be physical. So (1), whether true or false, expresses a proposition, a nonphysical entitiy. Therefore (1) is false: the proposition it expresses is its own counterexample.

Third Objection

My third objection is a circularity objection: (1) is damagingly circular. To see this, ask yourself whether Pegasus is a counterexample to (1). Pegasus is a winged horse. So Pegasus is a physical item. After all, a horse is a physical item, and to add physical appendages to a physical item does not alter its physicality. So Pegasus appears to be a counterexample to (1): Peagasus is physical, but does not exist. To block this and like counterexamples, one must construe (1) as short for

3. To exist = to be physical and exist.

On this construal, (1) is true but circular. This shows that existence cannot be identified with the categorial property of being physical. Indeed, it shows that existence cannot be identified with any property. And this for the simple reason that nothing can have a property unless it exists.

Conclusion

Physical science studies physical reality. But it is in no position to establish that physical reality exhausts the whole of reality. The assertion that to be is to be physical is a meta-physical assertion in that it attempts go beyond physical reality to characterize reality as such. My second and third arguments show that this meta-physical assertion is false, and my first argument shows that it cannot be supported by natural science.

Suppose then that on a particular occasion I am thinking about a certain species of animal, say dogs —- not some specific dog, just dogs in general (but I mean domestic dogs, specifically, not dogs in the generic sense that includes wolves and coyotes). The Martian scientist is present and has his usual complete knowledge of my neurophysiological state. Can he tell on that basis alone what I am thinking about? Can he tell that I am thinking about dogs rather than about cats or radishes or typewriters or free will or nothing at all? It is surely far from obvious how he might do this. My suggestion is that he cannot, that no knowledge of the complexities of my neurophysiological state will enable him to pick out that specific content in the logically tight way required, and hence that physicalism is once again clearly shown to be false.

[. . .]

Suppose then, as seems undeniable, that when I am thinking about dogs, my state of mind has a definite internal or intrinsic albeit somewhat indeterminate content, perhaps roughly the idea of a medium-sized hairy animal of a distinctive shape, behaving in characteristic ways. Is there any plausible way in which, contrary to my earlier suggestion, the Martian scientist might come to know this content on the basis of his neurophysiological knowledge of me? As with the earlier instance of the argument, we may set aside issues that are here irrelevant (though they may well have an independent significance of their own) by supposing that the Martian scientist has an independent grasp of a conception of dogs that is essentially the same as mine, so that he is able to formulate to himself, as one possibility among many, that I am thinking about dogs, thus conceived. We may also suppose that he has isolated the particular neurophysiological state that either is or is correlated with my thought about dogs. Is there any way that he can get further than this?

The problem is essentially the same as before. The Martian will know a lot of structural facts about the state in question, together with causal and structural facts about its relations to other such states. But it is clear that the various ingredients of my conception of dogs (such as the ideas of hairiness, of barking, and so on) will not be explicitly present in the neurophysiological account, and extremely implausible to think that they will be definable on the basis of neurophysiological concepts. Thus, it would seem, there is no way that the neurophysiological account can logically compel the conclusion that I am thinking about dogs to the exclusion of other alternatives.

[. . .]

Thus the idea that the Martian scientist would be able to determine the intrinsic or internal contents of my thought on the basis of the structural relations between my neurophysiological states is extremely implausible, and I can think of no other approach to this issue that does any better. The indicated conclusion, once again, is that the physical account leaves out a fundamental aspect of our mental lives, and hence that physicalism is false.

I will now sum up BonJour's reasoning in my own way. BonJour is thinking about dogs. He needn't be thinking about any particular dog; he might just be thinking about getting a dog, which of course does not entail that there is some particular dog, Kramer say, that he is thinking about getting. BonJour's thinking has intentional content. The question is whether the Martian scientist can determine what that content is by monitoring BonJour's neural states during the period of time he is thinking about dogs. The content before BonJour's mind has various subcontents: hairy critter, mammal, barking animal, man's best friend . . . . But none of this content will be discernible to the neuroscientist on the basis of complete knowledge of the neural states, their relations to each other and to sensory input and behavioral output. Therefore, there is more to the mind than what can be known by even a completed neuroscience. Physicalism (materialism) is false.

It goes without saying that securing agreement on just what the data are, and whether a given theory accounts for them adequately, is a messy business. It is especially messy when, as is the case here, what one is seeking are philosophical rather than scientific explanations.

How does Occam's Razor bear upon the question of metaphysical naturalism (which is to be distinguished from ethical, epistemological, and methodological naturalism)? As follows. If naturalism accounts for all the data adequately, then I say we should be naturalists. Thus there is arguably a presumption in favor of naturalism, a presumption that rests on the Razor.

Metaphysical naturalism (MN) may be defined as the doctrine that the world, the totality of entities, is identical to the space-time system. This is essentially D. M. Armstrong's definition. (A World of States of Affairs, p. 5.) If MN is true, then there is no God as classically conceived, no unembodied or disembodied finite minds, no abstracta or Platonica such as Fregean propositions, and no unexemplified universals. (MN as defined does allow for immanent physical universals: see Armstrong.)

Some identify MN with atheism, the denial that God as classically conceived exists. That is a mistake in my book: MN entails atheism, no doubt, but is not logically equivalent to it, since atheism does not entail metaphysical naturalism. McTaggart was an atheist but not a metaphysical naturalist.

Suppose there are three candidate entity-types, basic and mutually irreducible: bodies, minds, abstracta. The naturalist can be understood to be saying that the second two categories are empty and that their members are not needed to explain the data.

It follows that there are several ways to be an anti-naturalist. One way is to say that we need minds and bodies but not abstracta. Another is to say that we need bodies, minds, and abstracta. A third is to say that we need bodies and abstracta but no minds. A fourth is to say that we can get by just with minds. (Berkeley, McTaggart) A fifth is to say that we need only minds and abstracta. A sixth is to say that we can scrape by on abstracta alone. (I seem to recall a logician named Fitch who thought everything is at bottom a proposition or a construction out of propositions -- but I could easily be wrong about that.)

From the foregoing it should be clear that Occam's Razor does not support MN by itself, but only together with an antecedent acceptance of bodies as irreducibly real. But given the latter acceptance, then OR* enjoins us to try to explain the data without invoking irreducible minds or mental contents (qualia, e.g.) or abstracta.

So this is what I am interested in discussing: Can naturalism explain everything that needs to be explained? If it can, then we ought to be naturalists, or at least the pressure is on to accept naturalism. God might still exist even if everything apart from God could be explained without reference to God. But then what reason would one have to posit God? Mystical experience of God? God's self-revelation through his prophets as recorded in scripture? Perhaps, but then the question of the veridicality of these sources of putative knowledge becomes very pressing indeed. Metaphysical naturalism will most like bring epistemological naturalism and scientism in its train and thus a foreclosing on all sources of knowledge apart from science.

So I say that the pressure is on to accept naturalism if it can explain what needs to be explained. Of course, I don't think it can explain what needs to be explained, which is why I am an anti-naturalist. I am not an anti-naturalist because I am a theist, I am an anti-naturalist because naturalism fails to explain what needs to be explained. I have been building my case slowly, but it is far from complete.

But note well: to argue against naturalism is to not argue for substance dualism. For there are other options such as absolute idealism. If everything is a mind or a content in a mind, then that is as parsimonious an explanation as an explanation that states that everything is either a body or a construction from bodies.

What needs to be explained? This requires a separate post.

Since there is a presumption in favor of naturalism, it is appropriate to proceed as I have been proceeding, namely, challenging naturalists to show how their theories work and account for the data. Pollack et al. may feel this to be unfair because I have them on the defensive; but it seems to me that the presumption in favor of naturalism makes to reasonable to see if we can be satisfied by it. If we can, then there is no need to posit anything beyond the natural.

Note also -- and this may apply to Kevin Kim -- the untenability of substance dualism, say, does not show the tenability of naturalism. After all, they could both be false and/or untenable.

1. I am assuming that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Thus my question is not whether they are reliable, but whether it is rational to hold that they are reliable if one also holds they are the accidental products of blind evolutionary processes.

2. By 'reliable,' I mean reliable for producing true beliefs more often than not when our faculties are functioning properly in their appropriate environments. A true belief is one that corresponds to the way the world is in itself. If my belief that a is F is true, then a is F -- whether or not anyone believes it. Truth puts one in touch with reality.

3. Reliability is a normative concept. Compare trustworthiness. To say that a person is trustworthy is not merely to say that the person CAN be trusted, but that he is WORTHY of being trusted, that he deserves trust or merits trust. (Anyone who is trusted, can be trusted; but this is not to say that anyone who is trusted is trustworthy.) Hence to say that our cognitive apparatus (inner sense, outer sense, discursive reason, and whatever else one wants to include) is reliable or trustworthy is not to say that we as a matter of fact rely or have relied on it, or that we can rely on it, but that we are justified in relying on it due to a certain intrinsic aptness of the faculty for producing true beliefs. A reliable faculty is one that is worthy of being relied upon to produce true beliefs.

4. Pollack says in effect that it is rational to trust our faculties to produce true beliefs because such trust has proven to have survival-value. Although it is true that we and our faculties have arisen by accident via blind evolutionary processes from less complex forms of life, our faculties are nonetheless reliable because we have been relying on them and we have been successful in the struggle for existence.

5. If this is what Pollack means -- and it may not be -- then I think a mistake has been made, namely, an illicit inference from the factual assertion that our reliance on our faculties has worked out well as far as survival as a species goes to the normative assertion that our faculties are worthy of being relied upon to produce true beliefs.

I don't see how success justifies. I don't see how one validly moves from (a) Trusting our faculties, we have been successful to (b) Our trust in our faculties is justified. For if our faculties arose by accident, then it is sheer chance, a mere contingent fact, that so far they have been productive of true beliefs. If they weren't designed to track truth, but merely have happened to track truth so far, then we have no reason to trust them.

6. I don't believe it will do any good for Pollack to say that our faculties did not arise by accident but were designed by mindless processes, or anything along those lines. (Compare Dennett's silly talk of Mother Nature designing this and that.) For that is to misuse the word 'design.' To be designed is to be designed for a purpose by a being who is purposive. Something that arises from natural selection operating upon random mutations may appear to be designed, but it makes no sense to say that such a thing is designed. Thus the heart appears to have been designed for a purpose, namely, to pump blood. But the mere appearance of design does not entail design, and if the heart came about by undirected evolutionary processes, then the corrct thing to say is that the heart was not designed, and that the appearance of design is a mere appearance and no part of reality.

7. So I persist in my view that it is not rational to hold BOTH that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes.

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer.

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by a process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutuionary processes? I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:

. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)

This suggests the following design argument:

1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

Therefore

3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

To resist this argument, the naturalist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.

Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

Observe first of all that there is a difference between what Dawkins and Coyne impute to the proponent of ID, namely, "the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved" and what they should have imputed to him, namely, "the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved by natural selection." The proponent of ID, as I understand the position, need not deny evolution construed as the fact of common descent with later forms of life arising from earlier ones by numerous successive and slight modifications. What the proponent of ID questions is the mechanism of this descent, namely, natural selection. The question is whether there are forms of organizational complexity that cannot be accounted for by natural selection.

Once this is appreciated, it is easy to see that if something is too complex to have evolved in one way, by natural selection, it does not follow that it is too complex to have evolved in another way, i.e., by being created by an intelligent designer.

Dawkins and Coyne, however, think that ID is involved in an error of reasoning. What the proponents of ID are doing is giving a circular explanation. To be explained is a complex entity, the bacterial flagellum say. But the entity invoked in the explanation is itself a complex entity. So complexity is being explained in terms of complexity -- which is circular. Thus they write,

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. [. . .] the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.

