Maverick Philosopher

It is difficult to see how items such as sensations can be called surds in nature when they are precisely not in nature as physicalistically conceived, but I shall let that pass the better to get on with spookstuff.

There are philosophers who seem to think that doctrines held by great philosophers and outstanding contemporaries don't need to be studied and refuted but can be shamed or ridiculed or caricatured out of existence. Daniel Dennett is an example:

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)

This is an amazing passage in that it compares the views of distinguished dualist philosophers such as Richard Swinburne to the views of astrologers, alchemists, and flat-earthers. It would be very interesting to hear precisely how the views of Swinburne et al. are in "defiance of modern science" — assuming one doesn't confuse science with scientism. But let's look at what Dennett has to say in his more substantial (511 page!) Consciousness Explained (1991).

Dennett there (mis)characterizes dualism as the doctrine that minds are "composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff. . . ," and materialism as the view that "there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is some nothing but a physical phenomenon." (33) "In short, the mind is the brain." (33)

But as I have said before,

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.'

The point is made very well by the prominent idealist, T. L. S. Sprigge:

It is often difficult to get people to realize that the non-physical mind of which Cartesians speak is not, as some have thought it, 'a ghost in the machine' of the human body, since ghosts and 'spirits' such as might appear in a seance are, in contrast to it, as physical, if made of a finer stuff, as our ordinary bodies. When we speak of the mental we do so mostly or entirely in metaphors (more or less sleeping) of a physical kind: we grasp ideas and have thoughts in our minds. Whatever the real source of this materialism which is endemic to most of our thinking, it is not surprising that there should be a theory of existence which follows its leadings. As thinkers we are subjects, but the natural object of thought is objects and it is only with effort that the subject turns its thoughts upon its own un-object-like nature. (Theories of Existence, pp. 46-47, bolding added.)

The materialist cannot understand how anything could be real that is not physical in nature. So if mind is real, which it obviously is, then it too must be physical in nature. But to treat mind physically is precisely to miss its "un-object-like nature." Mind is subjectivity, and no matter how the materialist twists and turns, he cannot grasp this subjectivity objectively. The materialist project is fundamentally absurd in that it tries to treat as objective what is irreducibly subjective, all the while presupposing subjectivity without which there would be no access to objects at all.

Searle writes 'Intentional' rather than 'intentional' to underscore the fact that 'intention' as philosophers use it is a terminus technicus wider in meaning than 'intention' as when one says, for example, 'Her intention is to retire in Florida.' My intending to run a half-marathon in February is an instance of Intentionality, but so is my noting that the sun is setting -- despite the fact that Old Sol's habits don't fall within the purview of my will. I Intend the sun's setting, but I don't intend it. Get it? Now that the point has been made, I will drop the capital 'I.'

Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.

Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.

Can one scrounge up some sense of 'about' according to which itches ans tickles and pains are about something? I suppose so. But any sense of 'about' so scrounged would have nothing to do with intentional aboutness which alone is at isssue here. Thus if you said that the itch is about its physical cause [insert complicated dermatological story here], then I would accuse you of equiviocating and/or changing the subject.

The point is a simple phenomenological one. Unfortunately, people in the grip of naturalism and scientism often blind themselves to elementary phenomenological distinctions. Their reductionist zeal disposes them simply to eliminate what they cannot cram into their reductionist scheme. Suppose I inspect my scalp in a mirror. The inspecting is an intentional state of mind, an intentional Erlebnis. It presents something distinct from itself. The itch too is an Erlebnis but it presents nothing to me beyond itself.

That is a simple phenomenological difference. Either you 'see' it or you don't.

We have a subject S in a mental state M. M is an intentional state if and only if all of the following hold:

1. M takes an accusative or is directed upon an object O.

2. M's having an object, and having the very object it has, is not a contingent fact about M, but essential to M. O 'enters into the description' of M. Thus if I am imagining at time t, then this imagining is of a definite object, a unicorn, say, and I cannot describe the act of imagining without using the word 'unicorn.' It is constitutive of the act that it have the object it has: an imagining of a unicorn could not have been an imagining of a flying spaghetti monster; nor could the imagining of a unicorn of such-and-such description have been objectless.

3. From the fact that M has O as it object it does not follow that O exists. I cannot own X unless X exists. But I can want X whether or not X exists. 'Wanting' picks out a type of intentional state; 'owning' does not.

4. From the fact that M has O1 as its object, it does not follow that M has O2 as its object even if O1 is the same as O2. Suppose I am in Iceland and I see an unkempt, bearded old man in a bookstore. Suppose, unbeknownst to me, that this man is the chess grandmaster who defeated Boris Spassky in 1972. The intentional object of visual perceiving has all and only the properties revealed in the visual perceiving: the properties of being unkempt, bearded, old, etc., but not the property of having defeated Boris Spassky.

As John Searle, puts it, "All intentionality is aspectual." (Rediscovery of the Mind, 131) Seeing is seeing-as. A thing is seen under certain aspects and not others. And what holds for seeing holds for every other intentional state.

We are now in a position to answer the question whether the felt pain described above is an intentional state. It is only if all of the four conditions specified above are met. I will argue that none of them are met.

First, does the felt pain have an object or accusative? One might say that the object of the felt pain is the mean molecular kinetic energy of the water. But this can't be right. For one thing, the felt pain does not present or reveal molecules or the collision of molecules in the way seeing an old man presents or reveals an old man. This is a crucial phenomenological difference and by itself is enough to refute the notion that felt pains are intentional. Or to be precise: it refutes the notion that felt pains have as their intentional objects their physical causes.

Now consider condition (2). The seeing of an old man cannot be what it is unless it is precisely the seeing of an old man. 'Old man' enters of necessity into the description of the act (intentional experience). This seeing could not have been the seeing of a sick dog or of a flat tire or of nothing at all. An intentional state must have an object and it must have the very object it has. So if felt pain is an intentional state and its object is water molecules or else the mean molecular kinetic energy of water molecules, then the felt pain oculd not exist without exactly that object. But surely there is no conceptual absurdity in the supposition that the felt pain in question exists in a world in which temperature is not mean molecular kinetic enegy. (Consider Lavoisier's world in which caloric has pride of place.) 'Mean molecular kinetic energy' (MMKE) does not enter of necessity into the description of a felt pain even when said pain is caused by MMKE of a certain degree.

Condition (3) is also not satisfied by felt pain. If the intentional object of felt pain is the extramental cause of felt pain, then one would be able to infer the existence of the object from the existence of the pain. But one cannot infer the existence of the intentional object of an intentional state from the existence of the state. Ergo, etc.

The major premise is true because, if X causes Y, then both X and Y must exist. (Causation is a relation, and every relation is such that, if one relatum exists, then so does the other.) But if X is the intentional object of Y, then, while Y must exist, X need not exist. For this reason, Brentano denied that intentionality is a relation, maintaining instead that it is relation-like, ein Relativliches.

Finally, condition (4) is not satisfied. Suppose I see Big Joe walking towards me. Unbeknownst to me, Joe has just been elected sheriff. Even though Big Joe = the sheriff, from the fact that Big Joe is my intentional object it does not follow that the sheriff is. I see the man as Big Joe and not as the sheriff even though Joe is the sheriff. (The as-structure or aspectuality or perspectivity of intentionality is essential to it.) But if the intentional objects of felt pains were their physical causes, then, from the water's physical temperature being the inetntional object of the felt pain it would follow that a certain degree of MMKE would be the intentional object of the felt pain, since temperature = MMKE. But this does not follow. Therefore, the intentional objects of felt pains are not their physical causes.

But there is no other reasonable candidate for the office of being the intentional object of a felt pain. So I conclude that felt pains are non-intentional mental states.

The crucial argument here is: "The torn tendon is the cause of the pain sensation, but it is not the intentional object of the pain sensation. The torn tendon is hidden from the pain experience in the way the foot is not hidden from the visual experience. So what is the intentional object of the pain sensation?"

But it does not follow from the fact that details of something are hidden from an experience that the experience is not of it. Consider: Suppose I feel a pressure in my heart--I am taking that to be an uncontroversially intentional experience. I may be quite unaware that the pressure is in my heart--I might not even know I have a heart (people ignorant of anatomy may not know about hearts at all). I am aware that there is pressure somewhere, and vaguely locate the pressure somewhere in my chest. Likewise, the pain sensation presents me with the fact of damage, and a vague location. It does not seem to present me with details of the damage (perhaps with experience I would be able to recognize them just from the feel--or not).

Moreover, an object may have more than one description. When I feel that a knife is warm, the experience is about the knife's molecules having moderately high kinetic energy. But I can feel that a knife is warm without knowing about molecules at all, and then I simply don't know (non-circularly) what the experience is about.

Respondeo:

Our disagreement is about whether physical pains — felt physical pains — have intentional objects or not. You appear to be claiming that all such pains have intentional objects whereas I am claiming that some felt physical pains do not have intentional objects. Do you agree that this is the question under discussion?