But this shows a complete misunderstanding of what the proponent of ID is doing. It would be circular to try to explain complexity in terms of complexity. But it is not circular to explain one form of complexity in terms of another. The complexity that needs to be explained is the complexity that seems to have been designed. To invoke a crude analogy, it is not the complexity of a pile of rocks that needs personal explanation, but the complexity of a cairn, a pile of rocks whose assembly shows that they mark the trail. Now I cannot account for a pile of rock's being a cairn by invoking natural processes; I need to invoke an intelligent designer, a person such as a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Of course, this person is even more complex than his product. But there is no circularity since material complexity is not being explained by material complexity but by the thoughts, intentions and actions of a person. Material complexity is being explained by personal complexity. Hence there is no circularity in the explanation.

It is also worth pointing out that if A explains B, the explanation can be good even if A remains unexplained. Why so many wildfires this year? Because of a profusion of brush which in turn was caused by unusual spring rainfall. If this is a good explanation, its goodness does not require an explanation of why there was an unusual amount of rainfall.

So as far as I can see the proponent of ID is not committing any logical error. Dawkins is simply mistaken to accuse the IDist of "thoroughly rotten" logic. Of course, the IDist is violating a rule of natural science, namely the rule that everything be accounted for naturalistically, i.e., in terms of the space-time system and the laws that govern it. Thus living processes must be explained using the same laws as govern nonliving processes. One is no longer playing the scientific game if one invokes irreducible mentality or irreducible vitality.

But to violate the rule I just mentioned is not to violate any logical rule.

And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

If natural science must play by the rule mentioned above to be natural science, then ID is not natural science. To invoke an irreducibly intelligent designer (whether or not identical to God as traditionally conceived) is to invoke something that is not a mere part of the space-time system. But it is equally true that evolutionary biology is not strictly science either since it rests on philosophical assumptions that cannot be justified scientifically. Naturalism, the thesis that nothing (or perhaps nothing concrete) exists apart from the space-time system is a philosophical thesis. Cognate doctrines such as physicalism and scientism are also philosophical, not scientific doctrines strictly speaking. So I conclude as follows:

If ID should be removed from the science classroom and relocated in church, then Dawkins' evolutionary biology should also be removed from the science classroom and relocated in the philosophy lecture hall. For neither is science strictly speaking. But before Dawkins is allowed in the philosophy lecture hall he must take some logic courses. (You will have noticed above how refers to a syllogism as false -- that is logically inept.)

The traditional theism-friendly formulation is along the lines of

T. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Smith advises the "informed naturalist" to replace (T) with

R. Why is it the case that there is not only nothing?

In justification of his reformulation, Smith writes,

The formulation, “Why is there something rather than nothing,” begs the question against Leucippus and Democritus by assuming without argument something they deny. They would criticize this question as based on a false presupposition, viz., that there is or even can be something without nothing. There can be no beings (atoms, which move) without non-being (empty space). More precisely, there cannot be things that move and fill up what had been an empty place (nothing) unless there are empty places.

It is difficult to see in this passage any justification for the reformulation of (T) as (R) given the fact that Smith has shifted the sense of 'nothing.' One can use 'nothing' to refer to empty space. But that is not the way 'nothing' is being used in (T). It is just plain false to say that (T) rests on the false presupposition that there can be atoms without empty space. Someone who asks (T) can easily agree that there cannot be atoms without empty space.

To clarify this, let's think about a mundane example. I ask what is in a certain drawer, and you reply: nothing! You could mean by 'nothing' empty space. In that case, there is something in the drawer, namely, empty space. Obviously, empty space is not nothing. 'Empty space is not empty space' is a contradiction, but 'empty space is not nothing' is not a contradiction but a necessary truth. (Even on a relational theory of space with spatial relations reducing to monadic foundations in the things otherwise said to be 'in space,' space would not be nothing: it would be the set of monadic foundational properties.)

Of course, when you answer 'nothing' to my question you could mean: it is not the case that there is something in the drawer. Now you are not using 'nothing' as a name for something (empty space), but as a quantifier. 'Nothing is in the drawer' is then understood as having the logical form ~(Ex)Dx rather than the logical form ~Dn, where 'n' is name for empty space. What you are now saying is strictly speaking false since there is something in the drawer, namely, empty space, not to mention air, bacteria, etc.

My point is that (R) cannot count as a reformulation, naturalistic or otherwise, of (T) since (R) has nothing to do with (T): (R) asks a different question entirely. Thus Smith cannot make (T) 'go away' in the manner he suggests. It remains to annoy the naturalist who has no answer for it except to say that the existence of things is a brute fact, an answer that Smith admits is lame.

Smith also says,

. . . the [analytic] theist typically says nothing is a possible world in which there are no concrete objects, such that this possible world is an abstract object, a maximal state of affairs or proposition. But surely, it might be objected, a maximal proposition or state of affairs is something, an abstract thing, and thus is not nothing. In both cases, we have a relativizing of “nothing” to the non-existence of a certain kind of thing, atoms or concrete objects. This difficulty regarding the meaning of “nothing” has not yet been resolved in a satisfactory way.

Now it is true that for some analytic theists, possible worlds are maximal propositions. The conclusion I would draw from this is that a world in which nothing at all exists is not possible. It can't be the case that there is nothing at all for the simple reason that that's being the case — if it were the case — would itself be something, presumably a proposition or other abstract object. Arguably, there couldn't be just nothing at all. It's an unthinkable thought. Necessarily, there are at least some abstract objects.

Nothing at all is not empty space for the simple reason that empty space is something. Nor is nothing at all a possible world in which there are only abstract objects for the simple reason that abstract objects are entities, beings. Nothing at all is just nothing at all — an impossible state of affairs.

Although (T) cannot be reformulated as (R), (T) cannot be allowed to stand since it presupposes that there might have been nothing at all --which is impossible. It also rules out its own answer since any decent answer would have to invoke a necessary being, and the presupposition in question entails that every being is contingent. (T) needs a different sort of reformulation. But I have already explained this in detail in the prerequisite post.

Here is Smith's definition:

Naturalism, i.e., the thesis that there exist inanimate or animate bodies, with animate bodies being either intelligent organisms or non-intelligent organisms, but there exists nothing supernatural. The example of something supernatural of most interest to contemporary analytic philosophers is an unembodied mind that is the original and/or continuous creator of the universe and has the omniattributes described in perfect being theology. Other examples of hypothesized supernatural realities that govern or create in some sense the universe are the governing mind posited by the Stoics or the “Absolute I” posited by the early Fichte.

Note that N [the thesis of naturalism] does not imply that there are no abstract objects, such as Quine’s sets, Armstrong’s universals, Tooley’s laws of nature, or Moore’s or Butchvarov’s values. Nor does N imply that there are abstract objects. This issue is left open by N since my interest is in contrasting N (defined in terms of bodies and intelligent organisms) with supernaturalism. If abstract objects exist, uncreated by and not related in any way to a supernatural reality, they are natural, but the naturalist need not posit their existence. Given this, (i.e., that if there are abstract objects, they are natural) it follows that naturalism and supernaturalism are the only two possible ontologies.

1. What first strikes me about this definition is the presence in it of an affirmative existential proposition, namely, there exist inanimate or animate bodies . . . . I see this existential formulation as a defect. It is not clear why a naturalist need be committed to asserting the existence of any concrete individual. Naturalism is a metaphysical thesis. As such, it is presumably true in every metaphysically possible world if true at all. Well, consider a world W in which nothing concrete exists: in W only 'abstract' objects (numbers, Fregean propositions, sets. . .) exist. In W, naturalism is true. But on Smith's definition, naturalism cannot be true in W since nothing concrete exists in W.

A better formulation would be universal rather than existential (particular): Naturalism is the thesis that whatever exists is either an inanimate or animate body . . . and that nothing supernatural exists.

2. A second problem with the definition concerns the meaning of 'supernatural.' What is it for something to be supernatural? It might mean that which is not material or physical, where the concept of the physical is fleshed out by contemporary physics. But then abstract objects would be supernatural: they are, after all, not part of the world of space-time-matter. Think of an unexemplified universal. Whether or not (some) exemplified universals are in the physical world, it is surely not the case that unexemplified universals are in the physical world.

Now Smith tells us (in effect) that his definition is neutral on the question whther there are abstract objects. But if 'supernatural' denotes that which is not material or physical, then his definition is not neutral but entails that abstract objects are supernatural.

Is the supernatural perhaps that which violates the laws of nature? Is the supernatural the same as the miraculous? Then other problems arise. One is that God need not be understood as violating any laws of nature. Think of a God that does not intervene miraculously in the workings of nature, but is merely the sustaining cause of the existence of nature. Then there would be a clear sense in which God would be a natural being. Though outside of nature (and precisely because outside of nature) he would not violate any natural laws. Something not subject to natural laws cannot be said to violate them.

Or maybe the supernatural is that which cannot be explained naturalistically, in terms of natural laws. But then intentionality and qualia are supernatural since it is notorious that no one has ever given an adequate naturalistic explanation of them.

At the very least, we need to know what 'supernatural' means to fully understand Smith's definition. Does it mean nonnatural, miraculous, or naturalistically inexplicable? Note that it borders on circularity to be told that naturalism is the claim that nothing is supernatural, that everything is natural.

3. Can a naturalist accept the existence of abstract objects with equanimity as Smith seems to think? He calls them natural assuming they are not created by God or connected in any way with a supernatural reality. But this is strange thing to say given that abstract objects are not encountered in the natural world of space-time-matter, nor are governed by natural laws, nor enter into causal relations. For example, the laws of logic specify relations between and among abstract propositions, and these laws cannot be reduced to laws of physics or of psychology for that matter.

On a reasonable use of terms, abstract objects are not natural objects but belong in an ontological realm apart from the natural realm. But if there is one class of nonnatural objects, why cannot there be a class of unembodied minds, or a class of embodied minds that are capable of existing in an unembodied state? Is there a principled as opposed to an ad hoc way of excluding these actually or possibly disembodied minds once abstracta have been let in?

4. Perhaps the most serious problem with Smith's definition is that it allows for the truth of mind-body substance dualism. Although his definition rules out unembodied minds, it accommodates embodied minds ("intelligent organisms"), and there is nothing in the definition to rule out the possibility that these embodied minds exist in a disembodied state. The definition states what is the case, not what must be the case. Thus it states that there are no unembodied minds in the actual world but allows for possible worlds in which there are unembodied minds.

5. It might be better for Smith to accept David Armstrong's definition of naturalism, which makes no mention of the supernatural, and to supplement it with his definition of physicalism. Naturalism:

It is the contention that the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system. . . . The positive part of the thesis, that the spacetime system exists, is perhaps not very controversial . . . . The negative thesis, that the spacetime system is all there is, is more controversial. (A World of States of Affairs, p. 5)

Armstrong defines 'physicalism' as follows:

It asserts that the only particulars that the spacetime system contains are physical entities governed by nothing more than the laws of physics. The thesis is to be understood as a thesis about a completed physics. (p. 6)

Note how naturalism and physicalism differ. Naturalism excludes unembodied minds and abstract objects, but it allows (immanent) universals and embodied minds even if mental phenomena cannot be physicalistically explained. Physicalism, by contrast, excludes embodied minds but allows for unembodied minds and abstracta.

I take it that what Smith wants to affirm is something like the conjunction of the two: everything that exists (with the possible exception of abstracta) is in the space-time system, and everything in this system is wholly explainable in terms of a completed physics.