You may be using 'intentional object' in an idiosyncratic way, or (to put it nontendentiously) differently than I do. The intentional object of an act is the object as it appears in the act, with all and only the properties it appears to have. Example. I look out my window and see a yellow wall. The seeing is an intentional experience: it is an act of consciousness directed upon an object. This intentional object has the property of being yellow. But it doesn't have the property of being colored, even though in reality everything yellow is colored. For what is present to my consciousness is simply the wall as yellow, not as colored. It also has the property of being sat upon by a fly, and other properties besides, properties that are not present to my consciousness.

Necessarily, awareness of something (intentional awareness) is always awareness of something as something. I am not aware of bare objects, but of objects 'clothed' in properties. Furthermore, given the finitude of our minds, 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.

This has been called the aspectuality of intentionality. More in Brentano Notes III: Intentionality Without Mind?

Now suppose I grab hold of a hot poker. (I am trying to get the poker away from Wittgenstein who seems about to clobber Professor Popper.) I feel a painful sensation. Does the felt pain have an intentional object? Is it about anything? I take you to be saying that in cases like this the felt pain is about "molecules having moderately high kinetic energy." Now this makes no sense from my point of view. It is bad phenomenology. For the felt pain does not present to my consciousness molecules or any property of an aggregate of molecules.

There is no question of knowing or not knowing what felt pains are about since they are not about anything, though they do have causes.

"Suppose I feel a pressure in my heart--I am taking that to be an uncontroversially intentional experience." It sounds like you are simply begging the question against me. What you say is "uncontroversially intentional" I deny is such. There is felt pressure on the left side of my chest. I wonder with a bit of anxiety what this is a sign of, what it indicates, what its cause might be. Heart burn? Something worse? My point is that the felt pressure as such does not present anything to my consciousness and surely not its cause.

Our disagreement appears to rest on a broader disagreement about intentionality and intentional objects.

That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:

As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness, accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13)

This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." The argument has but one premise:

1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied consciousness in a variety of ways.

Therefore

2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it has while embodied.

Now consider near death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it.

1. Atheism and Dualism. Atheism is the denial of the existence of God. Since the only God worth discussing is the God of a sophisticated monotheism, the only atheism worth discussing amounts to the claim that nothing in reality corresponds to the conceptions of deity championed by the leading philosophers and theologians of such religions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 'Dualism' is elliptical for 'substance dualism in the philosophy of mind.' Dualists make a claim about human persons to the effect that (i) the mental states of a human being are states of an irreducibly mental substance; (ii) the physical states of a human being are states of an irreducibly physical substance; and (iii) mental and physical substances are ontologically separate. A substance is an entity that (i) is logically capable of independent existence, and (ii) maintains its numerical identity over time.

Given these definitions, it seems that that an atheist could also be a mind-body dualist. The dualist is saying something about human persons: they have a mental 'part' and a physical 'part' and these two parts are mutually irreducible. There is nothing in this about the existence or nonexistence of God. It is safe to say that most dualists are theists, and that this has always been the case; but there is nothing in dualism to entail theism or to entail the negation of theism. Hence dualism is consistent with both theism and atheism. Or at least this is the lay of land at first blush.

2. Theism and Materialism. This is a very large topic. One aspect of it is explored in my World Congress of Philosophy paper, Classical Theism and Global Supervenience Physicalism. Another side of the problematic is treated in "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 160-180.

Suppose we distinguish between universal materialism and materialism about human persons. The universal materialist claims that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either a material entity or supervenient upon material entities. If this is what is meant by materialism, then no materialist could be a classical theist. The God of classical theism is a purely spiritual, hence immaterial, being. But materialism about persons seems prima facie combinable with theism. Such a materialist claims that a human being is just a very complicated animal organism in principle wholly explainable in material terms. Now could it be true that all of my sensing, perceiving, thinking, etc. is just complex processes transpiring in my brain and central nervous system but that there is a being, God, who thinks without having a brain? On the face of it, this seems like a possibility.

My own view, however, is that, although this makes prima facie sense, deeper analysis reveals that it makes no sense for reasons I present in the Faith and Philosophy article above cited.

. . . Descartes took the interaction between mind and body to be so close that the two together constituted a third, unique substance, with its own distinctive properties: while shape, mass, and the like are confined to the body, and pure intellectual activity confined to the mind, sensation — pains, itches, feelings of thirst or hunger — is a feature strictly attributable only to the substance comprised of mind and body interacting together. Moreoever, it is this composite substance, rather than the mind alone, with which a person or human being is to be identified. (Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction, pp. 17-18)

Substances are entities capable of independent existence. The capability in question is broadly logical. If a thing is a substance, then it is possibly such that there is no other thing in which it exists or on which it depends for its existence. A substance exists in se, not in alio. So if my mind is a substance, it is metaphysically capable of existing on its own in a state of separation from my body. But Feser tells us that the mind-body composite is also a substance and that this composite is identical to the person. I find this puzzling. I do not understand how the composite can be a "third unique substance."