6. By the way, Smith claims in the passage quoted that Armstrong's universals are abstract objects, but this is a mistake. His universals are all of them immanent: they exist only as instantiated in material particulars. The space-time system for Armstrong includes both particulars (unrepeatable entitires) and immanent universals (repeatable entities). Armstrong's universals are not abstracta as this word is commonly (mis)used.

Nagel's essay begins by pointing out a certain Platonism in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, a Platonism that is foreign to pragmatism as usually understood. Nagel quotes Peirce as saying that the aim of science is "eternal verities," a notion at odds with the Jamesian view that the true is that which it is good for us to believe. What science is after is not a set of beliefs conducive to our flourishing but a set of beliefs that correspond to the world as it is independently of us. The researcher aims to "learn the lesson that nature has to teach. . . ." But to do this, the inquiring mind must "call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale [the natural light]. . . ."

Nagel finds these "radically antireductionist" and "realist" thoughts "entirely congenial" but "quite out of keeping with present fashion." (129) And talk of an "inward sympathy" of the inquiring mind with nature he finds "alarmingly Platonist."

But why should Nagel be alarmed at the Platonist view that reason operating properly mirrors the antecedent structure of reality? His alarm is rooted in the suspicion that the Platonist view is "religious, or quasi-religious." (130) A rationalism such as the Platonic "makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable." (130, emphasis in original.) That there should be a fundamental harmony between mind and world makes people "nervous" nowadays. This uncomfortableness and nervousness is one manifestation of the fear of religion in intellectual life.

Nagel makes it clear that he is talking about the fear of religion as such, and not merely fear of certain of its excesses and aberrations, and confesses that he himself is subject to this fear:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. (130, emphasis added)

Nagel admits that he may just have a "cosmic authority problem." But then he says something very perceptive in a passage that may be directed against Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett:

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. (131)

Let me give an example of my own. After Dawkins introduced the term 'meme' along about 1976, Dennett ran with it like a crazed footballer. Roughly, a meme is a self-replicating entity that plays on the cultural level the role that the gene plays on the biological level. They are like ideas, except that they are thought of -- literally, Dennett assures us -- as brain parasites. (Consciousness Explained, p. 220) A brain infested with these self-replicating parasites is really all that a mind is: "a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes." (CE, p. 207)

Now this is not the place to begin a critique of the meme meme; my only point for the nonce is that Nagel is on to something. Fear of religion may well be a good part of what is driving this 'philosophy fiction' of Dennett.

If death is the utter annihilation of the individual person, then life is ultimately senseless and ultimately hopeless. This cannot be evaded by saying that one's life can acquire meaning if it is placed in the service of the lives of others. For their lives too (and the lives of their progeny and their progeny's progeny ad indefinitum) are, on the annihilationist assumption, ultimately senseless and hopeless. Human life is in every case the life of an individual; so even if human beings existed at all times, that would do nothing to insure ultimate meaningfulness.

Of course, there are proximate meanings, hopes, and purposes even if ultimately it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." One can lose oneself in them. But to do so involves self-deception: one has to mistake the proximate for the ultimate. One has to burden fleeting concerns with a meaning they cannot bear. One has to fool oneself.

For example, one has to fool oneself that writing a book, starting a company, founding a family are all ultimately meaningful when the only way they could have any ultimate meaning is if they were part of a life that had a direction that wasn't about to be cut short in a few years.

To put it bluntly, we have no future if naturalism is true. But we cannot live without meaning. An existential trilemma looms. Either we cultivate self-deception by ascribing to fleeting concerns ultimate meaning, or we recognize their transiency and ultimate meaninglessness when considered in and of themselves and put our faith and hope in a transcendent meaning, or, avoiding both self-deception and the life of faith, we embrace nihilism.

Now I don't expect any naturalist to accept what I just said. I will be told that it is a false trilemma. There is a fourth way: one can live in and for the finite without self-deception. That will perhaps be followed by the claim that one who looks to the infinite is more justly accused of self-deception.

The four paths can be given names: the way of Nietzsche's Last Man; the way of Faith; the way of Nihilism; the way of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

It is no easy task to decide among them. But decide we must.

Filed under: Against Naturalism, Meaning of Human Existence

2. A second point, equal in obviousness unto the first, is that a decent explanation cannot issue in the elimination of the explanandum, that which is to be explained. You cannot explain beliefs and desires by saying that there are no beliefs and desires. A successful explanation cannot be eliminativist. It cannot 'explain away' the explanandum.

3. Summing up (1) and (2): the very project of explanation presupposes the existence of the explanandum, and success in explanation cannot result in the elimination of the explanandum.

4. Daniel Dennett points out that there can be no explanation without a certain 'leaving out': "Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations." (Consciousness Explained, p. 454.) Thus if I explain lightning as an atmospheric electrical discharge, I leave out the appearing of the lightning to lay bare its reality. That lightning appears in such-and-such a way is irrelevant: I want to know what it is in reality, what it is in nature apart from any observer. The scientist aims to get beyond the phenomenology to the underlying reality.

5. It follows that if consciousness is to be explained, it must be reduced to, or identified with, something else that is observer-independent. Dennett puts this by saying that "Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all." (454) For example, if your explanation of pain in terms of C-fibers and Delta A-fibers still contains the unreduced term 'pain,' then no satisfactory explanation has been achieved. There cannot be a "magic moment" in the explanation when a "miracle occurs" and unconscious events become conscious. (455)

6. Now if a successful explanation must explain conscious events in terms of unconscious events, then I hope I will be forgiven for concluding that consciousness CANNOT be explained. For, as I made clear in #2 above, a successful explanation cannot issue in the elimination of that which is to be explained. In the case of the lightning, there is a reduction but not an elimination: lightning is reduced to its observer-independent reality as electrical discharge. Now suppose you try the same operation with the sensory qualia experienced when one observes lightning: the FLASH, the JAGGED LINE in the sky, followed by the CLAP of thunder, etc. You try to separate the subjective appearance from the observer-independent reality. But then you notice something: reality and appearance of a sensory quale coincide. Esse est percipi. The being of the quale is identical to its appearing. This is what Searle means when he speaks of the "first person ontology" of mental data.

7. It follows from #6 that if one were to explain the conscious event in terms of unconscious events as Dennett recommends, the explanation would fail: it would violate the strictures laid down in #2 above. The upshot would be an elimination of the datum to be explained rather than an explanation of it. To reiterate the obvious, a successful explanation cannot consign the explanandum to oblivion. It must explain it, not explain it away.

8. I conclude that consciousness cannot be explained, given Dennett's demand that a successful explanation of consciousness must be in terms of unconscious events. What he wants is a reduction to the physical. He wants that because he is convinced that only the physical exists. But in the case of consciousness, such a reduction must needs be an elimination.

9. To my claim that consciousness cannot be explained, Dennett has a response: "But why should consciousness be the only thing that cannot be explained? Solids and liquids and gases can be explained in terms of things that are not solids, and liquids, and gases. . . . The illusion that consciousness is the exception comes about, I suspect, because of a failure to understand this general feature of successful explanation." (455)

Dennett's reasoning here is astonishingly weak because blatantly question-begging. He is arguing:

A. It is a general feature of all successful explanations that F items be explained in terms of non-F items
B. Conscious items can be explained
Ergo
C. Conscious items can be explained in terms of nonconscious items.

(B) cannot be asserted given what I said in #6 and #7. I run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (C) to the negation of (B): conscious items such as pains are irreducible.

10. Recall from #4 that Dennett said that successful explanations must leave something out. But in the case of a conscious item like a pain, what is left out when we explain it is precisely what we needed to explain! For what is left out is precisely the sensory quale, the felt pain, the Feiglian "raw feel,' the Nagelian "what it is like."

11. Amazingly, on p. 455 he retracts what he said on the previous page about successful explanations having to leave something out. He now writes:

Thinking, mistakenly, that the explanation leaves something out, we think to save what otherwise would be lost by putting it back into the observer as a quale -- or some other "intrinsically" wonderful property. The psyche becomes the protective skirt under which all those beloved kittens can hide. There may be motives for thinking that consciousness cannot be explained, but, I hope I have shown, there are good reasons for thinking it can. (455)

Do you see how Dennett is contradicting himself? On p. 454 he states that a successful explanation must leave something out, which seems plausible enough. Then he half-realizes that this spells trouble for his explanation of consciousness -- since what is left out when we explain consciousness in unconscious terms is precisely the explanandum, consciousness itself! So he backpedals and implies that nothing has been left out, and suggests that someone who affirms the irreducibility of qualia is like a lady who hides her 'kwalia kitties' under her skirt where no mean neuroscientist dare stick his nose.

The whole passage is a tissue of confusion wrapped in a rhetorical trick. And that is the way his big book ends: on a contradictory note.

12. To sum up. A successful explanation cannot eliminate the explanandum. That is nonnegotiable. So if we agree with Dennett that a successful explanation must leave something out, namely, our epistemic access to what is to be explained, then we ought to conclude that consciousness cannot be explained.

Q. Why should intentionality be a problem for naturalists and only explicable on the thesis that the supernatural exists? Having read The Maverick Philosopher's article, I can't see the problem.

A. First of all, I did not use 'supernatural.' People tend to conflate it with 'miraculous,' where the latter means something like 'involving a suspension of the laws of nature' and I see nothing miraculous about the existence of irreducible minds or irreducible mental properties.

The question is whether the whole of reality is exhausted by natural reality, where the latter is the object of the natural sciences. The problem is that phenomena such as consciousness and intentionality appear not be explicable in natural-scientific terms. Suppose they are not explicable in these terms. That would not make them miraculous: there needn't be any violation or suspension of natural laws.

Q. He gives the example of Bush believing Saddam had WMD's. True, we can have intentions about objects that do not exist, but I don't see the problem. After all, computers contain all sorts of software objects that don't exist as a collection of atoms, yet computers are fully materialistic.

A. No offense, but I don't think you are thinking clearly. If computers "contain" "software objects" that are not made of material particles, then how can computers be "fully materialistic"?

Note also that when a program is loaded into a computer, the program does exist in material form. Word Perfect 8.0 for example is stored on my hard drive in physical form.

Q. If the problem is that my intentionality is original and 'not derived or borrowed intentionality of the kind found in words and maps.', then I would like an explanation of how a physical map can contain borrowed intentionality.

A. Well, let say you have a topographical map of a certain chunk of wilderness. The map is of or about that land area, and certain marks on the map are about certain physical features of the landscape. Thus contour lines close together denote a sharp rise in elevation, whereas contour lines far apart denote a much more gradual change in elevation. A certain symbol denotes a mine shaft, etc. It is obvious that the aboutness of the map and its symbols is not intrinsic to the map and its symbols. That lines close together should denote a sharp elevation change is a matter of convention: we assign that meaning to the lines and their closeness, and we might have adopted some different convention. The map therefore derives its aboutness from us. Without us, it is not about anything. it is just a piece of paper with meaningless marks on it.

Isn't that just self-evident? If you deny it then you are saying that the map just by itself, just in virtue of its physical properties, means, refers, denotes, etc. And surely that is false.

A rock cairn indicates where the trail is. It is about the trail and says in effect: the trail is here where I am. But that is only because we assign that meaning to stacked rocks. The intentionality is derivative, not intrinsic.

A green light means: You may proceed. But there is no way to derive that meaning from the physical properties of a green light. The meaning is assigned by us.

Q. When we understand how a physical object can exhibit borrowed intentionality, I will understand better how physical objects can exhibit original intentionality.

A. You have lost me completely now. There is no problem at all in understanding how a physical object can exhibit borrowed intentionality, as explained above. What no naturalist has explained, however, is how a physical system, no matter how complex, can exhibit intrinsic intentionality.