If a substance, by definition, is an entity capable of independent existence, then it is difficult to see how the mind-body composite could also be a substance. For this composite is composed of two substances without which it cannot exist. It is obvious that I cannot exist as a soul-body composite unless both my soul and my body exist. So it is obvious that a soul-body composite cannot be a substance, strictly speaking. The fundamental point here is that a whole depends for its existence on the existence of its parts. Anything of which this is true cannot be a substance.

If soul and body are substances, then the composite composed of them cannot be a substance. If, on the other hand, the composite is a substance, then soul and body cannot be substances in their own right; they can at most be 'principles' invoked in the analysis of substances as on Thomistic hylomorphic dualism. What is impossible is that the composite be a "third unique substance" in addition to the other two. For if the composite is a third substance, then it is something over and above soul and body and so precisely not the composite of the two. One must choose. Either the composite is a substance, in which case soul and body are non-substances as on the hylomorphic approach, or soul and body are substances, in which case the composite is a non-substance. It is not an option to say that there are three substances.

And since the composite cannot be a "third unique substance," it is hard to understand how it could have "its own distinctive properties." Moreover, the properties Feser cites, pains, itches, and feelings, are clearly examples of cogitationes in Descartes' broad sense. It is well-known that cogitatio (thinking, thought) in Descartes is not restricted to the higher intellectual operations but covers all manner of mental activity. Thus for Descartes it is not a composite entity that senses, but the mind that senses, imagines, feels and so on.

Since the composite is not a substance on its own, it has no properties of its own. The properties of the composite are either properties of the mind or properties of the body. Thus the property of feeling depressed is a property of the mind, while the property of weighing 180 lbs is a property of the body. But don't I weigh X lbs? Not exactly. I weigh X lbs (derivatively) in virtue of my body's weighing X lbs (nonderivatively). The ordinary language 'I weigh X lbs' is a loose way of talking. This is no different in principle than the situation in which I say with the vulgar, 'I am moving at 65 mph' while meaning with the Cartesianly learned that the car I am driving is moving at 65 mph.

Now who or what am I? If I am a soul-body composite, then my body is a proper part of me. But if so, I cannot exist without my body, since a whole depends for its existence on the existence of its parts. This, however, flies in the face of the Cartesian insight that the I that thinks can exist disembodied.

And if I am a soul-body composite, then my soul, too, is a proper part of me. This has the unacceptable consequence that my thinking is done for me by something numerically distinct from me. For as we saw earlier, if my soul is a proper part of me, then it is numerically distinct from me. But surely it is absurd to say that my thinking is done for me by something numerically distinct from me.

If the reply is that it is the composite that thinks, then the response is that this would make disembodied thought impossible. But this contradicts a central tenet of substance dualism.

My conclusion is that a substance dualist ought to be a simple substance dualist.

1. It is possible that there exist disembodied persons

to

2. Some actual person can exist disembodied.

(1) is de dicto: it says of a dictum or proposition that it is possibly true. (2) is de re: it says of a res or thing that disembodiment is one of its possibilities. To see the difference, consider that (1) can be true even if every actual person is a purely material being, and thus a being for whom disembodied existence is not a possibility. On that supposition, (2) is false. So the truth of (2) does not follow from the truth of (1).

Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile on 6 May 1954. Before his birth it was surely possible that someone run a mile in under four minutes. But it does not follow that before Bannister's birth there was a runner for whom breaking the four minute barrier was a possibility. The possibility that there exist an F that is G does not logically guarantee that there exists an F that is possibly G. For it might be that every existing F is necessarily not G.

Another example. I cannot imagine a chiliagon (a regular polygon having 1,000 sides) but I can conceive one. Suppose conceivability entails possibility. Then it is possible that there be a chiliagon. But it doesn't follow that there is anything that actually exists anywhere in the universe that could have the shape of a chiliagon.

So how can I get to the conclusion that some actual person, such as dear old me, can survive his physical dissolution and exist disembodied? Well, can't I imagine my existing disembodied as opposed to some person in general's existing disembodied? Isn't there such a thing as de re imagination? But how do I know that when I seem to be imagining my existing disembodied, I am really doing so as opposed to imagining some person's existing disembodied? How do I know that I am not imagining merely the instantiation of disembodied personhood as opposed to some definite actual person's disembodied existence?

Here we enter waters as murky as the Charles. I can imagine myself taking a walk through Boston's North End in search of an old haunt of mine, Piccola Venezia. The imaginability of this state of affairs is pretty good evidence of its possibility. But is this a de re possibility involving me or a de dicto possibility concerning some possible person?

Since no one will claim that I am incapable of revisiting the North End, there is no reason to doubt that when I imagine myself walking its streets, the possibility for which this imagining provides evidence is a de re possibility involving me, not some possible person in general. I am such that it is possible that I revisit the North End. So what reason could there be for denying that I am such that I possibly exist disembodied? Apparently, the only reason is a question-begging one: All actually existing persons are necessarily embodied.

My interim conclusion is the de dicto objection is nothing to worry about.

I exist, and I have a body. But it is conceivable that I exist without a body. 'Conceivable' in this context means thinkable without logical contradiction. My disembodied existence is conceivable in the way that my body's disembodied existence is inconceivable. But the question is this: does the conceivability of my disembodied existence entail the possibility of my disembodied existence? If yes, then a very interesting argument appears sound:

1. If a = b, then necessarily a = b. (Necessity of Identity)
2. If possibly ~(a = b), then ~(a = b). (From 1 by Contraposition)
3. If possibly I am not identical to my body, then I am not identical to my body. (From 2 by Instantiation)
4. Possibly I am not identical to my body. (Premise)
Therefore
5. I am not identical to my body. (From 3, 4 by Modus Ponens)

This is a fascinating argument since it seems to establish a very significant metaphysical result on the basis of cogent reasoning from very plausible premises. The move from (2) to (3) presupposes that the first-person pronoun is a referring term, something denied by Elizabeth Anscombe under the (dubious) influence of Wittgenstein. I would say that Miss Anscombe is mistaken about this, but I don't want to discuss it now.

But what reason do we have to accept (4)? We can argue for (4) as follows: Conceivability entails possibility. It is conceivable that I am not identical to my body (because I can conceive my disembodied existence). Therefore, possibly I am not identical to my body.

But why should we accept that conceivability entails possibility? The following argument sees to show that conceivability does not entail possibility:

6. It is conceivable that I am not identical to my body.
7. It is conceivable that I am identical to my body.
8. If conceivability entails possibility, then it is possible that I am not identical to my body and it is possible that I am identical to my body.
9. It is possible that I am not identical to my body iff I am not identical to my body.
10. It is possible that I am identical to my body iff I am identical to my body.
11. If conceivability entails possibility, then I am not identical to my body and I am identical to my body.
12. The consequent of (11) is a contradiction.
Therefore
13. Conceivability does not entail possibility.

Let me sum up the argument as follows. If we take seriously the Necessity of Identity, then either it is a necessary truth that I am identical to my body, or a necessary truth that I am not identical to my body. If the first is necessarily true, then the second is necessarily false, and vice versa. Thus neither are contingent. Now both my identity and my non-identity with my body are conceivable. Therefore, if conceivability entails possibility, then it is possible that I am not identical to my body and possible that I am. But this is a contradiction. So if we accept the Necessity of Identity, then we must deny that conceivability entails possibility.

Do I have good reason to think that it is logically possible that I exist without a body? Or is it necessarily the case that if you destroy all my physical parts, you destroy me? Well, the following is true and known to be true:

5. It is conceivable that I exist without a body.

By 'conceivable,' I don't just mean thinkable — round squares are thinkable -- I mean thinkable without logical contradiction. And surely it is thinkable without logical contradiction that I exist without a body. Read your Descartes. I had a student once, a hopeless materialist, albeit otherwise alert and intelligent, who just could not appreciate the point. He kept repeating, "But if I shoot you dead, then you cease to exist!" What I found bizarre was that his religious upbringing hadn't even softened him up for the conceivability of post-mortem existence. It was as if he was so sunk into his bodily existence that the mere thought of not being identical to his body was unavailable to him. So I branded him a Cave-dweller and gave up on him.

But now comes the hard part. How do we move validly from conceivability to possibility, from (5) to (2)? (2) affirms the (broadly) logical possibility of disembodied existence. But it is not clear why being able to conceive a state of affairs should guarantee its logical possibility. Note that it would serve no purpose to stipulate that logical possibility just is conceivability. That would have all the advantages of theft over honest toil. Broadly logical possibility is a species of real possibility, and one cannot just assume that what one can conceive without contradiction is possible in reality. (On the other hand, one can be certain that a concept harboring a contradiction cannot have anything answering to it in reality.)

Consider the floating bar of iron (FBI). If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to the FBI's logical possibility. If I think of the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron (e.g., hardness) but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. There seems to be no logical contradiction in the thought of a hard metal that floats.

But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn implies that it will sink in water. For someone with this richer understanding, the FBI is a bar of iron that both floats and does not float — which is a contradiction.