A wordprocessor, for example, is not a meaning-processor but a physical symbol manipulator. Nothing in the hardware, or in the software, or in the hardware running the software makes a physical symbol mean or refer to anything. WE interpret the symbols as meaning something.

Q. If the problem is that I cannot explain how matter is conscious , then this is a fact about me, and not a disproof that matter is conscious. It is a pure ad hominem argument.

A. Well, the problem is not that YOU cannot explain it, but than no one can. But you are right that not being able to show how something is possible does not prove that it is not actual. If some matter is conscious, then it is possible that it be conscious. But on the other hand, if I cannot understand HOW matter can be conscious, then that gives me a reason to deny that it is conscious.

Analogy. If the number 9 is anorexic, then it is possible that it be anorexic. But I don't understand how a number could be anorexic, or have any sort of eating disorder: after all, numbers don't eat. My failure to understand how numbers could be anorexic is not merely an autobiographical or psychological fact about me, but reveals the incoherence of supposing that a number could be anorexic.

Note that consciousness is not third-person observable.

That something like this is Kim's view is suggested by a remark he made about Flat Earthers. The members of this benighted coterie believe that the earth is literally flat despite the empirical evidence to the contrary. (See also here.) Similarly, substance dualists believe what they do despite mounting empirical evidence to the contrary.

But note the difference. Flat Earthers are making an empirically testable claim, one that that can be decided on the basis of empirical evidence. Dualists, however, are making a philosophical claim, one that cannot be verified or falsified by appeal to empirical evidence.

My view (which I can only begin to defend in this post) is that it makes no sense to suppose that there could be empirical inductive evidence for the truth of a philosophical thesis such as the thesis that every mental state is token-identical to a physical state (whether this be a human brain state or the physical state of a computer).

Suppose we consider an analogy. Distinguished philosophers have proposed that there are three categories of entity. Following Karl Popper, who builds on the work of Gottlob Frege, we can call them World 1, World 2 and World 3 entities.

World 1 includes physical items; World 2 mental items; World 3 'abstract' or 'ideal' items. 'Abstract' is not the best term since it suggests something unintended, namely, mental acts of abstraction; but the term is in use, and I'll use it. An abstract entity is one that is not located in space or time and is not causally active or passive. Take a humble arithmetical truth such as 7 + 5 = 12. The truth expressed (which is not to be confused with the sentences used to express it or the thoughts used to think it) can exist and be true whether any World 2 entities exist and whether any World 1 entities exist. I won't trot out all the arguments for this; I'll simply refer the reader to Frege, Popper, et al.

Now suppose some benighted soul came along who got it into his head to build a "gradualist bridge" (to use a phrase of Dennett) from World 1 (the physical world) to World 3. He thinks that by a sufficiently deep and protracted investigation of the physical world we can come to explain abstracta as ultimately physical in nature. He thinks that if we only knew enough physics we would be able to understand that there is no independent realm of abstracta.

One ought to be able to see that there is something utterly absurd about building a "gradualist bridge" from World 1 to World 3. Why, exactly? Well, physics presupposes mathematics; hence the truths of the latter cannot be reduced to truths of the former. For example, from pure mathematics we know that if d = vt, then v = d/t. That is a necessary truth, true in all possible worlds, including those in which there is no space, time, or moving particles. As such, it cannot be verified or refuted by any empirical test.

Once one sees that it is absurd to suppose that knowing more and more about World 1 will bring us to the point where we can explain away World 3, then one will be in a position to see that it is absurd to suppose that knowing more and more about the brains in World 1 will bring us to the point where we can explain away World 2.

Just as physics presupposes mathematics, the meaning of both physical concreta and abstracta presupposes consciousness which remains, therefore, irreducible.

Mind is king.

Accordingly, my thinking brain is just a syntactic engine: it is a machine that is running a program. When I play my chess computer, I am doing what it is doing, namely, running a program. It is just that it runs a better program on a faster machine and so wipes the floor with me.

Now I agree with John Searle that this cannot be right. My thinking cannot be my brain's implementation of a program. This is because thinking involves a semantic dimension: my thoughts mean or intend something. They possess intrinsic intentionality. But no physical object or state possesses intrinsic intentionality. At most, physical objects or states possess derivative intentionality, intentionality that derives from a being who possesses intrinsic intentionality.

The Chinese Room (a version of which is here) is a thought-experiment devised by John Searle to make this more intuitive. A man with no understanding of the Chinese language is enclosed in a windowless room. He has a manual that allows him to match up strings of Chinese characters. Through slit A comes a piece of paper with squiggle-squiggle on it. Looking in his manual, the man sees (with his eyes, but with no understanding of meaning) that squiggle-squiggle correlates with squoggle-squoggle. So he passes out through slit B a piece of paper with squoggle-squoggle on it. Unbeknownst to the man, it is questions formulated in Chinese that are coming in through slit A and it is answers to those questions that he is passing out through slit B.

So what we have here is the implementation (instantiation, realization, running) of a certain program or set of instructions. Now the question is this: Does the man in the room, or the whole room including the man and his manual, etc., understand anything in virtue of instantiating the program?

The man may be thinking about sex while he does his boring job, but he is not thinking ABOUT anything just in virtue of his implementing the program. He has no understanding of the characters he takes in or passes out. And yet, viewed fromn outside, the room behaves as if it understands Chinese. But that's all it is: AS IF behavior. What we have is mere simulation of understanding. There is no artificial intelligence here; there is an artificial SIMULATION of intelligence. It's a smart room, but it is smart the way my thermostat is smart: smart enough to 'know' when to turn on the air conditioner. What my thermostat does is 'sense' that the temperature is 82 degrees and 'remember' that I told it to turn on the AC when the temp. gets up to 82. Since it 'desires' not to end up on the junk heap, it does what it is told.

Now obviously my thermostat, 'smart' as it is, does not know, sense, remember or desire diddlyjack. The same goes for the Chinese room and any contraption you rig up no matter how complicated. Thinking is not the instantiating of programs.

Now let's consider part of what Ray Kurzweil has to say:

Searle is best known for his “Chinese Room” analogy and has presented various formulations of it over twenty years (see below). His descriptions illustrate a failure to understand the essence of either brain processes or the nonbiological processes that could replicate them. Searle starts with the assumption that the “man” in the room doesn’t understand anything because, after all, “he is just a computer,” thereby illuminating Searle’s own bias. Searle then concludes—no surprise—that the computer doesn’t understand. Searle combines this tautology with a basic contradiction: The computer doesn’t understand Chinese, yet (according to Searle) can convincingly answer questions in Chinese. But if an entity—biological or otherwise—really doesn’t understand human language, it will quickly be unmasked by a competent interlocutor. In addition, for the program to convincingly respond, it would have to be as complex as a human brain. The observers would long be dead while the man in the room spends millions of years following a program billions of pages long.

I would say that Kurzweil just doesn't get it. The point is that programs are entirely syntactical, while mental states have content, or as Searle likes to say 'semantics.' Since syntax is not sufficient for sematics, implementing a program is not sufficient for understanding.

Most importantly, the man is acting only as the central processing unit, a small part of a system. While the man may not see it, the understanding is distributed across the entire pattern of the program itself and the billions of notes he would have to make to follow the program. I understand English, but none of my neurons do. My understanding is represented in vast patterns of neurotransmitter strengths, synaptic clefts, and interneuronal connections. Searle appears not to understand the significance of distributed patterns of information and their emergent properties.

It doesn't matter whether we take the man or the whole system. There is no understanding of Chinese in the man even though he plays the role of the CPU in implementing the program, and there is no understanding of Chinese in the room as a whole. To speak of understanding as distributed shows a failure to grasp the importance of the unity of consciousness, a topic I will return to in a later post.

What we've seen through science, thus far, is that one can affect the mind by affecting material components-- the brain, the sense organs, etc. Our ability to do this reliably is increasing. This leads me to believe that a materialistic thesis is better than a non-materialistic one, which has yet to produce any positive evidence for its own case: where's the vaunted disembodied mind? Show it to me. . . .

Of course, everyone has known all along that physical changes bring about mental changes. The ingestion of caffeine and nicotine stimulate alertness, a blow to the head may cause loss of consciousnness, etc. The facts Kim cites cannot be reasonably disputed. And no dualist has ever disputed them. They are part of the 'data of the problem.' But what do these facts show? Do they show that the mind is just a complex physical system? Not at all. The facts are consistent with the mind's being a physical system, but they don't entail that the mind is a physical system. In other words, the following argument is invalid:

1. Physical changes cause mental changes
Therefore
2. The mind is just a physical system.

If that argument were valid, then the following argument would be valid:

3. Mental changes cause physical changes
Therefore
4. The body is a system of ideas in my mind.

Note that we have as much reason to accept (3) as we have to accept (1). Drinking whisky alters my mood, no doubt, but I have to decide to drink, and know where the bottle is located before any of the stuff will get into my gut. The decision is a mental event that causes the hoisting of the bottle. The two arguments are 'on all fours' as a Bristish philosopher might say: they are either both valid or both invalid. Obviously, they are both invalid.

Now go back to (1). Everybody accepts it. It is consistent with physicalism or materialism. (I use these terms interchangeably.) But (1) is also consistent with substance dualism. Indeed (1) is consistent with every theory of mind. What the substance dualist will say is that, since all the minds we are familiar with are embodied, it is no surprise at all that physical changes bring about mental changes.

What say you, Kevin? Do you accept everything so far? If not, why not?

Now let's consider Occam's Razor. (Memo to self: write a post, 'Abelard's Cup'). The Razor enjoins us to not multiply entities beyond necessity. How does that go in Latin? Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. It is a principle of theoretical economy or parsimony. The idea is that if you are trying to explain some phenomenon, then posit only as many (types) of entity as you need to get the explanatory job done. In particular, don't posit any occult (hidden) entities if you don't have to. The tides, for example, can be explained in terms of the gravitational effect of the moon; there is no need to call upon Zeus or his minions. To take a better example, modern physics post Michaelson-Morley has no need of the ether hypothesis to explain the propagation of electromagnetic radiation.

Methodological naturalism is part and parcel of scientific practice. To explain a stroke for example, one looks for natural causes such as elevated blood pressure. To explain hypertension one looks to sodium intake, water retention, certain genetic factors. In science one tries to go as far as one can without invoking anything as cause that cannot be located with the natural or physical world. Ideally, one would explain the very existence of the physical universe in physical terms. See my published paper refuting this.

Obviously, I have no problem with methodological naturalism. If the task is to explain physical phenomena, then by all means go as far as possible invoking only physical causes. But mental phenomena, whether intentional (e.g. desiring a beer) or non-intentional (e.g. suffering a headache) have properties that make it impossible to identify them with physical state or events. How do you get meaning out of meat? By squeezing hard? The intentional states mean something, they refer to an object, which may or may not exist. This semantic property of aboutness is not a physical property.

So at the very minimum it looks as if we are forced to posit irreducible mental properties. Thus arises property dualism, which of course is not to be confused with substance dualism.

What I would say to Kevin is that his appeal to Occam's Razor is out of place. The Razor says: Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. But as I have suggested, it is a necessity to posit irreducible mental properties if we are to account for mental phenomena. The fact that they do not fit into the naturalistic scheme is just too bad. And is it not unscientific to demand a priori that everything fit a preconceived conceptual mold?

Is there a phenomenon the explanation of which requires substance dualism (or at least the positing of an irreducibly mental substance)? I believe there is: the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness/self-consciousness. But that is a topic for a further series of posts.