What this example seems to show is that my failing to find a contradiction in my concept of X does not entail that X is logically possible; for it may be that my concept of X is insufficiently determinate, and that if I had a sufficiently determinate concept of X, then I would see from the concept alone that X is logically impossible. Now let's apply this to our problem. My disembodied existence is conceivable. But it might well be that my identity with my body is hidden from my powers of conception in a way similar to the way the logical impossibility of floating iron is hidden from someone whose concept of iron is inadequate. It may be that my belief in the possibility of disembodied existence feeds on ignorance. How can I rule out this possibility?

If the only way to rule it out is by assuming the truth of (4), then the modal argument begs the question. I am not now saying that it does beg the question. I'll leave that for subsequent posts.

Also, the action of no body is self-reflexive. For it is proved in [Aristotle's] Physics [VIII, 5, 256a2-33] that no body is moved by itself except with respect to a part, so that one part of it is the mover and the other the moved. But in acting the intellect reflects on itself, not only as to a part, but as to the whole of itself. Therefore, it is not a body.

One will be tempted to dismiss this quaint verbiage as just so much medieval mumbo-jumbo, but I think there is an argument here that has a serious claim on our attention. Taking some minor liberties, I would present the argument as a nice, neat syllogism:

1. No body is wholly and non-formally self-reflexive.
2. Every intellect in act is wholly and non-formally self-reflexive.
Therefore
3. No intellect in act is a body.

It is easy to see that the conclusion follows from the premises. But are the premises true? More importantly, what do they mean?

Ad (1). A body in this context is any material thing of whatever size, artificial or natural, animate or inanimate. What the first premise says is that no body can act upon itself as a whole. If body B acts upon itself, then some proper part of B acts upon some other proper or improper part of B. Thus when I shave myself, one of my hands drags a razor across small portions of my epidermis: the whole of BV does not shave the whole of BV. In the case of a self-inflating mattress, a proper part of the mattress inflates the whole of the mattress. But it would be a fabulous mattress indeed the whole of which inflated the whole of it.

Self-cleaning ovens and cats clean themselves, but that is not to say that the whole oven or cat cleans the whole oven or cat; the oven doesn't clean its outside, and the cat does not clean its inside. A boiler that is self-monitoring is monitored by a proper part of itself, not by the whole contraption. And so on for eating, biting, touching, feeding, fueling. What about a machine whose sole function, once turned on, is to turn itself off? The whole of it gets turned off, but the whole of it does not do the turning off.

But everything is self-identical, and so one may be tempted to say that bodies stand in the relation of identity to themselves and that therefore there are self-reflexive bodies. To block this silly move, I added 'non-formally' to (1).

So premise (1) looks to be true. Or can you think of a counterexample? If (1) is true, then presumably (1) is necessarily true: there is something about the very ontological structure of bodies that disallows their being wholly and non-formally self-reflexive. If the body is simple (non-partite), then there is no possibility of a distinction between agent and patient; and if the body is partite, then the part that is the agent cannot be the whole.

Perhaps the closest we can come to a body that is wholly and non-formally reflexive is a light source that illuminates itself along with other things in its environment. A lamp illuminates a room and itself, but not every part of itself, the inside of the lampstand, for example. Now imagine a bare light bulb, emitting light, hanging from the ceiling. It does not illuminate the inside of the wire from which it hangs and which supplies it with current. Imagine a light magically on without a source of current. Still, the inside of the filament would go unilluminated, and the glass would do no illuminating.

Ad (2). The second premise says in effect that every mental act, such as an occurrent episode of thinking that 7 is prime, stands as a whole in some non-formal relation to the whole of itself. What might that relation be? As Aquinas says, the intellect reflects upon itself. But this is perhaps too strong. I can think about something without explicitly reflecting upon my thinking about it. I can think about X without thinking: I am thinking about X. Many philosophers and psychologists have held, however, that acts (occurrent episodes) of thinking are implicitly self-aware. Thinking about X, I am not only conscious of X, I am simultaneously albeit secondarily conscious of being consious of X. This is what Brentano called inner perception and distinguished from inner observation, and what Sartre called the pre-reflective cogito. Intentional consciousness, consciousness of an object, is always simultaneously albeit secondarily consciousness of itself as conscious of the object.

In the concrete act of consciousness, consciousness as a whole is conscious of itself as a whole. Suppose I am conscious of X. The idea is that I am not only conscious of X, a mountain say; I am also simultaneously albeit secondarily conscious of myself as conscious of X. Thus there is a distinction between C1 of X and C2 of (C1 of X). But although one can and must draw a distinction between C1 and C2, the two are inseparable: they form a unity. To distinguish is not to divide. Thus the whole of C2 is directed to the whole of C1.

This is one aspect of the unity of consciousness. Consciousness exhibits both diachronic and synchronic unity, and what is under discussion here is one aspect of synchonic unity: awareness of X is simultaneously awareness of (awareness of X).

Ad (3). I have just made a case for (1) and (2), a case that could be strengthened in several ways in a longer exposition. But I think I have said enough for it to be clear that something like Aquinas' argument above has a serious claim on our attention. The premises are plausible and the conclusion follows from them. And note that one needn't be a hylomorphic dualist to makes use of the argument.

Three Dualisms Distinguished

A. Simple or Pure Substance Dualism. This is the view that I am identical to my soul or mind. In Cartesian terms, I am identical to a res cogitans, a thinking thing or thinking substance. If so, my body is not a part of me. I am not a compound of soul and body; I am a simple substance.

B. Compound Substance Dualism. This is the view that I am a composite of soul and body, which implies that my body is a proper part of me. Thus I have two proper parts, soul and body, the first essential to me, the second accidental. I cannot exist without my soul, but I can exist without my body, where 'can' expresses broadly logical possibility.

(A) and (B) are mutually exclusive. Assuming the truth of Cartesian dualism, they are also jointly exhaustive. So if you are a Cartesian dualist, you must choose between saying that you are your soul (mind) or that you are not your soul but a composite of soul and body.

C. Hylomorphic Dualism. This is the view that I am a compound of soul and body, but with the difference that the soul is the form of the body. The idea is not that the soul is like a form or analogous to a form, but that the soul is a form. Hylomorphic dualism is not a species of Compound Substance Dualism for the simple reason that form and matter are 'principles' invoked in the analysis of primary substances but not primary substances themselves. But it is dualistic in that mind and body are mutually irreducible.

A Problem with Compound Substance Dualism

Suppose we ask a simple question. Using 'think' in the broad Cartesian way, to cover all manner of intentional states including perceiving, imagining, remembering, etc., who or what is it that thinks when I think? Who or what is the subject of thinking? There are only two possibilities given the above. Either a soul thinks when I think, or a soul-body composite thinks when I think.

The Compound Substance Dualist must say that a soul-body composite thinks when I think. Now soul = mind = thinking substance (res cogitans). So CSD implies that when BV thinks there are really two thinkers, the thinking substance which is a proper part of BV, and the whole BV as soul-body composite. (The point is made in a different way by Eric T. Olson in "A Compound of Two Substances" in Soul, Body, and Survival, Corcoran ed., Cornell UP 2001, p. 75.) Here is the way Olson puts it:

. . . compound dualism entails that there are at least twice as many thinking things as we thought there were. You are a compound of a body and a soul. But that soul is itself rational and conscious. So there are two thinking things sitting in your chair, a soul and a compound, reading an essay that was co-written by simple and a compound philosopher.

Obviously, this won't do. Well, why not just say that the soul does not think, that only the compound thinks? One might say that soul and body are each sub-psychological, and that to have a psyche and psychic activity (thinking), soul and body must work together. Soul and body in synergy give rise to thinking which qualifies the whole man. But this makes hash of substance dualism. For one of the reasons for being a substance dualist in the first place is the conceivability of disembodied thinking. (We'll have to look at Kripke's argument one of these days.) Disembodied thinking is obviously inconceivable if it is a soul-body composite that thinks. Second, if it takes a soul and a body working together to produce thinking, then the soul is not a mind or thinking substance -- which again makes hash of substance dualism.

For these and other reasons, CSD is to be rejected, and simple or pure dualism is to be preferred if one is to be a substance dualist.

Hylomorphic Dualism Faces a Similar Problem

Now let's confront the hylomorphist dualist with the question about the subject of thinking. Who or what thinks when thinking occurs in BV? It is presumably the composite of soul and body, form and matter. Thus the soul by itself is subpsychological and so does not think: the subject of thinking, that which thinks, is the soul-body composite. But when we turn to the 'king' of the hylomorphic dualists, Thomas Aquinas, we find him saying things about the intellect that run directly counter to this.

In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, chapters 49-51, we find a variety of arguments to the conclusion that the intellect is a subsistent form and so not dependent for its existence on matter. This is not the place to examine these arguments, some of which are defensible. Now since the intellect is that in us which thinks, the same ambiguity we found in Cartesian dualism, as between pure dualism and compound dualism, is to be found in Aquinas. Is it the composite that thinks, or a part of the composite? The answer must be that it is a part of the composite that thinks, the res cogitans on the Cartesian view, the intellectus on the Thomist view. And note that both must be viewed as substances, as capable of independent existence. Aquinas expresses this by referring to the soul as a subsistent form.