Kim says this:

To date, science has not discovered a disembodied consciousness, which makes me lean toward the high likelihood that consciousness is not disembodied.

I think this shows confusion. The substance dualist is not saying that consciousness is disembodied, but that consciousness, though embodied, can exist in a disembodied state. The dualist is saying this: consciousness, though causally dependent on bodily events while embodied, is not ontologically dependent on its embodiment: it can exist without being embodied.

Science has not discovered a disembodied consciousness because it cannot due to its commitment to methodological naturalism. But there are mystical accounts of disembodied consciousness. If you say that these cannot be veridical, then you are simply presupposing the truth of a philosophical doctrine, that of naturalism, a doctrine that cannot be scientifically supported.

One of the mistakes naturalists make is to fail to realize that naturalism is a philosophical position. They mistakenly think that it is entailed by scientific menthod -- when it is not. Science teaches us about nature. What it cannot teach us is that reality is exhausted by nature.

So my question is this: Are mind and brain identical? To answer the question one must know what one means by 'identity.' I mean strict numerical sameness. Consider the sole of my boot and the print it leaves on the trail. Are boot sole and boot print identical? Well, they are qualitatively identical, identical in respect of at least one quality, namely having the same shape. But they are obviously numerically distinct. Count 'em: one, two. You could say that there is a correlation between the two. But correlation is not identity. If X and Y are correlated, then they are precisely not numerically identical but numerically distinct.

So don't confuse qualitative with numerical identity, and don't confuse identity with correlation. That's the beginning of wisdom, but only the beginning.

I now introduce a principle known in the trade as the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Stated roughly, it says that if X and Y are numerically identical, then they share all properties. This is not only true, but necessarily true in the sense that it is impossible that X and Y differ property-wise if they are numerically identical.

Given the truth of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, if my mind is identical to my brain, then my mind and my brain share all properties: everything true of the one is true of the other, and vice versa. But it is clear that they do not share all properties. The brain is a physical thing with a definite mass, weight, location, size, shape. One can inject dyes into various of its subregions. One can insert electrodes into it. One can remove and discard parts of it. I can literally give you a piece of my brain. But can I literally give you a piece of my mind? Does my mind have a weight in grams? Is it divisible?

It is true that my mind is now wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. But it is either false or makes no sense to say that my brain is wholly occupied with the mind-body problem. It follows from these facts alone that my mind and my brain cannot be identical.

The most we could say is that a proper part of the brain is thinking about the mind-body problem. Not everything the brain does is concerned with consciousness or with thinking. The parts that control cardiac and respiratory functions have nothing directly to do with mental activity. Connected with this is the fact that, even if every mental event is a brain event, not every brain event is a mental event. A blockage of an internal blood vessel is a brain event, but not one that is mental. The brain has perhaps 100 different structures and some of these such as the vascular and bony structures have nothing directly to do with mental phenomena. In simple terms, the brain cannot function without oxygenated blood pumped through a system of blood vessels, but those processes are not conscious processes.

So it is clear that the mind cannot be identical to the brain. If that identity held, then every brain state would be mental, which is obviously false. But what is wrong with the view that some brain states are mental states? Now the problem is one of specifying the difference between those brain states that are mental and those that are not. What is it that makes a brain state mental? What makes a pain sensation mental if you assume that it is identical with a brain state? What gives it the phenomenal property of painfulness? At this point I refer the reader to yesterday's post.

Churchland apparently thinks that a substance, to be 'substantial,' must be material. Churchland thereby betrays his inability to conceive of (which is not the same as to imagine) an immaterial substance. (Note that this expression is not an oxymoron like 'immaterial matter.') But let that pass. The issue for now is simply this: How can two things belonging to radically disjoint ontological categories be in causal contact? But here again, Churchland seems to be laboring under a false assumption, namely, that causation must involve contact between cause and effect. But why should we think that this 'billiards ball' model of causation fits every type of causation? Why must we think of causation as itself a physical process whereby a physical magnitude such as energy is transferred from one physical object to another? I discussed this briefly in a previous post and suggested that on a regularity or counterfactual theory of causation there is no difficulty in principle with the notion of a causal relation obtaining between two events that do not make physical contact.

But today I have different fish to fry. I want to see if the materialist's conception of mind-body interaction is free of difficulty. If the materialist view of mind were without diffuclty I would be a materialist, on grounds of parsimony.

Suppose that every token mental state is identical to some token brain state. (Token as opposed to type: If you don't undersdtand this distinction, I will explain it.) This token-token identity will be held both by type-type identity theorists as well as by functionalists who reject type-type identity. Accordingly, my pain sensation after touching a hot stove is strictly identical to (not merely correlated with) a state of my brain. If so, there would seem to be no difficulty in principle with this state's being brought about by other physical states. For then physical-mental causation would just be a special case of physical-physical causation — which we assume to be unproblematic. At first glance, then, it appears that physicalism does not face the sort of interaction objection that substance dualism faces. To put it graphically, there is no 'ontological chasm' to 'jump over.' The mind-body problem gets traded in for the brain-body problem which presents no special philosophical difficulties, as difficult as it may be to work out the scientific details.

But why does the brain state which is (identically!) my pain sensation cause aversive behavior such as the withdrawal of my hand from the stove? Because it has the property of being painful. It is the painfullness of the sensation that is causally relevant. Why did I remove my hand from the stove? Because touching the stove hurt. A causal explanation of my aversive behavior (the yanking back of the hand) cannot merely invoke a brain state such as the firing of C-fibers (or whatever a completed neuoscience would specify): it must make reference to a brain state that has the property of being painful. This is a qualitative property or a quale to use a piece of phlosophical jargon. It is the peculiar first-person feel of the experience, the what-it-is-like of it. This raw feel (to us an old expression of Herbert Feigl) has what Searle calls a "first person ontology": its esse is its percipi. One cannot distinguish its appearing from its being.

Now here is the problem: if the pain sensation is identical to a brain event, then there is no place for the felt painfulness. For the brain event has a third person mode of existence and among the properties of this brain event you will not find anything that has a first person mode of existence. A brain event is purely physical and has only physical properties.

But even if you insist that the phenomenal property of painfulness -- the sensory quale -- is a property of the brain state, this phenomenal property surely plays no causal role in bringing about the aversive behavior. For it is only the physical aspects of the brain state that play a causal role in bringing about the the other physical states that comprise aversive behavior.

The materialist seems to be no better off than the substance dualist. Both face the problem of interaction since common sense strongly suggests that mind acts on body, and body acts on mind. (Parallelists and occasionalists deny this, but they move quite a distance from common sense.) The problem for the dualist is the problem of bridging the gap between two disjoint ontological categories, while the problem for the materialist is explaining the causal relevance of a pain sensation, say, to other physical events when the very painfulness which accounts for the aversive behavior cannot play any causal role if the pain sensation is identical to a brain state.

Although the materialist avoids the dualists' gap problem, he faces a different problem which is just as bad: the problem of explaining how a brain state can bring about aversive behavior when the property of this brain state that ought to be causally relevant, namely, the phenomenal painfulness of it, cannot be causally relevant.

In sum, the materialist solves the gap problem by construing mental-physical interaction as physical-physical interaction, but he can do this only by rendering the very phenomenal properties that first give rise to the mind-body problem causally inefficacious.

Why then the double standard? Why is the substance dualist taxed with a problem of interaction, when the materialist faces an equally difficult problem? My conjecture is that there is an ideological bias in favor of materialism that is at the root of this double standard.

Recommended Reading: Kenneth Einar Himma, "What is a Problem for All is a Problem for None: Substance Dualism, Physicalism, and the Mind-Body Problem," Amer. Phil. Quart. (April 2005), 81-92.

A good broad definition of naturalism might be this (negative) one: the thesis that there are no intermittent or ad hoc supernatural interventions in our world. Under this view, we can still retain an open mind about whether the world may include properties or causal structures not historically contemplated by physics, but which are nonetheless lawful and internal to the world and thereby worthy of the term “natural”. Such a broad view neither excludes nor entails theistic proposals (although it does contradict tenets of traditional theistic systems).

Let us compare this definition with a definition given by the prominent Australian philosopher, David Armstrong:

It is the contention that the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system. . . . The positive part of the thesis, that the spacetime system exists, is perhaps not very controversial . . . . The negative thesis, that the spacetime system is all there is, is more controversial. (A World of States of Affairs, p. 5)

If we accept Armstrong's definition -- and I see no reason not to accept it -- and if naturalism so defined is true, then the following do not, and presumably cannot, exist: God as classically conceived, disembodied minds/souls, unexemplified universals, and a whole range of objects variously characterizable as ideal, Platonic, or abstract, including Fregean propositions, Fregean senses in general, numbers, irreducible sets, and the like.

Comparing Armstrong's and Esser's definitions we can see that Armstrong's is more restrictive since it rules out God as classically conceived, while Esser's does not: it merely rules out divine interventions in the spacetime system that abrogate or suspend natural laws.

Armstrong defines 'physicalism' as follows:

It asserts that the only particulars that the spacetime system contains are physical entities governed by nothing more than the laws of physics. The thesis is to be understood as a thesis about a completed physics. (p. 6)

Note that one could be a physicalist without being a naturalist. For physicalism as just defined is open on the question whether there is anything apart from the spacetime system. A believer in a transcendent deity could be a physicalist in the sense defined. This motivates A. to distinguish between weak and strong physicalism. The definition quoted gives weak physicalism. Strong physicalism is weak physicalism plus naturalism.

Steve Esser uses 'physicalism' differently, to name the view that that "all reality can be reduced to (or supervenes on, if I understand the term supervenience) phenomena of the sort traditionally studied by physicists: particles and waves following deterministic laws."

I would quibble about the 'deterministic' part: Steve should allow for probabilistic laws reflecting indeterminacy at the quantum level.

So what Esser is calling physicalism is what Armstrong calls strong physicalism. According to Victor Reppert,

Physicalism . . . is committed to three fundamental doctrines. 1) Physics is mechanistic at the most basic level of analysis. Whetever is happening to the basic stuff of the universe is fully determined by the laws of physics, the initial conditions, and perhaps a quantum chance factor. 2) Physics is closed. No physical event has a nonphysical cause. 3) Whatever exists in space and time that is not physical supervenes on the physical. Given the state of the physical, whatever states that are not physical must be the way they are and not some other way.

This is very close to Armstrong's weak physicalism and cannot be faulted as a definition. But I would point out that it does allow a transcendent deity, and perhaps also a transcendent deity who agent-causes (as opposed to event-causes) the entire spacetime system.

It is essential to realize that definitions here and also in political discussions have a substantial stipulative component. It is therefore the mark of a bonehead to say to an interlocutor: Your definition is WRONG! Terms can be defined in different ways and there is no right way as long as all the relevant distinctions are captured. It would be silly for someone to say to Reppert: your definition is false because it allows into the ontological inventory God and the devil. A stipulation (whether pure or mixed with lexical ingredients) cannot be false or true.

I will try to be consistent and use 'naturalism' and 'physicalism' the way Armstrong does. I reject naturalism and strong physicalism. I need to think some more about weak physicalism.

If empirical detectability can include detectability via inner sense, however, premise 1 is no longer so intuitively plausible. It is certainly going to be controversial. Some materialists would no doubt say that consciousness is empirically detectable despite being physical, precisely because it is detectable via inner sense. Inner sense is in their view just a sixth empirical mode of awareness, which reveals phenomena no less physical than the phenomena revealed by the external senses; it’s just that it reveals them under a different aspect than the other senses do. This is, for example, what Armstrong and Churchland would say.

BV: I see your point, Ed. It certainly does look as if I am equivocating on 'empirically undetectable' in the way you explain. What I may have had in mind is this argument:

1* If consciousness is a property of the brain, then consciousness is empirically undetectable by any outer or inner sense.
2* Consciousness is not empirically undetectable by any outer or inner sense.
Therefore
3* Consciousness is not a property of the brain.

This revised argument is free of equivocation, but premise (1*) needs support against the likes of Armstrong and Churchland, as you suggest. I think that support can be provided: the brain simply does not appear to inner sense, and so inner sense cannot detect the brain's possesssion of any property. The brain is a physical thing, and the only way to secure epistemic access to it is via the outer senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, etc.).

I also would not make the concession that “if consciousness is a property of some physical entity, then the brain is the natural candidate.” There is, in my view, no sense to be made of the suggestion that consciousness is a property of the brain. Consciousness is a property of the whole person: it is not my brain that is conscious of a mountain, it is I who am conscious of it. So, if persons are “physical entities,” as materialists claim, then they are the most natural candidates.

BV: Very good. I was feeling dubious about that concession as I made it. I was thinking: it is not just the brain that is conscious, (assuming consciousness can be ascribed to any physical thing), but the neural pathways and the optical transducers (eyes) that convert optical information into electrochemical information. But why stop there? Why not ascribe consciousness to the whole causal set-up including the mountain which is bouncing photons of certain wavelength from the sun into my eyes?

You are right: It is I who am conscious, not my brain. The brain is no more conscious than my eyeglasses are. Both are merely instruments of vision.

For this reason alone I would accept your conclusion that consciousness is not a property of the brain. And I would also reject the claim that consciousness is a property of any physical entity, at least if the expression “physical entity” is understood the way materialists understand it. However, if “physical entity” is given instead a hylomorphic interpretation, on which a physical substance is a composite of matter and form, and a human person in particular is a composite of body and soul, then I would say that consciousness is a property of a physical entity – namely a property of that physical creature that is a human being.

So the subject of consciousness is form and matter working in tandem? This is unclear. We'll have to discuss it later. My own tendency is more Platonic-Cartesian. Form can't be conscious, and matter can't be conscious, so how can informed matter be conscious?

But since, on the Thomistic view I endorse, the human soul is unique among forms in being subsistent – that is to say, not dependent on matter for all of its operations and capable of continuing in existence as a particular beyond the death of the matter it informs – to say that consciousness is a property of a physical entity is fully consistent with a kind of dualism.

How did you get to be a Thomist attending UCSB? By your own independent efforts? So the subject of consciousness is a subsistent form. The notion of form needs clarification, but we can leave that for later.

Thank you very much for the penetrating commentary.

I am presently enjoying a visual awareness of Superstition mountain. The mountain is the object of consciousness, and if Searle is right, my brain is the subject. My brain is that which is conscious of the mountain. I'll present an argument against this view, and you tell me if it is at all persuasive.

1. If consciousness is a property of the brain, then, unlike the liquidity of water, it is an empirically undetectable property. For if you examine a brain, even a living brain supplied with oxygenated blood while engaged in 'visual processing,' you will not be able to detect the property of being conscious, or the property of being conscious of a mountain, or the property of being conscious of a mountain having such-and-such properties. Note that to be conscious is to be conscious of something, and indeed of something quite specific: a purplish mountain shimmering in the lambent light of the desert Southwest. Now surely no examination of the brain in any of its parts or regions by whatever instrumentality will turn up the property of being conscious or the property of being conscious of a purplish mountain. At best, you will detect properties that can be correlated with the property of being conscious or the property of being conscious in a specific way.

2. But consciousness is not empirically undetectable: I know via what is traditionally called inner sense that I am conscious of yonder mountain.

3. It follows from (1) and (2) by Modus Tollens that consciousness is not a property of the brain.

The argument is logically valid. (I rigged it that way!) So if you do not accept the argument, tell me which premise you reject, and why.

Even if I leave aside the popular view among physicists that Nothing might simply be unstable, I must ask how theism can explain why anything contingent exists in the first place, without merely declaring that the Deity is, well, just not contingent. One intellectually and theologically consistent response to the question, of course, is to say "Quite right! God is not contingent. Haven't you been listening?" But if one doubts the existence of God, then such an answer is obviously not very satisfying, and even believers get no answer as to why God is not contingent.

BV: Nothing is unstable? What are the good physicists doing, reifying Nothing, making of it a something? If anything is clear, it is that 'nothing' is not a name for some weird entity. When I say that there is nothing in the closet, I am not saying that there is something in the closet called 'nothing.' I am saying that it is not the case that there is something in the closet. The logical form of 'Nothing is in the closet' is not Fa but ~(Ex)Fx.

A bit of dialog to illustrate the point.

Mary: Whom did you meet on the trail this morning? Bill: I met nobody. Mary: How's he doing?

As you appreciate, to explain why anything contingent exists one must have recourse to a necessary being on pain of embarking on a vicious infinite regress.

Why is God necessary rather than contingent? That's easy. The very concept of God is the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived, which entails in short steps that God is a necessary being. This is not to say that God exists. It is to say that if God exists, then God necessarily exists, and if God does not exist, then God is impossible. That was Anselm's insight.

In 'possible worlds' jargon: either God exists in every possible world or in no possible world. By his very nature, God cannot exist in some (but not all) possible worlds. He cannot be a contingent being.

And if theists are allowed such latitude, why can't we naturalist-leaning types follow suit and just announce that Nature is not contingent? Einstein, who seemed to want it both ways, suspected that as far as God's design for the Universe was concerned, He simply had no choice in the matter.

BV: Let's leave Big Al out of it since his conception of God is Spinozistic the last time I checked: Deus sive natura, etc. I am working with a classical conception of God such as we find in Augustine and Aquinas.

Why can't naturalists announce that nature exists of metaphysical necessity? Well, they can announce it, but it wouldn't make much sense. If the things in nature (rocks, trees, black holes . . .) and their parts and the parts of their parts (and so on) are all contingent, then it is is difficult to see how the sum-total of all that stuff could be necessary. Think of it in simple terms: if each building, classroom, blackboard, playing field, road, etc. in the university is contingent, why should anyone think that the university is necessary? If I destroy one of the buildings, the university still exists. But if I destroy all of the buildings, roads, playing fields, etc., then how could the university still exist? A collection of contingent beings is as contingent as its members.

I suggest that what is true of the university is true of the universe. And no, I am not committing the Fallacy of Composition.

To sum up my answer: nature is not the sort of thing that could be a necessary being. God, however, is not the sort of thing that could be a contingent being. So God, but not nature, can function as ultimate explainer. Again, that is not to say that God exists -- or even that nature exists -- it is to say something about the nature of God and the nature of nature (using 'nature' in two senses.)

Mightn't it be premature to sign off on what naturalism can and cannot explain? I certainly agree that there is much that naturalism has not explained. Although the "gradualist bridge from natural processes to mind" is still incomplete, I think it is also fair to say that "I have yet to see" it proven that it will always be. At the very least we need be in no rush to make up Gods of the Gaps to fill the void. We can take our time, as Wittgenstein suggested.

BV: I am all for science. But science is not naturalism. Naturalism is a philosophical, not a scientific, doctrine to the effect that everything that exists is a denizen of the space-time manifold. (Or at least that is one way to articulate the doctrine.) No natural science can establish the doctrine of naturalism. Think of it this way: how could the examination of physical systems, no matter how intense and protracted, establish the thesis that everything that exists is physical? I assume that science will explain things that have not yet been explained. But note that the advances in neuroscience have not solved the mind-body problem. Even within the naturalist camp, fierce battles rage, e.g., Dennett versus Searle.

I hope to say more about Dennett's "gradualist bridge" later, but at the moment I'll say that the problem is not that the bridge is incomplete, but that it hasn't even begun to get off the ground.

I like the Wittgenstein allusion. In Culture and Value he says that philosophers should greet each other thusly: "Take your time!" (Lass dir Zeit!) But with all the time in the world, one could not build a physical tower that would reach up to the nonphysical God. Similarly, with all the time in the world one cannot build a gradualist bridge from the physical to the mental.

What exactly do you mean by "god of the gaps"? Do you mean the illicit invocation of God to explain something that, if it had an explanation, would have a physical explanation? But that is not what the anti-naturalist is doing. He is simply stating obvious facts and drawing conclusions from them. For example, mental states have a "first person ontology" (in Searle's phrase) which makes it impossible to understand them in natural-scientific terms.

I appreciate your comments.

I think the problem for materialists is not an inability to imagine classes of "things" that are immaterial - we traffic all day long in such immaterial concepts as "love", the number five", etc, but rather a difficulty with any coherent description of such "things" that does not depend rather completely on a material substrate for their existence. For there to be any actual instance of Love in the world requires that some Lover exists; while it is easy enough to suggest that Love simply IS, with blithe Platonic independence of its instantiation, there is not really any convincing reason for anyone to believe any such thing.

Pollack is here claiming that a materialist can countenance immaterial entities but only if they are dependent on a material substrate for their existence. His understanding of materialism seems to be along these lines:

M. Everything that exists is either a material entity or dependent for its existence on a material entity.

I grant that that (M)is one way materialism can be spelled out. But consider his example of the number 5. 5 exemplifies the property of being odd. But 5 is not a physical or material object: if you deny this, direct me to the region of spacetime where I may encounter 5. Since the property of being odd is exemplified by 5, but 5 is not a material object, the property of being odd does not depend for its existence on a material entitty. We seem to have a counterexample to (M).

Pollack is making two suggestions. One is that no property can exist unexemplified. The other is that every instance of a property must be material. I have just refuted the second suggestion. As for the first, consider the property of being perfectly honest. Presumably, no one exemplifies it. But the property is none the worse for that. Surely there is the possibility that there bre a perfectly honest individual. Now what could that possibility if it were not identical to an unexemplified property?

Consider the true sentence, 'Honesty is a virtue.' It is about the property of being honest and is true whether or not there are any honest persons. How can that sentence be true if there are no unexempified properties?

And I'd have to say that the same goes for Mind. Here we have stupendously complicated material objects - brains -that seem, so far at least, to be necessary for the presence of minds (Searle would happily agree with that, I think), and we can also observe that tampering with the physical brain has definite (and often predictable, even with our rudimentary understanding) effects on the associated mind. Why is it then necessary to postulate an ineffable "something extra"? The closest analogy, I suppose would be Brain as some sort of radio receiver that merely transduces Mind, but radio waves are just as material as the radio sets whose behavior they determine.

Consider first the claim that brains are necessary for minds. How establish that? All one can claim to know is that so far every mind has an associated brain. How move from this empirical generalization to the statement that brains are necessary for minds? As Kant says, experience teaches what is the case, but not what must be the case. How do you squeeze necessity out of a mere empirical generalization?

Pollack seems to argue as follows:

1. Mental changes can be brought about by tampering with the brain. Therefore 2. The mind is dependent for its existence on the brain.

But surely that is a non sequitur. Consider a parallel argument:

1*. Changes in my body can be brought about by tampering with my clothes (e.g., by setting them on fire). Therefore 2*. My body is dependent for its existence on my clothes.

It is a plain empirical fact that what I do to my body and brain (via exercise, smoking, drinking, blows to the head, etc.) affects the quality of my mental life. But how does this show that the mind cannot exist without the brain?

Here is another consideration inspired by McTaggart. I am presently looking at Superstition mountain through my window. But I don't need to look through the window to see it. Now suppose someone was born in a house and never left the house. Everything seen by that person in the 'external world' is seen through windows. Suppose the person infers that windows are necessary for seeing things outside the house. After all, nothing that this person ever sees outside the house is seen except through windows! The empirical generalization admits of no counterexample. Still, that would obviously be a mistake. So why is it not possible to hold that while the mind is embodied it is affected by the brain in various ways, but that the mind can exist without the brain?