But 'subsistent form' smacks of contradiction. How can a form be subsistent? To say that a form is subsistent is to say that is is a primary substance. But a form is precisely not a primary substance but a 'principle' invoked in the analysis of primary substances. Aquinas cannot do justice to his own insight into the independence of the intellect from matter from within the hylomorphic scheme of ontological analysis he inherits from Aristotle. His metaphysica generalis is at war with his special-metaphysical insight into the independence of intellect from matter.

So I cannot see that hylomorphic dualism is any improvement over pure substance dualism. It is rather a step backward. And as I tried to show in the my last post, the notion that HD can solve the interaction problem -- assuming as I do not that it is a genuine problem -- is chimerical.

Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose.) When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on internal to the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher might call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.)

Surely, zombies are conceivable. To conceive one, start with yourself. You, dear reader, are not a zombie. You have feelings, and you know you do. Right now, perhaps, you feel bored or puzzled by what you are reading. Slap yourself across the face to wake up. You felt something, a stinging sensation. Do it again just to be sure. Now subtract off (in thought) the conscious experiences leaving behind your body, its behavior, its environment and all the causal processes disporting themselves between body and environment. What you are now conceiving is a zombie.

The reader says that he can't conceive of a zombie who is not hungry but who nonetheless want to eat a chocolate bar. But the zombie in question is hungry; it is just that his hunger and its linguistic and behavioral manifestations have a purely objective existence. Salivation, for example, is an objective, 3rd person verifiable process. Objectively viewed, hunger is just the sum total of all such processes.

I said I wouldn't worry about cat zombies, but I just changed my mind. My old and spoiled female cat makes it very clear to me when she is hungry. I don't reckon she's a zombie, but she might be for all I know. Surely her being a zombie is conceivable. Descartes thought of non-human animals as machines, and thus as insentient. If I am not mistaken, this is equivalent to conceiving of non-human animals as zombies. Although I don't believe that non-human animals are zombies, I find this quite conceivable. And vivisectionists who justified their practice on Cartesian grounds found it not only conceivable but believable as well -- so believable that they were prepared to act upon their belief.

But I should not make it sound as if the conceivability of zombies is uncontroversial. Competent philosophers deny that they are conceivable. I attempt to refute one such philosopher in Jim Ryan on Consciousness and Zombies.

Aquinas discusses this question in Summa Theologica, Q. 75, art. 3. He attempts to navigate a middle course between a form of materialism according to which sense and intellect are both "referred to a corporeal principle," and the view he takes to be Platonic according to which both sense and intellect are "referred to an incorporeal principle." On the Platonic view, both sensing and understanding "belong to the soul as such." Thomas points us to Theaetetus 184 c. This is a fascinating passage which, according to Paul Natorp, anticipates Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.

In this passage, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:

Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)

The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, the 'divine' Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)

Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.

This argument from the unity of consciousness, which of course needs to be more rigorously developed, is present in nuce in Plato in the passage cited. According to Aquinas, if this argument is sound, ". . . it follows that even the souls of brute animals are subsistent." This seems to be a correct inference.

Aquinas hopes to block the inference with the help of Aristotle's De Anima 429 a 24. Thomas gives an argument that I interpret as follows:

1. Although understanding alone is performed without a corporeal organ, as Aristotle maintains, sensation and the operations of the sensitive soul are accompanied by changes in the body at our sensory receptors.

Therefore

2. The sensitive soul has no per se operation of its own, and every operation of the sensitive soul belongs to the soul-body composite.

Therefore

3. The souls of brute animals, having no per se operations, are not subsistent.

Unfortunately, I cannot see that this is a good argument. The gist of the argument is that while there are specific corporeal organs for seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, namely, eyes, ears, etc., there is no corporeal organ for understanding. From this it is concluded that there is a crucial difference between sensing and understanding: it is broadly logically possible that there be understanding without a body; but it is not broadly logically possible that there be sensing without a body. And since we alone among animals are rational, or capable of understanding, we alone have subsistent souls.

What this ignores is that sensing is not merely a mechanical or material process. When my cat simultaneously sees, smells, and tastes her food (or my food for that matter) there is a unity of consciousness in her no less than there is one in me when I lay into my food. There is no specific corporeal organ that does this unifying of sensory data, neither in me nor in my cat. The unity-of-consciousness argument against materialism can be 'run' both for man and cat. If it works for me it should work for her. So if the possibility of my disembodied existence follows from there being no physical organ that unifies my consciousness, then we get the same result for my cat, and the difference between man and brute in respect of subsistence cannot be maintained.

To sum up. Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases 'sensitive soul' and 'intellective soul' are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.