It is not hard to imagine that such a view might arise from a wish to preserve a special place for ourselves...

Similarly, it is not hard to imagine that the opposite view might arise from a wish to deny a special place for ourselves. Psychologizing won't settle the issue.

Suppose an atheist says that the theist belives as he does becauses he desires psychological comfort, and the theist replies that the atheist believes as he does because his sinful pride make it impossible for him to accept a measure and standard other than his own petty ego.

MP's First Law: The psychologizer can always be psychologized. Hence no dialectical advantage can be gained by this tactic.

And what, exactly, is meant, above, by the phrase "natural-scientific study"? It seems to me that the only essential ideological framework required for science is the belief in a consistency to the behavior of the world, so that falsifiable predictions may be made; throughout scientific history many things that were once have been thought of as insusceptible of scientific study have later been brought into the fold.

My point was simply that no natural science is in a position to establish the proposition that nothing can exist except what is an object of natural science. That proposition is not a scientific claim, but the philosophical doctrine of scientism.

I do have to ask: How exactly IS it possible, in the view of those who are able think outside the materialist box, that something can exist that is not material, except as a state, or posture, or attribute, or relationship, etc., of things that ARE material? And how does such an immaterial "thing" exert its influence on the material world? Is this even explainable to someone who doesn't just "see" it?

Arguably, all sorts of logico-mathematical objects (numbers, sets of numbers, ordered n-tuples, functions, propositions, properties of the foregoing abstract objects, etc) exist but are neither material nor states of material things.

How does an immaterial mind exert its influence on the material world? How does my free decision to compose this post eventuate in keystrokes, etc.? You want me to specify the mechanism? Can you specify the mechanism whereby current though a wire filament causes the filament to glow? Make the account as finegrained as you like, how do you explain one event's causing a later event? Nobody has a good acount of causation in the physical world — yet we don't take that as showing that there is no causation.

If you are suggesting that mental events cannot cause physical events, then I have dealt with this in a previous post.

Thank you for your stimulating comments.

To defeat this argument, Searle makes a distinction between epistemic subjectivity and ontological subjectivity, and a distinction between epistemic objectivity and ontological objectivity. Compare a pain and a mountain. A pain has a subjective mode of existence whereas a mountain has an objective mode of existence. The difference is that the appearing of the pain is identical to the being of the pain unlike the mountain whose appearing and being are distinct. A pain cannot exist unless it is experienced, whereas a mountain can exist without being experienced. But Searle maintains that what is ontologically subjective can be studied by a science that is epistemically objective. If this is right, then the argument above falls victim to a failure to distinguish the two senses of 'subjectivity' and the two senses of 'objectivity.' Searle's contention is that there is nothing to prevent a science that is epistemically objective from studying consciousness which is ontologically subjective.

Here is the crucial passage (ML&S, pp. 44-45):

The pain in my toe is ontologically subjective, but the statement "JRS now has a pain in his toe" is not epistemically subjective. It is a simple matter of (epistemically) objective fact, not a matter of (epistemically) subjective opinion. So the fact that consciousness has a subjective mode of existence does not prevent us from having an objective science of consciousness.

Searle's argument goes like this:

1. The pain in JRS' toe is ontologically subjective.
2. That JRS has a pain in his toe is a matter of epistemically objective fact.
Therefore
3. That consciousness has a subjective mode of existence is consistent with there being an epistemically objective science of it.

Although both premises are true, the conclusion does not follow from them. Searle is confusing the objective reality of his pain with its objective accessibility to science. This confusion is aided and abetted by the ambiguity of 'object' and 'objective.' From the fact that the pain exists in itself and is in that sense objective, it does not follow that the pain is exhaustively knowable by science, that it is an object of scientific knowledge.

Consider a different example. Mary says, "The room is cold!" Bill says, "The room is not cold." Clearly, there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not the room is cold or the opposite. It is a matter of perception: Mary feels cold, while Bill does not. The objective fact is that the room temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, a fact perceived differently by Bill and Mary.

Note that it is ALSO an objective fact that Mary feels cold and that Bill does not. But how is it supposed to follow that Bill's sensation, or Mary's, are exhaustively understandable in natural-scientific terms? The fact that the sensations themselves exist in reality and not relative to perceivers does not show that they are wholly accessible to science.

The mistake Searle is making is to think that what is objectively real (in the sense of that which exists in itself and not relative to perceivers) is exhausted by what is natural and therefore accessible to natural science. He mistakenly identifies reality with nature. It is undoubtedly true that sensations (and mental data generally) exist in observer-independent fashion: they are not mere appearances but appearances in which appearance and reality coincide. Thus Searle is right to say that they are ontologically subjective. Searle is also right to say that this ontological subjectivity is consistent with mental data's existing in themseelves and not merely for an observer.

But it is a howling non sequitur to conclude that mental data are objects of scientific knowledge. To be objectively real (in the sense of existing an sich and not merely for observers) is not the same as an object (accusative) of knowledge. Beware the ambiguity of 'object'! It appears that Searle has fallen victim to it.

But why does Searle mistakenly identify reality with the objects of scientific knowledge -- especially given his clear insight into the ontological subjectivity of mental data? Because he is in the grip of the IDEOLOGY of scientific naturalism. This prevents him from properly exploiting his insight. But to make this allegation stick will require further citations and considerations.

The Mystery of Consciousness (1997) ends on this note: "We can, in short, accept irreducibility without accepting dualism." (214) Consciousness is irreducible, but still "a part of the ordinary physical world." How exactly?

Searle sees with crystal clarity that it makes just no bloody sense at all to think that conscious phenomena are reducible to an underlying physical reality in the way that perceived lightning, say, is reducible to an atmospheric electrical discharge. With respect to objective phenomena such as lightning it makes sense to distinguish appearance and reality and to attempt a description of the underlying reality in observer-independent terms. But "where consciousness is concerned, the reality is the appearance." (213)

The esse of a pain, for example, just is its percipi: no sort of logical wedge can be driven between the two. Searle likes to say that mental data have a "first-person ontology." That amounts to saying that pains and the like have a mode of existence radically different from the mode of existence of nonconscious items. Digestion and photosynthesis occur whether or not they are experienced; "but consciousness only exists when it is experienced as such." (213)

But this smacks of dualism, does it not? You have two radically different modes of existence just as in Descartes there is the radical difference between thought and extension. If you know your Descartes, you know that for him 'thought' covers all manner of conscious data, not just thinking in contrast to sensing, imagining, wishing, willing, etc. A res cogitans, a thinking thing, is a conscious (and indeed self-conscious) thing. So we could just as well name the Cartesian modes consciousness and extension. This seems to be close (though of course not identical) to what Searle is getting at: there is first-person (subjective) being and third-person (objective) being: "consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has a third-person or objective ontology" (212) Searle (mis)uses the inflated term 'ontology' where it would be better to use 'being' or 'existence.'

The last quotation explains why Searle is not a materialist: he is not trying to reductively identify something essentially first-personal with something essentially third-personal. So far so good. But then why does he fight shy of being called a dualist? Even if he is not a substance dualist like Descartes, why does he not own up to being a property dualist?

The answer, I am afraid, is that he is in the grip of the ideology of scientific naturalism. In contemporary philosophy of mind, nothing is worse than to get yourself called a dualist. For then you are an unscientific superstitious fellow who believes in spook stuff, ghosts in machines, and worse. Next stop: the Twilight Zone.

Searle is in a tough bind. He appreciates the irreducibility of mind and sees clearly the hopelessness of behaviorism, identity-materialism, and functionalism. But at all costs he must contain his insight into irreducibility and not allow it any spiritual or dualistic significance. Consider this sentence: "Consciousness is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else." (210)

But what is the real world? Why, the natural world. So what Searle is saying is that consciousness is in the natural world as a "real and intrinsic feature of certain biological systems" but it has a first-person ontology that makes it radically different from everything else in the natural world.

This appears to be a contradiction since the natural world is just the world of the (objective, third-personal) natural sciences. Natural entities have a third-person ontology. So if consciousness is natural, then it too must have a third-person ontology. It is a contradiction to say that consciousness is both natural and has a first-personal ontology.

To avoid contradiction, Searle ought to admit that there is more to reality than nature. But he cannot do this, of course, without abandoning his ideological and scientistic commitment to scientific naturalism.

This comes out very clearly on pp. 118-124 of The Rediscovery of the Mind(1992). There he is concerned to deny that the irreducibility of consciousness has any "deep consequences." Searle writes:

. . . the irreducibility of consciousness is a trivial consequence of the pragmatics of our definitional practices. A trivial result such as this has only trivial consequences. It has no deep metaphysical consequences for the unity of our overall scientific world view. It does not show that consciousness is not part of the ultimate furniture of reality or cannot be a subject of scientific investigation or cannot be brought into our overall physical conception of the universe . . . .

One can see from this that for Searle, the unity of the scientific world view must be preserved at all costs. One can also see that Searle identifies ultimate reality with the physical world which is the subject of scientific investigation. But how can consciousness be irreducible and not threaten the unity of the scientific world view?

Searle's answer is that the irreducibility of consciousness is merely an artifact of a pragmatic decision to carry out reductions in a certain way. "Consciousness fails to be reducible, not because of some mysterious feature, but simply because by definition it falls outside the pattern of reduction that we have chosen to use for pragmatic reasons." (122-123)

This suggests that we might have chosen a different "pattern of reduction," and that, had we done so, consciousness would not have been irreducible. But what could that mean?

It doesn't mean anything! Obviously, consciousness provides the epistemic access to every objective phenomenon which we can then attempt to reduce to a more fundamental reality. Because I am conscious I feel heat which I can then explain in terms of mean molecular kinetic energy. Because I am conscious, I see the lightning before I hear the thunder and can go on to explain why in terms of light waves whose propagation needs no medium unlike sound waves that move throught the air, etc. Because I am conscious, I am aware of a certain freshness in the air after a thunderstorm, a freshness that I then reduce to the presence of ozone, etc.

Searle is right that consciousness is irreducible, but this irreducibility is grounded in the nature of consciousness, in its "first person ontology." This nature is not a trivial consequence of a mere decision on our part as to how we shall conduct reductions.

Once one sees that the fancy footwork on pp. 122-123 of RM is a sham motivated by an ideological commitment to scientific naturalism, one sees that Searle has not avoided dualism. He has failed to provide a satisfying naturalistic solution to the mind-body problem.

There are other problems as well, which I will leave for later.

Dualism (the view that minds are composed of some nonphysical and utterly mysterious stuff) . . . [has]been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with alchemy and astrology. Unless you are also prepared to declare that the world is flat and the sun is a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses — unless, in other words, your defiance of modern science is quite complete — you won't find any place to stand and fight for these obsolete ideas. (Kinds of Mind, Basic Books, 1996, p. 24)

There is something contemptibly intellectually dishonest about this passage since Dennett must know that it makes a travesty of the dualist's position. Yes, I know he studied under Gilbert Ryle and had phrases like "ghost in the machine" drummed into him at an impressionable age; but he is smart and well-connected and has had plenty of opportunity to be set straight. A substance dualist such as Descartes does not hold that minds are composed of some extraordinarily thin intangible stuff. The dualism is not a dualism of stuff-kinds, real stuff and spooky stuff. 'Substance' in 'substance dualism' does not refer to a special sort of ethereal stuff but to substances in the sense of individuals capable of independent existence whose whole essence consists in acts of thought, perception, imagination, feeling, and the like. Dennett is exploiting the equivocity of 'substance.'

Of course, it is very difficult for the materialistically minded to understand this because they cannot understand how anything could be real that is not material. This incapacity on their part leads them to construe the Cartesian dualist as talking about some sort of rarefied matter, some sort of spook stuff, a kind of immaterial matter if you will.

The incapacity in question also leads Dennett to the preposterous notion that a defender of dualism must stand in complete "defiance of modern science." (Note en passant that Descartes was among the founders of modern science.) But where in modern science is it established that everything that exists is material or physical in nature? Which branch of physics is competent to establish this meta-physical result? Observe the difference between the following two propositions:

1. Nothing in the physical world is in principle insusceptible of natural-scientific study.

2. Nothing is in principle insusceptible of natural-scientific study.

(1) is unobjectionable, but (2) presupposes that everything is physical. But that everything is physical is a metaphysical proposition that is neither entailed by any scientific result, nor presupposed by scientific investigation.

Since Dennett is the exact opposite of stupid, one has to conclude that he is either intellectually dishonest or simply in the grip of an ideology, the ideology of scientific naturalism. He seems to think that the substance dualist, with his supposed postulation of spook stuff, is in some sort of unscientific competition with a scientific approach to the mind. But he can make this blunder only by presupposing something obviously false, namely, that the progress of natural science has shown, or is showing, that everything is at bottom physical in nature.

IS THERE INTENTIONALITY IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD?

CRITICAL REMARKS ON DRETSKE

‘Intentionality’ is the philosophical term of art for that property of (some) mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or, in the case of propositional accusatives, may or may not be true. Thus Bush’s belief that Saddam possessed WMDs is the belief it is, and has the aboutness it has, whether or not the proposition the belief is about is true or false.

Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.) But we are now living in naturalistic times. The widespread conviction that physicalism or materialism or naturalism in some version or other just must be true has made it seem important to 'naturalize' intentionality, to show how intentional phenomena such as beliefs and desires can be explained physicalistically. For if they cannot be so explained, if they cannot be identified with physical phenomena, how can they be real? As Jerry Fodor puts it, "If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Jerry A. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 97) This is Fodor’s paradoxical way of saying that there is a problem about explaining how intentionality — the ‘unnatural’ property of reference to what need not exist or be true — can be real given that only natural items are real.

This concern gives rise to what may be called the 'naturalization project,' the attempt to show that intentional phenomena are either identical to or supervenient upon physical phenomena. Others do not see much of a problem here. Fred Dretske, for example, holds that "there is no need to naturalize intentionality" since "It is already a familiar part of our physical world." (Fred Dretske, "If You Can't Make One, You Don't Know How It Works," Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIX, eds. French, et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 471.) He means original, not derived or borrowed intentionality of the kind found in words and maps. A map, for example, is about a portion of terrain. But the map’s aboutness is not intrinsic to it, but borrowed from us, who interpret the map as about the terrain. Our interpreting, however, and our comparing of map and terrain, are presumably instances of original intentionality. Dretske's view, then, is that there is original or intrinsic intentionality in natural systems below the level of mind. Not only are mental intentional phenomena really physical, but there are nonmental intentional phenomena. If Dretske is right, we should not be puzzled by mental intentional phenomena, nor should we take them as posing any threat to a thoroughgoing naturalism.

Dretske invites us to consider a compass the needle of which normally (i.e., when it is functioning properly and is used correctly) points to magnetic (as opposed to geographic) North. Dretske holds that this pointing or indicating is a case of original intentionality: the compass’ “being a reliable indicator does not itself depend on us." (Ibid., p. 471.) It is unlike a map which gets its intentionality from us. So far, so good.

But what makes the needle's pointing to magnetic North an intentional phenomenon? Note that Dretske's claim is not that the needle's behavior is in some metaphorical or 'as-if' sense intentional, but that it is genuinely intentional. Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality. "Anything exhibiting this mark is about something else under an aspect." (Ibid.) The idea is a familiar one. To be aware (whether in perception, imagination, memory...) of something x is to be aware of it as something F. Necessarily, awareness is always awareness of something as something. Furthermore, even if every F is a G, I can be aware of x as F without being aware of x as G. Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc. Dretske sees the same structure in compass needles:

Compass needles are about geographical regions or directions under one aspect (as, say, the direction of the pole) and not others (as the habitat of polar bears). This is the same way our thoughts are about a place under one aspect (as where I was born) but not another (as where you were born). (Ibid.)

Dretske's argument seems to be this:

a. Anything that is about objects under some aspects but not others in the way our thoughts are is an intentional state.

b. Compass states are about objects under some aspects but not others in the way our thoughts are.

Therefore

c. Compass states are intentional states.

This strikes me as a breathtakingly bad argument the badness of which should be evident from my (deductively valid) reconstruction. First of all, to say that the needle is 'about' the polar region as magnetic North is just to say that its pointing in that direction is caused by the magnetic properties of the polar region. What else could 'about' mean here? It is obvious that the needle is not conscious of magnetic North, or of anything else. A compass needle cannot intend or mean anything, any more than a pile of bear scat can intend or mean anything. Of course, one can say such things as, 'This fresh bear scat means that a bear was in the vicinity recently,' but this use of 'means' expresses derivative intentionality, intentionality of the kind which presupposes the original intentionality of minds. And to say that the compass needle's pointing is not 'about' the polar region as bear-inhabited is just to say that its pointing in that direction is not caused by the 'ursine' properties of the polar region, even though the 'ursine' and magnetic properties are coexemplified. Premise (b), then, is simply and strikingly false.

It is widely accepted that causation is always causation in respect of specific properties. Thus a knife cuts through tendons in virtue of its sharpness and not in virtue of its being two feet long, but fits into the drawer in virtue of its being two feet long but not in virtue of its sharpness. The properties may even be necessarily coextensive. Triangularity and trilaterality are necessarily coextensive properties: there is no possible world in which one but not the other is exemplified. Nevertheless, it is in virtue of the triangularity, but not the trilaterality, of a piece of metal that I have three bloody points on the palm of my hand.

What Dretske is doing in the quoted passage, then, is assimilating the aspectuality of intentionality to the 'aspectuality' of causation:

INTENTIONALITY: if x is about y, then x is about y under some aspect F, and x can be about y under F without being about y under G even if necessarily every F is a G.

CAUSATION: if x is caused by y, then x is caused by y in virtue of some property F of y, and x can be caused by y in virtue of F without being caused by y in virtue of G of y even if necessarily every F is a G.

No doubt there is an interesting structural analogy between the aspectuality of intentionality and the 'aspectuality' of causation. But does this analogy warrant saying that the compass needle is about a place in the same way (Dretske's words) that our thoughts are about a place? I would think not. First of all, to use ‘about’ and ‘of’ in connection with the pointing of compass needles is a misuse of terms, or at best a misleading idiosyncrasy. There may be as-ness in the compass example, but there is no of-ness. Genuine intentionality involves both as-ness and of-ness. Second, even if we acquiesce in Dretske's terminological mischief, a compass needle is not 'about' or 'of' a place the way consciousness is — on pain of an egregious equivocation. Consciousness presents its object, makes or lets it appear, which is something it could not do apart from consciousness; the needle does not present its 'object,' nor does it make or let it appear. Strictly speaking, the needle's pointing does not have an object; it has a cause. Nor does the needle present its 'object' under an 'aspect.' One cannot speak literally of aspects here, because nothing is appearing to the needle or to the compass. ‘Aspect’ by its very etymology (ad-spectare) is a mind-involving term. What we have here again is terminological inflation. Furthermore, the needle's pointing to magnetic North is a purely physical, publicly observable, pointing. In this sense, consciousness does not 'point' to its object; it is rather the presentation of its object. I cannot examine your states of consciousness to see what they are about the way I can examine compass needles, weather vanes, etc. to see what they are pointing at. And I do not examine my own states of consciousness to see what they are about. I may examine a state of my body such as a skin rash to inquire about its underlying cause, but I never examine my conscious experiences to see what they are of or about. Experiences are not signs of their objects. Husserl refuted this 'sign-theory' of consciousness long ago. (Cf. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: The Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 593-596.)

Thus it is only by equivocating on such key words as 'about' and 'aspect' that Dretske can come to ascribe original intentionality to compass needles, clouds, smoke, tree rings, and the like. But he may be committing another mistake, namely, that of inferring that if something is not a case of derived intentionality, then it must be a case of original intentionality. For there is the possibility that it is a case of what Searle calls ‘as-if’ intentionality, which of course is not intentionality at all. A good example is a thermostat which, as we say, ‘senses’ a change in room temperature. Such talk is harmless in everyday life but misleading to some philosophers. Clearly, the thermostat does not literally sense anything; it is not conscious of a change in temperature. ‘Sensors’ in general, whether electrical, mechanical, electromagnetic, photoelectric, etc., do not literally sense anything. Sentience is a mode of consciousness, and no such contraption as a thermostat is conscious. Or do you want to say that a chocolate bar melting in a hot car literally feels the heat? Yet thermostats behave as if they sense a change in temperature; it is as if they possess intentional states. The same holds for the pointing of the compass needle. From the fact that this is not a case of derived intentionality, it does not follow that it is a case of original intentionality. What follows is that it is not a case of intentionality at all, but merely behaves as if it were a case of intentionality. As Colin McGinn puts it, "When we think we are conceiving of content in the absence of consciousness we are really treating a system as if it were conscious, while simultaneously denying that this is what we are up to."(Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), p. 33. McGinn does not endorse this view.)

To deny the distinction between intrinsic and 'as-if' intentionality would be to embrace the view that all natural phenomena are intentional. For all natural phenomena have causes, and causation, as noted, is always in respect of properties. But it is surely obvious that not all natural phenomena are intentional in the very same way conscious phenomena are intentional. If they were, absolutely everything would be conscious, which is absurd.

What one could say, perhaps, is that that there are two kinds of intentionality, or two kinds of content. There is unconscious intentionality and there is conscious intentionality. In this way one might hope to avoid the absurd conclusion that every natural phenomenon exhibits conscious intentionality. McGinn speaks in this connection of "two species of content, personal and subpersonal..." He continues:

I doubt that the self-same kind of content possessed by a conscious perceptual experience, say, could be possessed independently of consciousness; such content seems essentially conscious, shot through with subjectivity. This is because of the Janus-faced character of conscious content: it involves presence to the subject, and hence a subjective point of view. Remove the inward-looking face and you remove something integral — what the world seems like to the subject. (Ibid. p. 34)

This is right, and spells the doom of the naturalization project, the attempt to account for such intentional phenomena as beliefs and desires in wholly physicalistic terms. For what it implies is that there can be no third-person, wholly objective, understanding of conscious intentionality. But without an understanding of conscious intentionality, there is no understanding of mind.

But even more fundamentally, could there be two kinds of original intentionality? Is this a coherent proposal? If there are two kinds or species of original intentionality, conscious and unconscious, then there must be a genus of which they are the species. But what could this genus be? We saw, pace Dretske, that the pointing of the compass needle is not about magnetic North in the same sense that a thought is about magnetic North. It is only by equivocating on 'of' and 'about' that one could think otherwise. Thus there is no generic aboutness. If there is no generic aboutness, there can be no kinds or species of aboutness. Clearly, what we must say is that unconscious intentionality is no more a kind of intentionality than artificial leather is a kind of leather. In 'artificial leather,' 'artificial' does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'leather.' Similarly, 'unconscious' does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'intentionality.' Unconscious intentionality, then, is as-if intentionality. And McGinn's subpersonal contents are as-if contents.